While totally off topic. "Going forward" implicitly means "excluding the past" and therefore this is a new thing. This doesn't add much to the conversation going forward, but will easily prevent people from saying "but I didn't see that" because obviously it wasn't there before. And yeah, I did that again for you.
I was going by this section which talks about actual exposure to people:
The result: estimated radiation doses ingested by people living near the coal plants were equal to or higher than doses for people living around the nuclear facilities. At one extreme, the scientists estimated fly ash radiation in individuals' bones at around 18 millirems (thousandths of a rem, a unit for measuring doses of ionizing radiation) a year. Doses for the two nuclear plants, by contrast, ranged from between three and six millirems for the same period. And when all food was grown in the area, radiation doses were 50 to 200 percent higher around the coal plants.
McBride and his co-authors estimated that individuals living near coal-fired installations are exposed to a maximum of 1.9 millirems of fly ash radiation yearly. To put these numbers in perspective, the average person encounters 360 millirems of annual "background radiation" from natural and man-made sources, including substances in Earth's crust, cosmic rays, residue from nuclear tests and smoke detectors.
Yeah, they do say 100 times more emissions, but nuclear plants don't even have emissions except for what manages to penetrate the walls. In the next paragraph, they say the ash concentrates it 10 times. Which section you quote depends on how much fear you want to create. Upon second reading, it does concern me that one measure is from peoples bones - to me (and I'm no expert) that would seem worse than getting the same does from the environment. OTOH, the dose from the environment is still 20x higher.
Under normal operation, coal plants emit a few time more radiation than nuclear plants - a few time more than an irrelevant amount is still an irrelevant amount. It's when things go wrong that nuclear is many orders of magnitude than coal and goes way beyond the irrelevant level.
The linked article - towards the end - puts the radiation exposure around a coal plant into perspective and shows that it's less than 1% above background. 1.9 millirem per year vs 360millirem per year. That was really anticlimactic after reading all that blather about how burning coal concentrates the radioactive material. Oh, and it's about 3 times higher than around a nuclear plant. Hmmm. The problem with nuclear though isn't the normal operation, it's the accidents that can contaminate hundreds or even thousands of square miles to the point where people should not live there. When a coal plant has an accident it's much more localized and non-radioactive. Then there it the production of plutonium in nuclear, which is extremely toxic and does not occur naturally on earth. Much of our nuclear waste is sitting around in swimming pools on-site waiting to be the next fukushima. Just think - in the east coast blackout, many nuclear plants in the US went into emergency shutdown and had the spent fuel pools cooling systems running on generators. There was no grid for external power, and fuel was somewhat hard to get due to the widespread outage. The coal plants on the other hand were shut down, and posed not the slightest potential for disaster.
It's the combination of self driven and idiot driven ones that scares me most.
Yeah, because the idiot will be blamed. The reason car makes are not really serious about this is simple. When 2 cars made by the same manufacturer are get in an accident with each other, there is no question who is to blame - it's a big company with deep pockets who claimed this system was OK. End of story. Then there are the even trickier things like pedestrian accidents which are more likely to kill someone and involve a whole different range of AI problems in order to avoid.
Don't get me wrong, this technology is being worked on in the D, but things like lane keeping systems get turned into "lane departure warnings" and perhaps performing minor assistance in staying in lane, but never driving your whole trip. I've seen video of a car driving itself at 60mph on a dirt road many years ago, but that system was being marketed as a lane departure warning. Liability is huge if you go beyond that.
That is what companies are suppose to do. make money.
I've often thought that is a stupid argument. If a company wants to make money, just sell all the assets and start a hedge fund. Got it? OK, now that we understand that a company exists to participate in some specific part(s) of the economy we can ask how other activities fit into that business model.
I usually use this argument to ask why a company doesn't want to innovate or strive to be among the best in its industry. The ones that are more focused on the dollars than the business don't last.
Incandecent lighting has a power factor of 1. Electric motors have a pf of quite a bit less than 1. Florescent bulbs have really shitty power profiles. This goes on top of the overall power consumptions of devices. I've seen the same thing done with just a precision current measurement on a car - door opens, key goes in, engine cranks, door closes, radio goes on, etc....
The thing people keep failing to point out is that there is NO benefit to the customer or the utility for collecting this data. Because they have the data and the customer causes the usage, there is no way to affect usage as a result of this data collection. So called smart appliances that can use less power during peak are a nice thought, but if they make rates adjustable and broadcast them people will go after the savings themselves without sharing data. Oh wait, but they want to smooth the load (turn off my fridge) independent of the rates...
Why would your employer want to keep track of you at home? If you show up for work on time, don't take the pi$$ with well - pi$$ breaks/lunch breaks, and don't skip off home early, why would they care what time you had your shower in the morning? Are employers in the states that paranoid? Granted, if you work from home, that I guess that's one thing but the vast majority don't.
Maybe your boss wants to fool around with your wife that he met at the Christmas party - you're at work and power usage tell him someones home.
Or worse yet (and more realistic) the window salesman wants to pay a visit to the non-working housewife while nobody is around to object to the sales pitch. Granted, they can just go door to door, but with data on who is home combined with say household income data and purchasing history they can save a LOT of time going to the homes most likely to buy.
So even if we entertain the idea that guys from JPL will not suffer any human rights oppression in China, do you still think they'll go there vs moving to SpaceX or Boeing, or someplace else in the US? I think they'll be quite happy in the US but not at NASA.
Can we just transmit data through a few kilometers of fiber wound on a spool, demodulate the data and then resend it as a storage mechanism? At 300MHz you store 1bit per meter or 1Kbit per km. At 300GHz you get 1Mbit per km. At 300THz you get 1Gbit per km. At 300 petabit/s you store 1Tbit per km. Of course this storage medium loses data when the power is turned off, but that's OK for some applications. And with 1km of fiber, your data is never more than 3.3 uS away.
Fracking is exempted from EPA regulation of the substances they pump into the ground - you be surprised what they're pumping down there. It's likely that much of the contamination is not from the release of the gas, but from the stuff directly injected into the ground. This methane issue does suggest that both are a problem though.
And yes, there is Ekiga for Windows. I'm really shocked this isn't brought up more. Even if there turn out to be issues, slashdot seems to be overlooking this obvious alternative to skype.
The goal: get the world's smartest hackers thinking about how news organizations can harness the open web. The current challenge is all about comment threads.
So what does "harness the open web" mean? To the news organizations it probably means "make money". Comments are largely irrelevant for that. If news organizations want to attract readers (assuming that translates to "make money") they need to do two things - 1) report news that people feel is interesting or relevant. and 2) provide intelligent analysis of the news (not discussion forums). They could use a forum to generate ideas for further investigation/reporting/answering tough questions that the media doesn't do too often. Of course by the time they ask questions and do some further investigation the story will be a bit old. And this also doesn't work with stories about tornadoes and celebrities.
"Coming soon" = "Not released". As the article says. There is no jumping the gun.
The GPL requires that they provide the source upon request. If a bunch of people go poking around the web site and can't find it, that doesn't mean a thing. If someone actually asks Apple for the source, they are supposed to provide it *to them*. There is no requirement to put to code on the web or in any public place - that is just the practical way to satisfy the GPL terms easily.
They "support" it now. So do Intel. The problem is not that the processor or even chipset supports it but that the bundled BIOS *IS* coreboot, which is unlikely.
The first thing to do is make sure support is there in coreboot. Then in markets that are very cost sensitive the system makers can use it to save money. Then at some point if AMD feels it is mature and really want to force the issue, they can stop supporting traditional BIOS developers, which will almost force the board and system guys to switch to coreboot. Not saying that is likely to happen, but the first step for any of it is to make sure the support is there. Hopefully the second step - cost saving - will get everyone on board.
I'm an Electronic Engineer, with a curiosity in programming. I've done a C module (where I self-taught because we weren't actually taught anything), a C++ module the following year, same thing, an Architecture module, where I did Assembly, and my final year project is PHP/MySQL/HTML/AJAX (Completely self taught).
If you can say you're self taught, that shows initiative. OK, so not yet a great programmer, but you can DO things. You wouldn't believe how many people come to an interview and we see "super-gadget-team at company xyz" and when asked "what did you DO on the super-duper-team?" they just can't really offer anything of substance. We have one guy who interviews by going over the resume and trying to get at what people actually did, and if he can't identify anything, he crosses stuff off the resume (yes, right in front of them). Some resumes get a half their contents removed from this. The problem is that HR screening looks for the buzzwords, not the verbs. My resume is full of verbs - most sentences start with one - and I never had too much trouble finding interesting work.
The reactors are not in cold shutdown because there is no water cooling. They *could* achieve cold shutdown quickly by water in faster, but it would not help the situation.
And I think that's the point. The fact that they are not in cold shutdown indicates problems. But we already knew they have ongoing problems.
I think he's talking about taking water and sending it to Arizona where it then evaporates in the desert and doesn't actually make it to the end of the river. I'm guessing of course. But as for these "inexhaustible" supplies under ground, you should read about the supply in the midwest which requires drilling to new depths because it is being depleted. Should you think going deeper is always an option, you may want to read the recent stuff of fracking to see how the deeper water is being deliberately contaminated. There are solutions to these, problems, but what we are doing vs what we could be doing don't really match.
Can you imagine the personal information gathering and targeted advertising you could do with fixed IPs?
Can you imagine the improved privacy offered when something like your FaceBook profile becomes an App running on your local wall-wart server that can only be accessed friends you choose (i.e. whitelist by IP)? How about the ability to make video phone calls directly to someones IP address without the need for any intermediary to make the connection? email server at home with no ISP storing and mining data or serving it to others? All of the real personal data becomes private. The only thing left is your surfing of public sites and downloading which can be tracked by IP. The really personal stuff gets to stay private.
Finally a reason for people to get fixed IP addresses. IPv6 of course - preferably at least 256 per house. Most commercial interests don't want this, but if the **AA want if maybe it will actually happen:-)
If you're not happy with what's out there, you need to roll your own. If what's out there is open source, you can pick the best of each of them and build the solid system you're looking for. With research projects, once the stated goal has been reached they are done - until a follow-up grant for further work is awarded. That seems to be what research is about - showing that things can be done or done a different way - not producing a useful software product. Once they show what and how, it's up to someone else to take that and make something great from all the pieces. Unfortunately that means sifting through all the duplicate stuff and finding the best approach and possibly reimplementing it to fit in with everything else you're doing.
For example, you may find Kalman filters, genetic algorithms, neural networks, GPU implementations, etc. all able to solve a particular problem. For real-world software you really don't care about all that, you just want the ONE that works best in your application. Of course then there will be papers on "extensible frameworks" with "plugins" that can handle any of those implementations... Again, for real software you pick the one that works "best" for your definition of best and go with that. To make this happen, you need to get an ego-less (read non-PhD) software team to pull it all together.
Great, now lets get the 3d head mounted display - which is where this type of tracker was originally used way back when - and get on with the real 3D environments. I played Dactyl Nightmare in the early 90's and have been waiting for that to arrive at home for like 16 years. And that was powered by what? An Amiga?
Slashdot Mirror
While totally off topic. "Going forward" implicitly means "excluding the past" and therefore this is a new thing. This doesn't add much to the conversation going forward, but will easily prevent people from saying "but I didn't see that" because obviously it wasn't there before. And yeah, I did that again for you.
Yeah, they do say 100 times more emissions, but nuclear plants don't even have emissions except for what manages to penetrate the walls. In the next paragraph, they say the ash concentrates it 10 times. Which section you quote depends on how much fear you want to create. Upon second reading, it does concern me that one measure is from peoples bones - to me (and I'm no expert) that would seem worse than getting the same does from the environment. OTOH, the dose from the environment is still 20x higher.
Under normal operation, coal plants emit a few time more radiation than nuclear plants - a few time more than an irrelevant amount is still an irrelevant amount. It's when things go wrong that nuclear is many orders of magnitude than coal and goes way beyond the irrelevant level.
Oh, you mean the stuff inside that laptop you're posting with?
The linked article - towards the end - puts the radiation exposure around a coal plant into perspective and shows that it's less than 1% above background. 1.9 millirem per year vs 360millirem per year. That was really anticlimactic after reading all that blather about how burning coal concentrates the radioactive material. Oh, and it's about 3 times higher than around a nuclear plant. Hmmm. The problem with nuclear though isn't the normal operation, it's the accidents that can contaminate hundreds or even thousands of square miles to the point where people should not live there. When a coal plant has an accident it's much more localized and non-radioactive. Then there it the production of plutonium in nuclear, which is extremely toxic and does not occur naturally on earth. Much of our nuclear waste is sitting around in swimming pools on-site waiting to be the next fukushima. Just think - in the east coast blackout, many nuclear plants in the US went into emergency shutdown and had the spent fuel pools cooling systems running on generators. There was no grid for external power, and fuel was somewhat hard to get due to the widespread outage. The coal plants on the other hand were shut down, and posed not the slightest potential for disaster.
Yeah, because the idiot will be blamed. The reason car makes are not really serious about this is simple. When 2 cars made by the same manufacturer are get in an accident with each other, there is no question who is to blame - it's a big company with deep pockets who claimed this system was OK. End of story. Then there are the even trickier things like pedestrian accidents which are more likely to kill someone and involve a whole different range of AI problems in order to avoid.
Don't get me wrong, this technology is being worked on in the D, but things like lane keeping systems get turned into "lane departure warnings" and perhaps performing minor assistance in staying in lane, but never driving your whole trip. I've seen video of a car driving itself at 60mph on a dirt road many years ago, but that system was being marketed as a lane departure warning. Liability is huge if you go beyond that.
I've often thought that is a stupid argument. If a company wants to make money, just sell all the assets and start a hedge fund. Got it? OK, now that we understand that a company exists to participate in some specific part(s) of the economy we can ask how other activities fit into that business model.
I usually use this argument to ask why a company doesn't want to innovate or strive to be among the best in its industry. The ones that are more focused on the dollars than the business don't last.
Incandecent lighting has a power factor of 1. Electric motors have a pf of quite a bit less than 1. Florescent bulbs have really shitty power profiles. This goes on top of the overall power consumptions of devices. I've seen the same thing done with just a precision current measurement on a car - door opens, key goes in, engine cranks, door closes, radio goes on, etc....
The thing people keep failing to point out is that there is NO benefit to the customer or the utility for collecting this data. Because they have the data and the customer causes the usage, there is no way to affect usage as a result of this data collection. So called smart appliances that can use less power during peak are a nice thought, but if they make rates adjustable and broadcast them people will go after the savings themselves without sharing data. Oh wait, but they want to smooth the load (turn off my fridge) independent of the rates...
Maybe your boss wants to fool around with your wife that he met at the Christmas party - you're at work and power usage tell him someones home.
Or worse yet (and more realistic) the window salesman wants to pay a visit to the non-working housewife while nobody is around to object to the sales pitch. Granted, they can just go door to door, but with data on who is home combined with say household income data and purchasing history they can save a LOT of time going to the homes most likely to buy.
So even if we entertain the idea that guys from JPL will not suffer any human rights oppression in China, do you still think they'll go there vs moving to SpaceX or Boeing, or someplace else in the US? I think they'll be quite happy in the US but not at NASA.
Can we just transmit data through a few kilometers of fiber wound on a spool, demodulate the data and then resend it as a storage mechanism? At 300MHz you store 1bit per meter or 1Kbit per km. At 300GHz you get 1Mbit per km. At 300THz you get 1Gbit per km. At 300 petabit/s you store 1Tbit per km. Of course this storage medium loses data when the power is turned off, but that's OK for some applications. And with 1km of fiber, your data is never more than 3.3 uS away.
Where is Microsoft Bob?
Fracking is exempted from EPA regulation of the substances they pump into the ground - you be surprised what they're pumping down there. It's likely that much of the contamination is not from the release of the gas, but from the stuff directly injected into the ground. This methane issue does suggest that both are a problem though.
Ekiga
And yes, there is Ekiga for Windows. I'm really shocked this isn't brought up more. Even if there turn out to be issues, slashdot seems to be overlooking this obvious alternative to skype.
So what does "harness the open web" mean? To the news organizations it probably means "make money". Comments are largely irrelevant for that. If news organizations want to attract readers (assuming that translates to "make money") they need to do two things - 1) report news that people feel is interesting or relevant. and 2) provide intelligent analysis of the news (not discussion forums). They could use a forum to generate ideas for further investigation/reporting/answering tough questions that the media doesn't do too often. Of course by the time they ask questions and do some further investigation the story will be a bit old. And this also doesn't work with stories about tornadoes and celebrities.
The GPL requires that they provide the source upon request. If a bunch of people go poking around the web site and can't find it, that doesn't mean a thing. If someone actually asks Apple for the source, they are supposed to provide it *to them*. There is no requirement to put to code on the web or in any public place - that is just the practical way to satisfy the GPL terms easily.
The first thing to do is make sure support is there in coreboot. Then in markets that are very cost sensitive the system makers can use it to save money. Then at some point if AMD feels it is mature and really want to force the issue, they can stop supporting traditional BIOS developers, which will almost force the board and system guys to switch to coreboot. Not saying that is likely to happen, but the first step for any of it is to make sure the support is there. Hopefully the second step - cost saving - will get everyone on board.
If you can say you're self taught, that shows initiative. OK, so not yet a great programmer, but you can DO things. You wouldn't believe how many people come to an interview and we see "super-gadget-team at company xyz" and when asked "what did you DO on the super-duper-team?" they just can't really offer anything of substance. We have one guy who interviews by going over the resume and trying to get at what people actually did, and if he can't identify anything, he crosses stuff off the resume (yes, right in front of them). Some resumes get a half their contents removed from this. The problem is that HR screening looks for the buzzwords, not the verbs. My resume is full of verbs - most sentences start with one - and I never had too much trouble finding interesting work.
And I think that's the point. The fact that they are not in cold shutdown indicates problems. But we already knew they have ongoing problems.
I think he's talking about taking water and sending it to Arizona where it then evaporates in the desert and doesn't actually make it to the end of the river. I'm guessing of course. But as for these "inexhaustible" supplies under ground, you should read about the supply in the midwest which requires drilling to new depths because it is being depleted. Should you think going deeper is always an option, you may want to read the recent stuff of fracking to see how the deeper water is being deliberately contaminated. There are solutions to these, problems, but what we are doing vs what we could be doing don't really match.
Can you imagine the improved privacy offered when something like your FaceBook profile becomes an App running on your local wall-wart server that can only be accessed friends you choose (i.e. whitelist by IP)? How about the ability to make video phone calls directly to someones IP address without the need for any intermediary to make the connection? email server at home with no ISP storing and mining data or serving it to others? All of the real personal data becomes private. The only thing left is your surfing of public sites and downloading which can be tracked by IP. The really personal stuff gets to stay private.
Finally a reason for people to get fixed IP addresses. IPv6 of course - preferably at least 256 per house. Most commercial interests don't want this, but if the **AA want if maybe it will actually happen :-)
If you're not happy with what's out there, you need to roll your own. If what's out there is open source, you can pick the best of each of them and build the solid system you're looking for. With research projects, once the stated goal has been reached they are done - until a follow-up grant for further work is awarded. That seems to be what research is about - showing that things can be done or done a different way - not producing a useful software product. Once they show what and how, it's up to someone else to take that and make something great from all the pieces. Unfortunately that means sifting through all the duplicate stuff and finding the best approach and possibly reimplementing it to fit in with everything else you're doing.
For example, you may find Kalman filters, genetic algorithms, neural networks, GPU implementations, etc. all able to solve a particular problem. For real-world software you really don't care about all that, you just want the ONE that works best in your application. Of course then there will be papers on "extensible frameworks" with "plugins" that can handle any of those implementations... Again, for real software you pick the one that works "best" for your definition of best and go with that. To make this happen, you need to get an ego-less (read non-PhD) software team to pull it all together.
Great, now lets get the 3d head mounted display - which is where this type of tracker was originally used way back when - and get on with the real 3D environments. I played Dactyl Nightmare in the early 90's and have been waiting for that to arrive at home for like 16 years. And that was powered by what? An Amiga?