7. 10 years later, greenhouse gas emissions worldwide fall to near zero. 50 years after that, glaciers cover both hemispheres down to the 30th parallel. See Niven/Pournelle/Flynn's Fallen Angels.
Scenario 3.
Cold fusion works so well and is so easy that every disgruntled person and terrorist can suddenly start building multimegaton explosive devices and civilization ends within a few years of the discovery.
Uh-uh. One of the nice things about fusion power, should we ever figure it out, is that there's no positive feedback in the reaction. It takes external force, a magnetic or gravitational or inertial squish, to start and sustain fusion; take that away and everything stops. Contrast with fission, which requires throttling to keep it from running away and melting down your reactor - or, under the right conditions, from exploding. Remember that an H-bomb is pumped by a fission explosion. If CF turns out to be real, a mad genius might well be able to employ it in all sorts of nasty weaponry. But atomic bombs? No.
But does it not seem coincidental that one of the two suddenly owns an island and the other vanished?
Yep, the secret vanished, to the same place where hides the 100 MPG carburetor, the Dean Drive, and the rest. Just for the record, let me point out the teeny flaw in reasoning common to this class of conspiracy theories:
Scenario 1:
Pons and Fleischmann discover a source of effectively unlimited energy that is relatively safe and easy to manufacture, and portable in the bargain!
Exxon and Ford investigate, and discover that the process works and is commercially viable.
E & F decide that this incredible discovery must be suppressed for the sake of their businesses. They buy off Pons for an island and $whatever, on condition that he become a permanent recluse. Fleischmann refuses to cooperate, and "vanishes".
Exxon's profits sag as OPEC jacks up the price of crude yet again. Ford ups its factory rebates to hang on to its market share.
Scenario 2:
Pons and Fleischmann discover a source of effectively unlimited energy that is relatively safe and easy to manufacture, and portable in the bargain!
Exxon and Ford investigate, and discover that the process works and is commercially viable.
Exxon and Ford gain exclusive licenses for the process from P & F for a few US$billion each. Pocket change for them.
Exxon builds huge CF generators to pump hydrogen and electricity into the grid at one third of current prices, and its net profit jumps by a factor of 20 as Westinghouse, GE, BP/Amoco, and OPEC go bankrupt. U.S. pollution and CO2 emissions drop 30%. CEO honored at Sierra Club's annual convention.
Ford immediately retrofits entire product line for CF power at 30% above current sticker prices. New Expedition gets 11,400 miles per gallon of heavy water with zero emissions and near-zero maintenance (grease the suspension and empty the tritium cup every now & then). Ford's market share increases to 90% in three years. US pollution and CO2 emissions drop another 40%. Members of employee stock purchase program retire and buy yachts, CF-powered of course. Ford CEO honored at Greenpeace's annual convention.
Pons and Fleischmann are multi-billionaires and Nobel Prize winners. Forever after revered in history books as saviors of mankind.
Flippancy aside, which scenario do you consider more plausible?
But with satellite feeds and other communications, the latency was already there, wasn't it?
Yes indeedy. Had a most entertaining time on the phone several weeks ago, explaining to my mom why the sound from my Dish receiver was lagging about a half second behind that from the same channel on her cable TV.
More fun with lightspeed and CPU power: there's a consistent 100-odd ms delay in video and voice from my bedroom Echostar 4000, relative to the model 6000 in my living room. And a much shorter, but clearly perceptible lag from the 6000 vs. my brother's model 311. (And a full three-minute delay from his DVR 721 after he comes back from the bathroom, but that's another topic....)
Speaking of the topic, note that none of these four receivers have any problem whatsoever keeping video and sound in sync, despite a rather wide spread of speed and RAM. So imho the high-def set makers, which I presume have way more processing oomph in their designs, have no excuse whatsoever for their products' not keeping sync. Two letters: QA.
Has any videogame translated well to movies? The only one that comes to mind that didn't stink under liquid helium was Mortal Kombat, and that only because of the halfway decent eye candy.
Don't know torgosan, & a quick search didn't turn up his/her line of work. On the assumption it's IT, here's a few hints based upon 5 years on a facilities mgmt. contract at a SE Mich. community college:
The environment was low-key, relaxed, relative to corporate IT. Deadlines tended to be looser and less arbitrary. Minds tend to be more open (with the occasional hellish exception, see below); if you're an OSS advocate you'll have a MUCH easier time getting support for introducing or expanding its use.
As with any non-profit org, budgets are tight. The budget model may not be what you're used to. xxCC had separate funding pools for operations (revenue mostly from tuition and local millage) that was usually hurting, and for capital acquisitions (revenue mostly from bonds and fed/state grants) that was usually bulging. We didn't get new toys often, but when we did we got GOOD ones, and lots of them, with tons of software and long-term maintenance bundled in to shift those costs out of the ops fund.
Job security is much better than average, IF you stay on the right side of the political game. See below.
Politics are vicious, even by corporate standards. Our situation was aggravated by a board of trustees with delusions of godhood - long, entertaining story in itself - but the main source of grief here is professors, especially tenured ones. Expect a caste system based on level and number of degrees you hold, minus about two caste levels' handicap because you will be lowly staff, not lordly faculty. Plus pecking-order infighting within each caste. You will make friends among staff, but you will need friends among faculty. Do favors for faculty members above and beyond what your job requires. And keep in mind that some faculty will view you as sub-scum no matter how friendly and helpful you are. Be cordial and professional with these people, but avoid them otherwise, and never turn your back to them. (We had one business prof who was utterly convinced that the job scheduler on our mainframe was racially biased. Really. We had to prepare more than one report for mgmt and trustees detailing the way jobs were prioritized because he kept raising the issue in meetings. I was more than a bit curious as to how he thought the VT220s we used distinguished caucasian from african-american input, but I never worked up the cojones to ask him.)
Management will probably be much the same as mgmt. anywhere else. We had good ones and bad ones.
Bureaucracy will probably be about the same as anywhere else. Pluses are that college admin tends to be relatively small and centralized; minuses are that the purchasing pipeline can be extremely long, slow, and politicized. You will have incentive to build all but the most complex solutions in-house. See above re OSS.
If staffing is in any way adequate, you can expect to work more than a few projects on tight deadlines, esp. around enrollment time. ..but you can also expect to have more than a few slack periods to clean up loose ends, refactor code you rushed through earlier, and engage in whatever loosely-work-related intellectual pursuits you might enjoy. At least where I was, mgmt didn't have a problem with this as long as you weren't running a warez distro hub or cranking out CGI pr0n on the lab servers or such.
Some more food for thought, from my own quest for an eye-friendly work space:
Position your desk and monitor so windows are outside your field of view. If you can't do that, shade the windows to drop full daylight down to a little less than your monitor's brightness (see below).
Room lighting should be halogen or the newer residential-use fluorescent lamps, which with warm color and electronic ballasts are no less eye-friendly than incandescents. Install about twice the lighting typical for the room's size, and a dimmer to adjust downward according to your needs/mood/whatever of the moment. Which will vary, and you'll appreciate the reserve lumens when working on hardware & such. Make sure lamps and dimmers are compatable. Direct or indirect, lamps should be placed outside your field of view when looking at your monitor, to avoid even a hint of glare. Avoid overhead lighting of any type. Note that the common el-cheapo office fluorescents are bad, bad news on all counts.
Desk lamps should be halogen, or full-spectrum fluorescent if you can afford it, shaded and positioned to direct all of the light down to the desk surface. Regular table lamps with translucent shades don't cut it. You shouldn't be able to see even a hint of dazzle, either from the lamp or reflected from the desk.
As many others have said, LCDs are easier on the eyes than CRTs, but make sure your Lin/Win/Mac display is set to the recommended resolution for the monitor. Otherwise, the monitor has to map the display pixels to its discrete LCD pixels, and the result is usually pretty bad.
Regarding the black-on-white vs. white/yellow/green-on-black debate: I've found that the key comfort-wise is to minimize the differential between the brightness of the display and that of the rest of your field of view, with the display just slightly brighter. If the room is dimly lit, or typical room lighting with a dark or shaded surface behind the monitor, use green/yellow-on-black. In typical room lighting with a light surface behind the monitor, black-on-white with the brightness about half the monitor's maximum. In daylight with a light surface backdrop, black-on-white with brightness and contrast cranked up to max. In intermediate conditions, interpolate.:)
I suspect your move away from gaming parallels my own, so here's what moved me:
Time, or rather the lack thereof. A decade or so ago I usually had several hours a day to game & code. Now I'm working more, (usually) sleeping more, maintaining a home, getting laid regularly, and engaging in face-time with relatives/friends every week or two instead of every other month.
Improving taste. I burnt out on FPSs and flash-bang-for-its-own-sake long ago. I burn out on MMORPGs (sp?) quickly through sheer monotony - another monster vanquished, [yawn]. Nowadays my main interests are sims and strategy games, and there are at best one or two good releases per year in those categories.
New hobbies. I transitioned from flight sims to the real thing a couple years ago, and quickly discovered I'd much rather blow $60 on an hour in the air than on Final Fantasy Pi or whatever.
Maturity; i.e., the realization that There Are Things In Life More Important And Rewarding Than Finding The Faerie Hat So Zelda Can Get Past The Pond Full Of Zombie Sharks. This is the only thing on the list I really regret.:)
Does that company now have access to the email even though there is no written contract nor technology use policy?
That was your first mistake. Your second was in not running to a lawyer the instant you got the request. Without something on paper, you're now at risk of legal action no matter what you do or don't do. Get off Slashdot and go talk to someone who knows business law!
And hopefully, your third mistake will NOT be hosting another company's mail or whatever without a written agreement and AUP.
That being said: If the person using the mailbox was an employee of the co. paying for it, easy call: the contents belong to the employer. If the mailbox user was a contractor or, worse still, an unconnected third party, privacy and/or copyright and/or trade secret laws could apply and things could get very sticky. In which case you may be best off doing as some earlier posters suggested, causing the server to "forget" it ever had mail in that box, then forgetting about it yourself. IANAL, blah blah blah.
This is just magnetic radiation. Get that? No "electro" involved. just like the poles of the earth, and magnets on your fridge. it won't hurt you any more than walking around with a magnet next to your head for 5 hours a day would.
There's at least
someevidence that magnetic fields affect human tissue. Not to mention the presence of
ferromagnetic crystals in the human brain whose function is still a mystery. There's no evidence that even intense magnetic fields cause harm, but every page I Googled up noted that there's been very little research done.
That being said, what little I remember from Physics 310 tells me that the field energy from those lift magnets should be concentrated in the vicinity of the rail (since that's where the work is being done) with relatively little leakage up & to the sides. And any reasonable amount of shielding should keep what's left out of the passenger compartment. Note that a number of mass transit systems, e.g. the Detroit People Mover, have linear induction motors driving the cars. Lots of magnetic & electromagnetic activity, and yet the DPM web page notes no relevant precautions, even for pacemakers and such.
What ISP are we talking about??? Speakeasy (mine) has an explicitly casual policy regarding excessive use. That's one of the reasons I signed with them; my usage is pretty volatile, and if I need to download a few ISOs I don't want to have to spread it out over several weeks, or have the Piracy Police second-guessing my activity. So if that letter came from Speakeasy, I'd like to know.
Of course, this also seems to indicate that TiVo isn't doing so well these days. I had thought they were doing OK.
I think you've pegged the reason even meritful patent lawsuits are growing irritating - with so many co's (ab)using the courts as strategic weapons, any co. making this kind of announcement is instantly under suspicion as to its true motives.
I wonder if it wouldn't be possible to tweak the system to minimize this kind of crap. Maybe a mandatory licensing process that would require a patent holder to issue licenses on demand at a fixed price, that being the lowest price negotiated by a licensee. If the holder cuts a deal with, say, GE for $1/unit royalties, royalties for all other licensees automatically drop to that rate. Plus some practical-use rules to prevent cross-licensing duopolies - use the license or lose it...for that matter, use the patent or lose it. And, while we're at it, patent duration based on a reasonable lifetime for the area of interest - you can still patent software, but the patent is only good for, say, five years. A patent on a building construction method might last 20.
At any rate, something must be done to return the patent system to its original intent of promoting progress in the sciences and arts instead of stifling it.
Cheaper than TurboTax, relatively EULA-friendly, and trouble-free if you make sure to download all the available updates. TC's been balky out of the box on a couple occasions (I've used since '99), but the automatic updates have set it right each time.
I do acknowledge the possibility that some as-yet-uninvented variation or hybridization of Marxism might prove viable in the real world. I think it highly unlikely, but who knows what a powerful socioeconomic sim coupled to, say, an equally powerful genetic algorithm engine might come up with?
for your needs. ..or not. A friend of mine uses a programmable X10 controller to gradually ramp up the room lights and stereo volume starting 30 min. or so before desired wake-up time. Required: the controller, either clock- or PC-driven; the newer lamp dimmer module(s) that'll start from "off" (the older ones have to start at full "on", then dim); X10->IR interface & emitter for the stereo. Browsing SmartHome, it looks like the IR coupler for volume control is the expensive part; everything else can be had for probably $30 if you shop around a bit. Of course you can add wattage and intelligence to the setup as needed. He's currently working on an applet that'll take input from one of those cheap four-button Radio Shack controllers as a one-keypress "wake me in 6/7/8/9 hours" override of the default wake-up time.
Or cats; any size; quantity (Q) > 1. The probability of your waking at or before the cutoff time T varies directly with the value of Q. ..unfortunately, so does your chance of waking at any random hour of the night. Best results obtained when T ~ cat's feeding time.
of virtual economies is that they could enable experimentation with different socioeconomic theories without (serious) risk of screwing up real people's lives with the failures. I wonder how Marx's or von Mises' writings would have been affected if they'd had MMO simulators to play with?
This was disasterous for a couple of reasons: Amiga development revenues were diverted to PC development which meant the Amiga slowly became less revolutionary compared to what else was in the market, and the PC industry was already a commodity market...
[nod] They wanted so, so very badly to be Commodore Business Machines, leaving them utterly clueless in dealing with the home & creative markets for which Amiga was designed, which, oddly, were also the groups that were actually buying the things. Abysmally sparse / poor marketing and half-baked consumerware like CD32 didn't help. Whether they'd still be around if they'd gotten their act together, who knows. The whole debacle is proof positive, if more were needed, that technological superiority != market success.
...Varley's Red Thunder. The science and engineering work if you can get into suspension-of-disbelief mode in re the "squeeze" drive, the characters are marvelous, and the story is simply the most fun read I've had in a very long time.
...right here I was about to write "Would make a fantastic movie!" But then I remembered Millenium, slapped myself viciously in the face eight or nine times, and decided not to write that. But it's a very good book.
DDB (who would gladly chip in a few $ in taxes to enable us to land a Bigfoot rover on Mars)
Slashdot Mirror
A handwritten note to the CIA reading "Just wait a few hours".
...<g> I also left out of scenario 2:
7. 10 years later, greenhouse gas emissions worldwide fall to near zero. 50 years after that, glaciers cover both hemispheres down to the 30th parallel.
See Niven/Pournelle/Flynn's Fallen Angels.
Scenario 1:
Scenario 2:
Flippancy aside, which scenario do you consider more plausible?
More fun with lightspeed and CPU power: there's a consistent 100-odd ms delay in video and voice from my bedroom Echostar 4000, relative to the model 6000 in my living room. And a much shorter, but clearly perceptible lag from the 6000 vs. my brother's model 311. (And a full three-minute delay from his DVR 721 after he comes back from the bathroom, but that's another topic....)
Speaking of the topic, note that none of these four receivers have any problem whatsoever keeping video and sound in sync, despite a rather wide spread of speed and RAM. So imho the high-def set makers, which I presume have way more processing oomph in their designs, have no excuse whatsoever for their products' not keeping sync. Two letters: QA.
HTH.
- Position your desk and monitor so windows are outside your field of view. If you can't do that, shade the windows to drop full daylight down to a little less than your monitor's brightness (see below).
- Room lighting should be halogen or the newer residential-use fluorescent lamps, which with warm color and electronic ballasts are no less eye-friendly than incandescents. Install about twice the lighting typical for the room's size, and a dimmer to adjust downward according to your needs/mood/whatever of the moment. Which will vary, and you'll appreciate the reserve lumens when working on hardware & such. Make sure lamps and dimmers are compatable. Direct or indirect, lamps should be placed outside your field of view when looking at your monitor, to avoid even a hint of glare. Avoid overhead lighting of any type. Note that the common el-cheapo office fluorescents are bad, bad news on all counts.
- Desk lamps should be halogen, or full-spectrum fluorescent if you can afford it, shaded and positioned to direct all of the light down to the desk surface. Regular table lamps with translucent shades don't cut it. You shouldn't be able to see even a hint of dazzle, either from the lamp or reflected from the desk.
- As many others have said, LCDs are easier on the eyes than CRTs, but make sure your Lin/Win/Mac display is set to the recommended resolution for the monitor. Otherwise, the monitor has to map the display pixels to its discrete LCD pixels, and the result is usually pretty bad.
- Regarding the black-on-white vs. white/yellow/green-on-black debate: I've found that the key comfort-wise is to minimize the differential between the brightness of the display and that of the rest of your field of view, with the display just slightly brighter. If the room is dimly lit, or typical room lighting with a dark or shaded surface behind the monitor, use green/yellow-on-black. In typical room lighting with a light surface behind the monitor, black-on-white with the brightness about half the monitor's maximum. In daylight with a light surface backdrop, black-on-white with brightness and contrast cranked up to max. In intermediate conditions, interpolate.
:)
HTH.And hopefully, your third mistake will NOT be hosting another company's mail or whatever without a written agreement and AUP.
That being said: If the person using the mailbox was an employee of the co. paying for it, easy call: the contents belong to the employer. If the mailbox user was a contractor or, worse still, an unconnected third party, privacy and/or copyright and/or trade secret laws could apply and things could get very sticky. In which case you may be best off doing as some earlier posters suggested, causing the server to "forget" it ever had mail in that box, then forgetting about it yourself. IANAL, blah blah blah.
That being said, what little I remember from Physics 310 tells me that the field energy from those lift magnets should be concentrated in the vicinity of the rail (since that's where the work is being done) with relatively little leakage up & to the sides. And any reasonable amount of shielding should keep what's left out of the passenger compartment. Note that a number of mass transit systems, e.g. the Detroit People Mover, have linear induction motors driving the cars. Lots of magnetic & electromagnetic activity, and yet the DPM web page notes no relevant precautions, even for pacemakers and such.
.
(..."magnetic radiation"?)
tired of the ____ Eye for the _____ Guy cutesy?
Fourth variation I've seen today.
What ISP are we talking about??? Speakeasy (mine) has an explicitly casual policy regarding excessive use. That's one of the reasons I signed with them; my usage is pretty volatile, and if I need to download a few ISOs I don't want to have to spread it out over several weeks, or have the Piracy Police second-guessing my activity.
So if that letter came from Speakeasy, I'd like to know.
Henry Ford you're not.
I wonder if it wouldn't be possible to tweak the system to minimize this kind of crap. Maybe a mandatory licensing process that would require a patent holder to issue licenses on demand at a fixed price, that being the lowest price negotiated by a licensee. If the holder cuts a deal with, say, GE for $1/unit royalties, royalties for all other licensees automatically drop to that rate. Plus some practical-use rules to prevent cross-licensing duopolies - use the license or lose it...for that matter, use the patent or lose it. And, while we're at it, patent duration based on a reasonable lifetime for the area of interest - you can still patent software, but the patent is only good for, say, five years. A patent on a building construction method might last 20.
At any rate, something must be done to return the patent system to its original intent of promoting progress in the sciences and arts instead of stifling it.
Cheaper than TurboTax, relatively EULA-friendly, and trouble-free if you make sure to download all the available updates. TC's been balky out of the box on a couple occasions (I've used since '99), but the automatic updates have set it right each time.
(Be kind, people; my Nomex underwear is in the wash.)
I do acknowledge the possibility that some as-yet-uninvented variation or hybridization of Marxism might prove viable in the real world. I think it highly unlikely, but who knows what a powerful socioeconomic sim coupled to, say, an equally powerful genetic algorithm engine might come up with?
for your needs. . .or not. A friend of mine uses a programmable X10 controller to gradually ramp up the room lights and stereo volume starting 30 min. or so before desired wake-up time. Required: the controller, either clock- or PC-driven; the newer lamp dimmer module(s) that'll start from "off" (the older ones have to start at full "on", then dim); X10->IR interface & emitter for the stereo. Browsing SmartHome, it looks like the IR coupler for volume control is the expensive part; everything else can be had for probably $30 if you shop around a bit.
Of course you can add wattage and intelligence to the setup as needed. He's currently working on an applet that'll take input from one of those cheap four-button Radio Shack controllers as a one-keypress "wake me in 6/7/8/9 hours" override of the default wake-up time.
Best results obtained when T ~ cat's feeding time.
of virtual economies is that they could enable experimentation with different socioeconomic theories without (serious) risk of screwing up real people's lives with the failures. I wonder how Marx's or von Mises' writings would have been affected if they'd had MMO simulators to play with?
Whether they'd still be around if they'd gotten their act together, who knows. The whole debacle is proof positive, if more were needed, that technological superiority != market success.
DDB (who would gladly chip in a few $ in taxes to enable us to land a Bigfoot rover on Mars)