I'm an environmentalist, but I also know that if you put democracy "on hold" it's awfully hard to get it started again.
Lovelock is English, and Parliament suspended elections in both WWI and WWII. Let the leaders worry about the emergency without the distractions of getting reelected. Of course, the emergencies were a bit more obvious and short-term than climate change. Such suspensions are allowed under their rules, and they seemed to get things started again without any trouble. But they've had some practice at it.
Good points, and an apples-to-apples comparison is always difficult. While billed as a desktop, many of the Mini components are parts designed for mobile systems. Internal hard disk is 2.5", as is the external USB drive, and both spin down after a long enough period with no activity. Unused hardware components get powered off. The Core 2 Duo allows parts of the on-chip hardware to be shut down as well. The OS does as much with clock rates and voltage as it can, and does so aggressively. Some of Apple's literature says that the OS will, under the right conditions, slow things down between keystrokes.
Apple claims 13W idle for the new Minis (mine is a few years old now), but I consistently come in at about half that after its been sitting for several minutes. Arguably, it's not really "idling", but might be considered a semi-sleep state of some sort.
Agree that it's unimpressive. My Mac Mini running a 1.8 GHz Core 2 Duo, 2 GB RAM, built-in drive, assorted USB peripherals including a second drive, all running through a UPS, typically measures 5-7W at the wall when idling. From time to time I've tried to load it up so that everything is in use and the processors are pegged, but have never gotten above 70W, again measured at the wall. The graphics capabilities are pretty anemic, which may make a substantial difference relative to many systems. OS X appears to be rather aggressive about getting into that 5-7W mode.
Why is this being done as a federal law which regulates network users?
It seems to me that this is a policy that ought to be enforced by federal government sysadmins on their own networks...
In fact, the policy will be enforced by federal government sysadmins.
Absent direction,
those sysadmins
(or their bosses)
would be free to establish their own policies,
possibly varying wildly from agency to agency,
or choose to have none.
But the only mechanism Congress can use to establish a single consistent policy is to pass a law.
This is fairly routine;
Congress passes lots of laws to establish policies for how the government is supposed to operate:
document retention, required publication of results, etc, etc, etc.
Back in the day, individual telegraph and radio operators using morse code could very often be identified by their "hand", even when they had been through identical training (by the military, for example). Everyone develops a "rhythm" in signing their name which is so consistent that it can be used for biometric identification (google for dynamic signature verification). I suspect that my typing shows the same kind of consistent variations in timing for particular key sequences and that I could be identified from a large enough sample. With a pressure-sensitive keyboard, I suspect my typing "hand" is even more identifiable.
While I find the claims -- 95% accuracy from ten keystrokes -- to be suspicious, especially for broad characteristics like sex and age, I would want to see more of the background before I ruled it out completely.
And add in the reactor design proper would never have been licensed by any of the regulatory bodies in the US/Europe/Japan at any time.
Insanely large positive void coefficient, among other things.
In a fusion reactor, your energy is produced mainly in the form of neutrons (don't remember if these are slow, fast, or what)... and you get this energy out of the system... how?
In most proposals, let the neutrons transfer their kinetic energy to a bulk material, use that heat to boil water, and run the result through a steam turbine. Yes, it's a 75-year or longer effort to build the world's highest-tech... tea kettle.
Indeed. If I were running IT at a hospital -- or any other facility with medical records subject to the HIPAA security rules -- I would be annoyingly paranoid about standardized desktop platforms and application software. I'd also be looking for software vendors who had staff that understood HIPAA. Almost certainly true that MS has such staff, not nearly so clear about OSS.
OTOH, if I were sending out e-mail like that in the original post, and HIPAA was the root cause for the restrictions, it would clearly state that such uniformity had been deemed necessary to comply with the HIPAA rules within the available IT resources. I have always found that people react better if you give them a reason related to the business for what appear to be draconian restrictions.
I think Apple has taken a large gamble on the form factor,
since they don't have reasonable spur-of-the-instant input.
Digging out a wireless keyboard is a hassle.
Touch-typing on the flat screen is likely to prove difficult.
Check your calendar,
but adding new entries is hard.
Check your contact list,
but adding new people is hard.
Download a map,
but adding the notation that your friend says the bridge is out is hard.
Read your e-mail,
but don't compose a paragraph-length response.
I think the big question is whether
the iPad will survive the introduction of someone's similar device
that includes decent handwriting with a stylus.
The Bloom Box is advertised as 60% efficient at turning methane energy into electrical energy. The best most heat engines can do is about 35%...
Combined-cycle gas-fired plants are about 60% efficient.
Average loss to grid transmission is about 7%,
so a 60% box in my back yard would be more efficient,
but not enormously so.
Always questions about uptime and other reliability.
Plus the problems of keeping something that operates at 1,000 degrees C in my backyard...
Its pretty easy to island hop from mainland Greece to Crete. You would be looking at 20km at a stretch.
==========
The reason they're not thinking that is, probably, that there has as yet been no evidence that there were humans in mainland Greece anything like that early.
The logical answer.
Of course, that leaves the question of why
a group who could cross the 200 miles from northern Africa
stopped at Crete,
rather than island-hopping on across to Greece.
For gaming, probably not much. I did several modeling and simulation things that needed double-precision floating point, and the co-processor was much faster than the Linux emulation at that time. Many applications that needed just a little floating point faked it with fixed-point calculations, swapping accuracy for speed. As I recall, the big impact on rendering for games came with the introduction of the MMX and more especially the SSE instructions.
I don't drag it out very often, but still have this one up on the closet shelf. 20 MHz 386SX, separate floating point coprocessor, pre-1.0 Linux, MGR windowing software. Passive matrix 640x480 LCD display, MGR drove it in one-bit mode. I recall doing a large amount of technical work on it -- simulations, 100-page technical reports, etc. Four D-sized nicad batteries lasted about two hours, but it was easy to carry a spare set.
Sorry people of carriage, but if your caboose cannot fit into the seat to the point where you need to lift your armrest, you simply need to buy another god damned seat.
Yep. I've been known to demand that the person next to me leave the armrest down, and called the flight attendant to enforce it. There is no requirement that passengers be allowed to put armrests up during a flight if the adjacent passenger does not wish to. I find that mentioning "inappropriate physical contact" with a hint of sexual harassment gets the airline's staff's attention.
China has announced research programs, but almost all of the nuclear reactors recently finished, under construction, or planned for the near term are imported technology. Operating fleets of Westinghouse, Areva, and CANDU reactors makes you a big operator -- but doesn't position you to export those technologies. For the most part, China is focused on very large pressurized water reactors. Those may make sense for China's situation, but are not (IMO) the right "export" product for them. The "growth" market for reactors/generators would seem to be developing nations; since most of those lack large national grids, smaller reactors that can feed into regional grids would seem to make more sense as a product for that market.
The Touch Book is getting close.
Nine-inch touch screen, three pounds, 10 hour battery life fully assembled.
Screen is removable and can be used as a tablet (more limited battery life in that mode).
Runs multiple distros.
Shipped load includes: Firefox, OpenOffice, evince and fbreader, some sort of video and audio playback app, and bunch of other stuff.
I'd be seriously tempted by one, but I'm dependent on a piece of my own software written for Perl/Tkx, and AFAICT, no one's put the combination of Perl/Tcl/Tk on it yet.
Create an approved testing regimen, and certify each one that's going into a clinic.
Develop the specification.
Implement the test harness.
Hire permanent staff to manage the testing, maintain the harness, etc.
If any of the specification requires testing a component to destruction,
you have to sample the production in order to derive the statistics
and then certify the design,
not the individual devices.
Post the necessary performance bonds assuring the quality of your work.
Who pays for periodic recertification?
Certification can be very expensive unless it can be spread
across a lot of units.
Technical notation tends to be quite dense -- subscripts, superscripts, integral and summation symbols, etc. Writing legibly pretty much requires the kind of feedback provided by a pencil and paper -- the drawing instrument and the results are there together, not separated as in the case of a screen and separate graphics tablet (or even worse, a mouse). When my daughter was in college, I was occasionally called upon to provide some calculus tutoring. A simple shared whiteboard application let us both look at the same "piece of paper" while we talked. But writing out even simple expressions involving derivatives and integrals was very difficult and slow without a touchscreen.
My own opinion on the technology requirements are (1) better than 100 pixels/inch display and (2) half-pixel resolution and pressure sensitivity for stylus position. Plus durable and cheap, of course.
Limitless has its limits. Page management for the drawings, for instance. Can we get something that will extend the page to the right (or left) as you draw and write?"
I wrote my own small note-taking app at one point -- supported typed text, simple drawing, pasting images, etc. One of the early incarnations used the idea of a single, essentially unlimited piece of paper. Start taking notes, then just move off in whatever direction made sense at the time. It was... interesting. Searching for text strings or by date/time made it almost usable. A low-res representation of an entire page that had been in use for a while revealed that, for the most part, I was still organizing things as multiple separate pages, just with odd orderings and linkages.
Spot on. I was a double major, math and comp sci, and believe strongly that the mental processes involved in constructing proofs are very similar to the processes involved in debugging. At any given point in the code, what conditions should be satisfied? In the case of an erroneous result, what conditions would lead to this particular error state? Pushing the concepts far enough leads you to invariants and provably correct code.
Indeed. Not to mention that each terminal took up a few square feet of dedicated desk space, and consumed prodigious amounts of electricity (by contemporary standards).
The missing piece of the cheap child-oriented computer is an inexpensive durable display. OLED may get there -- it is inherently capable of being more robust than LCD, but the materials are still too expensive. If the resolution and monochrome display of the PLATO IV is acceptable, OLED displays are feasible today. I suspect that it is entirely possible to put something as capable as a PLATO into a 10x10x1 inch block of plastic that's completely sealed (recharge the battery by induction) and durable enough for a third grader for $100.
One of the differences in cost between truly high-speed rail in the US and in other parts of the world may be the large degree of road build-out in the US. Operating a train safely at 200+ MPH pretty much requires grade separation; that is, either the road or the track needs to be elevated at intersections. When the US Interstate highways were built, they caused a great deal of difficulty in rural areas because only a limited number of overpasses were built. It was not uncommon for two fields two miles apart worked by the same farmer to be suddenly separated by 20 miles of driving distance.
Similar problems in the often sprawling suburbs around the cities. Lots of existing at-grade crossings would have to be rebuilt in order to avoid slowing the train to 25-30 MPH while still many miles outside the city.
...would anyone waste there time learning football if they had to spend there first 3 years doing nothing but learning how to throw the perfect spiral before they could play the game?
Completely off topic, but... I do some epee fencing. My master has a long-standing interest in the history of both the weapon and methods of instruction. 400 years ago, many masters required beginning students (typically children in the aristocracy) to spend two years or more on footwork before they were allowed to pick up a blade. The consequences were somewhat different, of course; good footwork didn't mean that you would win the duel, but bad footwork would get you killed fairly quickly.
Lots and lots of comments about syntax (C's sparseness, Python's white space, VBA's readability), but not many about data. If he likes programming, he's very quickly going to be managing collections of data. My short list of mandatory data aggregates would be lists and associative arrays, with various ways of pulling things out of the lists. Lists of lists in some form. All garbage collected. In my experience of trying to explain things to non-programmers, lists and some form of tag-value pairs are the easiest things to get across, especially if there's some syntactic sugar.
For further down the road, blocks of generated executable code as first-class objects are mandatory. Which leaves out many compiled languages. But I admit that this makes me at least a little odd.
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Lovelock is English, and Parliament suspended elections in both WWI and WWII. Let the leaders worry about the emergency without the distractions of getting reelected. Of course, the emergencies were a bit more obvious and short-term than climate change. Such suspensions are allowed under their rules, and they seemed to get things started again without any trouble. But they've had some practice at it.
Good points, and an apples-to-apples comparison is always difficult. While billed as a desktop, many of the Mini components are parts designed for mobile systems. Internal hard disk is 2.5", as is the external USB drive, and both spin down after a long enough period with no activity. Unused hardware components get powered off. The Core 2 Duo allows parts of the on-chip hardware to be shut down as well. The OS does as much with clock rates and voltage as it can, and does so aggressively. Some of Apple's literature says that the OS will, under the right conditions, slow things down between keystrokes.
Apple claims 13W idle for the new Minis (mine is a few years old now), but I consistently come in at about half that after its been sitting for several minutes. Arguably, it's not really "idling", but might be considered a semi-sleep state of some sort.
Agree that it's unimpressive. My Mac Mini running a 1.8 GHz Core 2 Duo, 2 GB RAM, built-in drive, assorted USB peripherals including a second drive, all running through a UPS, typically measures 5-7W at the wall when idling. From time to time I've tried to load it up so that everything is in use and the processors are pegged, but have never gotten above 70W, again measured at the wall. The graphics capabilities are pretty anemic, which may make a substantial difference relative to many systems. OS X appears to be rather aggressive about getting into that 5-7W mode.
In fact, the policy will be enforced by federal government sysadmins. Absent direction, those sysadmins (or their bosses) would be free to establish their own policies, possibly varying wildly from agency to agency, or choose to have none. But the only mechanism Congress can use to establish a single consistent policy is to pass a law. This is fairly routine; Congress passes lots of laws to establish policies for how the government is supposed to operate: document retention, required publication of results, etc, etc, etc.
Back in the day, individual telegraph and radio operators using morse code could very often be identified by their "hand", even when they had been through identical training (by the military, for example). Everyone develops a "rhythm" in signing their name which is so consistent that it can be used for biometric identification (google for dynamic signature verification). I suspect that my typing shows the same kind of consistent variations in timing for particular key sequences and that I could be identified from a large enough sample. With a pressure-sensitive keyboard, I suspect my typing "hand" is even more identifiable.
While I find the claims -- 95% accuracy from ten keystrokes -- to be suspicious, especially for broad characteristics like sex and age, I would want to see more of the background before I ruled it out completely.
And add in the reactor design proper would never have been licensed by any of the regulatory bodies in the US/Europe/Japan at any time. Insanely large positive void coefficient, among other things.
In most proposals, let the neutrons transfer their kinetic energy to a bulk material, use that heat to boil water, and run the result through a steam turbine. Yes, it's a 75-year or longer effort to build the world's highest-tech... tea kettle.
You are not alone. I blame it on the yellow strap fooling me into seeing "p" when just glancing at the shirt. Either that, or we're both sick.
Indeed. If I were running IT at a hospital -- or any other facility with medical records subject to the HIPAA security rules -- I would be annoyingly paranoid about standardized desktop platforms and application software. I'd also be looking for software vendors who had staff that understood HIPAA. Almost certainly true that MS has such staff, not nearly so clear about OSS.
OTOH, if I were sending out e-mail like that in the original post, and HIPAA was the root cause for the restrictions, it would clearly state that such uniformity had been deemed necessary to comply with the HIPAA rules within the available IT resources. I have always found that people react better if you give them a reason related to the business for what appear to be draconian restrictions.
I think Apple has taken a large gamble on the form factor, since they don't have reasonable spur-of-the-instant input. Digging out a wireless keyboard is a hassle. Touch-typing on the flat screen is likely to prove difficult. Check your calendar, but adding new entries is hard. Check your contact list, but adding new people is hard. Download a map, but adding the notation that your friend says the bridge is out is hard. Read your e-mail, but don't compose a paragraph-length response. I think the big question is whether the iPad will survive the introduction of someone's similar device that includes decent handwriting with a stylus.
Combined-cycle gas-fired plants are about 60% efficient. Average loss to grid transmission is about 7%, so a 60% box in my back yard would be more efficient, but not enormously so. Always questions about uptime and other reliability. Plus the problems of keeping something that operates at 1,000 degrees C in my backyard...
The logical answer. Of course, that leaves the question of why a group who could cross the 200 miles from northern Africa stopped at Crete, rather than island-hopping on across to Greece.
For gaming, probably not much. I did several modeling and simulation things that needed double-precision floating point, and the co-processor was much faster than the Linux emulation at that time. Many applications that needed just a little floating point faked it with fixed-point calculations, swapping accuracy for speed. As I recall, the big impact on rendering for games came with the introduction of the MMX and more especially the SSE instructions.
I don't drag it out very often, but still have this one up on the closet shelf. 20 MHz 386SX, separate floating point coprocessor, pre-1.0 Linux, MGR windowing software. Passive matrix 640x480 LCD display, MGR drove it in one-bit mode. I recall doing a large amount of technical work on it -- simulations, 100-page technical reports, etc. Four D-sized nicad batteries lasted about two hours, but it was easy to carry a spare set.
Yep. I've been known to demand that the person next to me leave the armrest down, and called the flight attendant to enforce it. There is no requirement that passengers be allowed to put armrests up during a flight if the adjacent passenger does not wish to. I find that mentioning "inappropriate physical contact" with a hint of sexual harassment gets the airline's staff's attention.
China has announced research programs, but almost all of the nuclear reactors recently finished, under construction, or planned for the near term are imported technology. Operating fleets of Westinghouse, Areva, and CANDU reactors makes you a big operator -- but doesn't position you to export those technologies. For the most part, China is focused on very large pressurized water reactors. Those may make sense for China's situation, but are not (IMO) the right "export" product for them. The "growth" market for reactors/generators would seem to be developing nations; since most of those lack large national grids, smaller reactors that can feed into regional grids would seem to make more sense as a product for that market.
The Touch Book is getting close. Nine-inch touch screen, three pounds, 10 hour battery life fully assembled. Screen is removable and can be used as a tablet (more limited battery life in that mode). Runs multiple distros. Shipped load includes: Firefox, OpenOffice, evince and fbreader, some sort of video and audio playback app, and bunch of other stuff. I'd be seriously tempted by one, but I'm dependent on a piece of my own software written for Perl/Tkx, and AFAICT, no one's put the combination of Perl/Tcl/Tk on it yet.
Develop the specification. Implement the test harness. Hire permanent staff to manage the testing, maintain the harness, etc. If any of the specification requires testing a component to destruction, you have to sample the production in order to derive the statistics and then certify the design, not the individual devices. Post the necessary performance bonds assuring the quality of your work. Who pays for periodic recertification?
Certification can be very expensive unless it can be spread across a lot of units.
Technical notation tends to be quite dense -- subscripts, superscripts, integral and summation symbols, etc. Writing legibly pretty much requires the kind of feedback provided by a pencil and paper -- the drawing instrument and the results are there together, not separated as in the case of a screen and separate graphics tablet (or even worse, a mouse). When my daughter was in college, I was occasionally called upon to provide some calculus tutoring. A simple shared whiteboard application let us both look at the same "piece of paper" while we talked. But writing out even simple expressions involving derivatives and integrals was very difficult and slow without a touchscreen.
My own opinion on the technology requirements are (1) better than 100 pixels/inch display and (2) half-pixel resolution and pressure sensitivity for stylus position. Plus durable and cheap, of course.
I wrote my own small note-taking app at one point -- supported typed text, simple drawing, pasting images, etc. One of the early incarnations used the idea of a single, essentially unlimited piece of paper. Start taking notes, then just move off in whatever direction made sense at the time. It was... interesting. Searching for text strings or by date/time made it almost usable. A low-res representation of an entire page that had been in use for a while revealed that, for the most part, I was still organizing things as multiple separate pages, just with odd orderings and linkages.
Spot on. I was a double major, math and comp sci, and believe strongly that the mental processes involved in constructing proofs are very similar to the processes involved in debugging. At any given point in the code, what conditions should be satisfied? In the case of an erroneous result, what conditions would lead to this particular error state? Pushing the concepts far enough leads you to invariants and provably correct code.
Indeed. Not to mention that each terminal took up a few square feet of dedicated desk space, and consumed prodigious amounts of electricity (by contemporary standards).
The missing piece of the cheap child-oriented computer is an inexpensive durable display. OLED may get there -- it is inherently capable of being more robust than LCD, but the materials are still too expensive. If the resolution and monochrome display of the PLATO IV is acceptable, OLED displays are feasible today. I suspect that it is entirely possible to put something as capable as a PLATO into a 10x10x1 inch block of plastic that's completely sealed (recharge the battery by induction) and durable enough for a third grader for $100.
One of the differences in cost between truly high-speed rail in the US and in other parts of the world may be the large degree of road build-out in the US. Operating a train safely at 200+ MPH pretty much requires grade separation; that is, either the road or the track needs to be elevated at intersections. When the US Interstate highways were built, they caused a great deal of difficulty in rural areas because only a limited number of overpasses were built. It was not uncommon for two fields two miles apart worked by the same farmer to be suddenly separated by 20 miles of driving distance.
Similar problems in the often sprawling suburbs around the cities. Lots of existing at-grade crossings would have to be rebuilt in order to avoid slowing the train to 25-30 MPH while still many miles outside the city.
Completely off topic, but... I do some epee fencing. My master has a long-standing interest in the history of both the weapon and methods of instruction. 400 years ago, many masters required beginning students (typically children in the aristocracy) to spend two years or more on footwork before they were allowed to pick up a blade. The consequences were somewhat different, of course; good footwork didn't mean that you would win the duel, but bad footwork would get you killed fairly quickly.
Lots and lots of comments about syntax (C's sparseness, Python's white space, VBA's readability), but not many about data. If he likes programming, he's very quickly going to be managing collections of data. My short list of mandatory data aggregates would be lists and associative arrays, with various ways of pulling things out of the lists. Lists of lists in some form. All garbage collected. In my experience of trying to explain things to non-programmers, lists and some form of tag-value pairs are the easiest things to get across, especially if there's some syntactic sugar.
For further down the road, blocks of generated executable code as first-class objects are mandatory. Which leaves out many compiled languages. But I admit that this makes me at least a little odd.