The thing that bothers me most is that crap like this gets massive screaming headlines, but things like PCB dumping (which happen all the time and are about a million times more destructive) are treated as no big deal.
I don't want to be all "So what?" but so what? One plant leaks an unspecified amount of a weak beta emitter...It tested at the leak at a whopping 2 million picocuries, which is a bullshit measurement that's clearly chosen because it's more shocking than 2 microcuries. 2 microcuries is about what you'd get for a basic thyroid test at the docs office. Trituim doesn't stay resident in the body, it's half life is 12 years long, and it's a beta emitter: if you drink it you'll get a few rads, but you can take a shower in it without any problem.
The whole thing is clearly being pushed as an example of the horrible dangers of the super scary nuclear power industry, but what I see is the dangers that are inherent in running antiquated plants for years beyond their design life because a bunch of poorly informed hysterics have blocked all attempts to modernize them for the last 40 years.
And what the hell is the point in talking about the plants in Georgia? That's a different type of plant, being built by a different company! Georgia has the largest coal fired power plant in the us: where's that outrage? Where is the outrage over the radiation it emits?
The problem with that analogy is that passwords are by default 2 factor authentication: you need a username and a password.
That's not really the case with a url. A better analogy would be walking around a building on a public street, and looking in windows. It's legal, but morally suspect.
Sure it would. There are other rare mediums for exchange. We'd have been on the platinum standard, or the silver standard. Nothing magical about gold, in an economic sense.
Gold served as a medium of exchange, and media, as I shouldn't have to tell someone on slashdot, are irrelevant to the actual exchange.
Value can't be pegged to the value of the components, or the energy that went into making the item...That's a core fallacy of socialism, actually.
If that were the case, all comics would be worth the same, all art would be worth the same, all cars would be worth the same, etc, etc, assuming their component parts had equal value and they took the same time to make.
Value is completely relative to the consumer. Doesn't matter how "good" it is if no one wants it.
Hellfire was developed by Sierra, and priced at 29.00, iirc. (What a crappy expansion that was. No surprise they never farmed out to a 3rd party again).
They never suspected me for a minute, since all my prior work had also been quirky, and all the other guys prior work had been crap.
I never even got called in, and wouldn't have even known anything about it except my professor for 102 recognized my name and asked me about it...Apparently the story had made the rounds of the department.
Where I went it was pretty standard to fail both parties, unless you could prove that the code had been stolen...I guess they assumed that if I had given my code to someone, I wouldn't have given them ALL of it, just the part that they needed for the assignment.
Anyway it wasn't obsession. I had time on my hands, and I'd never worked with Java before (this was a long time ago), so I was teaching myself stuff, and having fun, meeting people..."Hey does your program work?" "Sure" "Run it and let me see...Okay, Okay, O...What...The...Fuck?"
Where I went everything was run through an automatic code tester. That was part of the point: you were given a spec and a design document, and you were expected to produce a piece of code that matched the spec and could be plugged flawlessly into the hypothetical "greater" project...Some of the classes even did all their assignments so as to combine into one big project at the end.
So it wasn't a matter of faith, it was certain knowledge. You wrote your code, and stuck it into the tester, and it spit out your grade, and where your error was. You could submit it as many times as you wanted, up until the deadline.
At the deadline your code was compared with other peoples code, and if it was too similar, you'd get flagged for cheating and automatically flunk the assignment.
Senior year, tons of hellish classes, and two huge project-driven coding classes. Now, one class was group projects, and the other class was solo. And it turned out that 3 of the 4 people in my group were in both classes.
So due date is coming around for both projects and they were due 8 hours apart (midnight thursday and 8am friday) and the two other guys in the group stop working on the group project and start working on their solo class project...Together. I say, "Fine, I'll do your share of the group project, but I want a copy of the solo thing."
So they give me a copy, and I take it home and try to make it work. Can't make it work. Can't even figure out how it's supposed to work. Ended up giving up and going to bed. Got up, did the solo project from scratch and turned it in 2 days late for a 40% reduction in the grade. Fine.
So I get my grade, 58, missed some little stupid 2 point thing somewhere, woulda been a goddamn 98 grumble grumble. One of the guys from my group came up to me and said, "Hey, what did you get?"
I say "58," and I kinda snarled it because I was pissed.
He says, without missing a beat, "58? I got a 5! Why didn't you give me your code?!"
Turns out the class average for that project was a 7. Heh. Those two jokers never managed to contribute anything to our group project either. We got the highest grade in the class on the group project for that turn in...Not because we were the best, but because the group who was the best let people copy off of them, and they both got 0's.
When I took CS101 I was well beyond the level of the class, so, in order to make the programming assignments interesting, I added extra functionality on top of what was requested. Little stupid stuff mostly, but I tried to make it clever, and since the testing was automated, it didn't matter as long as it was to spec.
The last project was to write a program to simulate one of those stupid "digital pets"; it had to have a pet object, and various, feed, cuddle, punish, methods, etc.
One of the boundary conditions was that the pet had to starve if you didn't feed it, but the program was set so that you could have as many pets as you wanted at the same time...Well, I decided to put a little rock 'n roll in there, and if one pet hadn't been fed for a certain amount of time, he had a chance to start a "pet deathmatch", and try to eat another pet.
The code for the combat and the actual fight was massive. Most peoples code was a couple of pages...mine was closer to 50.
I printed it out at one point, so I could take it to dinner and work on some bug, and someone swiped it off the printer, and subsequently copied the WHOLE THING and turned it in for the assignment.
RTFA moron. They specifically mentioned her as a case where this does not apply:
The new report, posted online by The New England Journal of Medicine, does not suggest that most apparently unresponsive patients can communicate or are likely to recover. The hidden ability displayed by the young accident victim is rare, the study suggested.
Nor does the finding apply to victims of severe oxygen depletion, like Terri Schiavo, the Florida woman who became unresponsive after her heart stopped and who was taken off life support in 2005 during an explosive controversy over patients’ rights.
Yea...But no. I appreciate their decision to limit their supported frameworks: it's basically the same decision as a console makers. They want a stable, easy to support platform that is still robust enough to allow people to do interesting things.
It's not their job to support every conceivable framework. It's your job to develop within the boundaries that they've set, same as people have been doing with consoles and embedded devices for years.
Well, passion is all well and good, but there is nothing wrong with being able to make money on your art. Many of the great artists of history did it for the money, and that includes greats like Leonardo DaVinci, Shakespeare, and Mozart.
I think most geeks are fine with that, it's just the long term copyright crap that drives people berzerk.
It's not quite zero. You've still got the initial work for layout and editing, as well as the author to compensate.
Let's say 5 bucks for a "hardcover" and 2 bucks for a "paperback". Far more than they're making from Barnes and Nobel, and then Amazon could tack on a dollar to actually make a profit instead of a loss on selling these things.
They're greedy. Even more than with CDs, the bulk of the costs with books are primarily in the printing/distribution model. The writer doesn't get that kind of money per book, I promise you that.
I think it's only a very short matter of time before independent authors skip the traditional publishing approach altogether. Once a viable digital book format takes off, the only thing they have left is an editing staff, and I'd happily split some of my book profits with a quality editor (they really do help) as opposed to a bunch of worthless executives.
The national standard is for a wimpy 50% reduction (5mph->2.5mph); this isn't the maximum by any stretch, since obviously you can put enough crap on the front to reduce the impact by 99% if you want to. So it's hardly an extreme claim.
The origin of the 28->5 number should be obvious. The material can compress to 80% of it's original size under load.
Actually, they use steel and ceramic plates behind the kevlar even now, so you could switch out those and maybe see an improvement in protection to weight.
Well, and elastic just describes it's tendency to return to it's original shape, it says nothing about how much energy it's going to take to make it change shape in the first place...We're talking about a block of aluminum filled with hollow steel balls here. Anything short of a sledgehammer isn't going to change it in the least.
Slashdot Mirror
"...and informed citizens should be applauding it."
They are. Both of them.
Obvious troll is obvious.
And misinformed.
The thing that bothers me most is that crap like this gets massive screaming headlines, but things like PCB dumping (which happen all the time and are about a million times more destructive) are treated as no big deal.
Granted, but as accidents go this is trivial by power company standards. I mean, compare it with the Kingston Coal Ash spill, or Love Canal.
And both of those were done by companies that specialize in hydroelectric power.
I don't want to be all "So what?" but so what? One plant leaks an unspecified amount of a weak beta emitter...It tested at the leak at a whopping 2 million picocuries, which is a bullshit measurement that's clearly chosen because it's more shocking than 2 microcuries. 2 microcuries is about what you'd get for a basic thyroid test at the docs office. Trituim doesn't stay resident in the body, it's half life is 12 years long, and it's a beta emitter: if you drink it you'll get a few rads, but you can take a shower in it without any problem.
The whole thing is clearly being pushed as an example of the horrible dangers of the super scary nuclear power industry, but what I see is the dangers that are inherent in running antiquated plants for years beyond their design life because a bunch of poorly informed hysterics have blocked all attempts to modernize them for the last 40 years.
And what the hell is the point in talking about the plants in Georgia? That's a different type of plant, being built by a different company! Georgia has the largest coal fired power plant in the us: where's that outrage? Where is the outrage over the radiation it emits?
The problem with that analogy is that passwords are by default 2 factor authentication: you need a username and a password.
That's not really the case with a url. A better analogy would be walking around a building on a public street, and looking in windows. It's legal, but morally suspect.
Sure it would. There are other rare mediums for exchange. We'd have been on the platinum standard, or the silver standard. Nothing magical about gold, in an economic sense.
Gold served as a medium of exchange, and media, as I shouldn't have to tell someone on slashdot, are irrelevant to the actual exchange.
Value can't be pegged to the value of the components, or the energy that went into making the item...That's a core fallacy of socialism, actually.
If that were the case, all comics would be worth the same, all art would be worth the same, all cars would be worth the same, etc, etc, assuming their component parts had equal value and they took the same time to make.
Value is completely relative to the consumer. Doesn't matter how "good" it is if no one wants it.
Yea, but jesus it sucks. You'd get better performance and throughput by just putting in a couple of WAPs.
I'll second the "use it for a wirepull" sentiment, though not the cat5 > cat5 sentiment.
No point in haggling with crappy old coax, and, happily, coax is really durable, so it's well suited to being a pull line.
Hellfire was developed by Sierra, and priced at 29.00, iirc. (What a crappy expansion that was. No surprise they never farmed out to a 3rd party again).
They never suspected me for a minute, since all my prior work had also been quirky, and all the other guys prior work had been crap.
I never even got called in, and wouldn't have even known anything about it except my professor for 102 recognized my name and asked me about it...Apparently the story had made the rounds of the department.
Where I went it was pretty standard to fail both parties, unless you could prove that the code had been stolen...I guess they assumed that if I had given my code to someone, I wouldn't have given them ALL of it, just the part that they needed for the assignment.
That was what was so funny.
Anyway it wasn't obsession. I had time on my hands, and I'd never worked with Java before (this was a long time ago), so I was teaching myself stuff, and having fun, meeting people..."Hey does your program work?" "Sure" "Run it and let me see...Okay, Okay, O...What...The...Fuck?"
Where I went everything was run through an automatic code tester. That was part of the point: you were given a spec and a design document, and you were expected to produce a piece of code that matched the spec and could be plugged flawlessly into the hypothetical "greater" project...Some of the classes even did all their assignments so as to combine into one big project at the end.
So it wasn't a matter of faith, it was certain knowledge. You wrote your code, and stuck it into the tester, and it spit out your grade, and where your error was. You could submit it as many times as you wanted, up until the deadline.
At the deadline your code was compared with other peoples code, and if it was too similar, you'd get flagged for cheating and automatically flunk the assignment.
I stole bad code once. True story.
Senior year, tons of hellish classes, and two huge project-driven coding classes. Now, one class was group projects, and the other class was solo. And it turned out that 3 of the 4 people in my group were in both classes.
So due date is coming around for both projects and they were due 8 hours apart (midnight thursday and 8am friday) and the two other guys in the group stop working on the group project and start working on their solo class project...Together. I say, "Fine, I'll do your share of the group project, but I want a copy of the solo thing."
So they give me a copy, and I take it home and try to make it work. Can't make it work. Can't even figure out how it's supposed to work. Ended up giving up and going to bed. Got up, did the solo project from scratch and turned it in 2 days late for a 40% reduction in the grade. Fine.
So I get my grade, 58, missed some little stupid 2 point thing somewhere, woulda been a goddamn 98 grumble grumble. One of the guys from my group came up to me and said, "Hey, what did you get?"
I say "58," and I kinda snarled it because I was pissed.
He says, without missing a beat, "58? I got a 5! Why didn't you give me your code?!"
Turns out the class average for that project was a 7. Heh. Those two jokers never managed to contribute anything to our group project either. We got the highest grade in the class on the group project for that turn in...Not because we were the best, but because the group who was the best let people copy off of them, and they both got 0's.
When I took CS101 I was well beyond the level of the class, so, in order to make the programming assignments interesting, I added extra functionality on top of what was requested. Little stupid stuff mostly, but I tried to make it clever, and since the testing was automated, it didn't matter as long as it was to spec.
The last project was to write a program to simulate one of those stupid "digital pets"; it had to have a pet object, and various, feed, cuddle, punish, methods, etc.
One of the boundary conditions was that the pet had to starve if you didn't feed it, but the program was set so that you could have as many pets as you wanted at the same time...Well, I decided to put a little rock 'n roll in there, and if one pet hadn't been fed for a certain amount of time, he had a chance to start a "pet deathmatch", and try to eat another pet.
The code for the combat and the actual fight was massive. Most peoples code was a couple of pages...mine was closer to 50.
I printed it out at one point, so I could take it to dinner and work on some bug, and someone swiped it off the printer, and subsequently copied the WHOLE THING and turned it in for the assignment.
RTFA moron. They specifically mentioned her as a case where this does not apply:
The new report, posted online by The New England Journal of Medicine, does not suggest that most apparently unresponsive patients can communicate or are likely to recover. The hidden ability displayed by the young accident victim is rare, the study suggested.
Nor does the finding apply to victims of severe oxygen depletion, like Terri Schiavo, the Florida woman who became unresponsive after her heart stopped and who was taken off life support in 2005 during an explosive controversy over patients’ rights.
--NYT (emphasis mine)
Yea...But no. I appreciate their decision to limit their supported frameworks: it's basically the same decision as a console makers. They want a stable, easy to support platform that is still robust enough to allow people to do interesting things.
It's not their job to support every conceivable framework. It's your job to develop within the boundaries that they've set, same as people have been doing with consoles and embedded devices for years.
Well, passion is all well and good, but there is nothing wrong with being able to make money on your art. Many of the great artists of history did it for the money, and that includes greats like Leonardo DaVinci, Shakespeare, and Mozart.
I think most geeks are fine with that, it's just the long term copyright crap that drives people berzerk.
It's not quite zero. You've still got the initial work for layout and editing, as well as the author to compensate.
Let's say 5 bucks for a "hardcover" and 2 bucks for a "paperback". Far more than they're making from Barnes and Nobel, and then Amazon could tack on a dollar to actually make a profit instead of a loss on selling these things.
They're greedy. Even more than with CDs, the bulk of the costs with books are primarily in the printing/distribution model. The writer doesn't get that kind of money per book, I promise you that.
I think it's only a very short matter of time before independent authors skip the traditional publishing approach altogether. Once a viable digital book format takes off, the only thing they have left is an editing staff, and I'd happily split some of my book profits with a quality editor (they really do help) as opposed to a bunch of worthless executives.
This stuff is nice, but it's a mistake to look at it as a drastic improvement in terms of safety.
The benefit of this is the reduction in weight without loss of strength.
The national standard is for a wimpy 50% reduction (5mph->2.5mph); this isn't the maximum by any stretch, since obviously you can put enough crap on the front to reduce the impact by 99% if you want to. So it's hardly an extreme claim.
The origin of the 28->5 number should be obvious. The material can compress to 80% of it's original size under load.
Actually, they use steel and ceramic plates behind the kevlar even now, so you could switch out those and maybe see an improvement in protection to weight.
Well, and elastic just describes it's tendency to return to it's original shape, it says nothing about how much energy it's going to take to make it change shape in the first place...We're talking about a block of aluminum filled with hollow steel balls here. Anything short of a sledgehammer isn't going to change it in the least.