And once we've successfully got the size of government down to the point where it can be drowned in the bathtub at Grover Norquist's convenience, who exactly do you think it going to stand up to the corporate plutocrats, even in principle?
It may surprise you but there are a few people out there who actually will fight for the people given a chance. Think of the Roosevelts. Of course, since the modern GOP deliberately sabotages the government for the purpose of proving that government doesn't work...
Yeah, sure, which is why it took this guy a year of working on CAD and prototyping.
This may come as a shock to those poor souls who've never actually created something entirely novel, but doing or deriving something new is actually a remarkably difficult process. It only looks easy because we don't show you the prototype or publish the paper until we're done, and then we handhold you through all the hard parts. No shit it would be fairly easy to build more now, the original inventors have already done all the hard work for you. They've gone down all the wrong alleyways, made the dumb mistakes, ironed out most of the bugs, proven the control software is possible, and more. Here, try it yourself - prove the existence and uniqueness of solutions to the linear IVP, or the Bell Inequality, or the Optical Theorem, or derive the heat capacity of a classical ideal gas, without looking any part of the answer up.
It never ceases to amaze me that, even on supposedly technically-oriented message boards, we still have this group that looks at a new creation which took man-years of work or more to make, and says "Oh, pfft, that was easy, anyone could do that."
It's not like dangerous, intoxicated drivers or even criminals would drive without a license. That almost never happends.
Either you've just demolished the argument for making anything illegal, or you didn't quite think your brilliant plan all the way through.
So once again... Do you truly feel that the right to control something as powerful and potentially dangerous and deadly as an automobile should not require first demonstrating some minimal competency and possibly a few other basic skills at operating one to a nominally disinterested 3rd party?
I have them installed, 260.19.29. For shits'n'giggles I downloaded some of the 4K videos on Youtube as a test...
mplayer can very nearly play 4096x2560 to fullscreen (2560x1600) using a single Athlon II core and a GeForce-240 (video is smooth, but audio eventually breaks up). Flash can almost get a smooth framerate on 480x360 windows on youtube, and the fullscreen button would be better termed the talking slideshow button.
Not to say that native is necessarily better... kde's dragon player is so horribly slow it makes Flash player look like mplayer. This may not directly be dragon's fault... in my experience, everything Qt4 touches is instantly covered in a thick layer of cold molasses and resin.
If you can come up with some other economical way for a typical 2-reactor plant to dump 6 gigawatts of leftover heat, by all means share.
I admit I'd be curious to see the calculations for a forced air cooled heat exchanger... it'd need to draw in roughly 50000 cubic meters of air per second, assuming an exhaust temp of 120*c is acceptable.
You realize the illusion of prosperity under the Bush administration was the same as the illusion of prosperity in the Roaring 20s right?
They're basically clones of each other... a false prosperity, supported by a bubble of circle-jerking investors, in which none of the "wealth" goes to the workers [during the 20s, income for the average American rose one percent and for the rich rose something like 50%], and in the end the bubble finally reaches a maximum inflation, jitters a bit, and implodes. Sound familiar?
If there is any causal connection, it's that the change in House control was the pin that pricked the bubble - the first investor to panic then brings the whole lie crashing down. Do you blame those who exposed the lie, or those who inflated it, created it, and enabled it?
Here's a hint, pal: If you think it's that easy, and it's not being done, it's because you are wrong, not because the entire world engineering community is stupid.
In related news tonight, the Dunning-Kruger Effect is in full effect in this thread.
It also wouldn't have the resources or ability to protect you from the corporate plutocrats, which is exactly why they're so very determinedly pushing this idea.
The solution to malicious behavior in governments is not to dismantle the government, it's to hunt down and remove the malicious people.
Except you and I both know that the idiots who get infected by the new virus every single time, who do the same things we tell them not to every time, will happily open any physical lock because the popup box says to.
Not until they are made to face major financial penalties for repeated stupidity will they stop being stupid. That means NOT repairing their box that they broke by being Fucking Retarded(tm) for the 1000th time.
Because when Hoover did nothing*, that sure worked out brilliantly. FDR initiates the new deal, economic cratering almost immediately halts and GDP starts going back up. 1936/7, Republicans demand new deal be cut back to balance budget, recession is immediate. Then shortly after we got into WWII, also known as "the biggest big-government deficit-spending jobs & stimulus program in all of history." Then the GI Bill paid to have them all sent off to school again and the next few decades were the zenith of American power and prestige around the world.
So, how's things going in Greece and Iceland?
*He actually did start the ball rolling on some stimulus-esqe stuff, but it was too little too late, and he didn't afaik do anything to stop the bank dominos from falling, which was the immediate short-term problem.
The operating principle is given in the second sentence of the goddamn summary: Fire neutrons in, watch radiation from activation products. As others have pointed out, otherwise known as Neutron Activation Spectroscopy.
Neutron radiation leads to neutron activation. I don't know off the top of my head what intensity of neutron radiation would be needed, but exposure which forms long-lived isotopes is cumulative. Common isotopes of iron, nickel and copper are all susceptible to some amount of activation.
Cross-section to spall neutrons off of U238 or Th232 are ~1barn with halflife of days, but the most common isotope of iron has a n-2n cross section of around half a barn and the result has a halflife of several years. Any nuke techs care to chime in?
I see where you're coming from, but wanting to permit some things and prohibit others is hardly unique to fascists, fundies or progressives. I'd argue that outside of a certain small set of things explicitly delimited in the Constitution as always allowed/always denied, it's the job of the legislature to permit unless explicitly denied, hence party platforms centered on denying certain things.
In any case, I think this comes down to a matter of definitions... You mean totalitarian, so why not just say totalitarian? Fascism and neo-Fascism both have specific characteristics other than totalitarianism - Romanticizing an imagined idyllic past, militancy and particularly (in Mussolini's words) "the merger of state and corporate power" - which are anathema to progressives.
Also it's worth noting the differences in how progressives and the religious right oppose things... Progressives want what amount to sin taxes on pot, soda and junk food, the fundies want to throw you in jail for doobies, booze or having an abortion.
I'm a PhD student whose job is currently get an MHD code running on multiple GPUs (getting it to run really fast on/one/ I have not yet quite done), and from my experiences, I sort of figured these were trivially parallel types of things.
There's only one kind of kernel I deal with that actually gets near full utilization without extensive hand-tuning (i.e. that could be written by a computer without human guidance) - the ones that do simple atomic operations on N input arrays and spits out M output arrays. Everything else takes weeks of agonizing hand-holding, tuning, and the occasional use of percussive maintainence before it gets past 10-20% efficiency. As you say, by the time you've solved the "parallel BS" for any nontrivial problem, you may as well have just written the GPU code yourself.
Like when liberals have government dictate to women what they can do about pregnancies. Or demand that two people who love each other not be able to get married if they're gay. Or have government agents forbid you from ending your life at a time of your choosing. And whenever anyone criticizes overreaching police, liberals in the US are first to trot out "if you have nothing to hide, you shouldn't be worried Comrade." And those far-left nuts in Arizona who passed a "papers, bitte" law clearly aimed at hispanics. And those insane socialists up in Wisconsin, out busting unions of working-class people in full force at the behest of a union of the rich.
Indeed, scarcely a week goes by before one hears of yet another perfidous attack by liberals on individual freedom.
I see this every now and then... Can someone please explain to me where in the bloody hell the idea that progressives are in any way related to fascism came from?
I've got a hunch, mind you, but I want independent confirmation...
Ah, I see for the moment the Party Line requires that Obama be an empty suit. No doubt when it's time to pass some legislation, he'll be an evil satanic genius perverting the system from within.
If you want energy prices to go down, the only thing that's going to make that happen is the civil wars in the middle east being resolved. That and gutpunching the oil companies and putting our boots on their necks for intentionally manipulating the market, but with the Republicans being what they are I'll count on the wars being over first.
With me it's never Firefox per se that does it, it's xulrunner and flash.
Computer's ground to a halt?
Hard drive paging like a mofo?
Why yes, xulrunner and flash are using 90% of all physical memory. Yet again. And I have flash-control plugins that only start the flash apps I say to start.
5-4 favoring the corporatists. That does seem to be the order of the day when it comes down to it.
Unless it involves the "b b but terrorists" legal cancer (You have no need to know about this, Citizen. Your betters will not abuse it), then it's 9-0.
The great majority of Chernobyl's fallout landed on eastern Europe (seeing as that's where it originated), not western. And about those ill effects...
The forest near Chernobyl that much of the aerosolized fuel/graphite rained down on was dead within days and will be uninhabitable/unapproachable for centuries.
Radiation levels on the solid artificial surfaces in the area are no longer immediately harmful. As soon as you even approach the roadside and get near exposed soil or plants they peg generic rad meters.
In a lot of the Ukraine, once rare thyroid problems, cancers, and operations are now commonplace.
Pointing out that the effects of Chernobyl (and radiation in general) aren't the ZoMg END of the W0RLDz!!! that a lot of ignorant people claim they are is one thing, claiming that "no ill effects were ever measured" from Chernobyl is insane. The hundred thousand (out of half a million) liquidators that put a cap on the plant and are now dead before reaching 50 would like to have a word with you...
If only there were some terms like "alpha" and "beta" and "rc" to describe software that's not yet ready for general use and only for developers.
Or in the case of kde 4.0, "early sub-pre alpha." I remember quite vividly at the time of launch that they weren't saying anything like "don't use this if you're not a developer." No, I remember reading article after article raving about how awesome it was, how innovative that was, how pretty it was, how it and all the new backends like Akonadi and Strigi and Nepomuk were gonna revolutionize the whole desktop experience. Then everybody absolutely hated it, I personally found it used 10x the memory to do the same things as before, it turned my screen into a slideshow, and it crashed every 10 minutes. The only unequivocally positive change I noticed was that kmail now remained responsive while waiting on the remote mail server!
The "4.0 was a dev-only release" bullcrap started to try and retcon away just how badly they'd screwed up. And I can understand... I wouldn't want to remember 4.0 either.
Physics simulations involving discretized partial differential equations can make any machine less powerful than a Matroshka Brain cry uncle. If some of my optimizations work out, I'll be able to get near-slideshow framerates on a 512x256 2D simulation of a single, ideal, purely hydrodynamic fluid using nVidia's top of the line C2050 GPU.
Now consider that I'd prefer to have at least a thousand cells per side in all 3 dimensions, which makes the problem ten thousand times larger, preferably several thousand which would make it nearly a million times larger. Then add magnetism, resistance, viscosity and ExB drift, and move to at least a two or three fluid model, which would make for about 30 times the work per cell over what I've currently got running.
So before even beginning to consider atomic physics, radiation and non-ideal equations of state, I've made the problem about 20-30 million times more difficult than one which utilizes a GPU to the limit. Even if everything scaled perfectly across a thousand GPUs, major problems would take days or weeks to run:(
Slashdot Mirror
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest you haven't thought this brilliant, cunning plan through.
Hint: It's not just about carbon dioxide.
And once we've successfully got the size of government down to the point where it can be drowned in the bathtub at Grover Norquist's convenience, who exactly do you think it going to stand up to the corporate plutocrats, even in principle?
It may surprise you but there are a few people out there who actually will fight for the people given a chance. Think of the Roosevelts. Of course, since the modern GOP deliberately sabotages the government for the purpose of proving that government doesn't work...
Yeah, sure, which is why it took this guy a year of working on CAD and prototyping.
This may come as a shock to those poor souls who've never actually created something entirely novel, but doing or deriving something new is actually a remarkably difficult process. It only looks easy because we don't show you the prototype or publish the paper until we're done, and then we handhold you through all the hard parts. No shit it would be fairly easy to build more now, the original inventors have already done all the hard work for you. They've gone down all the wrong alleyways, made the dumb mistakes, ironed out most of the bugs, proven the control software is possible, and more. Here, try it yourself - prove the existence and uniqueness of solutions to the linear IVP, or the Bell Inequality, or the Optical Theorem, or derive the heat capacity of a classical ideal gas, without looking any part of the answer up.
It never ceases to amaze me that, even on supposedly technically-oriented message boards, we still have this group that looks at a new creation which took man-years of work or more to make, and says "Oh, pfft, that was easy, anyone could do that."
Either you've just demolished the argument for making anything illegal, or you didn't quite think your brilliant plan all the way through.
So once again... Do you truly feel that the right to control something as powerful and potentially dangerous and deadly as an automobile should not require first demonstrating some minimal competency and possibly a few other basic skills at operating one to a nominally disinterested 3rd party?
I have them installed, 260.19.29. For shits'n'giggles I downloaded some of the 4K videos on Youtube as a test...
mplayer can very nearly play 4096x2560 to fullscreen (2560x1600) using a single Athlon II core and a GeForce-240 (video is smooth, but audio eventually breaks up). Flash can almost get a smooth framerate on 480x360 windows on youtube, and the fullscreen button would be better termed the talking slideshow button.
Not to say that native is necessarily better... kde's dragon player is so horribly slow it makes Flash player look like mplayer. This may not directly be dragon's fault... in my experience, everything Qt4 touches is instantly covered in a thick layer of cold molasses and resin.
If you can come up with some other economical way for a typical 2-reactor plant to dump 6 gigawatts of leftover heat, by all means share.
I admit I'd be curious to see the calculations for a forced air cooled heat exchanger... it'd need to draw in roughly 50000 cubic meters of air per second, assuming an exhaust temp of 120*c is acceptable.
You realize the illusion of prosperity under the Bush administration was the same as the illusion of prosperity in the Roaring 20s right?
They're basically clones of each other... a false prosperity, supported by a bubble of circle-jerking investors, in which none of the "wealth" goes to the workers [during the 20s, income for the average American rose one percent and for the rich rose something like 50%], and in the end the bubble finally reaches a maximum inflation, jitters a bit, and implodes. Sound familiar?
If there is any causal connection, it's that the change in House control was the pin that pricked the bubble - the first investor to panic then brings the whole lie crashing down. Do you blame those who exposed the lie, or those who inflated it, created it, and enabled it?
Here's a hint, pal: If you think it's that easy, and it's not being done, it's because you are wrong, not because the entire world engineering community is stupid.
In related news tonight, the Dunning-Kruger Effect is in full effect in this thread.
It also wouldn't have the resources or ability to protect you from the corporate plutocrats, which is exactly why they're so very determinedly pushing this idea.
The solution to malicious behavior in governments is not to dismantle the government, it's to hunt down and remove the malicious people.
Except you and I both know that the idiots who get infected by the new virus every single time, who do the same things we tell them not to every time, will happily open any physical lock because the popup box says to.
Not until they are made to face major financial penalties for repeated stupidity will they stop being stupid. That means NOT repairing their box that they broke by being Fucking Retarded(tm) for the 1000th time.
Because when Hoover did nothing*, that sure worked out brilliantly. FDR initiates the new deal, economic cratering almost immediately halts and GDP starts going back up. 1936/7, Republicans demand new deal be cut back to balance budget, recession is immediate. Then shortly after we got into WWII, also known as "the biggest big-government deficit-spending jobs & stimulus program in all of history." Then the GI Bill paid to have them all sent off to school again and the next few decades were the zenith of American power and prestige around the world.
So, how's things going in Greece and Iceland?
*He actually did start the ball rolling on some stimulus-esqe stuff, but it was too little too late, and he didn't afaik do anything to stop the bank dominos from falling, which was the immediate short-term problem.
The operating principle is given in the second sentence of the goddamn summary: Fire neutrons in, watch radiation from activation products. As others have pointed out, otherwise known as Neutron Activation Spectroscopy.
Neutron radiation leads to neutron activation. I don't know off the top of my head what intensity of neutron radiation would be needed, but exposure which forms long-lived isotopes is cumulative. Common isotopes of iron, nickel and copper are all susceptible to some amount of activation.
Cross-section to spall neutrons off of U238 or Th232 are ~1barn with halflife of days, but the most common isotope of iron has a n-2n cross section of around half a barn and the result has a halflife of several years. Any nuke techs care to chime in?
I see where you're coming from, but wanting to permit some things and prohibit others is hardly unique to fascists, fundies or progressives. I'd argue that outside of a certain small set of things explicitly delimited in the Constitution as always allowed/always denied, it's the job of the legislature to permit unless explicitly denied, hence party platforms centered on denying certain things.
In any case, I think this comes down to a matter of definitions... You mean totalitarian, so why not just say totalitarian? Fascism and neo-Fascism both have specific characteristics other than totalitarianism - Romanticizing an imagined idyllic past, militancy and particularly (in Mussolini's words) "the merger of state and corporate power" - which are anathema to progressives.
Also it's worth noting the differences in how progressives and the religious right oppose things... Progressives want what amount to sin taxes on pot, soda and junk food, the fundies want to throw you in jail for doobies, booze or having an abortion.
I'm a PhD student whose job is currently get an MHD code running on multiple GPUs (getting it to run really fast on /one/ I have not yet quite done), and from my experiences, I sort of figured these were trivially parallel types of things.
There's only one kind of kernel I deal with that actually gets near full utilization without extensive hand-tuning (i.e. that could be written by a computer without human guidance) - the ones that do simple atomic operations on N input arrays and spits out M output arrays. Everything else takes weeks of agonizing hand-holding, tuning, and the occasional use of percussive maintainence before it gets past 10-20% efficiency. As you say, by the time you've solved the "parallel BS" for any nontrivial problem, you may as well have just written the GPU code yourself.
Like when liberals have government dictate to women what they can do about pregnancies. Or demand that two people who love each other not be able to get married if they're gay. Or have government agents forbid you from ending your life at a time of your choosing. And whenever anyone criticizes overreaching police, liberals in the US are first to trot out "if you have nothing to hide, you shouldn't be worried Comrade." And those far-left nuts in Arizona who passed a "papers, bitte" law clearly aimed at hispanics. And those insane socialists up in Wisconsin, out busting unions of working-class people in full force at the behest of a union of the rich.
Indeed, scarcely a week goes by before one hears of yet another perfidous attack by liberals on individual freedom.
I see this every now and then... Can someone please explain to me where in the bloody hell the idea that progressives are in any way related to fascism came from?
I've got a hunch, mind you, but I want independent confirmation...
Ah, I see for the moment the Party Line requires that Obama be an empty suit. No doubt when it's time to pass some legislation, he'll be an evil satanic genius perverting the system from within.
If you want energy prices to go down, the only thing that's going to make that happen is the civil wars in the middle east being resolved. That and gutpunching the oil companies and putting our boots on their necks for intentionally manipulating the market, but with the Republicans being what they are I'll count on the wars being over first.
With me it's never Firefox per se that does it, it's xulrunner and flash.
Computer's ground to a halt?
Hard drive paging like a mofo?
Why yes, xulrunner and flash are using 90% of all physical memory. Yet again. And I have flash-control plugins that only start the flash apps I say to start.
5-4 favoring the corporatists. That does seem to be the order of the day when it comes down to it.
Unless it involves the "b b but terrorists" legal cancer (You have no need to know about this, Citizen. Your betters will not abuse it), then it's 9-0.
Do all the Liquidators who are now dead (1/5) or crippled old men at age 50 (4/5) count?
The great majority of Chernobyl's fallout landed on eastern Europe (seeing as that's where it originated), not western. And about those ill effects...
The forest near Chernobyl that much of the aerosolized fuel/graphite rained down on was dead within days and will be uninhabitable/unapproachable for centuries.
Radiation levels on the solid artificial surfaces in the area are no longer immediately harmful. As soon as you even approach the roadside and get near exposed soil or plants they peg generic rad meters.
In a lot of the Ukraine, once rare thyroid problems, cancers, and operations are now commonplace.
Pointing out that the effects of Chernobyl (and radiation in general) aren't the ZoMg END of the W0RLDz!!! that a lot of ignorant people claim they are is one thing, claiming that "no ill effects were ever measured" from Chernobyl is insane. The hundred thousand (out of half a million) liquidators that put a cap on the plant and are now dead before reaching 50 would like to have a word with you...
Nitpick: next-generation designs are meant to run for 60-80 years, then be refurbed to run for 100-120.
(if current experience holds, they'll then be refurbished once more and ultimately run for 150-200)
If only there were some terms like "alpha" and "beta" and "rc" to describe software that's not yet ready for general use and only for developers.
Or in the case of kde 4.0, "early sub-pre alpha." I remember quite vividly at the time of launch that they weren't saying anything like "don't use this if you're not a developer." No, I remember reading article after article raving about how awesome it was, how innovative that was, how pretty it was, how it and all the new backends like Akonadi and Strigi and Nepomuk were gonna revolutionize the whole desktop experience. Then everybody absolutely hated it, I personally found it used 10x the memory to do the same things as before, it turned my screen into a slideshow, and it crashed every 10 minutes. The only unequivocally positive change I noticed was that kmail now remained responsive while waiting on the remote mail server!
The "4.0 was a dev-only release" bullcrap started to try and retcon away just how badly they'd screwed up. And I can understand... I wouldn't want to remember 4.0 either.
Physics simulations involving discretized partial differential equations can make any machine less powerful than a Matroshka Brain cry uncle. If some of my optimizations work out, I'll be able to get near-slideshow framerates on a 512x256 2D simulation of a single, ideal, purely hydrodynamic fluid using nVidia's top of the line C2050 GPU.
:(
Now consider that I'd prefer to have at least a thousand cells per side in all 3 dimensions, which makes the problem ten thousand times larger, preferably several thousand which would make it nearly a million times larger. Then add magnetism, resistance, viscosity and ExB drift, and move to at least a two or three fluid model, which would make for about 30 times the work per cell over what I've currently got running.
So before even beginning to consider atomic physics, radiation and non-ideal equations of state, I've made the problem about 20-30 million times more difficult than one which utilizes a GPU to the limit. Even if everything scaled perfectly across a thousand GPUs, major problems would take days or weeks to run