I distinctly recall that in the original Dune novel, , Paul Atreides is impressed by the frictionless containers used by the Freemen to hold water, and Dune was written in 1965. Nice to see reality catch up to science fiction.
[...]"each time an additional book is downloaded to an e-reader, the mass of the e-reader increases. The effect doesn't really make the devices more difficult to carry: the professor calculates that 4GB of books would increase its weight by a billionth of a billionth of a gram— about the mass of a single virus or DNA molecule."
Damn. I'll never be able to take all my biblioteque with me, it would weigh a ton.
You're trying to be silly, but that kind of information would be useful:
- If I have a bunch of people's shopping lists, I'd be able to tell what sort of things were commonly eaten in that society.
- Based on how many other people had those foods on the list, I'd likely be able to get an idea as to what's considered rare delicacies versus what's common food (e.g. caviar versus ground beef).
- Especially combining that information with where the document was found, I'd have a good chance of linking menus to social classes.
- Once I've got an idea of which social classes have these documents and which don't, I'd know how widespread literacy was in that society, whether there were only professional scribes or amateur writers as well, and maybe some sense of how integrated the scribes were with the rest of the society.
I mean, imagine you're an archaeologist from the year 3000 trying to figure out why this "pizza" stuff was so wildly popular in ancient New York. Suddenly the nutritional information on the back of a pepperoni wrapper is vitally important.
the text you are looking for is " A canticle for Leibowitz", by Walter Miller. I distinctly remember that in the story there's a little note attributed to Leibowitz himself, that reads:"Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels—bring home for Emma." upon this, and other finds, a civilisation is reborn after a nuclear war.
Couriously enough, I read the book because it was quoted in the novel "Space", by James Michener, when one of the main characters wants to leave a legacy of love for science. Remeber, this is Slashdot!
I am only a middling user, but Truecrypt offers also plausible deniability, in that two different passwords offer access to a whole different set of data ("hidden volume"). It would be very difficult to assess if it has been used.
As someone else already said, Italy doesn't have any nuclear plant. They were all shut down after Tschernobyl.
Starting to build a new nuclear power plant now means that it will take 2-3 years to make the design and plans, find the right place and so on. Then years to build it and then the usual years to have it operational. Which means that the first power plant would have been operational not sooner than 10-15 years.
Italy missed the nuclear wave in '87 after the fear-driven vote. Now it was no point in starting again, when all technicians were gone abroad.
In 15 years probably we'll have other sources of power.
THAT's what they said after the Chernobil referendum here in italy. what's killing my country is not democracy, it's forgetfulness.
Actually, what we did is much, MUCH worse. From fear of nuclear power, we have halted all progress in nuclear technology, leaving ancient reactor designs in deployment, while new, safe designs sit on the drawing board.
In a real way, fear of nuclear power caused Fukushima. That plant should have been decommissioned a decade ago in favor of one of the new generation of power plants, maybe even one that burns thorium, meaning they could have gotten rid of all that waste they instead stuffed into the attic hoping no-one would ever find out.
I beg to disagree, witness Germany's choice to scrap nukes at the end of the useful lives. It's a clever sleigh of hand, because when they do, a debate will come up not on scrapping nukes, but what to use after them at at what costs, and the dirty little secret of "clean energy" is not the the energy produced is not competitive with fossil sources, but that they have uncertain capital cost per energy actually produced and trasmitted. I read an old IAEA paper in which they ascertained capital costs for wind in the region of 1.000$ per Kwh, but I do not know if it's still viable estimate
Where will you get power now? France's nuclear plants?
we already do. I live in Turin, next to france, and we DO import nuclear energy from france: the total represents about 7% of energy consumption; the dominant energy producer, ENEL, operates nuclear plants in Spain and Slovenia (Link), and France is Upwind from us, so I would laugh my head off if it wasn't sad.
Italy operates a few small research reactors, and part of the energy bill that I receive bimonthly has an Item called "sovrapprezzo termico", i.e. the part that I pay ENEL to compensate it for the added costs of dismantling the reactors that were stopped after Chernobil, plus the lost income due to fossil fuel use. But hey, it's democracy, honey.
For all it's worth, two other referenda were worse still; we voted out compensation for capital expenses incurred in mantaining and building water infrastructure, which call the question of who will put up the money required to reduce the water losses that the acqueduct has (about 20~25% here). Just the other day, my wife came in while I was brushing my teeth and closed the water tap, saying "the TV said to save water!"; I said "good Idea, let's reach the same level of eccellence of the water company: let's leave the tap open overnight."
coming back to Nuclear energy: the incumbent italian operator gets a sizable part of its energy production from fully or partly owned and operated nuclear plants, but all of them are abroad, and all except one (in slovenia) are too far to make exporting energy to Italy viable. To add insult to injury, many people said "we italians are incapable to guarantee the orderly functioning of nuclear plants". Maybe the spanish public ain't so picky.
Now i want to see how they will sell to the public on building coke or gas turbine plants for baseline operations; as most Slashdotters know, renewables are uneconomic unless someone pays the piper.
Why would insurance companies be opposed to medical expert systems?
A computerized billing and coding system could analyze patient records, second-guess doctors, and reject claims faster than thousands of weak human employees...
Legal responsibility trasfer. if an insurance company ever accepted the validity of an expert system, it could not delay payment by claiming any error, etc.
The private school teachers (partially as a result of the lower pay) are also the ones who want to teach -- not the ones who got an English degree and then realized that they couldn't get any other job.
Huh? I see no evidence for that.
In general, I think most teachers go into teaching because they want to teach, public and private. Some of them just burn out faster.
The one advantage that private schools do have is that it's much easier for them to eject students out for being disruptive.
? I have two teenage siblings, and I must say that the most infuriating element of public school here in Italy is that it shirks problems whenever it can. Inferior teachers, security problems, hazing, students pushed on even if they lack both the will and the preparation...I am fortunate because both my sons are good students, but we are not an "average" family, in that my wife could afford to stay at home and grow the kids, which is a luxury these days. coming back to the"student ejection" problem, remember that for the most part the decisions are made by parents, understandably, since they are paying.
Funny that americans should ponder how to fight pirates.
the American Navy and Marine Corp have their root in the fight against Barbary Coast pirates in the Mediterranean Sea, where the solution was to bring the fight on land to deny to pirates access to the sea lanes. In short: sink the ships, ANY of them, on the whole coast, and watch the somalis try to walk their way to the targets. What part of "to the coast of Tripoli" baffles you?
Here they solved the issue in an elegant way: The Post office has been granted a banking license, and the banking activity is subsidizing the postal activity. Mind you, in the central post office where I live (Turin, pop. 1,000,000 more or less), there are about 20 booths, 15 for banking, two for receiving mail and two for outgoing mail, so the service is mediocre, but banking has effectively stemmed the flow of post office closures.
Mind you, I cannot but wonder....what would have happened if they auctioned off the post service altogether with the general delivery obligations? maybe large banks would have been interested? and think of the multiple conflicts of interest, since the Post is state owned.... no banking licences in the sticks where a post office is present? is there a ban on opening more post offices in rich neighborhoods? After all, banks are after assets, not post traffic...
I question how much of a "motherlode" it truly is. This seems to fly in the face counter-intelligence.
The problem is it will take time to disseminate and act on the intell gained. Most of it is going to be out of data precisely because they announced they had it. Even if they didn't announce it a lot of it was going to be out of date if AQ couldn't verify that the US hadn't compromised the data. Basically, we sent out a huge "LOOK AT ME WE HAVE POSSIBLE INFO ON WHO YOU ARE AND WHAT YOU'RE PLANNING ON DOING" which basically has told all the terrorists to go to ground.
Good job heroes.
They should have just made the strike. Loot the hardware. Then covered up the scene with a cruise missile strike. Make it hard to tell the US nabbed the data.
Or, even if there's no effing computer in there, bring one in, and pretend to have found it. Encrypted or not, the whole organization has to act on the premise that data have been cracked. people that were on the verge of moving stay still, dormant people have to be activated just to see if the organization is crumbling or not, lots of SIGINT opportunities. This being slashdot, I assume many will have read Henlein's the moon is a harsh mistress; heavy compartmentalization is a must in underground organizations, but in these cases it works against it, precisely because the purpose is to avoid betrayal from below, not above.
Or
It might be that the name of the game is "Let's all gang up on Intel"... given that Intel has squeezed Nvidia put of motherboards, and AMD has integrated graphics all to herself for now, getting closer is sensible, because the dominating player has a)signaled that it wants to enter your arena, and b) has probably reached, as Microsoft has reached, a performance plateau after which further technology advances are not as valuable to consumers. Having said that, the SLI market is, and will remain, marginal in term of number of system installations. Given the pace of advance, we may be reaching in graphics what we have reached in processors; the basic market needs are more than adequately satisfied by entry-level systems.
I love the job they've done. I have two kids, and I feel for those kids. What I find distressing is that society always seems amazed when you use game formats as a teaching aid. Nature built us that way; pups, not only our own, get rewarded for imitating gestures and abilities they'll need later in life, and they enjoy it too. Personally I am amazed that games aren't used more often, even in adult training. I can say that here in Italy is almost unheard of.
The news is even LESS bad that the parent says. For a currency to become an international medium of exchange, there should be a supply that more or less grows as the Gross Domestic Product, and the ability/willingness of the issuing country to run a huge trade deficit.....forever. So phone me when China News Daily says: "huge export tariffs slapped onto chinese firms"
One more thing: for a currency, earning the trust of the international community is paramount, and lo and behold, even the famed Euro hasn't done it. I do not think it will fall apart, but I do not see Brasil selling their USD reserves and buying into the Euro. Why should this happen with the South African Rand?
That's why serious scientists should be leery of predicting things they do not have a good bead on far into the future. But then, Climate studies have been hijacked by politics. Call me back when the models explain the Maunder minimum.
P.S.: no, the right answer is not that my shaving foam causes sunspots to become rare.
The problem is that people [buy a copy of Microsoft Office just for Outlook] instead of using an e-mail client instead.
Does the e-mail client have an appointment calendar? For example, are Thunderbird users aware of Lightning, a version of Sunbird packaged as a T-bird extension? There's a reason that Outlook's icon is a clock, and not just because the rim and hands spell "OL". And can it connect to Exchange at work, where IT has disabled standards-based connection protocols for nebulous "security reasons"?
I work in a small office (My own!!). My partner is a thumbfisted computer user, take Excel off his computer and he usually would use it as a lamp. BUT, after I installed Thunderbird+ lightning + shared gmail calendar, he was hooked.
Training time: 0
His happy face when he clicked his way to setting up a shared event: priceless
Slashdot Mirror
I distinctly recall that in the original Dune novel, , Paul Atreides is impressed by the frictionless containers used by the Freemen to hold water, and Dune was written in 1965. Nice to see reality catch up to science fiction.
[...]"each time an additional book is downloaded to an e-reader, the mass of the e-reader increases. The effect doesn't really make the devices more difficult to carry: the professor calculates that 4GB of books would increase its weight by a billionth of a billionth of a gram— about the mass of a single virus or DNA molecule."
Damn. I'll never be able to take all my biblioteque with me, it would weigh a ton.
You're trying to be silly, but that kind of information would be useful: - If I have a bunch of people's shopping lists, I'd be able to tell what sort of things were commonly eaten in that society. - Based on how many other people had those foods on the list, I'd likely be able to get an idea as to what's considered rare delicacies versus what's common food (e.g. caviar versus ground beef). - Especially combining that information with where the document was found, I'd have a good chance of linking menus to social classes. - Once I've got an idea of which social classes have these documents and which don't, I'd know how widespread literacy was in that society, whether there were only professional scribes or amateur writers as well, and maybe some sense of how integrated the scribes were with the rest of the society.
I mean, imagine you're an archaeologist from the year 3000 trying to figure out why this "pizza" stuff was so wildly popular in ancient New York. Suddenly the nutritional information on the back of a pepperoni wrapper is vitally important.
the text you are looking for is " A canticle for Leibowitz", by Walter Miller. I distinctly remember that in the story there's a little note attributed to Leibowitz himself, that reads:"Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels—bring home for Emma."
upon this, and other finds, a civilisation is reborn after a nuclear war.
Couriously enough, I read the book because it was quoted in the novel "Space", by James Michener, when one of the main characters wants to leave a legacy of love for science. Remeber, this is Slashdot!
I am only a middling user, but Truecrypt offers also plausible deniability, in that two different passwords offer access to a whole different set of data ("hidden volume"). It would be very difficult to assess if it has been used.
Now about that "educated man leading the parliament"... there we have a problem mate! (And I'm not talking specifically about Italians) [...].
I am italian, so I can.
Harumph. here in Italy, the state-owned site www.italia.it ran up to 45 millions Euros (about 65 mil USD). Sorry, site in italian. trust me.
As someone else already said, Italy doesn't have any nuclear plant. They were all shut down after Tschernobyl. Starting to build a new nuclear power plant now means that it will take 2-3 years to make the design and plans, find the right place and so on. Then years to build it and then the usual years to have it operational. Which means that the first power plant would have been operational not sooner than 10-15 years. Italy missed the nuclear wave in '87 after the fear-driven vote. Now it was no point in starting again, when all technicians were gone abroad. In 15 years probably we'll have other sources of power.
THAT's what they said after the Chernobil referendum here in italy. what's killing my country is not democracy, it's forgetfulness.
Actually, what we did is much, MUCH worse. From fear of nuclear power, we have halted all progress in nuclear technology, leaving ancient reactor designs in deployment, while new, safe designs sit on the drawing board. In a real way, fear of nuclear power caused Fukushima. That plant should have been decommissioned a decade ago in favor of one of the new generation of power plants, maybe even one that burns thorium, meaning they could have gotten rid of all that waste they instead stuffed into the attic hoping no-one would ever find out.
I beg to disagree, witness Germany's choice to scrap nukes at the end of the useful lives. It's a clever sleigh of hand, because when they do, a debate will come up not on scrapping nukes, but what to use after them at at what costs, and the dirty little secret of "clean energy" is not the the energy produced is not competitive with fossil sources, but that they have uncertain capital cost per energy actually produced and trasmitted. I read an old IAEA paper in which they ascertained capital costs for wind in the region of 1.000$ per Kwh, but I do not know if it's still viable estimate
What do you do when the voters are conditioned and misinformed and the majority is wrong?
Let me see....
1. Condition the voters;
2. have a referendum;
3. ????
4. Profit!!!!!!
Where will you get power now? France's nuclear plants?
we already do. I live in Turin, next to france, and we DO import nuclear energy from france: the total represents about 7% of energy consumption; the dominant energy producer, ENEL, operates nuclear plants in Spain and Slovenia (Link), and France is Upwind from us, so I would laugh my head off if it wasn't sad.
Italy operates a few small research reactors, and part of the energy bill that I receive bimonthly has an Item called "sovrapprezzo termico", i.e. the part that I pay ENEL to compensate it for the added costs of dismantling the reactors that were stopped after Chernobil, plus the lost income due to fossil fuel use. But hey, it's democracy, honey.
For all it's worth, two other referenda were worse still; we voted out compensation for capital expenses incurred in mantaining and building water infrastructure, which call the question of who will put up the money required to reduce the water losses that the acqueduct has (about 20~25% here).
Just the other day, my wife came in while I was brushing my teeth and closed the water tap, saying "the TV said to save water!"; I said "good Idea, let's reach the same level of eccellence of the water company: let's leave the tap open overnight."
coming back to Nuclear energy: the incumbent italian operator gets a sizable part of its energy production from fully or partly owned and operated nuclear plants, but all of them are abroad, and all except one (in slovenia) are too far to make exporting energy to Italy viable. To add insult to injury, many people said "we italians are incapable to guarantee the orderly functioning of nuclear plants". Maybe the spanish public ain't so picky.
Now i want to see how they will sell to the public on building coke or gas turbine plants for baseline operations; as most Slashdotters know, renewables are uneconomic unless someone pays the piper.
Why would insurance companies be opposed to medical expert systems? A computerized billing and coding system could analyze patient records, second-guess doctors, and reject claims faster than thousands of weak human employees...
Legal responsibility trasfer. if an insurance company ever accepted the validity of an expert system, it could not delay payment by claiming any error, etc.
The private school teachers (partially as a result of the lower pay) are also the ones who want to teach -- not the ones who got an English degree and then realized that they couldn't get any other job.
Huh? I see no evidence for that.
In general, I think most teachers go into teaching because they want to teach, public and private. Some of them just burn out faster.
The one advantage that private schools do have is that it's much easier for them to eject students out for being disruptive.
? I have two teenage siblings, and I must say that the most infuriating element of public school here in Italy is that it shirks problems whenever it can. Inferior teachers, security problems, hazing, students pushed on even if they lack both the will and the preparation...I am fortunate because both my sons are good students, but we are not an "average" family, in that my wife could afford to stay at home and grow the kids, which is a luxury these days.
coming back to the"student ejection" problem, remember that for the most part the decisions are made by parents, understandably, since they are paying.
Funny that americans should ponder how to fight pirates.
the American Navy and Marine Corp have their root in the fight against Barbary Coast pirates in the Mediterranean Sea, where the solution was to bring the fight on land to deny to pirates access to the sea lanes. In short: sink the ships, ANY of them, on the whole coast, and watch the somalis try to walk their way to the targets. What part of "to the coast of Tripoli" baffles you?
Here they solved the issue in an elegant way: The Post office has been granted a banking license, and the banking activity is subsidizing the postal activity. Mind you, in the central post office where I live (Turin, pop. 1,000,000 more or less), there are about 20 booths, 15 for banking, two for receiving mail and two for outgoing mail, so the service is mediocre, but banking has effectively stemmed the flow of post office closures.
Mind you, I cannot but wonder....what would have happened if they auctioned off the post service altogether with the general delivery obligations? maybe large banks would have been interested? and think of the multiple conflicts of interest, since the Post is state owned.... no banking licences in the sticks where a post office is present? is there a ban on opening more post offices in rich neighborhoods? After all, banks are after assets, not post traffic...
I question how much of a "motherlode" it truly is. This seems to fly in the face counter-intelligence.
The problem is it will take time to disseminate and act on the intell gained. Most of it is going to be out of data precisely because they announced they had it. Even if they didn't announce it a lot of it was going to be out of date if AQ couldn't verify that the US hadn't compromised the data. Basically, we sent out a huge "LOOK AT ME WE HAVE POSSIBLE INFO ON WHO YOU ARE AND WHAT YOU'RE PLANNING ON DOING" which basically has told all the terrorists to go to ground.
Good job heroes.
They should have just made the strike. Loot the hardware. Then covered up the scene with a cruise missile strike. Make it hard to tell the US nabbed the data.
Or, even if there's no effing computer in there, bring one in, and pretend to have found it. Encrypted or not, the whole organization has to act on the premise that data have been cracked. people that were on the verge of moving stay still, dormant people have to be activated just to see if the organization is crumbling or not, lots of SIGINT opportunities.
This being slashdot, I assume many will have read Henlein's the moon is a harsh mistress; heavy compartmentalization is a must in underground organizations, but in these cases it works against it, precisely because the purpose is to avoid betrayal from below, not above. Or
A way for the Slashdot crowd to get a french kiss.
I use it to mix chemicals in my underground lab, you insensitive clod!!!
It might be that the name of the game is "Let's all gang up on Intel"... given that Intel has squeezed Nvidia put of motherboards, and AMD has integrated graphics all to herself for now, getting closer is sensible, because the dominating player has a)signaled that it wants to enter your arena, and b) has probably reached, as Microsoft has reached, a performance plateau after which further technology advances are not as valuable to consumers .
Having said that, the SLI market is, and will remain, marginal in term of number of system installations. Given the pace of advance, we may be reaching in graphics what we have reached in processors; the basic market needs are more than adequately satisfied by entry-level systems.
I love the job they've done. I have two kids, and I feel for those kids. What I find distressing is that society always seems amazed when you use game formats as a teaching aid. Nature built us that way; pups, not only our own, get rewarded for imitating gestures and abilities they'll need later in life, and they enjoy it too. Personally I am amazed that games aren't used more often, even in adult training. I can say that here in Italy is almost unheard of.
Anyone else read this as "Worlds With Two Suns May Sport Black Pants?"
Worlds With Two Suns
May Sport Black Pants;
the Scientists have said:
" that world's gone to plaid!"
and started on a Slashdot rant.
Call me back when the models explain the Maunder minimum.
What if by then it's too late to fix the catastrophic damage to our environment? Waiting until you have all the answers isn't always the best idea...
Do not take it amiss, I mean it as a friendly comment... but this reminds me of the "do something!!!" scene in "Spaceballs".
The news is even LESS bad that the parent says. For a currency to become an international medium of exchange, there should be a supply that more or less grows as the Gross Domestic Product, and the ability/willingness of the issuing country to run a huge trade deficit .....forever. So phone me when China News Daily says: "huge export tariffs slapped onto chinese firms"
One more thing: for a currency, earning the trust of the international community is paramount, and lo and behold, even the famed Euro hasn't done it. I do not think it will fall apart, but I do not see Brasil selling their USD reserves and buying into the Euro. Why should this happen with the South African Rand?
Here's a fact you might or might not like.
Science changes.
[...]
That's why serious scientists should be leery of predicting things they do not have a good bead on far into the future. But then, Climate studies have been hijacked by politics. Call me back when the models explain the Maunder minimum.
P.S.: no, the right answer is not that my shaving foam causes sunspots to become rare.
39% curse at the computer. 31% curse at the guy who sold them the computer. the rest curse at the nearest techie .
The problem is that people [buy a copy of Microsoft Office just for Outlook] instead of using an e-mail client instead.
Does the e-mail client have an appointment calendar? For example, are Thunderbird users aware of Lightning, a version of Sunbird packaged as a T-bird extension? There's a reason that Outlook's icon is a clock, and not just because the rim and hands spell "OL". And can it connect to Exchange at work, where IT has disabled standards-based connection protocols for nebulous "security reasons"?
I work in a small office (My own!!). My partner is a thumbfisted computer user, take Excel off his computer and he usually would use it as a lamp. BUT, after I installed Thunderbird+ lightning + shared gmail calendar, he was hooked.
Training time: 0
His happy face when he clicked his way to setting up a shared event: priceless
It's a kinjal, you insensitive clod!!!!