give you street level directions for every road anywhere in ALL of North America and Europe calculate optimal routes and detours find the closest Chinese restaurant in a city you've never been to before and give you its phone number so you can order ahead act as a speaker-phone via bluetooth for your cell phone play MP3s tell you that there is traffic ahead on the highway you are driving on
So. What.
I don't need any street directions to anywhere, ever. I can plan a 1200 mile trip after glancing at a map and arrive at my destination within 60 seconds of my eta. Including stopping for lunch, coffee, gas, cheese and a visit to the porn shop. done it, numerous times. Navigating from point A to point B anywhere in the U.S. is about the most trivial excercise imaginable.
Optimum routes and detours my sculpted muscular ass. If it takes a computer to figure that out for you, if your optimum route isn't instantly apparent the second you see your options, you're a moron, or the optimal route isn't significantly better than a similar suboptimal route. That particular function should be hardwired into your brain. You're not confused by those maze things on the placemats at Denny's are you?
You get more value out of your GPS than i get e out of my map?? Not a chance. Mathematically impossible. I get my maps free during a pee-breaks at state border welcome stops, or they get delivered for free to my door. Or i ask the person i'm visiting, or i click on "get directions" on the website. Hell, if i'm road tripping, the maps of the state are nailed to the wall at the rest stops. When they start passing out free garmin units with free maps, you let me know.
those other utilities you cite are bullshit. What are you gonna do if the freeway is clogged? Get jammed up in feeder traffic? yes, because your precious GPS doesn't know about traffic there. Or end up on some dum bass route because the routepicking software is stupid.
Play MP3's. Well, now i am truly defeated. Gosh. i wish i could play music in my car without a gps cellphone. dag.
Look, if you want a gadget, fine. Gadgets are fun. I have several. But they are toys. They are not, except for a tiny tiny minority of us, "tools" or productivity enhancers. They are electronic bullshit to amuse us. If you truly truly need GPS to manage your life, you're either completely fucked or you live out of your car and never visit the same place twice. In any case, i have yet to meet anyone who has GPS who says they need it.
It seems to me, barring a few specific places, that it takes an act of will to get lost in a modern city. Again, we're integrateing hundreds of dollars of technology with a multibillion dollar supporting infrastructure to replace a FOLDED PAPER MAP that we might need to use for TWO MINUTES EVERY THREE YEARS. This statement will be true for 90%+ of all pedestrians and drivers.
i guess... it [let's find a restaurant!] speaks to what seems to me to be a pretty narrow market/lifestyle segment. Maybe for the itenerant road warrior type. For me, i know every decent restaurant within miles (west surburban chicagoland) or at least enough. ditto in Chicago. Heck, if i'm in chicago and i want a place to eat, i just need to walk no more than five minutes from any location i'm likely to be and i'll come upon a great place to eat. Seriously: how fucking pathetic are we that we can't find a place to eat without hundreds of dollars of electronics and 10 billion dollars of supporting infrastructure to guide us?
I am quite sincere in my criticism and question. I just don't get it. It seems immasculating and trivializing. It sounds a lot like the old "you can use your PC to store recipes!! And Balance your checkbook (online banking not having been invented)". Oooh, i know, it'll free us from... looking out the window of our car!
Sorry, it sounds like feature-creeped bullshit. Of course, i am a luddite (with a macbook pro, who runs an atom smasher) on a bicycle most of the time.
for some reason i can't find the "...drive to utah" comment. having a bonde attacke i suppose...
Let's look at that "I can just drive to utah" comment. You could drive to utah. Ballpark terms it will cost you 50 gallons of gas each way. Call it $300 in gas money, not counting car depreciation, logding, food, tolls, insurance etc. If you're "socially responsible" you can get maybe 4 or five people in your car. Or if you're a bluehair, you can take a bus with 50 other blue hairs (and obviously the fuel costs change slightly).
Whatever.
So let's say, as a simple math approximation to make it easy: it'll cost you $100/person to go to utah.
Now... what is the average cost to go to Mars, right this instant, for anyone reading this post? less than a penny. A couple of clicks and you can go and stay as long as you want. For less than a penny.
Value of sparking the imagination of children around the globe: priceless.
Not bad.
QED.
Regardless of the truth of this story it has the effect of making life more difficult for any would-be dirty bomb makers, forcing them to work very much harder to hide their isotope decay signals.
Of course, by the same token, this kind of story makes it more likely that dirty bomb makers will tend to be that much harder to find in the future.
As far as the privacy and homeland security jackbooted gomer issues go: bullshit. It's wholly appropriate and frankly expected that we do this kind of monitoring. Whinging about this seems a little contrived. Radiological hazards are the only hazard that comes to mind, that we can wholly passively and remotely detect. As the article points out, we can even characterize indvidual isotopes. A modern friggin technological miracle and people are complaining. What. Ever.
Now then. Characterizing isotopes (claimed in the article) tends to let us rule out non-bomb materials, since theraputic radiochemicals tend to decay within a couple of days and are hence not really suitable for dirty bombs.
WHICH leads me to believe the original cited story is bullshit, since the officer would have known he was looking at medical radiation.
That's a good question. As they say, "more research is indicated". It might be a dead-end, and it might be a gateway to something fabulously useful.
On an grim note, i happened to notice a distinct lack of American presence in this announcement. Seems to be a Canadian/German thing. Y'know, that science stuff the US is running away from at full tilt (i work at a large US atom smasher that, like a *lot* of other Big and L'il Science Thangs, got a major budgetary wedgie this year). At least i still have my embarrassingly huge penis.
My only regret is that i'm reading and responding to this 400+ comments down the line...
Calling the editors "the government" is simply paranoid or asshole behavior. I post to here from a.gov address not infrequently, and it would take a special kind of head-up-the-ass fucktard shit-for-brains idiot to think that i'm speaking on behalf of the Department of Guess Who. In fact, in my 20 (!?) years of usenet/web posting, noone has ever been that Goddamned stupid. Yes, i'm specifically choosing earthy language as i want to express a deep and abiding contempt for this kind of censorous complaint that someone posting from.gov is "the government".
The worst that can *maybe* be said is that these people are posting on the taxpayer dime; even that is not a guarenteed-valid complaint, as many agencies acceptable use policy allows personal use of govt computers on a limited/reasonable basis. Surprise surprise.
And it is remotely possible, in some microscopic bubble of the Multiverse, that a Congressional staffer might possibly have a valid, legitimate perspective on these issues that is closer to "the truth" than some nimrod politically-correct just-read-his-first-Chomsky-book college sophmore editing from a dorm at Kansas State or some stoner from the mailroom at Iomega. We all have our own special perspectives on the world, and frankly, sometimes, they _are_ worth more than everyone elses.
So,bereft of factual content and perspective, as the original slugline post to Slashdot was, calling it "wikipedia editing by the government" and trying to paint it as propaganda or big-lie/Big Brother information control is censorous and morally wrong.
I will forebear to pontificate on how "people in 'the government'" can be good, decent, hardworking, intelligent honest people who sincerely believe in the value of the work they do, still, I think i'm a little offended by the implications made.
Color me surprised (one of the links in the article point to her site); i wouldn't have guessed her to be on the anti-RIAA side. Learn something every day... does that mean i'm going to have to think about what she says now?.max
If the FEC tries to charge Colbert wih anything, they'll have a higher liklihood of succes if they jump headfirst into a chipper shredder. Making a criminal case out of a clear cut case of satire = insert M-80 of first amendment up ass and light fuse.
The only reasonable response to crap like this is a spittle-flecked rant.
The simple irreducible fact of tech like these GPS nanny boxes is that they are castrating our society, and our next generation in particular. Disabling your [son's] vehicle because he was so [Mr. Burns air quotes] sneaky [/mr burns] as to drive to the next town is beyond assinine, it daddy-dicksizing, public humiliation and teaches... just what does it teach? Not anything i want my future leaders to learn, that's for sure.
This stuff is championed by the same fucktard gutless risk averse sissies who brought us... mandtory car seats (which ultimately drove the SUV explosion), parents driving their morbidly obese little fatties four blocks to school every day, chain link fences acros every yard, children kept indoors because it's too dangerous to actually "live" in their petri dish neighborhoods, grade school children xpelled for making gun-shaped finger gestures or carrying plastic picnic knives with their sack lunches... Which is not to forget "antiterrorism" security theater or any number of oft-cited outrages to common sense.
spittle-flecked rant because there is mathematically precisely zero chance (and in the quantum mechanical universe, "zero" is saying a lot!) of reversing this trend. "We" , the larger corpus of/., the fans of comp.risks or Bruce Schneier etc see it and resist and understand the implications. But sadly, the larger corpus of slashdot and it's cohorts doesn't mater.
We will all be alive (assuming we haven't been sent off to nutcase camp) to speak our I Told You So's in another 20~40 years.
As i said, "not-entirely" different. I've read almost^H^H^H^H^H^H every english language report available on Tokai that i could find.
The lack of control over a potentially critical mass of U-235 dissolved in water salient feature here. If, god forbid, the liquid had found a CM geometry as it oozed around the lab, i probably would have written "not-entirely the same".
we're quibbling over the meaning of the word different.
For the record, a not-entirely dissimilar thing happened in Japan a few years ago. That one wasn't a leak, it was the use of a higher-than-normal amount of 235 in the mixture. It caused a bit of a problem in the area and at least one technician died as a result of the criticality. Google "tokai criticality incident"
So leaving the isotopic enrichment and concentration of the material firmly in the land of "we don't know" but recognizing that the mysterious report said "uncontrolled criticality possible" i'm inclined to think it wasn't a wholly impossible scenario. Above a certain concentration and enrichment, all you need is enough [fissile] material and the right geometry.
We've had several incidents of this sort in thte past, and they're kind of not so fun, ramping up and down in power as they pass in and out of boiling, gently wafting highly radioactive fission products into the air, bleaching the bones of emergency personnel...
As far as being concerned about (gasp) terrorists learning about a CI... Get A Grip! In simple terms: we should extend to ourselves the same hazard warnings regardless of where the danger comes from.
Danger is danger, and classifying our mistakes is only going to help us kill ourselves before the bad guys do. We wouldn't classify a dirty bomb attack, or, for that matter, some chicago gangbanger's feeble half-assed attempts to acquire a dirty bomb. so... what has more real danger? One might suggest real U235 running down a real hallway...
Remember, even if this facility is out in Boo Foo Tn, (and it is) it's still a national technical asset. If the operators of the plant fuck it [the facility] up so that it can't be used, we have lost ~~50% of our national technical means to reprocess nuclear material. That suggests an additional interest in disclosure.
In an unrelated development, Attorney Lionel Hutz announced a 3.2 Kajillion lawsuit against Apple, arguing that the company did not adequately disclose the fact that their iPhone communicated via radio waves. He said he would amend his complaint later this week to include a complaint against its unnecesary use of "electricity".
"I looked all over the Apple website, and not once did they explain that it used "electricity""..max
The editorialist's comment that "The measuring stick is less what's right than the odds of getting caught" struck a resonant note with me.
I've been acting in loco parentis for the last year for my two 6 and 8 year old little girl nieces, to whom i've often 'splained to that "even bad people can do the right thing when you watch them, but good people do the right thing when nobody is looking".
This shit is not rocket science. sheesh -- even John Whorfin knew it..max
Not to worry for Fermilab; we have a nice neutrino program to keep us going for a while. In general everyone here is seriously cranked (in a good way) about CERN coming up. They are going to kick some ass when they crank up the ring. The engineering stats are... mind boggling.
I am but a lowly glamour-drenched peon and not not a decision maker, but i would be less than surprised if someone came up with a good non-higgsian excuse to keep the tev running after the current run, whether or not we actually find any of the higgeses i made between porkchops today.
Darren, the guy behind this, is playing the film totally straight; it's supposed to slot in as a real SW film, albeit with crappy fan actors (guilty as charged) and a microscopic budget.
I hope they have a 2008 or 2009 challenge, too; a fan film can take some serious lead and production time.
I have a friend who's working on a SWFF right now (in which i have a small part), and the amount of work -- synchronizing people's schedules, getting people for cast and crew, yadda, rendering (on legit software, no less), scraping up the cashish for... everything... it all adds up and it takes time. For my friend's film, we're looking at a release date of January 2009.
Of course, my friend is planning for a 2 hr film.
.max
more sword training w/ "darth" and the 3d degree black belt trainer tonight... sigh ---ouch!
Slashdot Mirror
So. What.
I don't need any street directions to anywhere, ever. I can plan a 1200 mile trip after glancing at a map and arrive at my destination within 60 seconds of my eta. Including stopping for lunch, coffee, gas, cheese and a visit to the porn shop. done it, numerous times. Navigating from point A to point B anywhere in the U.S. is about the most trivial excercise imaginable.
Optimum routes and detours my sculpted muscular ass. If it takes a computer to figure that out for you, if your optimum route isn't instantly apparent the second you see your options, you're a moron, or the optimal route isn't significantly better than a similar suboptimal route. That particular function should be hardwired into your brain. You're not confused by those maze things on the placemats at Denny's are you?
You get more value out of your GPS than i get e out of my map?? Not a chance. Mathematically impossible. I get my maps free during a pee-breaks at state border welcome stops, or they get delivered for free to my door. Or i ask the person i'm visiting, or i click on "get directions" on the website. Hell, if i'm road tripping, the maps of the state are nailed to the wall at the rest stops. When they start passing out free garmin units with free maps, you let me know.
those other utilities you cite are bullshit. What are you gonna do if the freeway is clogged? Get jammed up in feeder traffic? yes, because your precious GPS doesn't know about traffic there. Or end up on some dum bass route because the routepicking software is stupid.
Play MP3's. Well, now i am truly defeated. Gosh. i wish i could play music in my car without a gps cellphone. dag.
Look, if you want a gadget, fine. Gadgets are fun. I have several. But they are toys. They are not, except for a tiny tiny minority of us, "tools" or productivity enhancers. They are electronic bullshit to amuse us. If you truly truly need GPS to manage your life, you're either completely fucked or you live out of your car and never visit the same place twice. In any case, i have yet to meet anyone who has GPS who says they need it.
It seems to me, barring a few specific places, that it takes an act of will to get lost in a modern city. Again, we're integrateing hundreds of dollars of technology with a multibillion dollar supporting infrastructure to replace a FOLDED PAPER MAP that we might need to use for TWO MINUTES EVERY THREE YEARS. This statement will be true for 90%+ of all pedestrians and drivers.
Society of idiot feckless pussies. We are that.
i guess... it [let's find a restaurant!] speaks to what seems to me to be a pretty narrow market/lifestyle segment. Maybe for the itenerant road warrior type. For me, i know every decent restaurant within miles (west surburban chicagoland) or at least enough. ditto in Chicago. Heck, if i'm in chicago and i want a place to eat, i just need to walk no more than five minutes from any location i'm likely to be and i'll come upon a great place to eat. Seriously: how fucking pathetic are we that we can't find a place to eat without hundreds of dollars of electronics and 10 billion dollars of supporting infrastructure to guide us?
... looking out the window of our car!
I am quite sincere in my criticism and question. I just don't get it. It seems immasculating and trivializing. It sounds a lot like the old "you can use your PC to store recipes!! And Balance your checkbook (online banking not having been invented)". Oooh, i know, it'll free us from
Sorry, it sounds like feature-creeped bullshit. Of course, i am a luddite (with a macbook pro, who runs an atom smasher) on a bicycle most of the time.
for some reason i can't find the "...drive to utah" comment. having a bonde attacke i suppose... Let's look at that "I can just drive to utah" comment. You could drive to utah. Ballpark terms it will cost you 50 gallons of gas each way. Call it $300 in gas money, not counting car depreciation, logding, food, tolls, insurance etc. If you're "socially responsible" you can get maybe 4 or five people in your car. Or if you're a bluehair, you can take a bus with 50 other blue hairs (and obviously the fuel costs change slightly). Whatever. So let's say, as a simple math approximation to make it easy: it'll cost you $100/person to go to utah. Now... what is the average cost to go to Mars, right this instant, for anyone reading this post? less than a penny. A couple of clicks and you can go and stay as long as you want. For less than a penny. Value of sparking the imagination of children around the globe: priceless. Not bad. QED.
Here's several serially-related thoughts ...
Regardless of the truth of this story it has the effect of making life more difficult for any would-be dirty bomb makers, forcing them to work very much harder to hide their isotope decay signals.
Of course, by the same token, this kind of story makes it more likely that dirty bomb makers will tend to be that much harder to find in the future.
As far as the privacy and homeland security jackbooted gomer issues go: bullshit. It's wholly appropriate and frankly expected that we do this kind of monitoring. Whinging about this seems a little contrived. Radiological hazards are the only hazard that comes to mind, that we can wholly passively and remotely detect. As the article points out, we can even characterize indvidual isotopes. A modern friggin technological miracle and people are complaining. What. Ever.
Now then. Characterizing isotopes (claimed in the article) tends to let us rule out non-bomb materials, since theraputic radiochemicals tend to decay within a couple of days and are hence not really suitable for dirty bombs.
WHICH leads me to believe the original cited story is bullshit, since the officer would have known he was looking at medical radiation.
Great story, though.
On an grim note, i happened to notice a distinct lack of American presence in this announcement. Seems to be a Canadian/German thing. Y'know, that science stuff the US is running away from at full tilt (i work at a large US atom smasher that, like a *lot* of other Big and L'il Science Thangs, got a major budgetary wedgie this year). At least i still have my embarrassingly huge penis.
Cool! .max
this /. article is a headline article on google news at this moment. wauw!
i hope he chokes on it.
But, it needs one small tweak: you get your 95 year copyright, but you only get it ONCE. .max
http://www-bd.fnal.gov/ntf/
As i type this, we're shooting protons out of our LINaC at a neutron generatng target (beryllium i think) and treating some person. Many years now.
My only regret is that i'm reading and responding to this 400+ comments down the line...
.gov address not infrequently, and it would take a special kind of head-up-the-ass fucktard shit-for-brains idiot to think that i'm speaking on behalf of the Department of Guess Who. In fact, in my 20 (!?) years of usenet/web posting, noone has ever been that Goddamned stupid. Yes, i'm specifically choosing earthy language as i want to express a deep and abiding contempt for this kind of censorous complaint that someone posting from .gov is "the government".
Calling the editors "the government" is simply paranoid or asshole behavior. I post to here from a
The worst that can *maybe* be said is that these people are posting on the taxpayer dime; even that is not a guarenteed-valid complaint, as many agencies acceptable use policy allows personal use of govt computers on a limited/reasonable basis. Surprise surprise.
And it is remotely possible, in some microscopic bubble of the Multiverse, that a Congressional staffer might possibly have a valid, legitimate perspective on these issues that is closer to "the truth" than some nimrod politically-correct just-read-his-first-Chomsky-book college sophmore editing from a dorm at Kansas State or some stoner from the mailroom at Iomega. We all have our own special perspectives on the world, and frankly, sometimes, they _are_ worth more than everyone elses.
So,bereft of factual content and perspective, as the original slugline post to Slashdot was, calling it "wikipedia editing by the government" and trying to paint it as propaganda or big-lie/Big Brother information control is censorous and morally wrong.
I will forebear to pontificate on how "people in 'the government'" can be good, decent, hardworking, intelligent honest people who sincerely believe in the value of the work they do, still, I think i'm a little offended by the implications made.
Color me surprised (one of the links in the article point to her site); i wouldn't have guessed her to be on the anti-RIAA side. Learn something every day... does that mean i'm going to have to think about what she says now? .max
If the FEC tries to charge Colbert wih anything, they'll have a higher liklihood of succes if they jump headfirst into a chipper shredder. Making a criminal case out of a clear cut case of satire = insert M-80 of first amendment up ass and light fuse.
The only reasonable response to crap like this is a spittle-flecked rant.
... just what does it teach? Not anything i want my future leaders to learn, that's for sure.
... mandtory car seats (which ultimately drove the SUV explosion), parents driving their morbidly obese little fatties four blocks to school every day, chain link fences acros every yard, children kept indoors because it's too dangerous to actually "live" in their petri dish neighborhoods, grade school children xpelled for making gun-shaped finger gestures or carrying plastic picnic knives with their sack lunches ... Which is not to forget "antiterrorism" security theater or any number of oft-cited outrages to common sense.
/., the fans of comp.risks or Bruce Schneier etc see it and resist and understand the implications. But sadly, the larger corpus of slashdot and it's cohorts doesn't mater.
The simple irreducible fact of tech like these GPS nanny boxes is that they are castrating our society, and our next generation in particular. Disabling your [son's] vehicle because he was so [Mr. Burns air quotes] sneaky [/mr burns] as to drive to the next town is beyond assinine, it daddy-dicksizing, public humiliation and teaches
This stuff is championed by the same fucktard gutless risk averse sissies who brought us
spittle-flecked rant because there is mathematically precisely zero chance (and in the quantum mechanical universe, "zero" is saying a lot!) of reversing this trend. "We" , the larger corpus of
We will all be alive (assuming we haven't been sent off to nutcase camp) to speak our I Told You So's in another 20~40 years.
get off my porch!
... that's my wife! /rimshot .max
As i said, "not-entirely" different. I've read almost^H^H^H^H^H^H every english language report available on Tokai that i could find.
The lack of control over a potentially critical mass of U-235 dissolved in water salient feature here. If, god forbid, the liquid had found a CM geometry as it oozed around the lab, i probably would have written "not-entirely the same".
we're quibbling over the meaning of the word different.
For the record, a not-entirely dissimilar thing happened in Japan a few years ago. That one wasn't a leak, it was the use of a higher-than-normal amount of 235 in the mixture. It caused a bit of a problem in the area and at least one technician died as a result of the criticality. Google "tokai criticality incident"
.max
So leaving the isotopic enrichment and concentration of the material firmly in the land of "we don't know" but recognizing that the mysterious report said "uncontrolled criticality possible" i'm inclined to think it wasn't a wholly impossible scenario. Above a certain concentration and enrichment, all you need is enough [fissile] material and the right geometry.
We've had several incidents of this sort in thte past, and they're kind of not so fun, ramping up and down in power as they pass in and out of boiling, gently wafting highly radioactive fission products into the air, bleaching the bones of emergency personnel...
As far as being concerned about (gasp) terrorists learning about a CI... Get A Grip! In simple terms: we should extend to ourselves the same hazard warnings regardless of where the danger comes from.
Danger is danger, and classifying our mistakes is only going to help us kill ourselves before the bad guys do.
We wouldn't classify a dirty bomb attack, or, for that matter, some chicago gangbanger's feeble half-assed attempts to acquire a dirty bomb. so... what has more real danger? One might suggest real U235 running down a real hallway...
Remember, even if this facility is out in Boo Foo Tn, (and it is) it's still a national technical asset. If the operators of the plant fuck it [the facility] up so that it can't be used, we have lost ~~50% of our national technical means to reprocess nuclear material. That suggests an additional interest in disclosure.
etc.
In an unrelated development, Attorney Lionel Hutz announced a 3.2 Kajillion lawsuit against Apple, arguing that the company did not adequately disclose the fact that their iPhone communicated via radio waves. He said he would amend his complaint later this week to include a complaint against its unnecesary use of "electricity".
.max
"I looked all over the Apple website, and not once did they explain that it used "electricity"".
The editorialist's comment that "The measuring stick is less what's right than the odds of getting caught" struck a resonant note with me.
.max
I've been acting in loco parentis for the last year for my two 6 and 8 year old little girl nieces, to whom i've often 'splained to that "even bad people can do the right thing when you watch them, but good people do the right thing when nobody is looking".
This shit is not rocket science. sheesh -- even John Whorfin knew it.
no, really. i'm the tevatron operator today. :-)
Not to worry for Fermilab; we have a nice neutrino program to keep us going for a while. In general everyone here is seriously cranked (in a good way) about CERN coming up. They are going to kick some ass when they crank up the ring. The engineering stats are ... mind boggling.
I am but a lowly glamour-drenched peon and not not a decision maker, but i would be less than surprised if someone came up with a good non-higgsian excuse to keep the tev running after the current run, whether or not we actually find any of the higgeses i made between porkchops today.
disclaimer: i speak for dot.me, not my employer!
I call shenanigans!
Darren, the guy behind this, is playing the film totally straight; it's supposed to slot in as a real SW film, albeit with crappy fan actors (guilty as charged) and a microscopic budget.
I have a friend who's working on a SWFF right now (in which i have a small part), and the amount of work -- synchronizing people's schedules, getting people for cast and crew, yadda, rendering (on legit software, no less), scraping up the cashish for ... everything ... it all adds up and it takes time. For my friend's film, we're looking at a release date of January 2009.
Of course, my friend is planning for a 2 hr film.
more sword training w/ "darth" and the 3d degree black belt trainer tonight... sigh ---ouch!