It's not clear that, even without the executive branch's decision, continuing with Yucca Mountain was going to be easy. For the first time in pretty much a generation, in 2012 the SCOTUS ruled that there are things that the federal government can't force individual states to accommodate. The court might decide that taking even the perceived risks associated with transporting and storing large volumes of high-level nuclear waste is one of those things. The 1987 statutory change that said only Yucca Mountain could be studied was at least a little dodgy -- attached to a budget reconciliation bill in conference committee and never debated in Congress. There's some evidence that the hydrology at Yucca is more complex than originally believed. If Yucca Mountain got hauled back into court on state coercion grounds, there would be a lot of pressure to require the DOE to unseal the records on the clean-up at Rocky Flats in Colorado, which many people think was inadequate because of the government's subsequent behavior with regard to the "clean" site. The same sort of issue came up over the last few years when one of the tribes in Utah proposed using tribal lands as a "parking" site for dry cask spent fuel storage -- the utilities proposing that plan have abandoned it.
The American West has become much more populous, much more urban, and much more influential from an economic perspective since plans to locate the permanent waste site for (predominantly) eastern reactors in the West were originally floated.
The Ogallala "state" would be a disaster. Let's start with the name; the new state covers at best half of the High Plains/Ogallala aquifer, and three-quarters of the new state doesn't overlay the aquifer at all. For that area as a whole, far more surface water diversions are made than is withdrawn from the aquifer: the Red River diversions in North Dakota; the massive Missouri River diversions in Montana and South Dakota; the Platte River diversions in Colorado, Wyoming and Nebraska; the Republican River diversions in Colorado, Nebraska, and Kansas. The eastern portion of "Shiprock" is much more dependent on the aquifer than Ogallala is.
The biggest problem, though, is that for purely population counting purposes, the Front Range portion of Colorado (dominated by Denver and its suburbs) has been attached to an enormous rural area with which Denver has little or no current cultural or economic tie. The only positive thing you can say about it is that Shiprock makes even less sense.
Having a real-time chat for office hours is a nice shiny toy, but it's not really useful for demonstrations or sketches.
One of my larger disappointments is the lack of good readily-available free multimedia conferencing. Checking my old lab notebooks, it's been a few months short of 20 years since I built multiple sets of prototype software for doing real-time audio, video, and a shared piece of paper over IP networks. When I was doing that, I really expected that within a decade we would have appropriate inexpensive I/O devices to make the paper part truly useful -- trying to write calculus equations or sketch a curve quickly really needs the feedback of a stylus on a surface where the drawing is visible under the stylus tip. And I expected IP multicast to be readily available, which helps a lot with multi-point distribution of the audio and video. I had real people at locations as far apart as Denver and Minneapolis using a version of the software very effectively over our corporate network, mostly sans video because there wasn't enough bandwidth. One of those users came to get me the day they were running a seven-way conversation using three copies of the application to give them three simultaneous sheets of paper (mostly cutting and pasting pieces of screen shots, then marking them up, with a record of the session going into a file). I thought, "Man, this is going to make a bunch of things a lot quicker and easier." Starting with office hours.
Like I said, one of the bigger disappoints in my technical career.
IE fiasco? Are you talking about the same "fiasco" where IE ended up with around 95% marketshare? Sounds like a raging success to me.
The same fiasco where, absent George W. Bush beating Al Gore (a result that would almost certainly have gone the other way if Ralph Nader had not been on the ballot in Florida and taken 3% of the vote) and changing the direction of the Justice Department, MS winds up as two companies -- an OS company and an application company, forbidden from cooperating. A business strategy that comes within an eyelash of getting your company broken up by the anti-trust people is a fiasco for management, at least IMO.
The anti-drug movement didn't need any help from those lobbies. The original anti-cannabis legislation was part of a wave of laws controlling narcotics in general, and didn't outlaw growing hemp for industrial purposes. Those narcotics laws were passed at least a decade before the US government report suggesting hemp could compete with wood for paper pulp was published. As it turns out, the report was inaccurate on several counts, and at least with the technology of the time (19-teens), hemp fibers were not price competitive with wood. The same sentiments that led to those narcotic control laws culminated 15 or so years later in the 18th amendment to the US Constitution, which banned production of beverages containing ethanol.
Just a nit, but clarinet is more like chording input -- multiple fingers change position at once. I assume that any sort of chording keyboard that recognizes particular combinations as entire words is illegal for typing competitions. Basic certification as a stenotype operator requires that you be able to do on the order of 180 words per minute. There's considerable dispute about the world record for stenotypes, but it's clearly in the 350-375 words per minute range, much higher than the record for character-at-a-time typists.
How else can you explain the infestations of Dogbert-style consultants, over-priced/under-performing product acquisitions, and expensive projects that fail more often than not in the larger enterprises? It's like they took all the money they saved by leveraging their synergies and went looking for ways to piss it away?
Not stupidity, perhaps, but rather difficulties with making the mental transition from "we're a start-up and everything depends on the share price increasing by leaps and bounds every year" to "we're a mature company." The only way to drive the share price is by growing revenues, hence the need to buy companies with existing products and customer bases. And to pump money into projects where there's demonstrated potential for high revenues (eg, MS could see how much money there was in game consoles, if only they could take the market share away from Sony and Nintendo). And God forbid that we share the profits with the shareholders by consistently paying a reasonable dividend -- we don't share profits, they'll have to make their money off the capital gains.
It's not free, but a student license isn't much more than the high-end calculators (at least at local bookstore prices) and it will do just about anything you can imagine needing up through at least calculus. Even the mobile or browser front ends that use a Wolfram server are damned good, so long as you have network connectivity.
This is related to what I was thinking. At some speed on the external interconnect, things like parasitic capacitance have to become a factor. Some individual parts of the overall capacitance budget are approaching the single pF range; given a pin and socket, it may not be possible to meet that.
Or take ebook readers (certainly personal devices): that book you just downloaded to your Kindle is DRMed and stuck there!
TTBOMK, all of the DRM schemes in common use for e-books have been broken.
Of course, you have to get the files onto a normal sort of PC in order to decrypt them.
I work for a semiconductor company and we also stopped doing business with Apple... that they constantly break contracts in order to demand lower prices. We were losing money on every part sold to Apple.
With what results? Have you found other customers who will buy comparable amounts (in aggregate) and pay higher prices? Or did your company's product volume simply decrease?
Given the moon's 28.5 day rotation, wouldn't a single antenna on the far side of the moon be blocked from any particular deep-space target for significant periods of time? On the order of two weeks out of every month? So you'd need at least a couple of these in order to avoid the problem.
Or state the full value of the contents and be prepared to pay higher shipping rates. Standard contracts, at least for shipping domestically in the US, limit the shippers' liability to a few dollars per pound.
Good story about Murphy's Law. Many years ago I was shipping a complete lab from Georgia to New Jersey. Everything in custom crates, properly secured and padded. Somewhere in Virginia a tank truck making deliveries to gas stations hit the truck carrying my stuff, and everything got burned to a crisp. Had to pay well beyond standard shipping rates because I declared the full value of the gear, but the shipping company cut me the check for the stated value in a day or two.
Isn't it astounding how many of the "problems" involving health care financing that show up at Slashdot would be solved with single-payer, or regulation of medical insurance companies so that the system is functionally single-payer? And that 33 of 34 OECD countries have figured that out? And just coincidentally, that those 33 all have substantially lower spending for similar (and in several cases superior) health outcomes than the US?
Not to mention that a single-payer system that brought health-care spending into line with the rest of the world would free up substantial amounts to support research in areas such as fusion, space, etc?
but the point of most "intro to computers" courses at this point is to prepare people to use basic productivity software to complete the rest of their coursework.
This.
If you have to write, the profs will expect real Word files
(and while things have improved,.doc files exported from Libre Office or other word processors
still manage to screw up the formatting sometimes).
If you have to submit supporting calculations, the profs will expect real Excel files
(possibly including VBA macros that they provide).
If you have to do presentations, the profs will expect real Powerpoint files.
I'm somewhat surprised that there's no way to test out,
but the real purpose of the class is to try to make sure that everyone has some basic competency
with the tools that are required by the school.
There appear to be a couple of extraneous decimal points in the post. If there's someplace that I can buy hard disks for 0.23 cents per gigabyte (a bit over $1.00 for a 500-gig drive), I haven't seen it.
You do raise the (to me) interesting question of whether or not this could have been made on a multi-axis CNC milling machine. I'm not sure how much of the interior of an object contemporary machines can remove through openings from the outside.
Additive processes can work stainless steel and titanium with relatively little loss in overall strength compared to castings, so there's little question that 3D printing can make teeth or a beak that are strong enough. Metal-based printing is, as I understand it, much more expensive to do than polymer printing.
Section (1) bans things broadly. Section (2) lists exceptions that are legal. The judge cites Section (2)(g)(i), which makes interception legal if the communication system is configured so that it is readily available to the general public. An unencrypted wifi base station at a location where no physical trespass is needed certainly appears to meet that standard. If things were to go farther, I read Section (2)(g)(v) as saying that even if the wifi is encrypted, anyone who is given the key by the operator can legally intercept the encrypted frames. As soon as the users do their own end-to-end encryption of the packet contents, everything would change.
Cites, please? And is the statute (illegal implies it's either in statute or a regulatory rule with the force of law) specific to cell phones? Back in the day, when I paid some attention to this type of thing, the case law was pretty clear that if you transmitted unencrypted material you had no expectation of privacy, hence no wiretap order was needed.
The next step in the dance appears to be dispute between the UCI and the USADA over who has final say. USADA is saying that Armstrong is guilty as charged once he declines arbitration and the WADA code forces UCI to strip him of his titles. UCI is saying that the same code requires the USADA to lay out its case in detail before UCI is forced to do anything. No one knows how this is going to turn out yet.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not clear that, even without the executive branch's decision, continuing with Yucca Mountain was going to be easy. For the first time in pretty much a generation, in 2012 the SCOTUS ruled that there are things that the federal government can't force individual states to accommodate. The court might decide that taking even the perceived risks associated with transporting and storing large volumes of high-level nuclear waste is one of those things. The 1987 statutory change that said only Yucca Mountain could be studied was at least a little dodgy -- attached to a budget reconciliation bill in conference committee and never debated in Congress. There's some evidence that the hydrology at Yucca is more complex than originally believed. If Yucca Mountain got hauled back into court on state coercion grounds, there would be a lot of pressure to require the DOE to unseal the records on the clean-up at Rocky Flats in Colorado, which many people think was inadequate because of the government's subsequent behavior with regard to the "clean" site. The same sort of issue came up over the last few years when one of the tribes in Utah proposed using tribal lands as a "parking" site for dry cask spent fuel storage -- the utilities proposing that plan have abandoned it.
The American West has become much more populous, much more urban, and much more influential from an economic perspective since plans to locate the permanent waste site for (predominantly) eastern reactors in the West were originally floated.
The Ogallala "state" would be a disaster. Let's start with the name; the new state covers at best half of the High Plains/Ogallala aquifer, and three-quarters of the new state doesn't overlay the aquifer at all. For that area as a whole, far more surface water diversions are made than is withdrawn from the aquifer: the Red River diversions in North Dakota; the massive Missouri River diversions in Montana and South Dakota; the Platte River diversions in Colorado, Wyoming and Nebraska; the Republican River diversions in Colorado, Nebraska, and Kansas. The eastern portion of "Shiprock" is much more dependent on the aquifer than Ogallala is.
The biggest problem, though, is that for purely population counting purposes, the Front Range portion of Colorado (dominated by Denver and its suburbs) has been attached to an enormous rural area with which Denver has little or no current cultural or economic tie. The only positive thing you can say about it is that Shiprock makes even less sense.
One of my larger disappointments is the lack of good readily-available free multimedia conferencing. Checking my old lab notebooks, it's been a few months short of 20 years since I built multiple sets of prototype software for doing real-time audio, video, and a shared piece of paper over IP networks. When I was doing that, I really expected that within a decade we would have appropriate inexpensive I/O devices to make the paper part truly useful -- trying to write calculus equations or sketch a curve quickly really needs the feedback of a stylus on a surface where the drawing is visible under the stylus tip. And I expected IP multicast to be readily available, which helps a lot with multi-point distribution of the audio and video. I had real people at locations as far apart as Denver and Minneapolis using a version of the software very effectively over our corporate network, mostly sans video because there wasn't enough bandwidth. One of those users came to get me the day they were running a seven-way conversation using three copies of the application to give them three simultaneous sheets of paper (mostly cutting and pasting pieces of screen shots, then marking them up, with a record of the session going into a file). I thought, "Man, this is going to make a bunch of things a lot quicker and easier." Starting with office hours.
Like I said, one of the bigger disappoints in my technical career.
The same fiasco where, absent George W. Bush beating Al Gore (a result that would almost certainly have gone the other way if Ralph Nader had not been on the ballot in Florida and taken 3% of the vote) and changing the direction of the Justice Department, MS winds up as two companies -- an OS company and an application company, forbidden from cooperating. A business strategy that comes within an eyelash of getting your company broken up by the anti-trust people is a fiasco for management, at least IMO.
The anti-drug movement didn't need any help from those lobbies. The original anti-cannabis legislation was part of a wave of laws controlling narcotics in general, and didn't outlaw growing hemp for industrial purposes. Those narcotics laws were passed at least a decade before the US government report suggesting hemp could compete with wood for paper pulp was published. As it turns out, the report was inaccurate on several counts, and at least with the technology of the time (19-teens), hemp fibers were not price competitive with wood. The same sentiments that led to those narcotic control laws culminated 15 or so years later in the 18th amendment to the US Constitution, which banned production of beverages containing ethanol.
Just a nit, but clarinet is more like chording input -- multiple fingers change position at once. I assume that any sort of chording keyboard that recognizes particular combinations as entire words is illegal for typing competitions. Basic certification as a stenotype operator requires that you be able to do on the order of 180 words per minute. There's considerable dispute about the world record for stenotypes, but it's clearly in the 350-375 words per minute range, much higher than the record for character-at-a-time typists.
How else can you explain the infestations of Dogbert-style consultants, over-priced/under-performing product acquisitions, and expensive projects that fail more often than not in the larger enterprises? It's like they took all the money they saved by leveraging their synergies and went looking for ways to piss it away?
Not stupidity, perhaps, but rather difficulties with making the mental transition from "we're a start-up and everything depends on the share price increasing by leaps and bounds every year" to "we're a mature company." The only way to drive the share price is by growing revenues, hence the need to buy companies with existing products and customer bases. And to pump money into projects where there's demonstrated potential for high revenues (eg, MS could see how much money there was in game consoles, if only they could take the market share away from Sony and Nintendo). And God forbid that we share the profits with the shareholders by consistently paying a reasonable dividend -- we don't share profits, they'll have to make their money off the capital gains.
It's not free, but a student license isn't much more than the high-end calculators (at least at local bookstore prices) and it will do just about anything you can imagine needing up through at least calculus. Even the mobile or browser front ends that use a Wolfram server are damned good, so long as you have network connectivity.
This is related to what I was thinking. At some speed on the external interconnect, things like parasitic capacitance have to become a factor. Some individual parts of the overall capacitance budget are approaching the single pF range; given a pin and socket, it may not be possible to meet that.
Also the Trexa platform.
TTBOMK, all of the DRM schemes in common use for e-books have been broken. Of course, you have to get the files onto a normal sort of PC in order to decrypt them.
With what results? Have you found other customers who will buy comparable amounts (in aggregate) and pay higher prices? Or did your company's product volume simply decrease?
Given the moon's 28.5 day rotation, wouldn't a single antenna on the far side of the moon be blocked from any particular deep-space target for significant periods of time? On the order of two weeks out of every month? So you'd need at least a couple of these in order to avoid the problem.
Or state the full value of the contents and be prepared to pay higher shipping rates. Standard contracts, at least for shipping domestically in the US, limit the shippers' liability to a few dollars per pound.
Good story about Murphy's Law. Many years ago I was shipping a complete lab from Georgia to New Jersey. Everything in custom crates, properly secured and padded. Somewhere in Virginia a tank truck making deliveries to gas stations hit the truck carrying my stuff, and everything got burned to a crisp. Had to pay well beyond standard shipping rates because I declared the full value of the gear, but the shipping company cut me the check for the stated value in a day or two.
Isn't it astounding how many of the "problems" involving health care financing that show up at Slashdot would be solved with single-payer, or regulation of medical insurance companies so that the system is functionally single-payer? And that 33 of 34 OECD countries have figured that out? And just coincidentally, that those 33 all have substantially lower spending for similar (and in several cases superior) health outcomes than the US?
Not to mention that a single-payer system that brought health-care spending into line with the rest of the world would free up substantial amounts to support research in areas such as fusion, space, etc?
Slackware on Floppies (Oh so many floppies)
Manchester Computer Center Interim Linux, on remarkably few floppies.
This. If you have to write, the profs will expect real Word files (and while things have improved, .doc files exported from Libre Office or other word processors
still manage to screw up the formatting sometimes).
If you have to submit supporting calculations, the profs will expect real Excel files
(possibly including VBA macros that they provide).
If you have to do presentations, the profs will expect real Powerpoint files.
I'm somewhat surprised that there's no way to test out,
but the real purpose of the class is to try to make sure that everyone has some basic competency
with the tools that are required by the school.
There appear to be a couple of extraneous decimal points in the post. If there's someplace that I can buy hard disks for 0.23 cents per gigabyte (a bit over $1.00 for a 500-gig drive), I haven't seen it.
You do raise the (to me) interesting question of whether or not this could have been made on a multi-axis CNC milling machine. I'm not sure how much of the interior of an object contemporary machines can remove through openings from the outside.
Additive processes can work stainless steel and titanium with relatively little loss in overall strength compared to castings, so there's little question that 3D printing can make teeth or a beak that are strong enough. Metal-based printing is, as I understand it, much more expensive to do than polymer printing.
Section (1) bans things broadly. Section (2) lists exceptions that are legal. The judge cites Section (2)(g)(i), which makes interception legal if the communication system is configured so that it is readily available to the general public. An unencrypted wifi base station at a location where no physical trespass is needed certainly appears to meet that standard. If things were to go farther, I read Section (2)(g)(v) as saying that even if the wifi is encrypted, anyone who is given the key by the operator can legally intercept the encrypted frames. As soon as the users do their own end-to-end encryption of the packet contents, everything would change.
Cites, please? And is the statute (illegal implies it's either in statute or a regulatory rule with the force of law) specific to cell phones? Back in the day, when I paid some attention to this type of thing, the case law was pretty clear that if you transmitted unencrypted material you had no expectation of privacy, hence no wiretap order was needed.
4.2 million, not billion. About 2^22 files.
The article has been updated to indicate he's at the University of Miami, not FSU.
The next step in the dance appears to be dispute between the UCI and the USADA over who has final say. USADA is saying that Armstrong is guilty as charged once he declines arbitration and the WADA code forces UCI to strip him of his titles. UCI is saying that the same code requires the USADA to lay out its case in detail before UCI is forced to do anything. No one knows how this is going to turn out yet.