I know you mean well, and you probably just fat-fingered in your enthusiasm, but 20004 is probably a good estimate of how long it will take before a third party candidate sits in the White House again.
(The last time was in 1853, at the end of Fillmore's term as a Whig President.)
"Consumer-Class" Dell cases are actually easy to take apart so tech support can walk people thru certain things over the phone.
On the other hand, for a number of years Dell power supplies and motherboards had a nonstandard pinout. The socket was identical, but the actual arrangement of live and ground wires was different, with a little plastic doohickey to prevent you from plugging in a 'normal' connector.
The only reason I can see for this is to block you from using a non-Dell power supply in a Dell case. My roommate had an older Dell and just wanted to upgrade to a silent power supply. He had to buy a third-party cable to rearrange the pinout--he could also have done some soldering, but there's no good reason to have to do either. There are also the unfortunate souls who just cut the little plastic thingy off (yeah, I know--not a smart move) and fried either power supply or mainboard, or both.
My understanding is that Dell no longer does this, but the idea of vendor lock-in is certainly a concept with which Dell has at least a passing acquaintance.
Thank you, Michael, for finally bringing us a 'MS Trashes Open Source' article at last, so that balance can be restored to the force, and we can all flame in the same direction again.
...12 gigawatts of electrical power for several minutes...
You can get 2600 farad capacitors (not ufd, farads) at 2.5V today, and you can take current out fast. Auto engines can be started with six of these things, weighing a total of about 3Kg.
Okay, call it 1000 F at 2.5 V, per kilogram. That's about 3000 J. Assuming that we need to deliver that over a three minute period, we're looking at (round figures) 20 W.
To deliver 12 GW for three minutes, that's 600 million kilograms--600 thousand tons--of capacitor. That's big. That's something like the mass of two hundred fully fuelled Saturn V moon rockets. On the other hand, the Grand Coulee Dam contains something like fifty million tons of concrete, so it's not an unprecedented scale of construction. (No, I'm not going to give you the mass in VW Beetles, too.) Another neat fact--12 GW for three minutes at $0.05 per kWh is $30 million worth of electricity. Definitely cheaper than a Saturn V.
At the end, the total amount of recall I have of specific aspects of the book will be about equivalent to the recall I'd have after seeing a movie, only the movie gives me the information passively and in a fifth the time. Do you really remember significantly more detail about a story from reading a book than from seeing a movie?
The purists will argue that the difference is not that you were exposed to more detail, but rather that you did read the story in the first place. They may even have a point--if you read The Sum of All Fears, then you get the story as Tom Clancy wrote it. If you watch The Sum of All Fears, then you see the story as Phil Alden Robinson interpreted it. Out of necessity, the film version strips details, and out of political correctness it changes plot details (the nature of the terrorists who detonate the bomb, for instance.) It is impossible to present as detailed a plot in a movie as one might do in a novel--there just isn't time or space, and the audience can't flip back a few pages to check their notes, as it were.
There's an economic argument, too. If I go to the theatre to see a movie, then I'm out of pocket $13 (more if I have to buy snacks, parking, a ticket for my date...). If I rent the DVD, I'm on the hook for five bucks or so. Either way, I get two hours of entertainment for that money. If I buy the book (hardcover, $30; paperback, $12) I get ten hours of entertainment instead of two. Further, I can reread the book whenever I want. If I'm really frugal, I can wait a bit and buy it used ($3.50) or borrow it from the library (free).
Sure, if you look at it in terms of 'how quickly can I get the essence of the plot into my head?' then the movie is more efficient--but it also makes it sound like it's work. If I'm looking at it in terms of 'how can I enjoyably pass time at the lowest cost per hour of entertainment?', then books win hands down.
Tom Clancy isn't a good example, but there are some authors where you would miss out on incredible richness, wit, and clever detail if Hollywood ever tried to make a movie out of their books. Neal Stephenson comes to mind, for instance.
Then there's the world of short stories. Now, you can have as much plot as most movies, but in a convenient size suitable for finishing on the subway. Buy an anthology of a genre you want to try out--then you get a preview of several authors, without the time or financial commitment of buying a whole novel. Short short stories are small enough that you can lend them to coworkers and friends for easy discussion, too.
As far as 'limited memetic aspects'--yes, fewer people will have read the latest book X than the latest movie Y. So? Even more people will have watched the most recent episode of Friends or Survivor, but is that all the culture that you want to absorb, discuss, and think about? If you're desperate just to have a topic of conversation, talk about the weather. If you're looking to have a deep conversation about something, then be willing to make an effort to find people who took the time to read a book. Heck, feel free to recommend books to your friends--lend them your copy, if you have to.
But how many Democrats voted for the Patriot Act in the first place? Quite a few. There is too much blame to put on one group.
Kind of like Edwards now being against invading Iraq without the UN, versus his comments in televised interviews supporting that action in Jan. 2003.
Waffles anyone?
It's absolutely awful that a politician should learn from his mistakes, or revise his opinion based on better information. Virtually everyone, on both sides of the floor, in both houses, voted for the USA PATRIOT Act. Stupid, weak, and unprincipled it was, and every Representative and Senator who supported the Act deserves to be criticized for it.
Now it seems that the Democrats have mostly learned that they acted erroneously, and in haste--and are trying at least halfheartedly to rectify those errors.
If that's a waffle, then so be it. I'll take a stack.
Appropriately, the book's title was Sane Planning, Sensible Tomorrow. Lisa hopes that it's as exciting as Gore's other book, Rational Thinking, Reasonable Future.
Unfortunately, we seems stuck with Pinheaded Oilman, Perilous Prospects.
This is extremely misleading and alarmist. The Microsoft Monopol has been compared fairly to monoculture virus propagation. 90% of the world's personal computers use M$ and M$'s lazy closed source development model insures that each version mostly contains the same code. Flipping the analogy around is preposterous. Biology is diverse in ways that have no coding or even linguistic analogies.
Are you nuts? Life is very much a monoculture, in some ways. You think Microsoft is in trouble because versions of software reuse code? The DNA that codes for you overlaps better than 95% with closely related primate species. If you look at some of the proteins in e. coli, they're carried forward right up to human beings. The important domains (parts of the protein) can have 80% or better homology (similar structure) between the two species, with still better than 50% identity (identical amino acids.)
There is only one disease that we have managed to eradicate--smallpox--and one where we're close: polio. We have a hell of a time with trying to eliminate diseases because many are able to cross whole species barriers. (Yes, there's usually the odd individual with some mutation that confers immunity, but such individuals represent a vanishingly small portion of the population in most cases.) Ebola probably has some primate reservoir in the wild. Rabies affects just about all mammals. Influenza is carried in birds. Birds! It's like having a computer virus that ran under DOS, but spreads happily to Windows XP.
Is your DNA identical to that of the person next to you? Of course not. Is it damn similar? Yeah. Are the two of you vulnerable to the same diseases? Most likely, yes. We all have immune systems that work in roughly the same way. Though not identical, there are an awful lot of common vulnerabilities.
I doubt men will be able to match Nature's power and script kiddies won't come close. Nature itself is constantly working to create pathogens.
Nature isn't some malevolent force that is doing its level best to kill us all. It's a blind process driven by selection. Viruses that replicate successfully carry on, viruses that can't--don't. Particularly nasty viruses tend to disappear in short order--if they kill all their victims too quickly, then there's nobody left to carry and spread the virus. If someone has one of the Ebola variants, then you know it in a few days, and the victim is in no condition to go spreading the illness around. Often a mutant form of the virus will emerge that is less virulent--longer incubation times, more moderate symptoms. (This has been observed with syphilis and cholera, to name a few). There is some evidence that DNA from ancient viruses has actually been incorporated into our own genome.
You want a new disease? Take an animal virus that doesn't affect humans. Modify its protein coat so that it can bind to human cells. Cackle maniacally. It might take some testing, and you'd have to be a little bit inventive in your choices, but you'd have a homemade pathogen that could infect 90% of the population. Alternately something like a carefully retuned smallpox could do a lot of us in. It's a bit of a stretch right now to suggest that a script kiddie could do it, but it's within the reach of technically proficient graduate students.
Reminds me of a book I just finished, Prey, by Micheal Crichton. I that book he brings up the issue of "hackers" releasing a biological virus created using nanotechnology that would behave like a computer virus, attacking people and self-replicating.
It's a clever concept, but man does Crichton's execution suck. His earlier work is vastly superior, both from a technical standpoint, and from the standpoint of quality of writing. Jurassic Park had a few plot holes, but he's been getting sloppier ever since. He's also abandoned any concern for scientific credibility.
Prey demonstrates ignorance in roughly equal parts of the details of biology, physics, chemistry, and computer science.
He's just banging out books as fast as he can in hope that another one gets bought by a movie studio.
While keeping the tapes seems reasonable, making complaints easier looks rather like censorship through the backdoor.
Rather than a govenrment body directly cracking down, they can say they are responding to complaints, and fear of complaints may force some broadcasters to change things.
That is a bit tinfoil hat thinking, but some people in the current US admistration do seem very keen on "cleaning things up" (Ashcroft anyone?).
I think it's a bit of stretch to shout "conspiracy!" because the FCC has made regulations that make it easier to enforce rules that were already on the books. Before, the enforcement was very spotty, and sometimes relied on viewers or listeners to be lucky enough to catch something on tape. Since a mandatory record of broadcasts will ensure that there is an honest record of what went out over the air, specious claims can be readily dismissed, while legitimate ones can unambiguously be confirmed.
To claim that this is some sort of legally-mandated self-incrimination is a bit over the top. It's like saying that requiring a company to keep its books in order is a form of self-incrimination, because it might reveal fiduciary misconduct. Yes, fear of complaints may well encourage a form of self-censorship--in this particular case, the 'self-censorship' comprises obeying FCC regulations.
Incidentally, what does Ashcroft have to gain from reducing the number of f-bombs on television? Yes, he's a right-wing zealously-religous compulsive moralizer, and yes it's a move that might play well in the next election, but aside from those transparent motives I have trouble seeing a conspiracy. Unless an argument can be made that not letting Democrats swear on television will prevent them from unseating Bush....
Whether or not I agree with the FCC standards on indecency is another matter entirely--I live in Canada, and the broadcasters and regulators up here are much less uptight. But requiring broadcasters to keep records of their broadcasts for two or three months is not a particularly onerous demand. As a side benefit, it's always possible that a dramatic increase in fines and complaints could well lead to the reform of outdated indecency rules, too. Legislators are much more likely to reexamine a stupid law that is being enforced, and for once it might actually be beneficial that so many Senators and Members of Congress are bought and paid for by the media conglomerates.
Every device/appliance has one, short of the original light bulbs and some heaters. Computers, TV's, stereos, microwaves, etc.. I could list at least 80% of the things in your house as needing a DC convertor.
Actually, microwaves contain a big step-up transformer--they need a big chunk of high voltage current to do their thing. If you had DC mains, you'd have to convert to AC first, then rectify back to DC at higher voltage. Others on the thread have noted that building DC to AC converters is more costly than going the other way, too.
Yes, you have many DC appliances--but they operate at different voltages. Heck, your PC has 3.3, 5, and 12 volt rails. Converting between one DC voltage and another is a real pain in the neck, unless you don't mind wasting a ton of juice.
The real killer problem is that if you want to supply DC to homes at a voltage directly useful in small appliances (say 12 V) then you need to have absolutely massive wires to carry all the current. Let's say you want 200 W at 12 V for your computer--that's going to be nearly 17 amps. To run a hair dryer (1000 W) that's going to be more than eighty amps. If you're cooking dinner in the microwave, the air conditioner is running, plus you have the computer and a few lights on, you're pushing three hundred amps. In newly constructed homes, my understanding is that 200 amp service is the norm; older buildings may only have 100 amp or even sixty amp service. At 200 amps you're looking at pretty hefty cables. If each home starts requiring cable that can handle a thousand amps, you're getting into a lot of copper awfully quickly--even if the supply is relatively local.
Internal wiring would also have to be much heavier to avoid overheating. Resistance heating goes up linearly with resistance--but as the square of current. You probably wouldn't want to have to lift a hundred-foot extension cord.
Yes, you could get away with the same thickness of wiring you use now if you supply high-voltage DC inside the home, but then you would need a step-down transformer for all the same appliances that have wall warts now.
The trick is to use the paper towel to open the door before you throw it out. Of course, if the bathroom only has hot air hand dryers, you're out of luck.
And I am on the Do Not Call List, but they call and it is "unknown", and worse a recording to call some 800 number for a free satelite dish, from some company in Canada. No way to make them accountable for violating the law.
Interesting. You might actually look at their violations of Canadian law, then. Using an auto-dialler (an Automatic Dialling and Announcing Device, or ADAD) for solicitation--charitable donations, promotions, sales, etc.--is forbidden by the CRTC (Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission.) The CRTC can demand that a phone company suspend service to any company or individual who flagrantly violates these rules. Even if a company hires another company to make the calls, they can be held accountable. You might want to contact the CRTC directly to see how the rules apply on international calls, however.
Even if a company is blocking call ID, your phone company can probably trace the call. For advice on how to handle this type of thing with an international call, again you might need to contact the FTC and the CRTC. It doesn't hurt to ask, and I'm pretty sure that the people at these organizations hate the spam callers as much as everyone else.
If anything has been shown in history, is that the masses can be real morons. Slavery? Nazis? Witch burning? Stoning? I'll stick with readong stuff written by people with an education, thank you.
My understanding is that at the time, people with an education happened to participate in whatever behaviours we now find abhorrent just as much as everyone else.
Witch burning? Encouraged by the clergy, who at the time often had the best access to education.
Nazis? Some very prominent, respected, intelligent Germans were Nazis. Many went along just because the neck that sticks out gets cut off; some thought the Nazi party would be good for the country--stick it to those dirty Jews and all. Resistance to the Nazi regime came from all classes and all levels of education--we only hear about the most notable intellectuals, but for every Einstein there are probably thousands of Jan Schmidts that nobody ever heard of.
Slavery? Who owned slaves? Hint: it wasn't the poor. Slaves were owned by individuals with access to money. Usually, access to money also meant access to education. Twelve of the first twenty U.S. Presidents owned slaves; eight while they held the office. Was Washington a 'real moron', too? Thomas Jefferson was one of the largest slaveowners in Virginia.
For articles on political or social policy and commentary, the 'educated' are often capable only of more eloquent, complex, and pretentious wrongheadedness.
For articles with scientific content, I'd rather see an article that was produced from the work of several expert contributors than just one. Really, anybody could attempt an addition to an article on genetics, but the weak stuff would likely get wiped right out again. The people who are likely to contribute to scientific articles are generally experts. In my experience they like to share their expertise. As a matter of principle, I can also see them aggressively repairing factual errors, and updating material to reflect current thought--something that the dead tree encyclopedias just don't have the time, expertise, or will to do.
Why not spend the money on AIDS
research or prevention?
Because the International Telecommuncations Union--which operates under the aegis of the United Nations--isn't qualified or mandated to do AIDS research?
Because it makes sense for an international organization to coordinate efforts against what is an international problem?
Because the UN is--or ought to be--capable of managing more than one useful program at a time, eh? Sure, spam isn't as horrifying as AIDS, or cancer, or landmines. Nevertheless, it represents billions of dollars and hours wasted everywhere, every year, to transmit, deliver, and filter the stuff. Wouldn't it be nice if those resources could be delivered somewhere more useful?
I work at a major hospital research institute (I do cell biology) and I know that the dollars we spend on spam are nontrivial. I can easily see a hospital in the third world giving up on email altogether just because managing the spam takes too much time.
Yep. It's a real pity that they aren't on the verge of eliminating polio, for instance.
The United Nations is a big organization. Under its umbrella are both the World Health Organization and the International Telecommuncations Union, among many others. Unsurprisingly, they have different mandates. Their tasks are not mutually exclusive and each organization focuses on its own areas of expertise. In the private sector, does the CEO tell the IT department to design a new advertising campaign when sales are down?
A bigger problem, mentioned by Clark in Fountains of Paradise, is the cloud of space junk left over from thousands of earlier launches. The real expense will be the equipment to track every little particle passing through the Earth's neighborhood. To keep the elevator safe, we'll have to spot even tiny objects far enough in advance to send a wiggle down the rope just in time to move it aside when an object passes.
Actually, this is an easy one; you build three or four parallel cables. If they're spaced a meter or two apart and linked together every so often then each cable is still vulnerable, but the number of objects in earth orbit that could take out the whole structure is drastically reduced. (There are lots of pebble-sized bits of debris in earth orbit, and hardening a strand to those is probably not practical. On the other hand, the number of bits larger than one meter is much smaller--certainly countable, and readily trackable with good radar.) If a piece is damaged, you just have to cut out and replace the segment between the intercable joints.
Conventional elevators don't use just one cable and hope nothing goes wrong with it, now do they?
When Clarke was writing about wiggling the cable to avoid objects, I seem to recall that his characters were talking about a space elevator on Mars. They planned to set up a regular oscillation in the cable so that it would swing clear of one of Mars' moons (Phobos) which orbits quite low and fast.
I dunno...I think I'd prefer to pay the premium for helium. Helium has the added benefit of lower density, for nearly twice the lift per unit volume.
Ammonia is nasty stuff, too...exposure to 0.2% ammonia gas will burn and blister skin after a few seconds of exposure; if inhaled at that concentration it can cause serious irritation or damage to the upper respiratory tract and lungs. There's good reason why OSHA has pegged the maximum allowable workplace concentration of ammonia at 50 parts per million.
Oh, and it stinks, too.
On the other hand, ballooning is usually done in a well-ventilated area...
My gosh -- talking about "demon customers" is just terribly bad PR. I've never shopped at a Best Buy, and after reading that, I don't think I ever will. I don't care if they think I'm the angel fucking Gabriel of a customer, if they're calling customers "demons" I don't want to deal with them.
Actually, I find that sort of honesty kind of refreshing. There are customers who are out to take advantage of a store, whether it be through rebate, return, or just tolerant customer service policies. There are abusive customers.
A customer who gets angry when made to wait half an hour while the clerk takes a smoke break and makes a couple of personal phone calls to his girlfriend is justified. A customer who starts screaming when made to wait five minutes while the clerk helps another individual who arrived in the department first is abusive.
A customer who is upset because their new CD-ROM drive has failed for the second time is justified. A customer who is ranting because his cordless phone stopped working after he dropped it in the pool is abusive.
Sometimes, a customer just isn't worth the effort. You want a happy, healthy, productive, helpful staff? They need to have management that will back them up when they're being abused by customers. The rest of us will enjoy better, faster, happier service from customer service reps who aren't always stressed out from being abused from both sides--customers and managers. The real jerks might even modify their behaviour--either be civil, or pay a big premium for someone to put up with the aggression.
To be fair, calling customers 'demons' because they show up for sales is silly. Calling customers demons because they defraud the rebate or returns system, insult or assault staff, and regularly threaten management with lawsuits is fully justified and a breath of fresh air.
Factual error: Dr. Octavius says his fusion relies on tritium and that there is only 25 pounds of the substance in the world. In reality, tritium is merely an isotope of hydrogen and is a good deal more common than that. For example, there is a large region of the North Pacific that contains tritium-rich salt water.
'Tritium-rich' is relative. The estimated total amount of tritium in the North Pacific is on the order of 25 kilograms--less than sixty pounds. As far as extracting and purifying it for use is concerned, it might as well not be there. By comparison, gold is dissolved in seawater at a concentration of about fifty parts per trillion--there's a full fifty kilograms of gold in every cubic kilometer of seawater.
Tritium has a relatively short half-life (about twelve years) on a geological time scale, and it is replenished very slowly by natural processes. Consequently, its concentration in nature is very low.
Practically speaking, the only useful supplies of tritium are manmade. It's a pain to produce, requiring a linear accelerator or a nuclear reactor; global production is on the order of ten kilograms per year. Civilian use accounts for about half a kilogram of that; the rest goes mostly into maintaining nuclear weapons stocks (about a gram per hydrogen bomb per year to replace decayed tritium, plus five or ten grams for each new warhead).
Saying that there is only twenty-five pounds of the stuff in the world is a slightly low estimate, but the real number probably isn't above two hundred or so pounds. It sells for something like twenty or thirty thousand dollars per gram--in the neighbourhood of two thousand times the price of gold. (And it's a lousy investment, because unlike gold, it decays.)
The quantity shown being used was impossible to obtain. No one, including the US or former Soviet government, has ever had that much tritium in one place like that. A few hundred milligrams is probably the most anyone has ever had. Let alone a sphere that probably had a mass of around 1-2kg. And for damn sure, if anyone did have it, the price would be so high as to be somewhere around the collective budget of the US government.
Let's see...
If we assume that the tritium was present as tritium oxide (heavy heavy water)--which is not an unreasonable way to store the stuff, really--then a 2 kg mass of the stuff would contain about 500 g of pure tritium; that's about (I'm going to work in round figures here) 100 moles of tritium.
Tritium has a specific activity of 28.8 curies per millimole; so we're looking at a total activity of 28800 Ci per mole by 100 moles: about 3 million curies total activity.
Market price for bulk tritium seems to be about $2 per curie, so that sphere contains about six million dollars' worth of tritium. Expensive (call it about two thousand times the price of gold, by weight) but not untenable.
On the other hand, the peaceful commercial use of tritium runs to a half kilogram or so per year. The rest of the usage is in weapons programs, and accounts for a few kilograms.
Canada is the world's major commercial supplier, as tritium is generated as a waste product in its heavy-water moderated and cooled nuclear reactors. More than three kilograms are produced each year, and much of that is presumably stockpiled since Canadian law forbids the export of Canadian tritium for use in weapons programs.
To conclude...two kilograms of fully tritiated water would be expensive, dangerously radioactive, and hard to acquire--but it's not outside the realm of the possible. Actually, you can reduce the tritium requirement a bit by assuming that some of the weight of that sphere is shielding. I also haven't done the calculations for heating due to radioactive decay; you might need to use something that boils at a higher temperature than water, or dilute the stuff a bit. Still, I'd say an upper limit of 500 grams of tritium is a reasonable guess.
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I know you mean well, and you probably just fat-fingered in your enthusiasm, but 20004 is probably a good estimate of how long it will take before a third party candidate sits in the White House again.
(The last time was in 1853, at the end of Fillmore's term as a Whig President.)
On the other hand, for a number of years Dell power supplies and motherboards had a nonstandard pinout. The socket was identical, but the actual arrangement of live and ground wires was different, with a little plastic doohickey to prevent you from plugging in a 'normal' connector.
The only reason I can see for this is to block you from using a non-Dell power supply in a Dell case. My roommate had an older Dell and just wanted to upgrade to a silent power supply. He had to buy a third-party cable to rearrange the pinout--he could also have done some soldering, but there's no good reason to have to do either. There are also the unfortunate souls who just cut the little plastic thingy off (yeah, I know--not a smart move) and fried either power supply or mainboard, or both.
My understanding is that Dell no longer does this, but the idea of vendor lock-in is certainly a concept with which Dell has at least a passing acquaintance.
Thank you, Michael, for finally bringing us a 'MS Trashes Open Source' article at last, so that balance can be restored to the force, and we can all flame in the same direction again.
You can get 2600 farad capacitors (not ufd, farads) at 2.5V today, and you can take current out fast. Auto engines can be started with six of these things, weighing a total of about 3Kg.
Okay, call it 1000 F at 2.5 V, per kilogram. That's about 3000 J. Assuming that we need to deliver that over a three minute period, we're looking at (round figures) 20 W.
To deliver 12 GW for three minutes, that's 600 million kilograms--600 thousand tons--of capacitor. That's big. That's something like the mass of two hundred fully fuelled Saturn V moon rockets. On the other hand, the Grand Coulee Dam contains something like fifty million tons of concrete, so it's not an unprecedented scale of construction. (No, I'm not going to give you the mass in VW Beetles, too.) Another neat fact--12 GW for three minutes at $0.05 per kWh is $30 million worth of electricity. Definitely cheaper than a Saturn V.
The purists will argue that the difference is not that you were exposed to more detail, but rather that you did read the story in the first place. They may even have a point--if you read The Sum of All Fears, then you get the story as Tom Clancy wrote it. If you watch The Sum of All Fears, then you see the story as Phil Alden Robinson interpreted it. Out of necessity, the film version strips details, and out of political correctness it changes plot details (the nature of the terrorists who detonate the bomb, for instance.) It is impossible to present as detailed a plot in a movie as one might do in a novel--there just isn't time or space, and the audience can't flip back a few pages to check their notes, as it were.
There's an economic argument, too. If I go to the theatre to see a movie, then I'm out of pocket $13 (more if I have to buy snacks, parking, a ticket for my date...). If I rent the DVD, I'm on the hook for five bucks or so. Either way, I get two hours of entertainment for that money. If I buy the book (hardcover, $30; paperback, $12) I get ten hours of entertainment instead of two. Further, I can reread the book whenever I want. If I'm really frugal, I can wait a bit and buy it used ($3.50) or borrow it from the library (free).
Sure, if you look at it in terms of 'how quickly can I get the essence of the plot into my head?' then the movie is more efficient--but it also makes it sound like it's work. If I'm looking at it in terms of 'how can I enjoyably pass time at the lowest cost per hour of entertainment?', then books win hands down.
Tom Clancy isn't a good example, but there are some authors where you would miss out on incredible richness, wit, and clever detail if Hollywood ever tried to make a movie out of their books. Neal Stephenson comes to mind, for instance.
Then there's the world of short stories. Now, you can have as much plot as most movies, but in a convenient size suitable for finishing on the subway. Buy an anthology of a genre you want to try out--then you get a preview of several authors, without the time or financial commitment of buying a whole novel. Short short stories are small enough that you can lend them to coworkers and friends for easy discussion, too.
As far as 'limited memetic aspects'--yes, fewer people will have read the latest book X than the latest movie Y. So? Even more people will have watched the most recent episode of Friends or Survivor, but is that all the culture that you want to absorb, discuss, and think about? If you're desperate just to have a topic of conversation, talk about the weather. If you're looking to have a deep conversation about something, then be willing to make an effort to find people who took the time to read a book. Heck, feel free to recommend books to your friends--lend them your copy, if you have to.
God, I hate the Internet fad.
I'll never make my computer vulnerable to attacks by anyone who just happens to have a modem and a telephone line.
Kind of like Edwards now being against invading Iraq without the UN, versus his comments in televised interviews supporting that action in Jan. 2003.
Waffles anyone?
It's absolutely awful that a politician should learn from his mistakes, or revise his opinion based on better information. Virtually everyone, on both sides of the floor, in both houses, voted for the USA PATRIOT Act. Stupid, weak, and unprincipled it was, and every Representative and Senator who supported the Act deserves to be criticized for it.
Now it seems that the Democrats have mostly learned that they acted erroneously, and in haste--and are trying at least halfheartedly to rectify those errors.
If that's a waffle, then so be it. I'll take a stack.
Appropriately, the book's title was Sane Planning, Sensible Tomorrow. Lisa hopes that it's as exciting as Gore's other book, Rational Thinking, Reasonable Future.
Unfortunately, we seems stuck with Pinheaded Oilman, Perilous Prospects.
Are you nuts? Life is very much a monoculture, in some ways. You think Microsoft is in trouble because versions of software reuse code? The DNA that codes for you overlaps better than 95% with closely related primate species. If you look at some of the proteins in e. coli, they're carried forward right up to human beings. The important domains (parts of the protein) can have 80% or better homology (similar structure) between the two species, with still better than 50% identity (identical amino acids.)
There is only one disease that we have managed to eradicate--smallpox--and one where we're close: polio. We have a hell of a time with trying to eliminate diseases because many are able to cross whole species barriers. (Yes, there's usually the odd individual with some mutation that confers immunity, but such individuals represent a vanishingly small portion of the population in most cases.) Ebola probably has some primate reservoir in the wild. Rabies affects just about all mammals. Influenza is carried in birds. Birds! It's like having a computer virus that ran under DOS, but spreads happily to Windows XP.
Is your DNA identical to that of the person next to you? Of course not. Is it damn similar? Yeah. Are the two of you vulnerable to the same diseases? Most likely, yes. We all have immune systems that work in roughly the same way. Though not identical, there are an awful lot of common vulnerabilities.
I doubt men will be able to match Nature's power and script kiddies won't come close. Nature itself is constantly working to create pathogens.
Nature isn't some malevolent force that is doing its level best to kill us all. It's a blind process driven by selection. Viruses that replicate successfully carry on, viruses that can't--don't. Particularly nasty viruses tend to disappear in short order--if they kill all their victims too quickly, then there's nobody left to carry and spread the virus. If someone has one of the Ebola variants, then you know it in a few days, and the victim is in no condition to go spreading the illness around. Often a mutant form of the virus will emerge that is less virulent--longer incubation times, more moderate symptoms. (This has been observed with syphilis and cholera, to name a few). There is some evidence that DNA from ancient viruses has actually been incorporated into our own genome.
You want a new disease? Take an animal virus that doesn't affect humans. Modify its protein coat so that it can bind to human cells. Cackle maniacally. It might take some testing, and you'd have to be a little bit inventive in your choices, but you'd have a homemade pathogen that could infect 90% of the population. Alternately something like a carefully retuned smallpox could do a lot of us in. It's a bit of a stretch right now to suggest that a script kiddie could do it, but it's within the reach of technically proficient graduate students.
You: YA...
Person: Is it the ARM 1020E, or the 1022?
You: ...
It's a clever concept, but man does Crichton's execution suck. His earlier work is vastly superior, both from a technical standpoint, and from the standpoint of quality of writing. Jurassic Park had a few plot holes, but he's been getting sloppier ever since. He's also abandoned any concern for scientific credibility.
Prey demonstrates ignorance in roughly equal parts of the details of biology, physics, chemistry, and computer science.
He's just banging out books as fast as he can in hope that another one gets bought by a movie studio.
Rather than a govenrment body directly cracking down, they can say they are responding to complaints, and fear of complaints may force some broadcasters to change things.
That is a bit tinfoil hat thinking, but some people in the current US admistration do seem very keen on "cleaning things up" (Ashcroft anyone?).
I think it's a bit of stretch to shout "conspiracy!" because the FCC has made regulations that make it easier to enforce rules that were already on the books. Before, the enforcement was very spotty, and sometimes relied on viewers or listeners to be lucky enough to catch something on tape. Since a mandatory record of broadcasts will ensure that there is an honest record of what went out over the air, specious claims can be readily dismissed, while legitimate ones can unambiguously be confirmed.
To claim that this is some sort of legally-mandated self-incrimination is a bit over the top. It's like saying that requiring a company to keep its books in order is a form of self-incrimination, because it might reveal fiduciary misconduct. Yes, fear of complaints may well encourage a form of self-censorship--in this particular case, the 'self-censorship' comprises obeying FCC regulations.
Incidentally, what does Ashcroft have to gain from reducing the number of f-bombs on television? Yes, he's a right-wing zealously-religous compulsive moralizer, and yes it's a move that might play well in the next election, but aside from those transparent motives I have trouble seeing a conspiracy. Unless an argument can be made that not letting Democrats swear on television will prevent them from unseating Bush....
Whether or not I agree with the FCC standards on indecency is another matter entirely--I live in Canada, and the broadcasters and regulators up here are much less uptight. But requiring broadcasters to keep records of their broadcasts for two or three months is not a particularly onerous demand. As a side benefit, it's always possible that a dramatic increase in fines and complaints could well lead to the reform of outdated indecency rules, too. Legislators are much more likely to reexamine a stupid law that is being enforced, and for once it might actually be beneficial that so many Senators and Members of Congress are bought and paid for by the media conglomerates.
Actually, microwaves contain a big step-up transformer--they need a big chunk of high voltage current to do their thing. If you had DC mains, you'd have to convert to AC first, then rectify back to DC at higher voltage. Others on the thread have noted that building DC to AC converters is more costly than going the other way, too.
Yes, you have many DC appliances--but they operate at different voltages. Heck, your PC has 3.3, 5, and 12 volt rails. Converting between one DC voltage and another is a real pain in the neck, unless you don't mind wasting a ton of juice.
The real killer problem is that if you want to supply DC to homes at a voltage directly useful in small appliances (say 12 V) then you need to have absolutely massive wires to carry all the current. Let's say you want 200 W at 12 V for your computer--that's going to be nearly 17 amps. To run a hair dryer (1000 W) that's going to be more than eighty amps. If you're cooking dinner in the microwave, the air conditioner is running, plus you have the computer and a few lights on, you're pushing three hundred amps. In newly constructed homes, my understanding is that 200 amp service is the norm; older buildings may only have 100 amp or even sixty amp service. At 200 amps you're looking at pretty hefty cables. If each home starts requiring cable that can handle a thousand amps, you're getting into a lot of copper awfully quickly--even if the supply is relatively local.
Internal wiring would also have to be much heavier to avoid overheating. Resistance heating goes up linearly with resistance--but as the square of current. You probably wouldn't want to have to lift a hundred-foot extension cord.
Yes, you could get away with the same thickness of wiring you use now if you supply high-voltage DC inside the home, but then you would need a step-down transformer for all the same appliances that have wall warts now.
The trick is to use the paper towel to open the door before you throw it out. Of course, if the bathroom only has hot air hand dryers, you're out of luck.
If my job had that as a fringe benefit, I'd be willing to pay for my own broadband, too.
Auto-dialling calls is perfectly legal, otherwise.
Sorry; I should have been more specific in my comment. The great-grandparent poster reported,
Auto-dialling is forbidden--sequentially-dialled numbers or not--when used to solicit business using a prerecorded message. Cheers.Interesting. You might actually look at their violations of Canadian law, then. Using an auto-dialler (an Automatic Dialling and Announcing Device, or ADAD) for solicitation--charitable donations, promotions, sales, etc.--is forbidden by the CRTC (Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission.) The CRTC can demand that a phone company suspend service to any company or individual who flagrantly violates these rules. Even if a company hires another company to make the calls, they can be held accountable. You might want to contact the CRTC directly to see how the rules apply on international calls, however.
Even if a company is blocking call ID, your phone company can probably trace the call. For advice on how to handle this type of thing with an international call, again you might need to contact the FTC and the CRTC. It doesn't hurt to ask, and I'm pretty sure that the people at these organizations hate the spam callers as much as everyone else.
My understanding is that at the time, people with an education happened to participate in whatever behaviours we now find abhorrent just as much as everyone else.
Witch burning? Encouraged by the clergy, who at the time often had the best access to education.
Nazis? Some very prominent, respected, intelligent Germans were Nazis. Many went along just because the neck that sticks out gets cut off; some thought the Nazi party would be good for the country--stick it to those dirty Jews and all. Resistance to the Nazi regime came from all classes and all levels of education--we only hear about the most notable intellectuals, but for every Einstein there are probably thousands of Jan Schmidts that nobody ever heard of.
Slavery? Who owned slaves? Hint: it wasn't the poor. Slaves were owned by individuals with access to money. Usually, access to money also meant access to education. Twelve of the first twenty U.S. Presidents owned slaves; eight while they held the office. Was Washington a 'real moron', too? Thomas Jefferson was one of the largest slaveowners in Virginia.
For articles on political or social policy and commentary, the 'educated' are often capable only of more eloquent, complex, and pretentious wrongheadedness.
For articles with scientific content, I'd rather see an article that was produced from the work of several expert contributors than just one. Really, anybody could attempt an addition to an article on genetics, but the weak stuff would likely get wiped right out again. The people who are likely to contribute to scientific articles are generally experts. In my experience they like to share their expertise. As a matter of principle, I can also see them aggressively repairing factual errors, and updating material to reflect current thought--something that the dead tree encyclopedias just don't have the time, expertise, or will to do.
Because the International Telecommuncations Union--which operates under the aegis of the United Nations--isn't qualified or mandated to do AIDS research?
Because it makes sense for an international organization to coordinate efforts against what is an international problem?
Because the UN is--or ought to be--capable of managing more than one useful program at a time, eh? Sure, spam isn't as horrifying as AIDS, or cancer, or landmines. Nevertheless, it represents billions of dollars and hours wasted everywhere, every year, to transmit, deliver, and filter the stuff. Wouldn't it be nice if those resources could be delivered somewhere more useful?
I work at a major hospital research institute (I do cell biology) and I know that the dollars we spend on spam are nontrivial. I can easily see a hospital in the third world giving up on email altogether just because managing the spam takes too much time.
The United Nations is a big organization. Under its umbrella are both the World Health Organization and the International Telecommuncations Union, among many others. Unsurprisingly, they have different mandates. Their tasks are not mutually exclusive and each organization focuses on its own areas of expertise. In the private sector, does the CEO tell the IT department to design a new advertising campaign when sales are down?
Actually, this is an easy one; you build three or four parallel cables. If they're spaced a meter or two apart and linked together every so often then each cable is still vulnerable, but the number of objects in earth orbit that could take out the whole structure is drastically reduced. (There are lots of pebble-sized bits of debris in earth orbit, and hardening a strand to those is probably not practical. On the other hand, the number of bits larger than one meter is much smaller--certainly countable, and readily trackable with good radar.) If a piece is damaged, you just have to cut out and replace the segment between the intercable joints.
Conventional elevators don't use just one cable and hope nothing goes wrong with it, now do they?
When Clarke was writing about wiggling the cable to avoid objects, I seem to recall that his characters were talking about a space elevator on Mars. They planned to set up a regular oscillation in the cable so that it would swing clear of one of Mars' moons (Phobos) which orbits quite low and fast.
Ammonia is nasty stuff, too...exposure to 0.2% ammonia gas will burn and blister skin after a few seconds of exposure; if inhaled at that concentration it can cause serious irritation or damage to the upper respiratory tract and lungs. There's good reason why OSHA has pegged the maximum allowable workplace concentration of ammonia at 50 parts per million.
Oh, and it stinks, too.
On the other hand, ballooning is usually done in a well-ventilated area...
Actually, I find that sort of honesty kind of refreshing. There are customers who are out to take advantage of a store, whether it be through rebate, return, or just tolerant customer service policies. There are abusive customers.
A customer who gets angry when made to wait half an hour while the clerk takes a smoke break and makes a couple of personal phone calls to his girlfriend is justified. A customer who starts screaming when made to wait five minutes while the clerk helps another individual who arrived in the department first is abusive.
A customer who is upset because their new CD-ROM drive has failed for the second time is justified. A customer who is ranting because his cordless phone stopped working after he dropped it in the pool is abusive.
Sometimes, a customer just isn't worth the effort. You want a happy, healthy, productive, helpful staff? They need to have management that will back them up when they're being abused by customers. The rest of us will enjoy better, faster, happier service from customer service reps who aren't always stressed out from being abused from both sides--customers and managers. The real jerks might even modify their behaviour--either be civil, or pay a big premium for someone to put up with the aggression.
To be fair, calling customers 'demons' because they show up for sales is silly. Calling customers demons because they defraud the rebate or returns system, insult or assault staff, and regularly threaten management with lawsuits is fully justified and a breath of fresh air.
'Tritium-rich' is relative. The estimated total amount of tritium in the North Pacific is on the order of 25 kilograms--less than sixty pounds. As far as extracting and purifying it for use is concerned, it might as well not be there. By comparison, gold is dissolved in seawater at a concentration of about fifty parts per trillion--there's a full fifty kilograms of gold in every cubic kilometer of seawater.
Tritium has a relatively short half-life (about twelve years) on a geological time scale, and it is replenished very slowly by natural processes. Consequently, its concentration in nature is very low.
Practically speaking, the only useful supplies of tritium are manmade. It's a pain to produce, requiring a linear accelerator or a nuclear reactor; global production is on the order of ten kilograms per year. Civilian use accounts for about half a kilogram of that; the rest goes mostly into maintaining nuclear weapons stocks (about a gram per hydrogen bomb per year to replace decayed tritium, plus five or ten grams for each new warhead).
Saying that there is only twenty-five pounds of the stuff in the world is a slightly low estimate, but the real number probably isn't above two hundred or so pounds. It sells for something like twenty or thirty thousand dollars per gram--in the neighbourhood of two thousand times the price of gold. (And it's a lousy investment, because unlike gold, it decays.)
Let's see...
If we assume that the tritium was present as tritium oxide (heavy heavy water)--which is not an unreasonable way to store the stuff, really--then a 2 kg mass of the stuff would contain about 500 g of pure tritium; that's about (I'm going to work in round figures here) 100 moles of tritium.
Tritium has a specific activity of 28.8 curies per millimole; so we're looking at a total activity of 28800 Ci per mole by 100 moles: about 3 million curies total activity.
Market price for bulk tritium seems to be about $2 per curie, so that sphere contains about six million dollars' worth of tritium. Expensive (call it about two thousand times the price of gold, by weight) but not untenable.
On the other hand, the peaceful commercial use of tritium runs to a half kilogram or so per year. The rest of the usage is in weapons programs, and accounts for a few kilograms.
Canada is the world's major commercial supplier, as tritium is generated as a waste product in its heavy-water moderated and cooled nuclear reactors. More than three kilograms are produced each year, and much of that is presumably stockpiled since Canadian law forbids the export of Canadian tritium for use in weapons programs.
To conclude...two kilograms of fully tritiated water would be expensive, dangerously radioactive, and hard to acquire--but it's not outside the realm of the possible. Actually, you can reduce the tritium requirement a bit by assuming that some of the weight of that sphere is shielding. I also haven't done the calculations for heating due to radioactive decay; you might need to use something that boils at a higher temperature than water, or dilute the stuff a bit. Still, I'd say an upper limit of 500 grams of tritium is a reasonable guess.