I am afraid shouting "Wrong!" and calling parent poster a "moron" do nothing to refute his claims. It would be interesting to have an actual dispassionate discussion of the matter, because for example the Wikipedia article does very little to illuminate it, nor is the official website very illuminating. From what little I can determine, the parent poster APPEARS to accurately describe the basics.
Are you confusing pressurized water reactors with boiling water reactors?
It doesn't matter to the argument. PWRs and BWRs have the same design deficiency. Given decay heat and geometry, any design which relies on circulating water to prevent meltdown is fatally weak, because if the circulation fails for more than a short period of time, or if the water leaks out and can't be replenished quickly, you have a meltdown.
HTGRs and LFTRs can be designed to be FUNDAMENTALLY free from such a weakness.
As each day passes without incident the probability of something going wrong increases.
Actually that is a misunderstanding of probability. The probability of something going wrong is some constant, essentially an unknowable constant but an estimable one. The length of time that actually elapses before an accident has absolutely nothing to do with mysteriously increasing or decreasing the probability.
Tossing a coin is the classical illustration. The probability of heads is 0.5. As long as the coin is not rigged, that probability is absolutely fixed. You can toss it 100 times in a row and (conceivably) get 100 heads in a row, and the probability that the next toss will be heads is still precisely 0.5.
Similarly, the odds of 1,2,3,4,5,6 with a bonus ball of 7 coming up in a lottery is exactly the same as any other sequence. This is true even if it just came up last night. You are just as likely to get a repetition tonight as to get any other sequence.
It may very well be that the necessity of a scope is less widespread today than in times past. However, when the argument is made that analog circuits are dead nowadays, it is HIGHLY questionable. The simple fact is that the real world, and ALL circuits built in the real world, are, when you come right down to it, fundamentally analog. True, if all you ever did was hook up single standalone "digital" ICs to power and done, then you wouldn't need a scope. But think, whatever you are building has to have SOME input from somewhere and has to output to SOMETHING. Now you are interfacing time-varying voltages and currents, almost certainly with some degree of parallelism. Those parts all have analog attributes: logic level voltage windows, rise times, pulse widths, current source capability, input capacitance, etc.
I remember when we were no longer able to source the latches in an in-house circuit used in a product. So we substituted a "better" one. The minimum strobe pulse width required was shorter. How could that ever be bad, right? Well, we started getting glitches where latches were triggered when not addressed. Not addressed on purpose, that is. Turns out the decoder chips always had very brief glitches during state changes, but they were never a problem until the strobe inputs they were connected to were actually able to "see" those glitches. We found that one on a scope.
Cruel fact: even when you set, say, 4 bits of a single output port of a microcontroller in a single atomic instruction, you don't get a perfect idealized syncing of the 4 transitions to within a 0.0 nS window. If those 4 bits are inputs to a decoder, you've got a potential glitch in the decoder output.
You are so full of bullshit that it is leaking out of your nose. Shill.
Theft: the wrongful removal of personal property. You have to deprive some owner of the benefits of his ownership. Tangibly. Never mind bullshit like "presumed profits now unrealized". Nobody is taking away anything that belongs to anybody else here. This is simple reverse engineering (a rather trivial form of same) which has been a natural right since time immemorial. Not until governments were completely bought off by fucking soulless corporations did patently immoral and unfair shit like the DMCA get passed into (grossly evil and illegitimate) law.
Suppose someone actually discovered a natural fountain of youth, took ownership of it by bribing the government, and merchandised it. Suppose he sells 100 ml bottles of it labeled "plant food" for $5, and 100 ml bottles of it labeled "cancer cure" for $500,000. Let it be stipulated that they both "work"; i.e., they are effective in their labeled applications. Now someone analyzes them both chemically and determines that they are identical. So he publishes his findings on the internet and points out that you only have to spend $5, not $500,000 to cure your cancer. Theft? HELL NO.
Reality check. There are no elections being sold. There is only advertising/PR being sold on behalf of candidates. If the voting public is so goddam fucking stupid as to be swayed like sheep by political advertisements, they are getting PRECISELY the government they deserve. As a block, not as individuals, unfortunately. The voters who have functioning intellect are being sold down the river by the voters who are ignorant, stupid, and selfish bastards. Just assign the blame where it belongs.
I happen to agree it is a damn poor design, but it is the standard. Just like case-sensitive pathnames in Posix. Actually, truth be known, I kind of dig that it makes an automatic laughingstock out of lazy sons of bitches who can't be bothered to use the fucking shift key.
Which, full circle, is not to say that all of these are not poor designs. I'll give you another one. C forcing you to interrupt the flow of typing by reaching for the shift key on identifiers, whether you use camel case or underscores. Although I still remember the magnificent ADM-3A, where underscore was a gorgeous UNSHIFTED keystroke.
This should be bloody obvious to anyone with the mentality of an everage 12 year old or greater, but there is no guarantee that ANY law stay in effect permanently. You can supercede any law at any time just by passing a new law. Hell, you can even amend the Constitution. If you supersede the fiftth amendment and then pass a law enabling the cops to beat you with a rubber hose to extract a confession, you couldn't even (legally) refuse to incriminate yourself any more.
I'm not sure I was ever on a system younger than Methuselah that didn't have vi, but nonetheless the point is taken that there is no law that says it has to be there. Point taken that emacs in very frequently missing. And bad news: nano and pico are not always there either. FreeBSD has something called ee which is hardly as simple and intuitive as they seem to think it is. But It also has vi always in base, so the issue does not arise there.
I'm going to have to side with you. The only editor that is ALWAYS always there or the system is posix-BUSTED is ed.
As an emacs fan and user, I'm not hostile to your viewpoint really, but the first time you are faced with a really big code refactor job, Eclipse or Netbeans come into their own and vi/emacs fall flat. The floor tilted a little and the lights went a little dim for a second the first time somebody showed me refactor in Eclipse.
Also, the point minimizing intellisense and the point about using variables before you bother to define them are both REALLY reaching.
Thanks for the screenshot! Every part of Gnome has turned into stuff BY stupid people FOR stupid people. In gedit they have utterly Fisher-Price despoiled what used to be a perfectly good tool. I console myself that kwrite and kate continue to be as good as, actually better than, ever.
Vi has a learning curve that's more of a cliff than a curve, but it's probably the most usable text editor ever invented. People get freaked out by it and give up on trying to learn it, but everything is available without having to remove your hands from the keyboard and it has commands for virtually anything that you're likely to want to do.
Emacs has a learning curve that's more of a cliff than a curve, but it's probably the most usable text editor ever invented. People get freaked out by it and give up on trying to learn it, but everything is available without having to remove your hands from the keyboard and it has commands for virtually anything that you're likely to want to do.
I'm actually agreeing with you 100%. The same points work for either one of them. Choice is a blessing. In my experience it takes no more than 5 minutes to familiarize anyone with either one of them enough to use it at kiddy level, and from there they can advance as the spirit moves them if they so desire. Back in the days of Teco and Pmate I found the same thing.
Anybody using linux or bsd had best be prepared for occasionally getting thrown into either vi or emacs without directly typing the command. Knowing escape-colon-q-enter[*] (control-x-control-c-n-yes-enter) and escape-colon-w-q (control-x-control-s-control-x-control-c) are the simple keys of the kingdom. With vi you have the added bullshit of trying to explain you're not entering text until you first hit i to insert or a to append, but that's not that much to master either.
The first time you DON'T hear "help, I'm stuck in some weird mode", or "help, I'm in ssh and have to edit.bashrc again", you are deeply satisfied knowing you have fostered a little competence and confidence in the new guys.
You're completely right. It's your IQ being over 70 that makes the surrender joke not funny.
If I may be permitted to demur, I don't think that's got it either. For me it's history of a longer range than a few years that makes it not as funny as it otherwise might be. The way the American Revolution would have been unquestionably lost without the aid of the French. The way the dear sweet young generation of France reddened the soil of their homeland with their blood to save it in the Great War. The way young and old went underground full of fight when the Nation was overwhelmed in 1940.
All that just sharpens the contrast with today, now that we see the nation of France, along with so many others, surrender to the evil ravening islamic mob in the streets of their own capital.
What part of this is hard to understand? "Testing was performed on a low-thrust torsion pendulum that is capable of detecting force at a single-digit micronewton level, within a stainless steel vacuum chamber with the door closed but at ambient atmospheric pressure." That's a direct quote from the abstract of the NASA paper.
It was in a vacuum chamber, but it was not in a vacuum.
I second the endorsement of the Beaglebone Black. Note that it is ARMv7 with a proper openly documented TI CPU, compared to the crappy RPi which is ARMv6 with the locked-up Broadcom abortion.
I was crushed when they discontinued the original $45 BB rev and slipstreamed the "improved" $55 rev C with more flash and RAM. I consider the added flash and RAM to be completely wasted and pointless, but I recognize that the $45 price point was just a bit unsustainable. They should have just admitted overoptimism and raised it to $47 or $49 without touching the specs.
But let's face it, even for $55 it is far and away the best choice out there. ARMv7 with Thumb2 is properly supported by mainline Debian, unlike ARMv6 with Thumb1. The latter is really only a dead end of limited historical interest.
The Weissman score is actually unitless. When one divides "log seconds" by "log seconds" the units cancel.
That is because it is presented as the ratio of the figure of merit of the candidate algorithm to the figure of merit of some bullshit "universal compresser", times a completely useless "scaling constant". To strip away the obscuration, all you have to do is see that for a completely transparent effectless compresser, r is unity and log t is log 0, or unity. 1/1, and it drops out.
The underlying figure of merit once you cut through the bullshit is r / log t. r is the compression ratio (unitless) and log t is log seconds. So yes, the units of the underlying figure of merit are reciprocal log seconds.
You need learn to cut through the hocus pocus and analyze the actual underlying equation before the Oz Sauce is ladeled on. You can well imagine that those who actually understand programming metrics are holding their sides laughing at those who are taking it seriously.
Slashdot Mirror
If the City of London Police are "like all others", can you elaborate with citations just what authority they report to?
I am afraid shouting "Wrong!" and calling parent poster a "moron" do nothing to refute his claims. It would be interesting to have an actual dispassionate discussion of the matter, because for example the Wikipedia article does very little to illuminate it, nor is the official website very illuminating. From what little I can determine, the parent poster APPEARS to accurately describe the basics.
Because you say so? I really want to know. WHY are they not good?
It doesn't matter to the argument. PWRs and BWRs have the same design deficiency. Given decay heat and geometry, any design which relies on circulating water to prevent meltdown is fatally weak, because if the circulation fails for more than a short period of time, or if the water leaks out and can't be replenished quickly, you have a meltdown.
HTGRs and LFTRs can be designed to be FUNDAMENTALLY free from such a weakness.
Actually that is a misunderstanding of probability. The probability of something going wrong is some constant, essentially an unknowable constant but an estimable one. The length of time that actually elapses before an accident has absolutely nothing to do with mysteriously increasing or decreasing the probability.
Tossing a coin is the classical illustration. The probability of heads is 0.5. As long as the coin is not rigged, that probability is absolutely fixed. You can toss it 100 times in a row and (conceivably) get 100 heads in a row, and the probability that the next toss will be heads is still precisely 0.5.
Similarly, the odds of 1,2,3,4,5,6 with a bonus ball of 7 coming up in a lottery is exactly the same as any other sequence. This is true even if it just came up last night. You are just as likely to get a repetition tonight as to get any other sequence.
That's the best you got? Did you even look at the definition of "theft"?
It may very well be that the necessity of a scope is less widespread today than in times past. However, when the argument is made that analog circuits are dead nowadays, it is HIGHLY questionable. The simple fact is that the real world, and ALL circuits built in the real world, are, when you come right down to it, fundamentally analog. True, if all you ever did was hook up single standalone "digital" ICs to power and done, then you wouldn't need a scope. But think, whatever you are building has to have SOME input from somewhere and has to output to SOMETHING. Now you are interfacing time-varying voltages and currents, almost certainly with some degree of parallelism. Those parts all have analog attributes: logic level voltage windows, rise times, pulse widths, current source capability, input capacitance, etc.
I remember when we were no longer able to source the latches in an in-house circuit used in a product. So we substituted a "better" one. The minimum strobe pulse width required was shorter. How could that ever be bad, right? Well, we started getting glitches where latches were triggered when not addressed. Not addressed on purpose, that is. Turns out the decoder chips always had very brief glitches during state changes, but they were never a problem until the strobe inputs they were connected to were actually able to "see" those glitches. We found that one on a scope.
Cruel fact: even when you set, say, 4 bits of a single output port of a microcontroller in a single atomic instruction, you don't get a perfect idealized syncing of the 4 transitions to within a 0.0 nS window. If those 4 bits are inputs to a decoder, you've got a potential glitch in the decoder output.
You are so full of bullshit that it is leaking out of your nose. Shill.
Theft: the wrongful removal of personal property. You have to deprive some owner of the benefits of his ownership. Tangibly. Never mind bullshit like "presumed profits now unrealized". Nobody is taking away anything that belongs to anybody else here. This is simple reverse engineering (a rather trivial form of same) which has been a natural right since time immemorial. Not until governments were completely bought off by fucking soulless corporations did patently immoral and unfair shit like the DMCA get passed into (grossly evil and illegitimate) law.
Suppose someone actually discovered a natural fountain of youth, took ownership of it by bribing the government, and merchandised it. Suppose he sells 100 ml bottles of it labeled "plant food" for $5, and 100 ml bottles of it labeled "cancer cure" for $500,000. Let it be stipulated that they both "work"; i.e., they are effective in their labeled applications. Now someone analyzes them both chemically and determines that they are identical. So he publishes his findings on the internet and points out that you only have to spend $5, not $500,000 to cure your cancer. Theft? HELL NO.
Reality check. There are no elections being sold. There is only advertising/PR being sold on behalf of candidates. If the voting public is so goddam fucking stupid as to be swayed like sheep by political advertisements, they are getting PRECISELY the government they deserve. As a block, not as individuals, unfortunately. The voters who have functioning intellect are being sold down the river by the voters who are ignorant, stupid, and selfish bastards. Just assign the blame where it belongs.
I happen to agree it is a damn poor design, but it is the standard. Just like case-sensitive pathnames in Posix. Actually, truth be known, I kind of dig that it makes an automatic laughingstock out of lazy sons of bitches who can't be bothered to use the fucking shift key.
Which, full circle, is not to say that all of these are not poor designs. I'll give you another one. C forcing you to interrupt the flow of typing by reaching for the shift key on identifiers, whether you use camel case or underscores. Although I still remember the magnificent ADM-3A, where underscore was a gorgeous UNSHIFTED keystroke.
Well ... actually ... the prefix for 1/1000 is milli, not mili. At least in English speaking countries.
Really?
This should be bloody obvious to anyone with the mentality of an everage 12 year old or greater, but there is no guarantee that ANY law stay in effect permanently. You can supercede any law at any time just by passing a new law. Hell, you can even amend the Constitution. If you supersede the fiftth amendment and then pass a law enabling the cops to beat you with a rubber hose to extract a confession, you couldn't even (legally) refuse to incriminate yourself any more.
I find it pretty amusing that something called PortableApps seems like it only supports Windows.
Kate is far superior anyway, but you're right. The brats got to gedit and completely wrecked it.
I'm not sure I was ever on a system younger than Methuselah that didn't have vi, but nonetheless the point is taken that there is no law that says it has to be there. Point taken that emacs in very frequently missing. And bad news: nano and pico are not always there either. FreeBSD has something called ee which is hardly as simple and intuitive as they seem to think it is. But It also has vi always in base, so the issue does not arise there.
I'm going to have to side with you. The only editor that is ALWAYS always there or the system is posix-BUSTED is ed.
As an emacs fan and user, I'm not hostile to your viewpoint really, but the first time you are faced with a really big code refactor job, Eclipse or Netbeans come into their own and vi/emacs fall flat. The floor tilted a little and the lights went a little dim for a second the first time somebody showed me refactor in Eclipse.
Also, the point minimizing intellisense and the point about using variables before you bother to define them are both REALLY reaching.
Thanks for the screenshot! Every part of Gnome has turned into stuff BY stupid people FOR stupid people. In gedit they have utterly Fisher-Price despoiled what used to be a perfectly good tool. I console myself that kwrite and kate continue to be as good as, actually better than, ever.
Emacs has a learning curve that's more of a cliff than a curve, but it's probably the most usable text editor ever invented. People get freaked out by it and give up on trying to learn it, but everything is available without having to remove your hands from the keyboard and it has commands for virtually anything that you're likely to want to do.
I'm actually agreeing with you 100%. The same points work for either one of them. Choice is a blessing. In my experience it takes no more than 5 minutes to familiarize anyone with either one of them enough to use it at kiddy level, and from there they can advance as the spirit moves them if they so desire. Back in the days of Teco and Pmate I found the same thing.
Anybody using linux or bsd had best be prepared for occasionally getting thrown into either vi or emacs without directly typing the command. Knowing escape-colon-q-enter[*] (control-x-control-c-n-yes-enter) and escape-colon-w-q (control-x-control-s-control-x-control-c) are the simple keys of the kingdom. With vi you have the added bullshit of trying to explain you're not entering text until you first hit i to insert or a to append, but that's not that much to master either.
The first time you DON'T hear "help, I'm stuck in some weird mode", or "help, I'm in ssh and have to edit .bashrc again", you are deeply satisfied knowing you have fostered a little competence and confidence in the new guys.
[*] With escape-colon-q-!-enter in reserve!
A goddam spectacular bunch of fucking drivel by the Supremes. Not unheard of. May the fascists rot in hell for that shit. Ya hear me, pigs?
If I may be permitted to demur, I don't think that's got it either. For me it's history of a longer range than a few years that makes it not as funny as it otherwise might be. The way the American Revolution would have been unquestionably lost without the aid of the French. The way the dear sweet young generation of France reddened the soil of their homeland with their blood to save it in the Great War. The way young and old went underground full of fight when the Nation was overwhelmed in 1940.
All that just sharpens the contrast with today, now that we see the nation of France, along with so many others, surrender to the evil ravening islamic mob in the streets of their own capital.
What part of this is hard to understand? "Testing was performed on a low-thrust torsion pendulum that is capable of detecting force at a single-digit micronewton level, within a stainless steel vacuum chamber with the door closed but at ambient atmospheric pressure." That's a direct quote from the abstract of the NASA paper.
It was in a vacuum chamber, but it was not in a vacuum.
The sound of hands clapping by all zero remaining Itanic lusers.
I second the endorsement of the Beaglebone Black. Note that it is ARMv7 with a proper openly documented TI CPU, compared to the crappy RPi which is ARMv6 with the locked-up Broadcom abortion.
I was crushed when they discontinued the original $45 BB rev and slipstreamed the "improved" $55 rev C with more flash and RAM. I consider the added flash and RAM to be completely wasted and pointless, but I recognize that the $45 price point was just a bit unsustainable. They should have just admitted overoptimism and raised it to $47 or $49 without touching the specs.
But let's face it, even for $55 it is far and away the best choice out there. ARMv7 with Thumb2 is properly supported by mainline Debian, unlike ARMv6 with Thumb1. The latter is really only a dead end of limited historical interest.
That is because it is presented as the ratio of the figure of merit of the candidate algorithm to the figure of merit of some bullshit "universal compresser", times a completely useless "scaling constant". To strip away the obscuration, all you have to do is see that for a completely transparent effectless compresser, r is unity and log t is log 0, or unity. 1/1, and it drops out.
The underlying figure of merit once you cut through the bullshit is r / log t. r is the compression ratio (unitless) and log t is log seconds. So yes, the units of the underlying figure of merit are reciprocal log seconds.
You need learn to cut through the hocus pocus and analyze the actual underlying equation before the Oz Sauce is ladeled on. You can well imagine that those who actually understand programming metrics are holding their sides laughing at those who are taking it seriously.