Unless you are involved with the kernel, I would suggest that you would hold your judgment.
Linus does not blow up without good reason. I challenge anyone to find example where Linus starts to really attack people when they are not doing something clearly stupid, that would result for not accepting patches if not solved (like breaking userspace and refusing to admit that it's error to do so). https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/7/16/565 I have been reading and contributing to the kernel and I think Linus uses cursing people as very effective way to emphasize the urgency and his seriousness of how badly some maintainer is fucking things up (hurting feelings really helps to save time when people don't get the message). He makes misjudgments and there are sometimes miscommunication, but he acknowledges them openly.
One thing that separates Linux kernel development from other software projects I have worked with is that there are no grudges. When there is serious disagreement with Linus, there is one huge flame and the issue is settled in one way or another. After that he continues with that person just like before. There are some really difficult persons to work with, like glibc maintainer Ulrich Drepper and I would say that Richard Stallman is also much harder to work with than Linus.
I don't advocate cursing people as general way to handle things, but I think that Linus has personality that makes it work. The problem is that if people just think there is some general lesson to be learned from his behavior that can be applied to others.
I think he makes very good point at justifying himself:
"I really fundamentally believe that being honest and open
about your emotions about core/process is good. And because it's damn
hard to read people over email, I think you need to be *more* honest
and *more* open over email. I'm generally nicer in person. Not always."
The problem is politics of financing the spending.
Even with unnecessary wars and with serious economic downturn public debt would be in good shape (look at the graph) without Bush tax cuts.
There are some problems that must be fixed in long term but it has more to do with emulating other countries, than just cutting spending. We need to just emulate others and fix this sillyness.
We can fix public budged easily with just small increase to the taxes.
Unnecessary wars and overblown and ineffective internal security apparatus are expensive, but surprisingly not even they could not cause fiscal crisis. (Unfortunately) America is so rich that it has money to blow into wars and still go on. What we should do is to fix healthcare. It would not be even hard; Just look at what others are doing and do the same. This is just absurd.
Just increase taxes and cut war spending and America is fine: 2013 United States federal budget / Total revenues and spending.. This crisis is fundamentally just political. This problem is fundamentally caused by GOP and it's lost coherence. John Boehner has no authority to negotiate with Obama, nobody in GOP has any authority to negotiate.
The only problem I see with this is the fact that graphics drivers and cards still have subtle bugs and "features" in them.
Small things you don't realize in normal gaming, are really annoying in desktop UI. You don't notice if something is rendered temporarily one pixel left from what it should be while playing BF3 or video. But if you render web page or UI, that's visible. You want exactness from desktop. Graphics cards and their drivers have don't have that requirement as their first priority. DirectX 11.1 is added complexity and it's likely that it comes with a price.
Internet companies like Facebook or Instagram are still classified as technology companies for historical reasons, but technology is not driving them.
These companies are creating consumer services and the main deciding factor for their success is marketing and consumer behaviour. Innovations they do are just as technology oriented as new Nike shoes or Gillette razors. Technology is just in the background just like (chemical) technology is in the background of new shampoo or conditioner.
Back to the bubble. We are not in bubble. These prices are speculative prices in market share battle between companies that help to profile customers for marketing. In this market network externality (network effect) plays major part, so there can be only few global players. Companies like Facebook and Google must keep their checkbooks open and keep paying if they want to stay relevant. I would not worry about bubble until Facebook or Google start taking debt to pay for their acquisitions. Just like Microsoft was paying huge sums for companies just to drive them down to keep it's monopoly on PC markets for decades (while staying profitable all the time), Internet firms must do the same if they want to keep up their position in more volatile market.
Sergey Brin is known for his distaste of censorship and government control. It is clearly his personal passion, but it also reflects somewhat in Google's policy.
1. In comparison to Facebook, Apple and Microsoft, Google is censorship free.
2. Google provides statistics of government requests for private information of their users. It seems that they do what they legally have to, but not more.
3. They are also the only big company that has official policy that enables users to download all the data they have in open formats out of their servers. With Facebook, all the stuff is in Facebook and stays there.
It's true that all the information Google collects enables huge privacy infringement in scale that only Facebook can match, barely. I don't think for a second that Google as company is in any significant way better that others, but you must give it to Google that they at least initially tried. Some of that naivety is still there.
Rand corporation did its now famous August 2008 Pacific Vision wargame between China and US. It was not simulation of fighter performance, but simulation of whole aerial warfare, including logistics etc. US performed poorly because there is clear logistical limitations. No matter how good the fighter is, it can bring only very limited amount of missiles to the battle. What makes things even harder fo US is the fact that potential conflict happens close to China and far from US. China has unique approach to airfields, it has over 40 military airfields where planes are stored inside mountains in extremely well fortified bunkers. US has in the region maybe 20 lightly fortified airfields (depends on how many allies bail out) plus carriers.
The core problem in Pacific Vision 2008 was that even an invulnerable American fighter force ran out of missiles before it ran out of targets, at any number below 50% of missile firings resulting in kills. Whereupon the remaining Chinese fighters would destroy the American tankers and AWACS aircraft, guaranteeing that the USAF’s F-22As would run out of fuel and crash before they could return to Guam.
To reiterate: RAND’s core conclusion is not about specific fighter performance. It is about the theoretical limits of better performance under adverse basing and logistics conditions. RAND’s Project Air Force argues, persuasively, that based on history and current trends, numbers still matter – and so does the “Lanchester square.” That’s the theory under which the combat performance of an outnumbered combatant must be the square of the outnumbering ratio (outnumbered 3:1 must be 9x better, etc.) just to stay even.
Or, as the oft-repeated Cold War era saying goes, “quantity has a quality all its own.”
Additional problem with F-35 is that it has limited missile carrying capacity, range, and stealth (stealth requirements were downgraded from very low observable, to low observable).
But we can save money. Soyuz program is the most successful launch platform by wide margin. It's safe, cheap, reliable and can launch frequently. Soyuz has over 1700 successful launches. It's the closest thing to "space truck" that there is.
Classical properties of money are: medium of exchange, unit of account and store of value.
Very few, if any, goods in bitcoin economy are sold using bitcoins as unit of account. Paying with bitcoin may be option, but goods are priced in other currency. Bitcoin prices are periodically adjusted to match price in other currency. Bitcoin clearly is not way to store value. Most people use it to speculate. Apart from limited use in paying small amounts of drugs for personal use etc. in local settings, bitcoin is not preferred medium of exchange. Because bitcoin is not used like money, it is not money. Currently bitcoin is just way to make payments (similar to debit or credit card) and speculative hobby for some.
Even very shaky third world currencies have some stability because people constantly need to buy them to pay taxes and fees. Only way I can see bitcoins becoming viable currency if some network communities or services would only accept bitcoins as payment. That would tie the value of bitcoin into something that has tangible value.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Von Neumann architecture quantum computer is not very usable. There is not any way to program it in a usable way. Nor there is way to get results out.
The biggest problem with digital I&C is the “software common cause failure issue"
Imagine modern nuclear plant with multiple-channel redundancy in instrument and control systems, if one instrument fails, there are others. Same applies to whole cooling systems, if one cooling system fails, there are other completely independent systems that continue to work. Typically redundant systems use instruments from different manufacturers or instruments that are implemented with different technology.
This is not possible for digital systems because they are too costly to implement multiple times. What this means is that redundant digital control systems use same software. If one system fails because of software error, others may follow. This has already happened in German nuclear plant that had new digital system installed. Only the old analog system that was still operational saved the reactor.
This is why Finnish radiation and nuclear safety authority required changes in Areva's plans for the most modern nuclear reactor being build, Olkiluoto 3. They added analog safety requirements. Reactor must be able to shout down even when digital I&C has total failure. Relying for all digital systems compromises redundancy.
Best way to get everything right is to order desingn from company that specializes for control room design. Yokogawa is pretty good.
Special suggenstions for computer hardware:
- Monitors from Eizo. They just make the best monitors for control rooms, medical imaging, etc. http://www.eizo.com/global/ - Matrox graphic cards are really good for control rooms. It's their specialty and they exel in it. You can get multi monitor worstations that are silent http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/
I'm a Finn. I know we fought well in WW2. It's what happened after the war that was submissive. It has even own word: Finlandisation
It all started after the war. Politicians knew that we would not be able to stand war against Soviets if we were the only enemy. They desided to play really really nice. Almost everything was OK as long as it did not involve Soviet troops in Finnish soil. It became liturgy to talk how good relations were between our countries. I think this was good idea at first. But then new generation of politicians grew, who thought that this good relationships bullshit was real. Soviets were able to influence our politics a lot. Finland censored talking, books and movies that were negative to Soviets. Some people even started to believe Soviet propaganda that we started the war.
The good part of all this was that we could keep our own economic system and democracy going (even if Soviets were able to mess with it from time to time). The cost of having western lifestyle next to Soviet Union was our pride. Cold war era was bad time for Finns.
Or you could just use Smalltalk, where any number that fits in a pointer-sized variable is stored like that and anything that doesn't is transparently promoted to an object.
That's implementation dependent, but I think most good Smalltalk and Lisp implementations do it like that. If you reserve two tags for immediate integers (one for positive, one for negative), you lose only two bits. Having 64-bit system, and memory access as bottleneck, that's incredibly good solution. Completely future proof solution even.
Filesystem was so big issue in my work that we bite the bulled and tried first Open Solaris and then switched into Nexenta http://www.nexenta.org/
Nexenta is OpenSolaris kernel GNU/Debian/Ubutntu userland. What this gets to you is ZFS and RAID-Z and RAID-Z2. When you get used to the fact that your filesystems has end to end quarantee of data integrity by hashing (even cryptographic hashing if you want, you feel uncomfortable with any other filesystem.
In home I still run Linux on my laptop, but I made my own NAS that ruons with Nexenta.
The blocks of a ZFS storage pool form a Merkle tree in which each block validates all of its children. Merkle trees have been proven to provide cryptographically-strong authentication for any component of the tree, and for the tree as a whole. ZFS employs 256-bit checksums for every block, and offers checksum functions ranging from the simple-and-fast fletcher2 (the default) to the slower-but-secure SHA-256. When using a cryptographic hash like SHA-256, the uberblock checksum provides a constantly up-to-date digital signature for the entire storage pool.
Which comes in handy if you ask UPS to move it.
I found quote where Einsteins says he believes in Spinoza's God:
http://www.spaceandmotion.com/albert-einstein-god-religion-theology.htm
I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings. (Albert Einstein) Basically, he thinks that the idea of God as personality that cares about human beings and what happens to them silly (or as I interpret it: spiritual materialism). God of Einstein is closer to impersonal Brahman (Brahman is the unchanging, infinite, immanent, and transcendent reality which is the Divine Ground of all matter, energy, time, space, being, and everything beyond in this Universe). This is actually no God in any Christian sense.
"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."
Albert Einstein, in a letter March 24, 1954; from Albert Einstein the Human Side, Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, eds., Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1981, p. 43. But the following is the most interesting. It is basically Buddhist viewpoint. Emphasis mine.
A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. The true value of a human being is determined by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive. (Albert Einstein, 1954)
The most beautiful and most profound experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive forms - this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.
( Albert Einstein - The Merging of Spirit and Science) About happiness. The happiness that mystics in different traditions and Buddhists seek, is not feeling, but the release from the cause of suffering/unhappiness. Pain in life is inevitable, but suffering/unhappiness is not. Pain is what happens to you sometimes. Unhappiness is what self creates by itself. You are unhappy (or unsatisfied) when you feel that current experience you are in is something you want to avoid.
First, I am trying to make sense of your reply. Are you trying to tell me what you believe or what Einstein believed? I'm trying approximate to tell what Einstein believed when he talked about Nature and God. How can I know what he believed. I have red some of his letters that have been published long time ago, and I have read many of the same books he red. He quotes Spinoza often when he talks about spiritual stuff, so he is clearly influenced by his philosophy. Here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spinoza/, there is nice chapter named: God or Nature. Einstein is using terms and concepts with similar sense as Spinoza did.
Spinoza's fundamental insight in Book One is that Nature is an indivisible, uncaused, substantial whole -- in fact, it is the only substantial whole. Outside of Nature, there is nothing, and everything that exists is a part of Nature and is brought into being by Nature with a deterministic necessity. This unified, unique, productive, necessary being just is what is meant by 'God'. Because of the necessity inherent in Nature, there is no teleology in the universe. Nature does not act for any ends, and things do not exist for any set purposes. There are no "final causes" (to use the common Aristotelian phrase). God does not "do" things for the sake of anything else. The order of things just follows from God's essences with an inviolable determinism. All talk of God's purposes, intentions, goals, preferences or aims is just an anthropomorphizing fiction.
All the prejudices I here undertake to expose depend on this one: that men commonly suppose that all natural things act, as men do, on account of an end; indeed, they maintain as certain that God himself directs all things to some certain end, for they say that God has made all things for man, and man that he might worship God. (I, Appendix)
God is not some goal-oriented planner who then judges things by how well they conform to his purposes. Things happen only because of Nature and its laws. "Nature has no end set before it... All things proceed by a certain eternal necessity of nature." To believe otherwise is to fall prey to the same superstitions that lie at the heart of the organized religions. In short, In Einsteins thought God is substance, not personal being. God don't perform miracles, love or judge. You can't get anything from God. What is substance is again complex metaphysical question you should not ask from me.
My definition of good is pretty much what Spinoza, and Buddhist think about it. Things are good and bad only in the mind of the person, not in the Nature. If you put aside good and bad, you can act from your heart. Stoics called this kind of acting rationality. Real spirituality is when you stop seeking good for your own self (Buddhist say that there is no self. When you realize this you are free).
If this is true, why does he make a distinction between natural and spiritual? This is very hard to explain to most Christians (there is exceptions, like Christian mystics). Most religious people are so called spiritual materialists. They believe and behave because there is reward for belief and punishment for not believing. All suffering in this world is worth because there is so much bigger reward in the afterlife. All this is just projecting egoistic materialist viewpoint into spiritual life. There is no spiritual value in your beliefs if you do them for self serving reasons (remember "left hand should not know what right hand does")
Thought experiment: What if things were different? Accepting Jesus, or doing good would result eternal punishment in hell. Doing bad would take you into heaven. What then? Who would follow Jesus?
Spiritual life starts when person starts to tackle with the questions above. Buddhism recognizes that our selfish ego stands between spiritual life. If you can get rid of your ego, you can do what is good for deep spiritual reason. You don't need to beliefs to anything "bigger than you" or supernatural, because you are not seeking good times or reward in the future. I think it's easier for atheist to enter spiritual life than it is for Christian.
May I suggest reading for you? Jesuit priest Anthony de Mello has written good book about spiritual life: Awareness
Buddhism in Tibet is unholy merge between traditional BÃn religion, Tantric Hindu practices and Buddhism. So is almost any traditional Buddhist tradition in Asia.
I think the following might be from the same letter. At least it's written in same year. Einstein used to describe himself non religious but spiritual (his meaning of spiritual don't include belief in supernatural).
"The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend a personal God and avoid dogmas and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual, as a meaningful unity. If there's any religion that would cope with scientific needs it will be Buddhism." - Albert Einstein, 1954,from Albert Einstein: The Human Side, edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, Princeton University Press
Without knowing we can't know if his problem was mental or neurological. One thing is sure tough, it was not completely metabolic. No one gets that fat with metabolic problems only if they try to control their weight. If you eat only water, veggies and some rice you just don't grow that big. Digesting your food consumes lots of energy. Producing all that salt-acid etc. consumes energy even if you don't move. So if people with some extreme metabolic problem eat low calorie food and don't move there is limit how big they can grow. And that limit is much less than with this lady.
It is most likely her problem was mostly mental. But there is chance that she suffered from rare neurological condition where you are always extremely hungry. For these people life is constant suffering. This kind of rare conditior many times results people to eat themselves to dead. But we can't be sure.
If that man who was feeding her would have given her only rice, vater, veggies and vitamines she would be living today.
The link was OK. I understand that some people live in the land of Political Correctness where anything remotely fundamental like sickness, death or god can not be made fun of. Sorry about that. But we others like to do so. Why?
Because the laugh enables us to handle difficult questions of life. Laugh reveals the empty rhetoric we use to cocoon death and sickness. Laugh goes against what authorities want you to believe. Laugh is serious matter.
What is wrong is the fact that can be summarized into this slogan:
NASA:Boldly going where John Glenn has gone four decades before.
The fact is: lifting people into the orbit with shuttle is very expensive, dangerous and only interesting because it's so dangerous. NASA made huge mistake by designing shuttle that delivers both cargo and people. Re-usability of shuttle's don't give any savings over simple capsules and traditional one time use rockets. If you look at NASA's new concepts , they are continuations to Glen and Soviet era capsules. Multitask shuttle is expensive dead end in evolution of space technology.
Of course mistakes can't be avoided.Lesson learned (I hope) is: the KISS principle is the first principle in space travel.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless you are involved with the kernel, I would suggest that you would hold your judgment.
Linus does not blow up without good reason. I challenge anyone to find example where Linus starts to really attack people when they are not doing something clearly stupid, that would result for not accepting patches if not solved (like breaking userspace and refusing to admit that it's error to do so). https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/7/16/565 I have been reading and contributing to the kernel and I think Linus uses cursing people as very effective way to emphasize the urgency and his seriousness of how badly some maintainer is fucking things up (hurting feelings really helps to save time when people don't get the message). He makes misjudgments and there are sometimes miscommunication, but he acknowledges them openly.
One thing that separates Linux kernel development from other software projects I have worked with is that there are no grudges. When there is serious disagreement with Linus, there is one huge flame and the issue is settled in one way or another. After that he continues with that person just like before. There are some really difficult persons to work with, like glibc maintainer Ulrich Drepper and I would say that Richard Stallman is also much harder to work with than Linus.
I don't advocate cursing people as general way to handle things, but I think that Linus has personality that makes it work. The problem is that if people just think there is some general lesson to be learned from his behavior that can be applied to others.
I think he makes very good point at justifying himself:
The problem is politics of financing the spending.
Even with unnecessary wars and with serious economic downturn public debt would be in good shape (look at the graph) without Bush tax cuts.
There are some problems that must be fixed in long term but it has more to do with emulating other countries, than just cutting spending. We need to just emulate others and fix this sillyness.
We can fix public budged easily with just small increase to the taxes.
The problem is not spending. The problem is politics of financing it.
Public debt would be in good shape if Bush tax cuts would have not been implemented. See the graph in this page. And Contrary to "Entitlement Society" Rhetoric, Over Nine-Tenths of Entitlement Benefits Go to Elderly, Disabled, or Working Households
Unnecessary wars and overblown and ineffective internal security apparatus are expensive, but surprisingly not even they could not cause fiscal crisis. (Unfortunately) America is so rich that it has money to blow into wars and still go on. What we should do is to fix healthcare. It would not be even hard; Just look at what others are doing and do the same. This is just absurd.
Just increase taxes and cut war spending and America is fine: 2013 United States federal budget / Total revenues and spending.. This crisis is fundamentally just political. This problem is fundamentally caused by GOP and it's lost coherence. John Boehner has no authority to negotiate with Obama, nobody in GOP has any authority to negotiate.
The only problem I see with this is the fact that graphics drivers and cards still have subtle bugs and "features" in them. Small things you don't realize in normal gaming, are really annoying in desktop UI. You don't notice if something is rendered temporarily one pixel left from what it should be while playing BF3 or video. But if you render web page or UI, that's visible. You want exactness from desktop. Graphics cards and their drivers have don't have that requirement as their first priority. DirectX 11.1 is added complexity and it's likely that it comes with a price.
Internet companies like Facebook or Instagram are still classified as technology companies for historical reasons, but technology is not driving them.
These companies are creating consumer services and the main deciding factor for their success is marketing and consumer behaviour. Innovations they do are just as technology oriented as new Nike shoes or Gillette razors. Technology is just in the background just like (chemical) technology is in the background of new shampoo or conditioner.
Back to the bubble. We are not in bubble. These prices are speculative prices in market share battle between companies that help to profile customers for marketing. In this market network externality (network effect) plays major part, so there can be only few global players. Companies like Facebook and Google must keep their checkbooks open and keep paying if they want to stay relevant. I would not worry about bubble until Facebook or Google start taking debt to pay for their acquisitions. Just like Microsoft was paying huge sums for companies just to drive them down to keep it's monopoly on PC markets for decades (while staying profitable all the time), Internet firms must do the same if they want to keep up their position in more volatile market.
It's true that all the information Google collects enables huge privacy infringement in scale that only Facebook can match, barely. I don't think for a second that Google as company is in any significant way better that others, but you must give it to Google that they at least initially tried. Some of that naivety is still there.
Quoting Defense Industry Daily article The F-35’s Air-to-Air Capability Controversy:
The core problem in Pacific Vision 2008 was that even an invulnerable American fighter force ran out of missiles before it ran out of targets, at any number below 50% of missile firings resulting in kills. Whereupon the remaining Chinese fighters would destroy the American tankers and AWACS aircraft, guaranteeing that the USAF’s F-22As would run out of fuel and crash before they could return to Guam.
To reiterate: RAND’s core conclusion is not about specific fighter performance. It is about the theoretical limits of better performance under adverse basing and logistics conditions. RAND’s Project Air Force argues, persuasively, that based on history and current trends, numbers still matter – and so does the “Lanchester square.” That’s the theory under which the combat performance of an outnumbered combatant must be the square of the outnumbering ratio (outnumbered 3:1 must be 9x better, etc.) just to stay even.
Or, as the oft-repeated Cold War era saying goes, “quantity has a quality all its own.”
Additional problem with F-35 is that it has limited missile carrying capacity, range, and stealth (stealth requirements were downgraded from very low observable, to low observable).
But we can save money. Soyuz program is the most successful launch platform by wide margin. It's safe, cheap, reliable and can launch frequently. Soyuz has over 1700 successful launches. It's the closest thing to "space truck" that there is.
Classical properties of money are: medium of exchange, unit of account and store of value.
Very few, if any, goods in bitcoin economy are sold using bitcoins as unit of account. Paying with bitcoin may be option, but goods are priced in other currency. Bitcoin prices are periodically adjusted to match price in other currency. Bitcoin clearly is not way to store value. Most people use it to speculate. Apart from limited use in paying small amounts of drugs for personal use etc. in local settings, bitcoin is not preferred medium of exchange. Because bitcoin is not used like money, it is not money. Currently bitcoin is just way to make payments (similar to debit or credit card) and speculative hobby for some.
Even very shaky third world currencies have some stability because people constantly need to buy them to pay taxes and fees. Only way I can see bitcoins becoming viable currency if some network communities or services would only accept bitcoins as payment. That would tie the value of bitcoin into something that has tangible value.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Von Neumann architecture quantum computer is not very usable. There is not any way to program it in a usable way. Nor there is way to get results out.
The biggest problem with digital I&C is the “software common cause failure issue"
Imagine modern nuclear plant with multiple-channel redundancy in instrument and control systems, if one instrument fails, there are others. Same applies to whole cooling systems, if one cooling system fails, there are other completely independent systems that continue to work. Typically redundant systems use instruments from different manufacturers or instruments that are implemented with different technology.
This is not possible for digital systems because they are too costly to implement multiple times. What this means is that redundant digital control systems use same software. If one system fails because of software error, others may follow. This has already happened in German nuclear plant that had new digital system installed. Only the old analog system that was still operational saved the reactor.
This is why Finnish radiation and nuclear safety authority required changes in Areva's plans for the most modern nuclear reactor being build, Olkiluoto 3. They added analog safety requirements. Reactor must be able to shout down even when digital I&C has total failure. Relying for all digital systems compromises redundancy.
More info:
http://www.neimagazine.com/story.asp?storyCode=2053091
http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Instrumentation-Control-Systems-Nuclear/dp/0309057329
Best way to get everything right is to order desingn from company that specializes for control room design. Yokogawa is pretty good.
Special suggenstions for computer hardware:
- Monitors from Eizo. They just make the best monitors for control rooms, medical imaging, etc. http://www.eizo.com/global/
- Matrox graphic cards are really good for control rooms. It's their specialty and they exel in it. You can get multi monitor worstations that are silent http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/
I'm a Finn. I know we fought well in WW2. It's what happened after the war that was submissive. It has even own word: Finlandisation
It all started after the war. Politicians knew that we would not be able to stand war against Soviets if we were the only enemy. They desided to play really really nice. Almost everything was OK as long as it did not involve Soviet troops in Finnish soil. It became liturgy to talk how good relations were between our countries. I think this was good idea at first. But then new generation of politicians grew, who thought that this good relationships bullshit was real. Soviets were able to influence our politics a lot. Finland censored talking, books and movies that were negative to Soviets. Some people even started to believe Soviet propaganda that we started the war.
The good part of all this was that we could keep our own economic system and democracy going (even if Soviets were able to mess with it from time to time). The cost of having western lifestyle next to Soviet Union was our pride. Cold war era was bad time for Finns.
Or you could just use Smalltalk, where any number that fits in a pointer-sized variable is stored like that and anything that doesn't is transparently promoted to an object.
That's implementation dependent, but I think most good Smalltalk and Lisp implementations do it like that. If you reserve two tags for immediate integers (one for positive, one for negative), you lose only two bits. Having 64-bit system, and memory access as bottleneck, that's incredibly good solution. Completely future proof solution even.
Filesystem was so big issue in my work that we bite the bulled and tried first Open Solaris and then switched into Nexenta http://www.nexenta.org/ Nexenta is OpenSolaris kernel GNU/Debian/Ubutntu userland. What this gets to you is ZFS and RAID-Z and RAID-Z2. When you get used to the fact that your filesystems has end to end quarantee of data integrity by hashing (even cryptographic hashing if you want, you feel uncomfortable with any other filesystem. In home I still run Linux on my laptop, but I made my own NAS that ruons with Nexenta.
http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/entry/zfs_end_to_end_data
My definition of good is pretty much what Spinoza, and Buddhist think about it. Things are good and bad only in the mind of the person, not in the Nature. If you put aside good and bad, you can act from your heart. Stoics called this kind of acting rationality. Real spirituality is when you stop seeking good for your own self (Buddhist say that there is no self. When you realize this you are free).
Thought experiment: What if things were different? Accepting Jesus, or doing good would result eternal punishment in hell. Doing bad would take you into heaven. What then? Who would follow Jesus?
Spiritual life starts when person starts to tackle with the questions above. Buddhism recognizes that our selfish ego stands between spiritual life. If you can get rid of your ego, you can do what is good for deep spiritual reason. You don't need to beliefs to anything "bigger than you" or supernatural, because you are not seeking good times or reward in the future. I think it's easier for atheist to enter spiritual life than it is for Christian.
May I suggest reading for you? Jesuit priest Anthony de Mello has written good book about spiritual life: Awareness
In almost all Asian countries Buddhism is merged with local superstitious beliefs.
Buddhism in Tibet is unholy merge between traditional BÃn religion, Tantric Hindu practices and Buddhism. So is almost any traditional Buddhist tradition in Asia.
Without knowing we can't know if his problem was mental or neurological. One thing is sure tough, it was not completely metabolic. No one gets that fat with metabolic problems only if they try to control their weight. If you eat only water, veggies and some rice you just don't grow that big. Digesting your food consumes lots of energy. Producing all that salt-acid etc. consumes energy even if you don't move. So if people with some extreme metabolic problem eat low calorie food and don't move there is limit how big they can grow. And that limit is much less than with this lady.
It is most likely her problem was mostly mental. But there is chance that she suffered from rare neurological condition where you are always extremely hungry. For these people life is constant suffering. This kind of rare conditior many times results people to eat themselves to dead. But we can't be sure.
If that man who was feeding her would have given her only rice, vater, veggies and vitamines she would be living today.
The link was OK. I understand that some people live in the land of Political Correctness where anything remotely fundamental like sickness, death or god can not be made fun of. Sorry about that. But we others like to do so. Why?
Because the laugh enables us to handle difficult questions of life. Laugh reveals the empty rhetoric we use to cocoon death and sickness. Laugh goes against what authorities want you to believe. Laugh is serious matter.
Of course mistakes can't be avoided.Lesson learned (I hope) is: the KISS principle is the first principle in space travel.