These guys can't make a computer handle rolling over
I had a computer handle that rolled once, think it was on an Osborne I. The plastic grip rotated all the time, not just new year's day. I don't think it was spaceworthy, though -- you would have had to have left one of the astronauts at home.
(Gods save us from unambiguous speech in a humour drought).
Think about this, almost all light sources are encased in something
Well yes, the Sun has it's photosphere, let's start with that...um, the campfire is problematic. Actinic chemical reactions; test tube? Um, unless it's that unregistered lump of ammonium hydride I see over there. Cesium dropped into sea water? That's a light source.... golly, you're right though, I'm just having fun...
The oceans are DYING. CO2 raising acidity is killing the corals
The corals are a worry (hey, I'm Australian) but they don't worry me as much as that few centimetres of algae that live on or near the surface of the sea. That's our air supply -- nearly all of it. Kill that and we'll be sucking lemons because they taste like oxygen*.
Very true. Hidden large systems are generally ok. Remember it's our perception of the environment that keys the popular reaction, thus acceptability in the populace who must underwrite the venture.
An important little factoid that skews a lot of initiatives is threat substitution, i.e. replacing the truthful "Large wind farms will spoil our unspoilt horizon" with an equally truthful "even at 1 fatality per year, it could wipe out the Orange-Bellied Parrot". The first option was the true source of popular concern, but the argument was re-vectored to the OBP because that issue, while less popular, was more defensible in debate. This example is from a current fight happening in deepest Australia where I live.
I applaud saving the OBP, I applaud the switch from coal to wind, I applaud the conservation of natural beauty. It's an antinomy http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn/ that we have to deal with.
Hiding what could be world-saving, yet colossal infrastructure, is going to be increasingly important to us. Even huge reserves of hydro power, that which saved Tasmania from a reliance on the devistation of coal energy, was met with rather dramatic opposition in a more-ain't-better reaction ("Which would you prefer, an artificial lake or a strip mine?" was met with "Sorry, invalid question!" in the Gordon below Franklin dam issue).
So, let's please everyone we can. If we make huge undersea intarwebs to capture power (Auditors at 50 megameters! Ready the wave-motion gun! oh, sorry...) let's make them dolphin-safe. If we put wind power up, capture it in long underground plenums.
Hmm.... New idea. What if we were to dig a very large horizontal-ish tunnel, decreasing aperture to a turbine after (say) a mile or so, then having a smallish solar collector heat up the tunnel just a bit after the fan, with a second turbine to power the impeller -- would we end up with a very large, very-low-pressure jet turbine? Just curious...
You are quite right, and I stand corrected. And Asperger's is certainly more likely to be a characteristic of a good programmer. Whereas ADD in whatever flavour is far more likely to be a charact... is that a Ball Pein Hammer? Oooh... I switched to planishing hammers myself, helps if you use mild steel for the planishing stake takes a better polish than.... yes, that's definitely a square body hammer, not a planisher...not to be confused with the cooper's hammer which has the cross-pien at right angles from the (OUCH [wet smack])
It can be very hard living with Asperger's Syndrome. This is particulary evident when you have to keep many variables in your mind at once such as in any typical programming or scripting Let's go ride BICYCLES!!
Nothing, but nothing, leaks quite as enthusiastically as hydrogen gas. So if it's compressed, it's exactly like a compressed natural gas (what's more natural than hydrogen? Good ol' H2...) but there are major differences in handling light gases than heavier ones. Some don't store well on their own at all -- for example (sorry if I'm drifting off topic here, but this is Slashdot?) Acetylene isn't typically stored in it's compressed form at all, but is bubbled into liquid acetone because it can decompose spontaneously if pressure exceeds 15 PSIG. Bang. You do not want to drop an acetlyene tank.
The problem with hydrogen is that the small size of the molecule makes it very adept at sliding past barriers that would inhibit the passage of heavier gases. Porous bronze valves are right out of the picture iirc.
YMMV I haven't done any welding in a very long time.
Very long term storage has been dealt with by Larry Niven in a funny but somewhat flippant style -- put a bunch of signs around the site saying "Trespassers will die" in all available languages; let the stupidly curious remove themselves from the gene pool (or have them mutate, which is effectively the same thing). A more interesting method was embodied in Arsen Darnay's "The Karma Affair" where protection of radioactive storage was forced into a rather novel arrangement of religion and uh, conditioning.
Really though, the stuff should be put aside for re-use later. The sun, hopefully, isn't making any more heavy elements for us soon and we shouldn't throw away the ones we have in the rather arrogant opinion that future generations won't have any better ideas than we do wrt. storage, such as storing excess Polonium in expat Russians.
I think entombing the waste is a good idea, and the back side of the moon sounds like a good storage place for me.
If we ever bother to re-use it, that is -- it may be a very long time before we run out of asteroidal feedstocks.
Actually a better design might be a buried land line of some type to a buried dedicated wireless router with a hidden antenna (could be also buried, if carefully done -- perhaps a directional?) encrypted and securely locked to a receiver on the alarm system controller's transceiver (mounted in some inconvenient place about the premises). Top-slot floor safes make excellent portable equipment bunkers. No visible lines. Use frequency swapping. Set off a loud alarm if jammed.
... one cubic meter of bluff backed by a trained, testicle-eating fruit bat. Oh, and by having a shabbier looking house than my neighbor. What I really need, though, is an old, oil-dripping Harley ratbike chained to the front gate. That way they'll never guess I couldn't bench-press a yawn if I were soaked in sterioids, or that all my weapons are made out of pixels.
Security? HAH! Couple of fireballs & a weapon proc will fix them...
A friend of mine was once head of the massively parallel CS lab at a major Australian university. He observed that it was sad to see massively parallel processes constructed to solve a single problem on a Connection Machine devolve to the point where only a few processors in the corner were doing any work.
I think he was on to something fundamental about problem organisation, myself -- why else would large, otherwise healthy functioning companies end up with nine coxwains per rower?
Is it because of your mother that you say it's already difficult to tell whether a message is from a human or just a randomly generated string of nonsense?
The thing is, even if you blow the bits in LEO to vapour you'll have all these heavy ions floating about in orbit until the solar wind does something interesting to them. What would it look like if we did this for a few hundred years? Or would it all fall to Earth eventually and fool archaeologists in the far future into believing a meteor was the cause of an extinction event?
This presupposes we have archaeologists in the future to do the studies. Maybe we'd better cache a few humans off-site just in case...
Sometimes the hope of winning a lawsuit is the only revenue left to forecast when the sales pipeline dries up. Need I mention SCO here? No, probably not...
If your employer actually does bring suit, he's most likely done a risk analysis on costs vs. potential recovery of some of the dollars they've paid you, or perhaps (if you're a contractor) cash in on some of your professional liability insurance.
Either that, or he's just being a prick, as you said. I've worked for both types. The cold-blooded sort are the ones you have to guard against, i.e. bring in counsel of your own.
I'm poor little Buttercup
Think that my contract's up
Though I will never know why...
Think it's a budget cut
Or that my pay's gone up
Would you like code with your fries?
Slashdot Mirror
I had a computer handle that rolled once, think it was on an Osborne I. The plastic grip rotated all the time, not just new year's day. I don't think it was spaceworthy, though -- you would have had to have left one of the astronauts at home.
(Gods save us from unambiguous speech in a humour drought).
Well yes, the Sun has it's photosphere, let's start with that...um, the campfire is problematic. Actinic chemical reactions; test tube? Um, unless it's that unregistered lump of ammonium hydride I see over there. Cesium dropped into sea water? That's a light source.... golly, you're right though, I'm just having fun ...
The corals are a worry (hey, I'm Australian) but they don't worry me as much as that few centimetres of algae that live on or near the surface of the sea. That's our air supply -- nearly all of it. Kill that and we'll be sucking lemons because they taste like oxygen*.
*Yes, I know. Stop it, I'm attempting irony.
An important little factoid that skews a lot of initiatives is threat substitution, i.e. replacing the truthful "Large wind farms will spoil our unspoilt horizon" with an equally truthful "even at 1 fatality per year, it could wipe out the Orange-Bellied Parrot". The first option was the true source of popular concern, but the argument was re-vectored to the OBP because that issue, while less popular, was more defensible in debate. This example is from a current fight happening in deepest Australia where I live.
I applaud saving the OBP, I applaud the switch from coal to wind, I applaud the conservation of natural beauty. It's an antinomy http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn/ that we have to deal with.
Hiding what could be world-saving, yet colossal infrastructure, is going to be increasingly important to us. Even huge reserves of hydro power, that which saved Tasmania from a reliance on the devistation of coal energy, was met with rather dramatic opposition in a more-ain't-better reaction ("Which would you prefer, an artificial lake or a strip mine?" was met with "Sorry, invalid question!" in the Gordon below Franklin dam issue).
So, let's please everyone we can. If we make huge undersea intarwebs to capture power (Auditors at 50 megameters! Ready the wave-motion gun! oh, sorry...) let's make them dolphin-safe. If we put wind power up, capture it in long underground plenums.
Hmm.... New idea. What if we were to dig a very large horizontal-ish tunnel, decreasing aperture to a turbine after (say) a mile or so, then having a smallish solar collector heat up the tunnel just a bit after the fan, with a second turbine to power the impeller -- would we end up with a very large, very-low-pressure jet turbine? Just curious...
More properly, "Embrace, Extend, Exterrrrmmminnnnaate!!!"
Oh, that's gotta happen. Will Smith as The Doctor. Shatner as Davros. Wil Wheaton in a cameo with a red shirt.
What was the very first "Soviet Russia" joke to appear on Slashdot? I've only been reading it for a few years...
Got the Elemental....give me points for epic patience. But the misspelling was deliberate, to annoy him. Honest it was.
You couldn't be. The king of fish is Phinegal Atropos, who never tires of sea food.
I thought it was "Perl Hates Programmers"?
It was Greg Norman, wasn't it? Or some other golfer...
You are quite right, and I stand corrected. And Asperger's is certainly more likely to be a characteristic of a good programmer. Whereas ADD in whatever flavour is far more likely to be a charact... is that a Ball Pein Hammer? Oooh... I switched to planishing hammers myself, helps if you use mild steel for the planishing stake takes a better polish than .... yes, that's definitely a square body hammer, not a planisher...not to be confused with the cooper's hammer which has the cross-pien at right angles from the (OUCH [wet smack])
It can be very hard living with Asperger's Syndrome. This is particulary evident when you have to keep many variables in your mind at once such as in any typical programming or scripting Let's go ride BICYCLES!!
Nothing, but nothing, leaks quite as enthusiastically as hydrogen gas. So if it's compressed, it's exactly like a compressed natural gas (what's more natural than hydrogen? Good ol' H2...) but there are major differences in handling light gases than heavier ones. Some don't store well on their own at all -- for example (sorry if I'm drifting off topic here, but this is Slashdot?) Acetylene isn't typically stored in it's compressed form at all, but is bubbled into liquid acetone because it can decompose spontaneously if pressure exceeds 15 PSIG. Bang. You do not want to drop an acetlyene tank.
The problem with hydrogen is that the small size of the molecule makes it very adept at sliding past barriers that would inhibit the passage of heavier gases. Porous bronze valves are right out of the picture iirc.
YMMV I haven't done any welding in a very long time.
Really though, the stuff should be put aside for re-use later. The sun, hopefully, isn't making any more heavy elements for us soon and we shouldn't throw away the ones we have in the rather arrogant opinion that future generations won't have any better ideas than we do wrt. storage, such as storing excess Polonium in expat Russians.
I think entombing the waste is a good idea, and the back side of the moon sounds like a good storage place for me.
If we ever bother to re-use it, that is -- it may be a very long time before we run out of asteroidal feedstocks.
See? Easy.
Security? HAH! Couple of fireballs & a weapon proc will fix them...
...I'm sure all they want is more of their own personal energy dumped into flexing their suits...
I think he was on to something fundamental about problem organisation, myself -- why else would large, otherwise healthy functioning companies end up with nine coxwains per rower?
*snort* dang, another coffee in the keyboard.
Smile when you say that, Eliza.
I've known people, however, who spoke in a close approximation of Racter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racter/. Didn't need teraflops for that.
If I ever laugh like that again, my estate will sue you for damages.
-- Dr. Memory
This presupposes we have archaeologists in the future to do the studies. Maybe we'd better cache a few humans off-site just in case...
Oh my gosh... now you can combine a science degree with an environmental studies degree and get a PhD in Junk Science!
If your employer actually does bring suit, he's most likely done a risk analysis on costs vs. potential recovery of some of the dollars they've paid you, or perhaps (if you're a contractor) cash in on some of your professional liability insurance.
Either that, or he's just being a prick, as you said. I've worked for both types. The cold-blooded sort are the ones you have to guard against, i.e. bring in counsel of your own.
If in doubt, contact someone who IAL.
I'm poor little Buttercup Think that my contract's up Though I will never know why... Think it's a budget cut Or that my pay's gone up Would you like code with your fries?