while 95% of the population still live in extreme poverty and could make more use of the billions wasted on this project
Nah, sorry, this argument doesn't work. Far more billions are wasted on completely useless military activity than the relatively miniscule space program of all nations put together - and the space programme at least has a use...
As 'The Hawk' says, we urgently need to set up an off-world colony before the next asteroid strike wipes our species out. We had an unexpected visit from such an asteroid whizzing past inside the orbit of our geostationary satellites just a couple of days ago - this house-sized lump of rock was only detected for the first time about a week before it arrived. Who knows how long we've got before one of these things actually collides with us. Apparently such an event is now overdue in geological timescale terms.
Thanks - didn't know about that one, and I'm grateful for the information.... It's been worrying me more and more that idiots (i.e. politicians) keep commissioning more and more nuclear power generation facilities without having any idea (and without even wanting to know) how we're going to clean up the aftermath. It's good to know that somebody has made at least one serious attempt to try it. Although...
Still has the "what do we do with nuclear waste?" problem, but it was decommissioned anyway.
... as you noted, encasing the reactor vessel in concrete foam and burying it under 45 feet of gravel doesn't really cut it.
If you haven't seen it, there's a reallyinstructivedocumentary ("Into Eternity"), made in 2010, about a nuclear waste storage repository ("Onkalo") being constructed deep underground in Finland, that is tackling - among other things - the extreme difficulty of figuring out how to construct signage ("Stay Away - Extreme Danger To Health") at the entrance to the facility, that will still be adequately durable, legible and understandable to descendant humans 100,000 years from now.
As the narrator says, "Onkalo must last 100,000 years. Nothing built by man has lasted one tenth of that time."
Another instructive documentary covers the herculean efforts made by the Russians/Ukrainians at Chernobyl to avoid a worse disaster than we already had.
It's a horrific story. They used soldiers to go up on the roof of the reactor building, each of whom could only risk being there for 45 seconds before getting their full dose for the year - enough time to chuck 2 shovelfulls of debris over the side, and then run away fast. In the end, they had to mobilise 500,000 (!) workers of all kinds to get the emergency cleanup done - and as we all know, even then it wasn't done very well, so much so that the EU is having to do it all over again.
It seems to me (somebody else coined this, not me) that our technological capabilities have advanced faster than we have evolved the ability to safely manage them, and we should just take a step back and do some very careful thinking. We can afford to reduce our lifestyles, wait a while, and revisit The Plan repeatedly until its perfect - we only have the one planet. It's the greedy short-termism involved in the rush to have it all that disgusts me.
Personally I imagine the way forward will involve giant solar panels in orbit collecting the Sun's bounteous energy and somehow transmitting it down to the surface. I have no idea whether that's just science fiction:-).... it does of course require everyone to stop fighting wars, and divert all the money back into a proper space programme.
Yup, don't like fracking - it carries too high a risk of polluting my landscape, and quite likely turning a beautiful view into a rubbish-tip. In the UK, the government has even gone on record to say the extracted oil & gas won't reduce anybody's energy bills. It will, however, make a shit-load of money for some people who already have too much, and who seem willing to rigthe deck to make sure they get their way.
Don't like nuclear fission power either - it produces *filthy* dirty waste, that we have no idea what to do with. AFAIK, not a single nuclear power station has yet been decommissioned and cleaned up anywhere in the world - quite a few are mothballed, while an alleged "decommissioning" process achieves almost nothing and stretches endlessly into the future at vast expense to the tax-payer (cos poor little private sector can't take the pain, so public sector has to take that task on, or private sector will take its ball home).
Both these technologies are amateurish, half-assed, ill-thought-out, poor examples of our abilities at this climactic moment of the 21st century, and I'm embarrassed to be a member of the same species that wants to do this crap. Come on... we're capable of better than that.
For some reason, many of my peers in this/. community seem to take umbrage whenever there is any criticism of any industrial process if there is some kind of "technology" aspect to that process. There appears to be a belief that so long as a process makes money and is technological, it must be undertaken, irrespective of the impact on this one uniquely precious planet that we have here. I will continue to try to understand this point of view, but I fear its exponents are blinded by the flashing lights.
Yes, Javascript is used all over the web, but I find that in almost every case it is unnecessary. I use Noscript, and have a pretty small whitelist, comprising mostly just my bank, some webmail sites, and one or two travel ticket booking sites that just don't work at all without it. I temporarily whitelist quite a variety of sites whose functionality is enhanced by scripting, but only on those occasions when I actually need that extra functionality - and taking that moment to click on the Noscript icon to do the temporary whitelist really doesn't slow me down.
One example is the BBC news website, which runs at least twice as fast with scripting disabled - so I keep scripting blocked there except when I actually want to watch the video associated with a news story.
Facebook stays disabled except on those rare occasions when I actually venture into that cess-pit; I believe (not sure) that this preserves me from most/all of those attempts by Facebook to follow me round the Web ("Like"... "Share this"...).
And all those tracker sites of which I'm aware (doubleclick, google-analytics, 2o7, etc.) stay on my Noscript 'Untrusted' list.
All the forums I use regularly work just fine without scripting, albeit sometimes with a slightly clunky look'n'feel. Often a site's 'search' facility just reports "No hits" unless scripting is enabled, but I'm blessed if I know why. So on the rare occasions when I need to search the forum, I temporarily whitelist. Easy, quick. [BTW: I've authored plenty of websites with a search engine integrated, and scripting is just not necessary (at least with Ht://Dig).]
There is just no need for scripting in the vast majority of cases - genuinely Web 2.0 sites excepted. I reserve a special level of contempt for sites that implement links with Javascript.
I accept that large efficiencies of content data transfer are obtained when AJAX is used nicely (page components updated in situ instead of a complete retransmission of the entire modified page). However, as a capable security-minded sysadmin I'm also aware of that fundamental security adage: "If you let a Bad Guy run His program on Your computer, it's not Your computer any more", ((c) Microsoft). Javascript functions are programs, so to allow all websites to run Javascript on my computer is an act of faith that :
1) The site administrator is not a Bad Guy
2) The site administrator is competent enough to author and/or run the webserver platform in a sufficiently secure manner that it never gets broken into by a Bad Guy and infected with a silent drive-by malware download.
I'm afraid I just don't have that level of confidence in the abilities and motivations of all 5 Gajillion website sysadmins out there - and they not only have to be that competent, but also remain that competent 100% of the time. Heh.
I run without scripting enabled, I enjoy a significantly faster and more ad-free web experience, I visit all kinds of murky parts of the Web:), and it's literally years since any PC of mine acquired an infection - unlike the army of friends and relatives whose PCs I'm regularly called to disinfect. Sadly, I accept that most Ordinary Folks just cannot get their heads round this stuff, and are completely fazed by the idea of having to "authorise" anything that ever happens on their computer. This, my friends, is Our Fault - we should not have engineered a WWW that functions so dangerously.
Dialog Box (n):
A small window containing an 'Ok' button, a 'Cancel' button, and some text that the user will ignore.
You know that almost all drive-by downloads (apart from those that target buggy embedded document viewers) exploit a flaw in the DOM that requires Javascript to leverage, right ?
Once upon a time, all organisations of any significant size had an in-house 'Computer Department', with systems analysts, and programmers, and computer rooms, and operations teams... which provided bespoke custom-developed applications suites to perform all the business functions that organisation depended upon. These custom applications worked more or less well.
Then, along came the Big Bad articles in CEO magazine, which convinced the CEO to liberate herself from the need to employ all those IT weirdos (with their strange clothing, incomprehensible jargon, and salaries that offended the HR department), by simply outsourcing the organisation's IT needs - usually by buying an off-the-shelf ready made suite of software (often from SAP Corporation) that allegedly could perform any conceivable kind of business function... all you had to do was write a few configuration files that specified the parameters that defined the actual business needs of that organisation, press the 'Run' button, and hey presto.
This off-the-shelf ready-made software is known as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software, and it never does exactly what you need it for, but the CEO and the ERP sales consultants all get to have huge bonuses, and three holidays a year, and the actual end-users get to 'blame the computer' for the rest of their lives. Only a few old-timers still whisper in the canteen about the days of The Mainframe when Things Just Worked.
Oh, and the redundant in-house IT staff, who used to work on the bespoke custom application systems, get to have no cookie:)
These days I dust and polish my old COBOL-74 manuals in the shrine in the attic, tell my nephews and nieces lurid tales of paper-tape punches and systems that were taken down every Wednesday morning for hardware maintenance, shake my head in disbelief at all the J2EE-framework websites that litter the Interwebs, and stare into the distance a lot.
Did I ever tell you about the time th..[][][][][]..NO CARRIER
... it's beginning to get a bit complicated. To help keep it all reasonably clear I suggest we keep all the various definitions neatly organised in a Peter file.
Hmm... if a "US customary pint" has anything to do with the size of the usual beers people drink in bars, as portrayed in Hollywood movies, then *Imperial pint*.... UK beers are significantly larger:)
I still use PaintShop Pro V6 when on Windows - it does everything I need, and I will never need anything "better" - especially not some dodgy backstreet edition of Adobe Photoshop. Just FYI.
I have a workstation at home sporting a Phenom II X4 3.2GHz CPU and 8Gb 1333MHz RAM, running a Linux host OS using LUKS to provide FDE. This host OS is running VirtualBox to provide various VMs (Windows, Linux) and the performance of all VMs is pretty much instantaneous on all UI requests, and pretty damn zippy at workloads such as compiling.
The WinXP VMs (I give them 2Gb of "RAM" and 1 CPU core) are faster than any WinXP I've ever experienced on Real Hardware; boot to logon prompt takes 10 seconds, & shutdown from being logged in takes 8 seconds. I use one of those WinXP VMs for all my Youtube and DVD video watching needs, without any stutter of any kind. I run KDE4 in several of the Linux VMs, and it's very fast. I don't have any Win7, but a Win8 Preview VM takes 12 seconds to boot, and about 3 to shutdown [once you've figured out how to request shutdown that is:)]
Whatever the performance hit of the FDE is, I'm really not aware of it.
What about Clearfield wheat or any of the other non-GE crops bred for herbicide resistance? Why should that get a free pass? And what if I want to know the conventionally bred genes found in my non-GE food? It is very inconsistent to single out one method of crop improvement and ignore the rest
I'm a physicist by education & training, and I'm anything but anti-science (I'm all in favour of the space programme, never mind the cost, because we need that off-world colony asap) - but the idea of fiddling with the oh-so subtle machinery of a species' DNA, which has taken at least 2 billion years to evolve (I'm not a flat-Earther Creationist) makes the hairs rise on the back of my neck. There is no way we can possibly safely understand the full implications of inserting a fish gene into a tomato to improve shelf-life.
My objections to GE (and those of many others) have nothing to do with imagining that the resulting food will be in some way "unsafe to eat" or "bad for me" - that's just the way the anti crowd are painted with pitchfork'n'torches hysteria by the GE companies' PR teams. Protein is protein is protein. No, for me it's all about the rash folly of fiddling with that double helix and messing it up. It's a very clever molecule.
That conventionally-bred gene manipulation you mention, while resulting in similarly granular effects to that of the GE, has the benefit of using mechanisms and pathways which have stood the test of those 2 billion years without resulting in catastrophic species loss or damage - *that's* why it gets a free pass.... in my book, anyway.
I hesitate to invoke Hawking style religiosity but I will: Genetic Engineering is "playing God" (no, I'm anything but Christian) when IMHO there is no way we are anywhere near competent yet to exercise such ability. We need to exercise more humility instead. This beautiful planet is the only one we have, or are likely to have for some considerable time to come, and it should be treated with kid gloves.
NB: I'm not dogmatic about this - I'm deadly serious, and I'm always willing to be educated, so teach me if you will - that's the scientific way:-)
every time something nuclear comes up, there is a slew of OH MY GOD NUCLEAR BAD!!!
[sigh]... this is very simple: nuclear fission produces absolutely foul and disgustingly dangerous waste that we have no idea how to dispose of. That is far and away the most dangerous thing about it... I'm sure the reactors themselves are operated in a reasonably safe manner these days (apart from at Fukushima of course:), but the waste by-product is a shocking legacy that we bestow on generations to come for tens of thousands of years. I for one am not willing to be party to that.
Nuclear *fusion*, on the other hand, produces no dangerous waste at all... I'm prepared to wait till we've got all the wrinkles ironed out of that - it being slightly embarassing that we currently have to feed the fusion reaction with more energy than we get out of it:)
I feel exactly the same - I have no idea what an activity is, what it's for, or how to use it. But I have figured out (I think) that you have to edit activity settings in order to change the wallpaper or screensaver..... wait a minute, was that KDE 4.4, or KDE 4.8 ? Confused I am, quite a bit.
Still, at least in 4.8 you can now edit the window decoration theme for the KDM login dialog without having to know the arcane binary name of the 'System Settings' utility to run via KDESU.
One of the key missing components in current KDE is some good documentation about many of the features. Maybe I need to get off my ass, learn, and then contribute docs back...
Without getting deep into subtleties of their lawsuit against Google which I don't understand, what Oracle has effectively done is scare the pants off anyone who was contemplating using Java for any purpose ever again.
Perhaps that was their purpose.... maybe they just want to be rid of the burden of maintaining something they have to give away for the public good, without prospect of making megabucks from it. If that's the case, I just don't understand why they can't just hand the source to the community, and declare themselves to be no longer involved.
Totally agree. SP3 bumped the requirement up to 1Gb for any real use case. WinXP on its own may start up reasonably in 512Mb, but as soon as you open a word processor, or a handful of tabs in any modern browser (and I include FF 3.6 in that) you're in a world of hourglass.
I've solved "my PC's started running really slowly" for a number of friends now by simply upgrading their WinXP machines from 256Mb or 512Mb to 1Gb (yes, that's after checking for malware first).
This handy fact may help when comparing the sizes of heathen litres to USofA liters:
miles-per-gallon are equivalent to furlongs-per-pint
Strangely (...) this works for both USofA gallons and Ye Olde British Imperial gallons (even though they have slightly different volumes), which just goes to show how very very wise The Ancients were when they dreamed up their weird, unpronounceable and difficult-to-manipulate-arithmetically system of units.
Of course this depends on American furlongs being the same length as Imperial furlongs..... a British cricket pitch is one chain long, and as we all know, 10 chains make a furlong.... how many chains long is a baseball pitch ?:)
Why yes.. thanks very much... I will have a drink for my trouble - I'll have 1/6th of a gill of your American sippin whisky tipped over an acre of ice please;)
my e-mails have no worth and no one in their right mind would want to read them in the first place
I think it's about time reference was made in this discussion to the statement of need made by Uncle Phil Zimmerman at the beginning of his original PGP 2.x User Manual:
Perhaps you think your E-mail is legitimate enough that encryption is unwarranted. If you really are a law-abiding citizen with nothing to hide, then why don't you always send your paper mail on postcards? Why not submit to drug testing on demand? Why require a warrant for police searches of your house? Are you trying to hide something? You must be a subversive or a drug dealer if you hide your mail inside envelopes. Or maybe a paranoid nut. Do law-abiding citizens have any need to encrypt their E-mail?
What if everyone believed that law-abiding citizens should use postcards for their mail? If some brave soul tried to assert his privacy by using an envelope for his mail, it would draw suspicion. Perhaps the authorities would open his mail to see what he's hiding. Fortunately, we don't live in that kind of world, because everyone protects most of their mail with envelopes. So no one draws suspicion by asserting their privacy with an envelope. There's safety in numbers. Analogously, it would be nice if everyone routinely used encryption for all their E-mail, innocent or not, so that no one drew suspicion by asserting their E-mail privacy with encryption. Think of it as a form of solidarity.
And much much more, of course. It all sounded like a very sane stance when I first read that, so I tried to do exactly what he recommended. Of course, almost nobody else tooled up to deal with my highly secure bar crawl plans, so it was a waste of time. PGP tools for email back then were very primitive, but they're a lot better now... it shouldn't be beyond us all.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting link, but - as others have asserted - the correct word is "meece" :)
How old are we anyway ? The correct answer is "staying young".
while 95% of the population still live in extreme poverty and could make more use of the billions wasted on this project
Nah, sorry, this argument doesn't work. Far more billions are wasted on completely useless military activity than the relatively miniscule space program of all nations put together - and the space programme at least has a use ...
As 'The Hawk' says, we urgently need to set up an off-world colony before the next asteroid strike wipes our species out. We had an unexpected visit from such an asteroid whizzing past inside the orbit of our geostationary satellites just a couple of days ago - this house-sized lump of rock was only detected for the first time about a week before it arrived. Who knows how long we've got before one of these things actually collides with us. Apparently such an event is now overdue in geological timescale terms.
More space programme please.
Mod parent up !
You are *not* to detonate in the bomb bay. I repeat, you are NOT to detonate in the bomb bay!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Nuclear_Power_Plant
Thanks - didn't know about that one, and I'm grateful for the information .... It's been worrying me more and more that idiots (i.e. politicians) keep commissioning more and more nuclear power generation facilities without having any idea (and without even wanting to know) how we're going to clean up the aftermath. It's good to know that somebody has made at least one serious attempt to try it. Although ...
Still has the "what do we do with nuclear waste?" problem, but it was decommissioned anyway.
... as you noted, encasing the reactor vessel in concrete foam and burying it under 45 feet of gravel doesn't really cut it.
If you haven't seen it, there's a really instructive documentary ("Into Eternity"), made in 2010, about a nuclear waste storage repository ("Onkalo") being constructed deep underground in Finland, that is tackling - among other things - the extreme difficulty of figuring out how to construct signage ("Stay Away - Extreme Danger To Health") at the entrance to the facility, that will still be adequately durable, legible and understandable to descendant humans 100,000 years from now.
As the narrator says, "Onkalo must last 100,000 years. Nothing built by man has lasted one tenth of that time."
Another instructive documentary covers the herculean efforts made by the Russians/Ukrainians at Chernobyl to avoid a worse disaster than we already had.
It's a horrific story. They used soldiers to go up on the roof of the reactor building, each of whom could only risk being there for 45 seconds before getting their full dose for the year - enough time to chuck 2 shovelfulls of debris over the side, and then run away fast. In the end, they had to mobilise 500,000 (!) workers of all kinds to get the emergency cleanup done - and as we all know, even then it wasn't done very well, so much so that the EU is having to do it all over again.
I don't even want to think about how Fukushima's gonna go - it seems to be a worse mess than Chernobyl (albeit at a somewhat better designed & built power station). One fact that has stayed with me was how, at the time the tsunami took out the power, the on-site engineers had to go get their car batteries out of their own cars, bring them in, and wire them up in series so as to power up the control room instrumentation to find out what was going on in the reactors. We all owe those guys a beer.
It seems to me (somebody else coined this, not me) that our technological capabilities have advanced faster than we have evolved the ability to safely manage them, and we should just take a step back and do some very careful thinking. We can afford to reduce our lifestyles, wait a while, and revisit The Plan repeatedly until its perfect - we only have the one planet. It's the greedy short-termism involved in the rush to have it all that disgusts me.
Personally I imagine the way forward will involve giant solar panels in orbit collecting the Sun's bounteous energy and somehow transmitting it down to the surface. I have no idea whether that's just science fiction :-) .... it does of course require everyone to stop fighting wars, and divert all the money back into a proper space programme.
Yup, don't like fracking - it carries too high a risk of polluting my landscape, and quite likely turning a beautiful view into a rubbish-tip. In the UK, the government has even gone on record to say the extracted oil & gas won't reduce anybody's energy bills. It will, however, make a shit-load of money for some people who already have too much, and who seem willing to rig the deck to make sure they get their way.
Don't like nuclear fission power either - it produces *filthy* dirty waste, that we have no idea what to do with. AFAIK, not a single nuclear power station has yet been decommissioned and cleaned up anywhere in the world - quite a few are mothballed, while an alleged "decommissioning" process achieves almost nothing and stretches endlessly into the future at vast expense to the tax-payer (cos poor little private sector can't take the pain, so public sector has to take that task on, or private sector will take its ball home).
Both these technologies are amateurish, half-assed, ill-thought-out, poor examples of our abilities at this climactic moment of the 21st century, and I'm embarrassed to be a member of the same species that wants to do this crap. Come on ... we're capable of better than that.
For some reason, many of my peers in this /. community seem to take umbrage whenever there is any criticism of any industrial process if there is some kind of "technology" aspect to that process. There appears to be a belief that so long as a process makes money and is technological, it must be undertaken, irrespective of the impact on this one uniquely precious planet that we have here. I will continue to try to understand this point of view, but I fear its exponents are blinded by the flashing lights.
Sigh.
IOW, at any given time, you've got ~0.25% chance to be routed through a bad exit node.
[cough] .. 25 out of 1000 would be 2.5%
25 per 100 = 25%
25 per 1000 = 2.5%
25 per 10000 = 0.25%
etc. etc.
That's not very nice. Altruist much ? Not everything in life is a business proposition. Or is that really how you look at the world ?
Yes, Javascript is used all over the web, but I find that in almost every case it is unnecessary. I use Noscript, and have a pretty small whitelist, comprising mostly just my bank, some webmail sites, and one or two travel ticket booking sites that just don't work at all without it. I temporarily whitelist quite a variety of sites whose functionality is enhanced by scripting, but only on those occasions when I actually need that extra functionality - and taking that moment to click on the Noscript icon to do the temporary whitelist really doesn't slow me down.
One example is the BBC news website, which runs at least twice as fast with scripting disabled - so I keep scripting blocked there except when I actually want to watch the video associated with a news story.
Facebook stays disabled except on those rare occasions when I actually venture into that cess-pit; I believe (not sure) that this preserves me from most/all of those attempts by Facebook to follow me round the Web ("Like" ... "Share this" ...).
And all those tracker sites of which I'm aware (doubleclick, google-analytics, 2o7, etc.) stay on my Noscript 'Untrusted' list.
All the forums I use regularly work just fine without scripting, albeit sometimes with a slightly clunky look'n'feel. Often a site's 'search' facility just reports "No hits" unless scripting is enabled, but I'm blessed if I know why. So on the rare occasions when I need to search the forum, I temporarily whitelist. Easy, quick.
[BTW: I've authored plenty of websites with a search engine integrated, and scripting is just not necessary (at least with Ht://Dig).]
There is just no need for scripting in the vast majority of cases - genuinely Web 2.0 sites excepted. I reserve a special level of contempt for sites that implement links with Javascript.
I accept that large efficiencies of content data transfer are obtained when AJAX is used nicely (page components updated in situ instead of a complete retransmission of the entire modified page). However, as a capable security-minded sysadmin I'm also aware of that fundamental security adage: "If you let a Bad Guy run His program on Your computer, it's not Your computer any more", ((c) Microsoft). Javascript functions are programs, so to allow all websites to run Javascript on my computer is an act of faith that :
I'm afraid I just don't have that level of confidence in the abilities and motivations of all 5 Gajillion website sysadmins out there - and they not only have to be that competent, but also remain that competent 100% of the time. Heh.
I run without scripting enabled, I enjoy a significantly faster and more ad-free web experience, I visit all kinds of murky parts of the Web :), and it's literally years since any PC of mine acquired an infection - unlike the army of friends and relatives whose PCs I'm regularly called to disinfect. Sadly, I accept that most Ordinary Folks just cannot get their heads round this stuff, and are completely fazed by the idea of having to "authorise" anything that ever happens on their computer. This, my friends, is Our Fault - we should not have engineered a WWW that functions so dangerously.
Dialog Box (n):A small window containing an 'Ok' button, a 'Cancel' button, and some text that the user will ignore.
You know that almost all drive-by downloads (apart from those that target buggy embedded document viewers) exploit a flaw in the DOM that requires Javascript to leverage, right ?
Once upon a time, all organisations of any significant size had an in-house 'Computer Department', with systems analysts, and programmers, and computer rooms, and operations teams ... which provided bespoke custom-developed applications suites to perform all the business functions that organisation depended upon. These custom applications worked more or less well.
Then, along came the Big Bad articles in CEO magazine, which convinced the CEO to liberate herself from the need to employ all those IT weirdos (with their strange clothing, incomprehensible jargon, and salaries that offended the HR department), by simply outsourcing the organisation's IT needs - usually by buying an off-the-shelf ready made suite of software (often from SAP Corporation) that allegedly could perform any conceivable kind of business function ... all you had to do was write a few configuration files that specified the parameters that defined the actual business needs of that organisation, press the 'Run' button, and hey presto.
This off-the-shelf ready-made software is known as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software, and it never does exactly what you need it for, but the CEO and the ERP sales consultants all get to have huge bonuses, and three holidays a year, and the actual end-users get to 'blame the computer' for the rest of their lives. Only a few old-timers still whisper in the canteen about the days of The Mainframe when Things Just Worked.
Oh, and the redundant in-house IT staff, who used to work on the bespoke custom application systems, get to have no cookie :)
These days I dust and polish my old COBOL-74 manuals in the shrine in the attic, tell my nephews and nieces lurid tales of paper-tape punches and systems that were taken down every Wednesday morning for hardware maintenance, shake my head in disbelief at all the J2EE-framework websites that litter the Interwebs, and stare into the distance a lot.
Did I ever tell you about the time th..[][][][][]..NO CARRIER
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2004-01-11/
"I fixed the Internet"
... it's beginning to get a bit complicated. To help keep it all reasonably clear I suggest we keep all the various definitions neatly organised in a Peter file.
Hmm ... if a "US customary pint" has anything to do with the size of the usual beers people drink in bars, as portrayed in Hollywood movies, then *Imperial pint* .... UK beers are significantly larger :)
[oblig]: Handy fact: "miles-per-gallon" (Imperial gallons mind you) is equivalent to "furlongs-per-pint" :)
I'll get my coat ...
I still use PaintShop Pro V6 when on Windows - it does everything I need, and I will never need anything "better" - especially not some dodgy backstreet edition of Adobe Photoshop. Just FYI.
I have a workstation at home sporting a Phenom II X4 3.2GHz CPU and 8Gb 1333MHz RAM, running a Linux host OS using LUKS to provide FDE. This host OS is running VirtualBox to provide various VMs (Windows, Linux) and the performance of all VMs is pretty much instantaneous on all UI requests, and pretty damn zippy at workloads such as compiling.
The WinXP VMs (I give them 2Gb of "RAM" and 1 CPU core) are faster than any WinXP I've ever experienced on Real Hardware; boot to logon prompt takes 10 seconds, & shutdown from being logged in takes 8 seconds. I use one of those WinXP VMs for all my Youtube and DVD video watching needs, without any stutter of any kind. I run KDE4 in several of the Linux VMs, and it's very fast. I don't have any Win7, but a Win8 Preview VM takes 12 seconds to boot, and about 3 to shutdown [once you've figured out how to request shutdown that is :)]
Whatever the performance hit of the FDE is, I'm really not aware of it.
It's the least we can do to make up for the lousy moderation he's quite rightly complaining about.
What about Clearfield wheat or any of the other non-GE crops bred for herbicide resistance? Why should that get a free pass? And what if I want to know the conventionally bred genes found in my non-GE food? It is very inconsistent to single out one method of crop improvement and ignore the rest
I'm a physicist by education & training, and I'm anything but anti-science (I'm all in favour of the space programme, never mind the cost, because we need that off-world colony asap) - but the idea of fiddling with the oh-so subtle machinery of a species' DNA, which has taken at least 2 billion years to evolve (I'm not a flat-Earther Creationist) makes the hairs rise on the back of my neck. There is no way we can possibly safely understand the full implications of inserting a fish gene into a tomato to improve shelf-life.
My objections to GE (and those of many others) have nothing to do with imagining that the resulting food will be in some way "unsafe to eat" or "bad for me" - that's just the way the anti crowd are painted with pitchfork'n'torches hysteria by the GE companies' PR teams. Protein is protein is protein. No, for me it's all about the rash folly of fiddling with that double helix and messing it up. It's a very clever molecule.
That conventionally-bred gene manipulation you mention, while resulting in similarly granular effects to that of the GE, has the benefit of using mechanisms and pathways which have stood the test of those 2 billion years without resulting in catastrophic species loss or damage - *that's* why it gets a free pass .... in my book, anyway.
I hesitate to invoke Hawking style religiosity but I will: Genetic Engineering is "playing God" (no, I'm anything but Christian) when IMHO there is no way we are anywhere near competent yet to exercise such ability. We need to exercise more humility instead. This beautiful planet is the only one we have, or are likely to have for some considerable time to come, and it should be treated with kid gloves.
NB: I'm not dogmatic about this - I'm deadly serious, and I'm always willing to be educated, so teach me if you will - that's the scientific way :-)
every time something nuclear comes up, there is a slew of OH MY GOD NUCLEAR BAD!!!
[sigh] ... this is very simple: nuclear fission produces absolutely foul and disgustingly dangerous waste that we have no idea how to dispose of. That is far and away the most dangerous thing about it ... I'm sure the reactors themselves are operated in a reasonably safe manner these days (apart from at Fukushima of course :), but the waste by-product is a shocking legacy that we bestow on generations to come for tens of thousands of years. I for one am not willing to be party to that.
Nuclear *fusion*, on the other hand, produces no dangerous waste at all ... I'm prepared to wait till we've got all the wrinkles ironed out of that - it being slightly embarassing that we currently have to feed the fusion reaction with more energy than we get out of it :)
I love KDE but I don't understand activities
I feel exactly the same - I have no idea what an activity is, what it's for, or how to use it. But I have figured out (I think) that you have to edit activity settings in order to change the wallpaper or screensaver ..... wait a minute, was that KDE 4.4, or KDE 4.8 ? Confused I am, quite a bit.
Still, at least in 4.8 you can now edit the window decoration theme for the KDM login dialog without having to know the arcane binary name of the 'System Settings' utility to run via KDESU.
One of the key missing components in current KDE is some good documentation about many of the features. Maybe I need to get off my ass, learn, and then contribute docs back ...
This --^
Without getting deep into subtleties of their lawsuit against Google which I don't understand, what Oracle has effectively done is scare the pants off anyone who was contemplating using Java for any purpose ever again.
Perhaps that was their purpose .... maybe they just want to be rid of the burden of maintaining something they have to give away for the public good, without prospect of making megabucks from it. If that's the case, I just don't understand why they can't just hand the source to the community, and declare themselves to be no longer involved.
Imagine ... if Grace Hopper and the CODASYL Committee, or John Backus and colleagues at IBM, or Peter Naur, Donald Knuth and the ACM had been as pathetically venal and moronic as Oracle Corporation ... what kind of sadly crippled and fractured industry we'd be working in now.
Perhaps it's bye-bye-Java time. Sigh. What a bunch of slimy creeps there must be at Oracle Corp ... Whassamatter Larry ? Need a new yacht ?
Totally agree. SP3 bumped the requirement up to 1Gb for any real use case. WinXP on its own may start up reasonably in 512Mb, but as soon as you open a word processor, or a handful of tabs in any modern browser (and I include FF 3.6 in that) you're in a world of hourglass.
I've solved "my PC's started running really slowly" for a number of friends now by simply upgrading their WinXP machines from 256Mb or 512Mb to 1Gb (yes, that's after checking for malware first).
"ceciceciceci" ..... [laughs asthmatically]
are 104 liters equal to 39 litres?
This handy fact may help when comparing the sizes of heathen litres to USofA liters :
miles-per-gallon are equivalent to furlongs-per-pint
Strangely (...) this works for both USofA gallons and Ye Olde British Imperial gallons (even though they have slightly different volumes), which just goes to show how very very wise The Ancients were when they dreamed up their weird, unpronounceable and difficult-to-manipulate-arithmetically system of units.
Of course this depends on American furlongs being the same length as Imperial furlongs ..... a British cricket pitch is one chain long, and as we all know, 10 chains make a furlong .... how many chains long is a baseball pitch ? :)
Why yes .. thanks very much ... I will have a drink for my trouble - I'll have 1/6th of a gill of your American sippin whisky tipped over an acre of ice please ;)
my e-mails have no worth and no one in their right mind would want to read them in the first place
I think it's about time reference was made in this discussion to the statement of need made by Uncle Phil Zimmerman at the beginning of his original PGP 2.x User Manual :
Why Do You Need PGP ?
Privacy is as apple-pie as the Constitution.
Perhaps you think your E-mail is legitimate enough that encryption is unwarranted. If you really are a law-abiding citizen with nothing to hide, then why don't you always send your paper mail on postcards? Why not submit to drug testing on demand? Why require a warrant for police searches of your house? Are you trying to hide something? You must be a subversive or a drug dealer if you hide your mail inside envelopes. Or maybe a paranoid nut. Do law-abiding citizens have any need to encrypt their E-mail?
What if everyone believed that law-abiding citizens should use postcards for their mail? If some brave soul tried to assert his privacy by using an envelope for his mail, it would draw suspicion. Perhaps the authorities would open his mail to see what he's hiding. Fortunately, we don't live in that kind of world, because everyone protects most of their mail with envelopes. So no one draws suspicion by asserting their privacy with an envelope. There's safety in numbers. Analogously, it would be nice if everyone routinely used encryption for all their E-mail, innocent or not, so that no one drew suspicion by asserting their E-mail privacy with encryption. Think of it as a form of solidarity.
And much much more, of course. It all sounded like a very sane stance when I first read that, so I tried to do exactly what he recommended. Of course, almost nobody else tooled up to deal with my highly secure bar crawl plans, so it was a waste of time. PGP tools for email back then were very primitive, but they're a lot better now ... it shouldn't be beyond us all.