Is that most games don't allow for real-world techniques. Case in point, Call of Duty 4. The first problem I have with this is it doesn't let you lean out from behind cover so you only expose your head and weapon. No properly trained person would expose his whole body. Second, you can't climb stuff you would normally be able to. Third, there is an exponential component to racking up kills. Once you get to call in air-strikes and helicopters, you usually rack up enough kills to get more air-strikes and helicopters. And since when to.223 rounds not blow through body armor at close range? And finally, a simulation only would be effective if you can't play it anymore once you're dead.
both can be included in the game. In many servers, you can't call more than one airstrike, or helo, and in "search and destroy" mode, once killed, you stay killed. the side with more survivors wins.
Chances are, when the gamer is in the position of a fire he will act like any other 8 year old school girl...scratch that, the 8 year old school girl will do what her training in school taught her (walk out calmly in line), while the 35 year old gamer will run around screaming or stay huddled in a corner "oh god my life is flashing before my eyes and I realized I wasted it on computer games". Same thing in a gun situation - who here believes Counter Strike really teaches gamers how to be (counter)terrorists?
It doesn't. BUT, it teaches basic Fire and Manouver,Stealth, field of vision, use of terrain, plus unpredictability. Or at least it does to people whose fragrate is over 1. People who are scared will remain so. all the others will learn the basic tenets of all FPS games: staying in one place too long will get you killed, and ears can work concurrently with eyes even in a noisy environment.
Simulators can give you some insight, but it is far different then actually doing it in a physical environment. Ever drive a racing car game? It's a bit different then driving a racing car - hence why you smash into the wall all the time in the game. For this it would be great to learn the routes, but they need to introduce stress into the situation. At the very least the game, while designed to look like the building, will not look just like it (cartoon pixels of a wall do not look like a wall).
As for gamers doing things that someone normally one would not do, how about doing a triple twist jump while putting two shots into the heads of your classmates and landing safely on the other side?:)
Sorry, bunny hopping, martyrdom and last stand will get you banned from the office.
And you were perfectly productive on that, too; why the change?
I wasn't. I quit pestering the firm for a better computer at work about six years ago. My hunch is that at that time the trend inverted: power users passed from asking to have their machines changed, to asking to have them upgraded ( more ram and such), to resisting any call for change, since less and less applications needed more resources, stability improved remarkably, and an understandable mentality "change= trouble^2" ensued. There are many experienced admins here, and it would be interesting to know if they can report if they've seen a similar trend.
I guess many CIOs/expert users will balk at this... In the office, I am perfectly productive on a 3 years old AMD processor, 512MB ram and a 120 MB hard disk...
I assume you mean 120 GB harddrive?
Yep, slip, sorry. I use a fraction of that anyway, but not such a small part....forgive me, I started out on a 8088:D
from TFA: "[...]Windows XP users will have to perform a clean install of Windows 7, however, while Vista users will be able to keep their existing applications and data with an upgrade install."
I guess many CIOs/expert users will balk at this... In the office, I am perfectly productive on a 3 years old AMD processor, 512MB ram and a 120 MB hard disk....why should I spend money on a new (...) operating system, more ram, more processor, a new version of office, all to do the same things as before, just not any faster? Add to this that I cannot upgrade and pray, but I must Fdisk and install....then recover all the other programs, wait for them to say "sorry, no compatibility",restore old settings, rinse/lather/repeat. ...Oh wait....I cannot register XP anymore......$%&/£%@Â#!!!!!!!!!
Do not tell the redmond guys, but IMHO their onlt chance is working hard at a version that not only looks like XP, but WORKS exactly like XP. No use trying to impose a change for change's sake, people might say bad things like "Ubuntu" or "wine".
So who will need to pay me if my Linux box get hacked.
And yes a poorly configured/administrator Linux system can get hacked into, just as easily as a Windows system.
The problem is a lot of these places that get hacked have a pathetic Understaffed/underfunded IT team.
If you can get someone who know hows to use Linux they can normally keep a windows network secure too. But more often then you think these companies are run by the guy who currently knows the most about computers at the time and becomes the IT guy by default.
That the case if the person who doesn't know what is going on will choose windows by default without any consideration of other platforms. A good IT person may still choose windows for it advantages over Linux but knows where it is week and works to secure those points.
It isn't the OS it is more who maintains the OS.
...I am "the guy who currently knows the most about computers", So your comment is very pertinent to me. we're a "small" company, it wise, 20 users or so, but anyway there are a couple of considerations worth mentioning:
as much as i'd like throwing microsoft out of the window, third party software that we need to use is locked into windows. i'll be lucky of I escape the vista nightmare, and keep using win XP, and i'll probably squeal if and when the Ms guys will tell me that they do not support it any more, it's not available as an OEM install and if i use it my eyesight will fall off a cliff, but i'llhave to provide a windows environment;
as much as i love my Ubuntu, i love playing computer games at home, so I do care for a windows box with win XP. using a combination of firefox/thunderbird, a free antivirus and a hardware firewall, i've never experienced a problem. maybe teaching users some security basics is more important than which operating system you use.
Once mainstream support and bug fixes to XP end, enterprise level IT groups will move to Windows 7 to continue to receive patches (*). There currently is no reason to move to Vista because XP works and is still supported. Once that support is gone, it's time to move on. The grandparent is correct.
[...]
companies MAY move to win7, but it could be an hard battle. moving individuals may be easier, since all OEM sales may give no option to go on installing XP,but remember, the expiry of OEM winxp sales has been put off (again!) and that tells a lot on Vista acceptance by the masses. Win 7 may undergo a massive overhaul, but still it's not a compelling proposition.
I come from finance, and I can tell you that most banks in my country have XP as a centrally validated standard, and client machines, be they fat or thin clients, are really cheap. it may cost blood, sweat and tears to MS to convince this people on some issues, namely:
1. WIN7 is as stable and safe as an optimized installation of XP, and by optimized I mean Firefox/thunderbird replacing IE/outlook;
2.total initial costs will be comparable, and that's trouble, with software overtaking hardware as the bigger chunk of initial costs;
3.Total Cost of Ownership will be comparable or lower.
4. training people to use win7 will cost less than training them to use some kind of linux distribution.
there are a couple of points in there that for MS are particularly thorny, namely the possibility of being forced to make deep discounts to get sales, thus eating into margins, and especially training, which might seem a small thing, but if I were a company owner i'd think that going with MS would cost me X to train someone, and as soon as MS had another operating system ready i'd spend it again, while there's a fair chance that under linux i'd be able to keep the interface intact over the upgrades if I wanted to, which was not the case with Vista.
[...]
As far as I know the only reactor to have been decommissioned was Yankee Rowe, a 167 Mw reactor, and that cost almost half a billion dollars and the fuel rods are still on site. If those costs scale to the size of the reactor core then you are looking at roughly half a trillion dollars in decommissioning the existing 104 reactor facilities - at todays prices. [...]I do think we have to continue to develop reactor technology, but frankly, reactor designs proposed today still have the primary flaw that all reactors have - a forty year lifespan.
mmmmmm......I did a quick back of the envelope calculation. the assumptions are:
1. cost of decommissioning a nuclear plant at today's costs: 1 billion;
2. average availability : 95%;
rated power: 1,500 MWh;
3. lifespan: 40 years;
It comes out that total power production comes out at about 12.5 Billion Kw over the life of the plant, so this one Billion adds about 0.2 cents per Kw/hour; given estimated prices of "new nuclear energy, that would add about 3% to the gross price. I have a utility contract rated at 2.5Kwh max, which means that If I shave it close to maximum consumption, over which power is cut, at all times, day and night, it adds 50 bucks per year to my bill.
Be advised that this is not only an overstatement of my bill, it is especially an overstatement of the marginal effects of more nuclear energy, since at the margin nuclear power is cheaper than the average, and indeed of the marginal, wholesale price or electric power. It stands to reason that the average bill should come down because , even including that decommissioning charge, nuclear power should be cheaper than the alternative.
Indeed, the coupling of nuclear and alternative energy should be all the rage in the future, because the economics benefits of nuclear power should be sufficient to fund the big subsidies on which alternative energy is dependent to be attractive.
I think that there's a litmus test for all these scientific modeling, purely based on economics.
One of the tenets of all these scientific researchers is that we must do something and we must do it soonest. It should follow that the possible solutions should be prioritized for bang for the buck, little or no dependence on technological breakthroughs, and ability to set up/ mantain the whole structure at peak performance down the line. Yet, whenever somebody start talking about nuclear energy , all this community sniffs worse than at a "dumb and dumber" premiere. They love a nice, parched flatland covered in solar panels more than a forest, at ten times the costs.
What I find even funnier is that when you start talking about economics, they make me think that only Aliens pay taxes, because the usual line is: " you did not count about the decommissioning costs of the plant and storage of long term radioactive material", whose cost is included in ALL studies about nuclear power, and then they show the superiority of solar INCLUDING all the various subsidies/ tax advantages / special financing that the various government includes. Go figure, because unless women are from Venus and tax money from Mars, Citizens pay through taxes those same subsidies.
So, until and unless I see one of those panels do a good comparative studies about the possible solutions, as unbiased and scientific as possible, i'll label them as "old style lobbying" and move on.
I think the whole issue is,"How can i rid me of microsoft internet explorer once and for all?"
I've been using Firefox for two years now, and I also use firefox/thunderbird at work. In my small experience, it's happened time and again that I install firefox, erase the IE icon from the desktop, and lo! after some winXP update, if I click a link it starts in Microsoft internet explorer, which is NOT the default browser.
For the record, it never happened that after some update the link started in Opera, or Safari. So the problem is twofold:
1. the consumer COULD be allowed a choice about which browser install as default;
2. Once you pick, Microsoft should be forbidden to meddle.
BTW, the relative success of Firefox et al. is also getting MS off the hook for penalties for his defective products, even if I must confess that i laugh my head off thinking of Ballmer saying in court:" you see judge, if the accuser wanted internet security he should have used Firefox!!!!!"
[...]While in most cases it is easy to tell and block only those sites you trust. Those that you don't block may also allow third party scripts to be run such as in ads on the site.
as far as I know, from using noscript on firefox, I can enable java on my bank's page and it still blocks Ads and java scripts if they come from other sources.
from noscript home:"The NoScript Firefox extension provides extra protection for Firefox, Flock, Seamonkey and other mozilla-based browsers: this free, open source add-on allows JavaScript, Java, Flash and other plugins to be executed only by trusted web sites of your choice (e.g. your online bank), and provides the most powerful Anti-XSS protection available in a browser. "
All true, but somewhat beside the point.
Microsoft is just misunderstood. People think that Microsoft is a software company, but it isn't. Microsoft is an abuse company that sells software as a way of delivering abuse. Microsoft's evil is not a side-effect of their management philosophy, Microsoft's evil is their business model.
Because bankers are traditionally among the cheapest bastards on the planet. Rich people frequently are... it's part of why they got to be rich in the first place. Furthermore, in the modern world the contents of a bank's hard drives are much more valuable than what's in their steel-lined vaults. I don't think they've fully come to grips with that, or they'd have spent more money on information security.
That's only part of the answer. Burocrats, whatever their income, are also the most coward race on Earth, so they'd usually spend on security. the key point here is that to them computers are appliances: they know next to nothing about how they work.
The moment they need to know, like in this case, they usually revert to type: since computers were a problem, they'll try to avoid them, and the blame involved, by setting up some kind of "commission" to set up a "standard", ignoring the fact that a defined and documented standard is weak in the face of determined hackers.
I used to fly more frequently, now I am so fed up that I avoid it if I possibly can.
I do think, moreover, that all this paranoia about cellphones and other thingies is ludicrous. All military aircraft, combat and non combat, have been designed to work in a tactical nuclear exchange environment, which would probably fry any Ipod or nokia you can think of: and any time the systems act up on my civilian aircraft, which by the way has been designed very recently, someone blames Phones, Nintendos and such. Come off it, please, I do not think that, with the cold war over, there was a particular shortage of engineering skills in that particular field.
Both use "fly by wire" controls, i.e. all control surfaces are controlled electronically; It's true that it was unlikely that a fighter pilot would fly his plane, use a mobile and play on his nintendo DS at the same time, but 10 years of technology go far.
P.S: a small pet peeve: at Stansted airport, near London, they don't allow anybody to bring umbrellas on board; since it's impossible to stow them in the luggage, thay have become expendable items...I had an idea where to put them, the first time a prim officer told me I could not bring it aboard tough.
Don't tanks, attack helicopters and ground support planes also use scopes?
Yes. Just about every modern attack platform has some form of optics involved in their target acquisition system. There are few areas of the military where a system like this, assuming it is truly capable, would not be leveraged. Possible uses range from snipers to UAV to attack helicopters.
I think that this technology can be applied only on stationary scopes tough, since you must take an inordinate amount of screenshots of the same target for the technology to work its magic. So, stationary scope looking at stationary target = good, moving scope looking at a moving target = bad. Not a bad tradeoff since a moving target is usually much simpler to find/id/kill.
No, lazy people still waste time standing round the water-cooler and daydreaming; the internet is an additional factor.
This is exactly why we have to bail out the lazy bankers who couldnt be bothered to risk check their own assets, and the lazier mortgage holders who want to waste time reading about britney rather than working so their families arent kicked out. [....]
This might be just my personal pet peeve, but I have been a money manager this past twenty years. the risk managers have been busy as bees, all the time, always inventing some new algorithms. Really they worked their collective asses off.
the Lehman demise has only confirmed my long held view of Organizations: the most damage comes not from people who do not do enough, but from the employees that do too much.... in the wrong direction.
A smart employee who works only 75% of the working time, has an hidden cost of 25% of pay in relation to an employee of the same productivity who does not skulk: value addition remains positive, damamge is quantifiable. On the other hand, the biggest bloopers I've seen were done by the usual eaga beva types, those who work overtime on weekends. Management types, especially PHBs, tend to trust effort over ability, so oversight gets down the drain fast. Ten years from now, when we shall know more about the Lehman demise,I am afraid I'll be demonstrably right.... If ever a flag will be planted on the debris of Lehman, its caption should be "redoubled effort".
Climate modeling, on the other hand, has much less historical data to work with, but since it deals with average temperatures instead of day-to-day weather changes its also much less sensitive to the initial conditions. That's how come we can talk about 10,000 year climate changes but still can't tell if it will rain next weekend or not.
-JS
what you are saying is a literal truth: we can talk about 10.000 years climate changes..... but we are unable to pinpoint the real reasons behind the little ice age,
apart from noting the coincidence of part of it with the Maunders minimum, which marks a low in sunspot activity.
In a sense, and within the confines of being sure about the models, we have advanced very little in our understanding of climate. weather forecasting has really improved, as you rightly reminded, and three day forecasts are regularly issued, with a much greater granularity than twenty years ago. my perception is that, apart from saying "most of the scientist agree", many a climatologist would be very hard pressed to bring to slashdot an explanation sufficiently convincing to withstand Occam's razor (or slashdotting). Remember, Columbus had to be a great salesman to convince the Spanish to fund his exploration, because the conventional wisdom was an hazy notion of the Earth (flat like a cake, and the conventional wisdom of the times?). Not bad, considering that Eratosthenes of Cyrene had calculated its diameter very exactly in the 3rd century B.C., further proof that Science is not a matter of majority vote, and that occasionally science can go backwards.
Mind you, in my view the same mistake is what caused the recent financial crash ; bank people, analysts and other pundits forgot their Popper and thought that since the models had worked for a long time they all made sense; but that's like saying that since you cause the sun to rise every day by waking up, you do not want to risk oversleeping in the morning: it works until you get out for a bout of drinking with the buddies, and the morning after you realise that you slept till midday...and the sun is already up.
Re:Financial modeling and spying better funded
on
The Supercomputer Race
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Sadly, while predicting the weather and better understanding it ultimately helps a lot of people, I suspect a LOT more computing power is thrown at more mundane things like predicting where the financial markets are going to be based on a gazillion data inputs. Probably even better funded are the vast datacenters around the world that fondle communications and other data for the spymasters. I doubt those computing resources are represented in the annual supercomputing lists.:)
There are a couple of misperceptions here.
Both the problems described, modeling years of weather models or modeling financial instruments, suffer from a definite flaw: they are not mathematical problems in the "high school" sense of the world, i.e. it is not possible to prove that there is only one finite solution that is demonstrably right.
Financial models are "fit to reality": you take a long time series, make a few wild guesses, throw it into a Cray-2, and look what the model says. Lather, rinse, repeat. they work, most of the times.....Bank regulators just recently allowed banks to discard simpler risk controls if they proved that they had a financial modeling tool that did not get their accepted measure of risk wrong more that 3 days out of 120, and these models were mostly sophisticated mathematicals and statistical implementations....and then Lehman goes belly up.
Mind you, they were using computer modeling as well.
[DISCLAIMER: I've been working in finance since 1988, and I believe equally in advanced financial modeling, the tooth fairy and Santa]
Weather modelling in yearly time scales suffers from the same flaw, in my view: unless you have a long enough set of possible inputs , it's not verifiable in reality. If I try to make prediction over next week, I only need a week to see if my model is horribly wrong. If I want to test it in different seasons, 1-2 years can give me a good enough hint about the accuracy of a model. If I am trying to predict average weather changes on a 20 years time scale, I need 20 years of historical data to get 1 (one) result. another year to get two, etc. exaggerating a lot, it's like modeling to predict red or black at the roulette: 50% of the models will get it right the first time, and 25% over two tries. definitely not enough to know if it works.
An illegal order is something like "Shoot this prisoner we just captured. I don't want to fucking bring along extra baggage for 24 hours until we can get him to the rear." These kinds of orders are rare enough that most people go their entire enlistment without coming upon an illegal order.
Most people in the Army are not crazy and are reasonably well-natured enough that stuff that falls into the category of "illegal orders" are very uncommon.
I am a regular America's Army player, and the article basically states that they'll be using the game's physics engine to provide interactive simulations, which is nothing to write home about.
Having said that, and as a father of a teen kid, I prefer him to play America's army in a clan that the PS3. For one thing, the game is overwhelmingly played only between humans (no AI), and there's no respawning in any scenario. so it's easy to learn simple basics like "cohoperation wins", "do not make mistakes" etc... then again, the game itself attracts a certain kind of people, traditionalist who think "duty, honour, country"... if that kind of thing is not your bag, you can always move on. I do not think that will harm anyone.
Slashdot Mirror
Is that most games don't allow for real-world techniques. Case in point, Call of Duty 4. The first problem I have with this is it doesn't let you lean out from behind cover so you only expose your head and weapon. No properly trained person would expose his whole body. Second, you can't climb stuff you would normally be able to. Third, there is an exponential component to racking up kills. Once you get to call in air-strikes and helicopters, you usually rack up enough kills to get more air-strikes and helicopters. And since when to .223 rounds not blow through body armor at close range? And finally, a simulation only would be effective if you can't play it anymore once you're dead.
both can be included in the game. In many servers, you can't call more than one airstrike, or helo, and in "search and destroy" mode, once killed, you stay killed. the side with more survivors wins.
Chances are, when the gamer is in the position of a fire he will act like any other 8 year old school girl...scratch that, the 8 year old school girl will do what her training in school taught her (walk out calmly in line), while the 35 year old gamer will run around screaming or stay huddled in a corner "oh god my life is flashing before my eyes and I realized I wasted it on computer games". Same thing in a gun situation - who here believes Counter Strike really teaches gamers how to be (counter)terrorists?
It doesn't. BUT, it teaches basic Fire and Manouver,Stealth, field of vision, use of terrain, plus unpredictability. Or at least it does to people whose fragrate is over 1.
People who are scared will remain so. all the others will learn the basic tenets of all FPS games: staying in one place too long will get you killed, and ears can work concurrently with eyes even in a noisy environment.
Simulators can give you some insight, but it is far different then actually doing it in a physical environment. Ever drive a racing car game? It's a bit different then driving a racing car - hence why you smash into the wall all the time in the game. For this it would be great to learn the routes, but they need to introduce stress into the situation. At the very least the game, while designed to look like the building, will not look just like it (cartoon pixels of a wall do not look like a wall). As for gamers doing things that someone normally one would not do, how about doing a triple twist jump while putting two shots into the heads of your classmates and landing safely on the other side? :)
Sorry, bunny hopping, martyrdom and last stand will get you banned from the office.
And you were perfectly productive on that, too; why the change?
I wasn't. I quit pestering the firm for a better computer at work about six years ago. My hunch is that at that time the trend inverted: power users passed from asking to have their machines changed, to asking to have them upgraded ( more ram and such), to resisting any call for change, since less and less applications needed more resources, stability improved remarkably, and an understandable mentality "change= trouble^2" ensued.
There are many experienced admins here, and it would be interesting to know if they can report if they've seen a similar trend.
I guess many CIOs/expert users will balk at this... In the office, I am perfectly productive on a 3 years old AMD processor, 512MB ram and a 120 MB hard disk...
I assume you mean 120 GB harddrive?
Yep, slip, sorry. I use a fraction of that anyway, but not such a small part....forgive me, I started out on a 8088 :D
from TFA:
"[...]Windows XP users will have to perform a clean install of Windows 7, however, while Vista users will be able to keep their existing applications and data with an upgrade install."
I guess many CIOs/expert users will balk at this... In the office, I am perfectly productive on a 3 years old AMD processor, 512MB ram and a 120 MB hard disk....why should I spend money on a new (...) operating system, more ram, more processor, a new version of office, all to do the same things as before, just not any faster?
Add to this that I cannot upgrade and pray, but I must Fdisk and install....then recover all the other programs, wait for them to say "sorry, no compatibility",restore old settings, rinse/lather/repeat.
...Oh wait....I cannot register XP anymore......$%&/£%@Â#!!!!!!!!!
Do not tell the redmond guys, but IMHO their onlt chance is working hard at a version that not only looks like XP, but WORKS exactly like XP. No use trying to impose a change for change's sake, people might say bad things like "Ubuntu" or "wine".
So who will need to pay me if my Linux box get hacked. And yes a poorly configured/administrator Linux system can get hacked into, just as easily as a Windows system. The problem is a lot of these places that get hacked have a pathetic Understaffed/underfunded IT team.
If you can get someone who know hows to use Linux they can normally keep a windows network secure too. But more often then you think these companies are run by the guy who currently knows the most about computers at the time and becomes the IT guy by default.
That the case if the person who doesn't know what is going on will choose windows by default without any consideration of other platforms. A good IT person may still choose windows for it advantages over Linux but knows where it is week and works to secure those points.
It isn't the OS it is more who maintains the OS.
as much as i'd like throwing microsoft out of the window, third party software that we need to use is locked into windows. i'll be lucky of I escape the vista nightmare, and keep using win XP, and i'll probably squeal if and when the Ms guys will tell me that they do not support it any more, it's not available as an OEM install and if i use it my eyesight will fall off a cliff, but i'llhave to provide a windows environment;
as much as i love my Ubuntu, i love playing computer games at home, so I do care for a windows box with win XP. using a combination of firefox/thunderbird, a free antivirus and a hardware firewall, i've never experienced a problem. maybe teaching users some security basics is more important than which operating system you use.
Once mainstream support and bug fixes to XP end, enterprise level IT groups will move to Windows 7 to continue to receive patches (*). There currently is no reason to move to Vista because XP works and is still supported. Once that support is gone, it's time to move on. The grandparent is correct.
[...]
companies MAY move to win7, but it could be an hard battle. moving individuals may be easier, since all OEM sales may give no option to go on installing XP,but remember, the expiry of OEM winxp sales has been put off (again!) and that tells a lot on Vista acceptance by the masses. Win 7 may undergo a massive overhaul, but still it's not a compelling proposition.
I come from finance, and I can tell you that most banks in my country have XP as a centrally validated standard, and client machines, be they fat or thin clients, are really cheap. it may cost blood, sweat and tears to MS to convince this people on some issues, namely:
1. WIN7 is as stable and safe as an optimized installation of XP, and by optimized I mean Firefox/thunderbird replacing IE/outlook;
2.total initial costs will be comparable, and that's trouble, with software overtaking hardware as the bigger chunk of initial costs;
3.Total Cost of Ownership will be comparable or lower.
4. training people to use win7 will cost less than training them to use some kind of linux distribution.
there are a couple of points in there that for MS are particularly thorny, namely the possibility of being forced to make deep discounts to get sales, thus eating into margins, and especially training, which might seem a small thing, but if I were a company owner i'd think that going with MS would cost me X to train someone, and as soon as MS had another operating system ready i'd spend it again, while there's a fair chance that under linux i'd be able to keep the interface intact over the upgrades if I wanted to, which was not the case with Vista.
[...] As far as I know the only reactor to have been decommissioned was Yankee Rowe, a 167 Mw reactor, and that cost almost half a billion dollars and the fuel rods are still on site. If those costs scale to the size of the reactor core then you are looking at roughly half a trillion dollars in decommissioning the existing 104 reactor facilities - at todays prices. [...]I do think we have to continue to develop reactor technology, but frankly, reactor designs proposed today still have the primary flaw that all reactors have - a forty year lifespan.
mmmmmm......I did a quick back of the envelope calculation. the assumptions are:
1. cost of decommissioning a nuclear plant at today's costs: 1 billion;
2. average availability : 95%;
rated power: 1,500 MWh;
3. lifespan: 40 years;
It comes out that total power production comes out at about 12.5 Billion Kw over the life of the plant, so this one Billion adds about 0.2 cents per Kw/hour; given estimated prices of "new nuclear energy, that would add about 3% to the gross price. I have a utility contract rated at 2.5Kwh max, which means that If I shave it close to maximum consumption, over which power is cut, at all times, day and night, it adds 50 bucks per year to my bill.
Be advised that this is not only an overstatement of my bill, it is especially an overstatement of the marginal effects of more nuclear energy, since at the margin nuclear power is cheaper than the average, and indeed of the marginal, wholesale price or electric power. It stands to reason that the average bill should come down because , even including that decommissioning charge, nuclear power should be cheaper than the alternative.
Indeed, the coupling of nuclear and alternative energy should be all the rage in the future, because the economics benefits of nuclear power should be sufficient to fund the big subsidies on which alternative energy is dependent to be attractive.
I think that there's a litmus test for all these scientific modeling, purely based on economics.
One of the tenets of all these scientific researchers is that we must do something and we must do it soonest. It should follow that the possible solutions should be prioritized for bang for the buck, little or no dependence on technological breakthroughs, and ability to set up/ mantain the whole structure at peak performance down the line.
Yet, whenever somebody start talking about nuclear energy , all this community sniffs worse than at a "dumb and dumber" premiere. They love a nice, parched flatland covered in solar panels more than a forest, at ten times the costs.
What I find even funnier is that when you start talking about economics, they make me think that only Aliens pay taxes, because the usual line is: " you did not count about the decommissioning costs of the plant and storage of long term radioactive material", whose cost is included in ALL studies about nuclear power, and then they show the superiority of solar INCLUDING all the various subsidies/ tax advantages / special financing that the various government includes. Go figure, because unless women are from Venus and tax money from Mars, Citizens pay through taxes those same subsidies.
So, until and unless I see one of those panels do a good comparative studies about the possible solutions, as unbiased and scientific as possible, i'll label them as "old style lobbying" and move on.
I think the whole issue is,"How can i rid me of microsoft internet explorer once and for all?"
;
I've been using Firefox for two years now, and I also use firefox/thunderbird at work. In my small experience, it's happened time and again that I install firefox, erase the IE icon from the desktop, and lo! after some winXP update, if I click a link it starts in Microsoft internet explorer, which is NOT the default browser.
For the record, it never happened that after some update the link started in Opera, or Safari. So the problem is twofold:
1. the consumer COULD be allowed a choice about which browser install as default
2. Once you pick, Microsoft should be forbidden to meddle.
BTW, the relative success of Firefox et al. is also getting MS off the hook for penalties for his defective products, even if I must confess that i laugh my head off thinking of Ballmer saying in court:" you see judge, if the accuser wanted internet security he should have used Firefox!!!!!"
The thing I want to know is, if I take a picture of a cat with this camera, will it disappear??
I thought it would die!!!!!!
Because sometimes the camera is there ... and sometimes it isn't.
I beg to disagree with that. The real problem is , if you can find where's the camera, you cannot find where's the image.
[...]While in most cases it is easy to tell and block only those sites you trust. Those that you don't block may also allow third party scripts to be run such as in ads on the site.
as far as I know, from using noscript on firefox, I can enable java on my bank's page and it still blocks Ads and java scripts if they come from other sources. from noscript home:"The NoScript Firefox extension provides extra protection for Firefox, Flock, Seamonkey and other mozilla-based browsers: this free, open source add-on allows JavaScript, Java, Flash and other plugins to be executed only by trusted web sites of your choice (e.g. your online bank), and provides the most powerful Anti-XSS protection available in a browser. "
[...] I seriously doubt that if their were a scientifically founded protection for EM radiation, these people wouldn't use it.
They created billions of positrons with a high power laser.[...]
Why create Billions when you can create....... Millions???
All true, but somewhat beside the point. Microsoft is just misunderstood. People think that Microsoft is a software company, but it isn't. Microsoft is an abuse company that sells software as a way of delivering abuse. Microsoft's evil is not a side-effect of their management philosophy, Microsoft's evil is their business model.
[...]While you were in space I created a way for us to make huge sums of legitimate money and still maintain the ethics and business practices of an evil organization"
P.S.: if Ballmer is number two, who's mini me?
Because bankers are traditionally among the cheapest bastards on the planet. Rich people frequently are ... it's part of why they got to be rich in the first place. Furthermore, in the modern world the contents of a bank's hard drives are much more valuable than what's in their steel-lined vaults. I don't think they've fully come to grips with that, or they'd have spent more money on information security.
That's only part of the answer. Burocrats, whatever their income, are also the most coward race on Earth, so they'd usually spend on security. the key point here is that to them computers are appliances: they know next to nothing about how they work.
The moment they need to know, like in this case, they usually revert to type: since computers were a problem, they'll try to avoid them, and the blame involved, by setting up some kind of "commission" to set up a "standard", ignoring the fact that a defined and documented standard is weak in the face of determined hackers.
I used to fly more frequently, now I am so fed up that I avoid it if I possibly can.
I do think, moreover, that all this paranoia about cellphones and other thingies is ludicrous. All military aircraft, combat and non combat, have been designed to work in a tactical nuclear exchange environment, which would probably fry any Ipod or nokia you can think of: and any time the systems act up on my civilian aircraft, which by the way has been designed very recently, someone blames Phones, Nintendos and such. Come off it, please, I do not think that, with the cold war over, there was a particular shortage of engineering skills in that particular field.
Consider this:
First production of the F-16 Falcon: 1976
First production of the Airbus A 320: 1988
Both use "fly by wire" controls, i.e. all control surfaces are controlled electronically; It's true that it was unlikely that a fighter pilot would fly his plane, use a mobile and play on his nintendo DS at the same time, but 10 years of technology go far.
P.S: a small pet peeve: at Stansted airport, near London, they don't allow anybody to bring umbrellas on board; since it's impossible to stow them in the luggage, thay have become expendable items...I had an idea where to put them, the first time a prim officer told me I could not bring it aboard tough.
Do I have to pay an addiotnal fee for the BSOD?
Don't tanks, attack helicopters and ground support planes also use scopes?
Yes. Just about every modern attack platform has some form of optics involved in their target acquisition system. There are few areas of the military where a system like this, assuming it is truly capable, would not be leveraged. Possible uses range from snipers to UAV to attack helicopters.
I think that this technology can be applied only on stationary scopes tough, since you must take an inordinate amount of screenshots of the same target for the technology to work its magic.
So, stationary scope looking at stationary target = good, moving scope looking at a moving target = bad. Not a bad tradeoff since a moving target is usually much simpler to find/id/kill.
No, lazy people still waste time standing round the water-cooler and daydreaming; the internet is an additional factor.
This is exactly why we have to bail out the lazy bankers who couldnt be bothered to risk check their own assets, and the lazier mortgage holders who want to waste time reading about britney rather than working so their families arent kicked out. [....]
This might be just my personal pet peeve, but I have been a money manager this past twenty years.
the risk managers have been busy as bees, all the time, always inventing some new algorithms. Really they worked their collective asses off.
the Lehman demise has only confirmed my long held view of Organizations: the most damage comes not from people who do not do enough, but from the employees that do too much.... in the wrong direction.
A smart employee who works only 75% of the working time, has an hidden cost of 25% of pay in relation to an employee of the same productivity who does not skulk: value addition remains positive, damamge is quantifiable. On the other hand, the biggest bloopers I've seen were done by the usual eaga beva types, those who work overtime on weekends. Management types, especially PHBs, tend to trust effort over ability, so oversight gets down the drain fast. Ten years from now, when we shall know more about the Lehman demise,I am afraid I'll be demonstrably right.... If ever a flag will be planted on the debris of Lehman, its caption should be "redoubled effort".
what you are saying is a literal truth: we can talk about 10.000 years climate changes..... but we are unable to pinpoint the real reasons behind the little ice age, apart from noting the coincidence of part of it with the Maunders minimum, which marks a low in sunspot activity.
In a sense, and within the confines of being sure about the models, we have advanced very little in our understanding of climate. weather forecasting has really improved, as you rightly reminded, and three day forecasts are regularly issued, with a much greater granularity than twenty years ago. my perception is that, apart from saying "most of the scientist agree", many a climatologist would be very hard pressed to bring to slashdot an explanation sufficiently convincing to withstand Occam's razor (or slashdotting). Remember, Columbus had to be a great salesman to convince the Spanish to fund his exploration, because the conventional wisdom was an hazy notion of the Earth (flat like a cake, and the conventional wisdom of the times?). Not bad, considering that Eratosthenes of Cyrene had calculated its diameter very exactly in the 3rd century B.C., further proof that Science is not a matter of majority vote, and that occasionally science can go backwards.
Mind you, in my view the same mistake is what caused the recent financial crash ; bank people, analysts and other pundits forgot their Popper and thought that since the models had worked for a long time they all made sense; but that's like saying that since you cause the sun to rise every day by waking up, you do not want to risk oversleeping in the morning: it works until you get out for a bout of drinking with the buddies, and the morning after you realise that you slept till midday...and the sun is already up.
Sadly, while predicting the weather and better understanding it ultimately helps a lot of people, I suspect a LOT more computing power is thrown at more mundane things like predicting where the financial markets are going to be based on a gazillion data inputs. Probably even better funded are the vast datacenters around the world that fondle communications and other data for the spymasters. I doubt those computing resources are represented in the annual supercomputing lists. :)
There are a couple of misperceptions here.
Both the problems described, modeling years of weather models or modeling financial instruments, suffer from a definite flaw: they are not mathematical problems in the "high school" sense of the world, i.e. it is not possible to prove that there is only one finite solution that is demonstrably right.
Financial models are "fit to reality": you take a long time series, make a few wild guesses, throw it into a Cray-2, and look what the model says. Lather, rinse, repeat. they work, most of the times.....Bank regulators just recently allowed banks to discard simpler risk controls if they proved that they had a financial modeling tool that did not get their accepted measure of risk wrong more that 3 days out of 120, and these models were mostly sophisticated mathematicals and statistical implementations....and then Lehman goes belly up. Mind you, they were using computer modeling as well.
[DISCLAIMER: I've been working in finance since 1988, and I believe equally in advanced financial modeling, the tooth fairy and Santa]
Weather modelling in yearly time scales suffers from the same flaw, in my view: unless you have a long enough set of possible inputs , it's not verifiable in reality.
If I try to make prediction over next week, I only need a week to see if my model is horribly wrong. If I want to test it in different seasons, 1-2 years can give me a good enough hint about the accuracy of a model.
If I am trying to predict average weather changes on a 20 years time scale, I need 20 years of historical data to get 1 (one) result. another year to get two, etc. exaggerating a lot, it's like modeling to predict red or black at the roulette: 50% of the models will get it right the first time, and 25% over two tries. definitely not enough to know if it works.
An illegal order is something like "Shoot this prisoner we just captured. I don't want to fucking bring along extra baggage for 24 hours until we can get him to the rear." These kinds of orders are rare enough that most people go their entire enlistment without coming upon an illegal order. Most people in the Army are not crazy and are reasonably well-natured enough that stuff that falls into the category of "illegal orders" are very uncommon.
I am a regular America's Army player, and the article basically states that they'll be using the game's physics engine to provide interactive simulations, which is nothing to write home about.
Having said that, and as a father of a teen kid, I prefer him to play America's army in a clan that the PS3. For one thing, the game is overwhelmingly played only between humans (no AI), and there's no respawning in any scenario. so it's easy to learn simple basics like "cohoperation wins", "do not make mistakes" etc...
then again, the game itself attracts a certain kind of people, traditionalist who think "duty, honour, country"... if that kind of thing is not your bag, you can always move on. I do not think that will harm anyone.