Any diplomatic treaty is like that - fluff, air. But even that 0.0001% difference that it makes is better than nothing. By the way a common phrase to describe diplomacy is : good dog, nice dog, and keeping the dog down with talk while I'm looking to get a stick. Which is why we have to put up space stations and live on them. The biotech threat of artificial miltary weapon diseases escaping the lab and killing everybody trumps the nuclear holocaust threat, because that one lacks intelligence. The order of threats to humanity are: 1. Artificial intelligence that happens to not cooperate with you, but go against you, and try to eat you - what are the chances of that, - against which you cannot run away to outer space, unless you take 70,000 year trips to nearby stars, they you might buy some time, and call it semi -escape. This is the only true threat without solutions, all the others have easy solutions. 2. Biotech weapon diseases that eat up all eukaryotes, or computer virus like hackers fucking up all life on Earth. Living on huge Earth-orbit or Sun-orbit rotating cylinder space stations is a workable defense against this threat. 3. Nuclear. Everything else is peanuts, piece of cake compared to the other two, and this includes a total nuclear global holocaust - there are issues at Chernobyl, but it's not really a desert either. Life adapts, and it's easier to adapt to radiation, than to a semi-intelligent biotech disease. Of course at the height of the Cold War nuclear arms-race the two superpowers, USA and Soviet Union amassed so many nukes that some said there was enough to erase all life 7 times over on the planet. You can get out of proportion with that too, but the issue with small scale nuclear terrorism is nowhere near as bad as two superpowers, or many superpowers, building up stocks for a mutually assured destruction threat-counterthreat. And of course living on space stations is a solution to this threat too. 4. Global warming. The Earth adapts. Increased temperatures mean increased desertification, which mean increase solar reflectance. Some places, like Siberia or Russia, might even like it, however the water stored at the poles high up in the air as icebergs or Antarctica mountains, and on top of mountains that have snow peaks throughout the world, cause a global sea level rise to where people in Venice have to walk in thigh-high boots (they say it's cuz Venice is sinking constantly). The Kilimanjaro no longer has snow peaks, Lake Chad is gone, so with global warming if much of Antarctica melts, Florida and the like might go under water completely, including all major population centers that are ports, such as NY, SF, LA, DC, London, Paris, Hamburg, etc., etc, etc. Global warming has many easy solutions. One is to run away onto space stations, and then you don't give a fuck, if there are 7 billion people living on space stations, they are not really affected by the 7 billion down here screwing things up. The other solution is to put up shades, to artificially control the climate to a desired temperature, but it would require a massive scale buildup unheard of even to the ancient Egyptian pyramid builders. Another solution is to switch to carbon-neutral fuels, but I have a feeling people are too stupid, and once we're out of all oil, then all gas, then we'll go after all coal, and put it up into the atmosphere, increasing deserts even further and causing sea level rise. There is probably at least 200 years for that to happen, and there might be some global economic collapse that forces people to stop consuming so much, and shipping fuel back and forth stops, then everyone will be forced to survive sustainably, based on green grass and trees and food renewable energy sources. That's what you call a zombie apocalypse though, and it's not pleasant living through it.
And even nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not conducted properly. The military did not listen to Leo Sz. and the scientists asking for a demo. They said the chance for a demo failure is too high, so let's bomb. A demo might have stopped any civilian use, or at the very least a demo + Hiroshima would have definitely ended the war, saving Nagasaki. When it only happened to Hiroshima, the japs were wondering if it was a natural disaster like a meteorite hit, necessitating a 2nd bomb. Similar to how a plane colliding with a WTC might be thought of as an accident, or something strange out of the ordinary, but when it's duplicated, it's obviously not a mere accident. Without a demo there was automatic need for duplicate bombs.
By the way, if fuel cells are nonworkable, because the huge membrane surfaces leak constantly, and you have to use internal combustion engines, hdyrogen as combined with ammonia does not burn, but it burns in air. Even in air the oxygen is too diluted with nitrogen, and the oxyhydrogen blowpipe can get super high temperature by excluding the air nitrogen from the flame. It's easy to separate the nitrogen diluent from hydrogen in ammonia, but it's not easy to do the same from the oxygen in air.
To separate the nitrogen, and get pure hydrogen, you first have to split NH3 back to N2 + H2, ammonia (aka trihydrogen-mononitride, or nitrogen-hydride, etc,) back to nitrogen and hydrogen. There was a post earlier a few months back on Slashdot of some R&D team in the UK using the NaNH2 sodium amide pathway. Frankly, you don't have to get that complicated. Ammonia barely has a forward pushing "free energy change" of formation in the Haber-Bosch process, to where the lower the temperature, the better the equilibrium concentration, but slower the reaction rate, so a balance is obtained, with like 10% of the feed reacting, and the 90% unreacted parts separated recycled for many rounds through the reactor before they get to react too. So at high temperature the entropy dominates the free energy term, as in deltaG=deltaH - Temp*deltaS, where H is enthalpy(heating value), S is entropy(something that has to do with why processes that have negative heating value go forward in nature, such as when mixing 0C ice + 0C table salt, the temperature drops to -20C, and you get cooling, negative heat out of the process, and it goes forward, even if it consumes heat, let alone give off heat. The reason is mixing, entropy, randomness, that naturally happens at any temperature greater than absolute 0 of 0K=-273.15C, and the higher the temperature, the greater the internal motions and mixing, and processes go forward even if they consume energy from their environment, especially when such energy is plenty.) So to get to the point, ammonia does have a minute deltaH, heating value of formation, but the entropy term is huge as 2NH3-->N2+3H2, you get 4 molecules out of 2, and the more molecules a reaction generates, the greater disorder it generates, as uniting many molecules into one is called order, organizing them, splitting them to pieces and mixing them around is called disorder. So to get to the point, all you need to split ammonia is temperature. Such as an incandescent tungsten, platinum, iridium, heck even iron filament. They don't reform ammonia on cooling.
To separate the hydrogen from the nitrogen after it's molecularly split into elements, you're lucky that there are many metals that dissolve hydrogen but not nitrogen, and dissolve it to great extent with high speed. Palladium, platinum, and even nickel-metal-hydride battery cathodes (I think titanium(magnesium) hydride and the like). So all you need is a chamber under pressure, with a thin membrane of palladium, supported by a tight mesh of great strength that can hold the pressure, and the hydrogen will escape through the walls of the chamber to a partial pressure equivalent to the one outside, and you can pump the remaining N2+small amount of H2 out. It does generate H2 waste, and if vented to the atmosphere, it might create a constant hydrogen leak into outer space, over the centuries, but outer space solar wind is mostly hydrogen, so it's complicated. But you can get 100% pure hydrogen at 99% recovery if your pressure ratio is 100:1 or that order of magnitude.
Unfortunately there is no similar separation for oxygen from the nitrogen in the air. A hemoglobin-like liquid might help with the concentrating, but at the cost of a high weight and complex chemical plant lugged along in an automobile.
Internal combustion engines are extrememly sensitive to flame temperature diluents when it comes to mpg, such as extra inert nitrogen, both from air and ammonia, to the point of noncombustion at all. In fact that's why 85% gasoline + ethanol blends are worse than put
I disagree. I think every country has the right to self defense, and possess these. However I'd be a big fan of a global nuclear weapon's ban that everybody signs.
PS. What are the Scots thinking of trying to be independent? If I were them I'd be happy to be ganged up with England, as long as England is not exploiting me economically because I'm Scot, nor does it restrict my liberties such as freedom of expression, or practicing my own Gaelic mother tongue. tradition. But hey. they are the Scots, and you have to let them decide for themselves. I just think they are proving themselves stupid. Instead of separation, they should be trying to liberties and while united, and only if that's impossible while being united, when push comes to shove, do you have to lower your expectations and strive for independence. But they might be misjudging England, and its willingness to allow for broad reaching internal freedoms, within the UK, such as practicing your own language, etc. United is usually better than divided. The proverb says together we stand, alone we fall. But there are of course many exceptions.
If Tesla has stock, there might be a most opportune moment to sell in the future, right when reality of $20,000 just for the battery, smacks everyone in the face. Unfortunately my broker won't let me sell short, he won't give me a margin account, I keep applying, and get no reply. But it'd be really easy money, say 2 or 5 years from now. Of course it's gonna sell like candy at the beginning, due to the hype it gets fr,om Slashdot and the media, and even the California government, for say $40,000 - $80,000 range. It can never compete with a Corolla for instance. If you ever play Railroad Tycoon II the 2nd Century, you learn that the more you progress away from the heyday of steam, even with available electric and diesel locomotive engines, (and of course competition for passengers from airplanes and cars and trucks for freight being the real killer of rail), you cannot make ends meet, because of engine cost. There is a single theme for RRII 2nd century, is that you get all this wonderful tech, but you cannot afford it, The only way to win in late years, such as past 2010, is to optimize and get the cheapest but still decent engines available. Which is like a prophecy to anyone living under today's minimum wage economy, even with a Corolla, you absolutely cannot afford a $20,000 brand new Corolla on minimum wage, and your only hope is mediocre, but very cost effective used cars, such as mid 90's Saturns with sticks, which you can get for under $2000, which is an order of magnitude. But that is a common theme of the future, for anyone trying to stay out of bankruptcy, engine cost engine cost engine cost. Even with today's fuel prices, it's still the engine cost that makes or breaks your bank account. After housing, which is the worst thing out of what with the economy and inability to compete in the global market place against unfair competition who does not have the same housing and transportation costs that we do, so instead we go home, and sit and cry, boo hoo, unfair competition, we can't compete because our cost of living is high. All you need to fix that high cost of living issue is to buy one of these Tesla's.
It's a friggin inconvenience to park at a gas station when you're car is outta juice, and they have to have an enterntainment park next to every one of them to keep you busy while you wait the "superfast" recharce of 30 minutes. They can't really exchance Li-ion batteries, like they can propane cylinders, because propane cylinders are relatively cheap, but with an electric vehicle Li-ion you're talking at least $20,000, so how you're gonna drop of your perfectly good $20,000 battery, and exchange it for someone else's crappy one, that's been abused, and it's only worth $1,500. That's a big deal, you can't swallow a cost like that like you can for propane exchange cylinders for instance. The other big deal of EV's is the limited range, with huge batteries. The energy density of all batteries, including Li-ion is much smaller than fuels, by at least an order of magnitude - i.e. 0.3-1.0 MJ/kg for a battery, and 44 MJ/kg for gasoline and diesel including biodiesel, and something like 20 MJ/kg for Ethanol/Methanol/Liquid Ammonia. Nuclear powerplant generated liquid ammonia is the fuel of the future, because it's carbon neutral. It's the answer to the storage problems of the hydrogen economy - tag it on to nitrogen, and you got no hydrogen storage problem. I don't understand what's so complicated about this.
By the way most movies coming out of Hollywood are action movies, where something happens, somebody either gets killed, or something blows up, or there is a car chase, or in general it's about guns, sex, and violence. That's what sells, so if you can see that in a movie, why not this one? Wait, one is "fictional" grueling details of historical events, such as King Henry the VIII's wives' heads rolling, vs. this one that's "real" in the more near present history. don't really understand what's the big deal in watching the gruely details of a video - which I haven't watched, nor interested in it - when people who want to see nasty things can watch, for instance a surgery movie, to see guts. Or go work in a butcher shop, where you get to slice and dies cows or chickens for bloody body parts, and even just going to the supermarket, it's fully of bloody meat everywhere.
Maybe multiple 9mm shots are preferable to behading, on the beheadee's part, because, as during the French revolution they found out, people could keep blinking after their head was cut, for various lengths, but most around 35 seconds or so. So you don't die instantly, and experience horror for at least 35 seconds.
Btw the UK may not have a Freedom of Speech 1st amendment right for it's population, it's good to live in the USA, where you can say anything. At least I try to say anything on Slashdot, and I'm still not dead yet, nor in jail over it.
By the way I found illustrative examples of what Unix should be like, on the pussy analogy:
First of all, here is a rococo-pussy (this is not what you want Unix to look like): http://nudes13.hegre-art.com/h... It's dark, mysterious, full of features, difficult to debug. Here it is for closer inspection, under the hood, it's still dark, mysterious and difficult to find the fleas in it: http://nudes13.hegre-art.com/h...
Compared the above to this unix-pussy: http://content8.pureandsexy.or... It's light, simple, low on features, easy to debug. And for closer inspection, under the hood: http://content8.pureandsexy.or... It's still not that complicated, streamlined, and follows Einstein's principle of make it as simple as possible, but not simpler. It still has all the features of a pussy, properly implemented, headache free. You cannot get any simpler than that, or it's no longer a pussy.
When it comes to pussy, both are equally gorgeous, and functional. Variety is the spice of life. But when it comes to Unix, only the light, simple, easy to see, understand and debug, nonmysterious, low on complications but still getting everything done variety is what's beautiful.
The Chinese government remembers the opium wars, and exploitation of China over profits, and disregard for their welfare in it. What do you think would happen with GMO plants that you don't own, and not only in the intellectual property sense, where it could be pirated, but you don't own it because it's not fertile seed, and you have to keep going back to the original manufacturer for a survival, after he successfully convinced you to get rid of all seeds able to produce fertile seeds themselves, so you no longer have a means to go back to them if seed prices go up, by, mm, say 10 million times of their present cost? And that price is not an overstatement, there is a huge amount of money to be made blackmailing the whole world's population over their stomachs. Everybody has to eat, no matter what the price, therefore the price, in absence of excess supply, which of course would be artificially created by withholding GMO seeds, tends to infinity. To withhold GMO seeds all you have to do is create artificial catastrophies around the available funds of seeds, and lose much of the supply like that. Supply/demand, with a hard demand, is a really easy way to make money if you can cut the supply hard and fast. But only after the alternatives to run to, such as traditional fertile seeds have been abandoned, and it's not possible to have them as an option.
You still, get to keep some of your data on your cellphone memory. True cloud computing is where you can get blackmailed for access to your data, plus government snooping is automated, with common sense network traffic monitoring therefore inspection at each access instance to your data by you, as opposed to the feds raiding your house to look at your hard drives, which in the old days required a warrant, so you could keep accessing your own data for free, without having to pay ransom for it constantly. For now you don't get blackmailed over your cloud stored data, because there are many legal, offline competitor alternatives. Alternatives which have to be eliminated by those pent up on blackmailing you for some good ransom money in the future. It's so hard to make money on software, by trying to sell you an operating system as a subscription service with daily security patches that patch the patches that patch the patches.. it's a joke, so a business model where the operating system is free, but you hand over the data and pay each time you access it, sounds like a much more workable one, to those whose daily bread comes from computer software related things..Why work hard to make new software when the old stuff was much better, when you can just sit back and get fat collecting over cloud data storage ransom fees? Of course there is a fair price, in that they do have to provide the cloud infrastructure, they buy the harddrives and you get to rent them, as opposed to having your own, and there is sometimes a fair rent price, but in the free market the usual question is not what a fair, economic benefit and accordingly price such a service should carry, but instead, what is the price the market is willing to bear under blackmailing situations? Only the commies would ever dream of calculating fair prices, and assigning them to everything in the economy, as in absolute 100% price control on everything, instead of letting the free market manage it, and as their case proved, instead of economic efficiency and fairness and justice, all they created were empty stores and people standing in line at the stores, because the prices were so cheap, and miscalculated, that every time it arrived at the store it fully sold out. In a blackmail prone situation, as in, if you're a city dweller, you have to stand in line for bread, no matter what the price of bread, you're getting blackmailed. Usually in the commie era it was the self reliant independently able to exist without a job or even a government villages, where free independent growing of food still went on anyway, and they were the ones who constantly kept the city dwellers decently fed. The only issue a village has is military security, for which it needs a city like contraption, or at the very least a monastery like scientific advancement zone, to where the villagers provide the excess production to sustain these "parasites" who can defend them against an invasion
The whole main posting topic is similar to business provided cars vs. rental cars. At one point in time I was stuck renting cars to get to work for a while, my boss keeping under so much stress and uncertainty about the future that I never got to the point to making the jump into purchasing a car, right after college, for months on and on. And they teased me to go to some scale manufacturer, with my own car, and were waiting for me to raise the miles done under business hours using a personal car issue, but of course I shrugged it off, last thing you need when you're trying to get hired on so you can jump into buying a car, is to bring whether you should be hired over making dumb decisions like that. It was supposed to be 4 months temp to hire, with enough pay in to temporarily afford a rental, unlike a minimum wage job, but pretty much all that pay went into this extended temporary situation of not knowing what the fuck I'm gonna be doing next week. As soon as I jumped into debt to get a reliable car, I would have been fired, it was just so much in the air. When they told me after 6 months that they like what I'm doing in some respect, but they can't hire me for at least another 6 months I quit. It was not a very healthy job anyway, always inhaling fumed silica dust and solvent in the lab, and that silica dust depositing on my eyeglass frames that were supposedly titanium, chewed it up, it was weird. Plus the lab coats I wore all had a spot of some kind of burning chemical half way up the arm, in an, let's annoy you kinda way, plus they announced a hiring freeze, then told you about the 6 months, because of the hiring freeze, then they post other college grads getting hired straight out college, without being temps first, during the hiring freeze, on the bulletin board posting saying that their greatest skill is drinking the most beer at keg parties. So it was like a general agreement it was time to go without actually getting fired.
So the point is would you charge a business for the gas cost and car cost it takes you to conduct your employment? There are rules that if you're on the clock they might reimburse you on car cost, but that's so up in the air, how about when you're not on the clock? Everyone is expected to have their own cars from their salaries, their own clothes, unless there are company provided uniforms, and in this sense a phone sometimes may be in the same ballpark as the clothes, so are you gonna charge the company for the wear and tear from the use of your shoes and clothes while being on the clock? That's how I'd consider looking at it. Own clothes vs. uniforms provided by the company, own car vs. company car, own phone vs. company provided phone. And out of those using your own car for business while on the clock is the most reasonable, but there are these exempt and non-exempt rules about overtime too, where managers are exempt from being paid overtime for the hours they work over 40 each week, instead they get a monthly salary (which in Feb is nice.) But if you work hours for free, and dedicating yourself to the company like that, then why nitpick on getting paid for using your car while doing regular work during non-overtime hours, and instead managing your personal affairs from the hopefully big salary the company is able to give you, without being bogged down the paperwork overhead of calculating how much they owe you over it. But of course the rule is that there is no rule. And it's easy to see how it can lead to exploitation, but the ultimate answer to that is that nobody forces you to work a job you don't like to work, or want to work, it's only exploitation if you're forced to work, as in you can't find a low cost of living for yourself, and you have to accept any exploiting job thrown at you, you have to keep up with the other dogs jumping higher for that piece of bacon, which is the general trend in the present unemployment atmosphere. There are no jobs, therefore all jobs are highly vulnerable to exploitation, so the court may have that on their side. If the economy picks up an
There are lots of portable x-ray devices , usually for on the road or nursing home type fell and broke a bone situations, and it's friggin lovely when the neighbors use it on you. At my previous residence there was not a single spot in the whole place where I could be and not be sick, I usually ended up in the entrance lobby or the kitchen area, never in the bedroom, as, I figured out lately why, but not back then, there was a contractor van with two black dudes that always looked at me weird when they came out of the driveway right when I walked by on the sidewalk, and I did not understand why back then. I guess everyone got a job to do, and I'm not an angel either. So lucky me, I got a thick cast iron metal tub now on a top floor, so the only way to really irradiate me with microwaves or x-rays or whatever the heck goes through wooden houses like they are paper, so the only way to get me now is from an airplane, or if someone climbed the roof. But the house is really tall, so dark hour drone strikes are most feasible, but the good thing about that is that if they are low power, because you can't take up a huge amount of electric power, unless the plane itself is huge. But lately it's been getting better, I mean last week or so, a couple weeks ago the hits were really bad. But just like Chernobyl proves, like can take a whole lot of radiation dose, as long as it's within tolerance limits, and you get breaks to recuperate. Worst is when you get a job where they make you sit in one place or stand in one place, and xray you there too, then when you come home, it's the same thing, and you don't get enough breaks to recuperate, and get things like, swollen gums and loose teeth, stinky breath, tooth cavities, and cancer in your skin and meat that doesn't get fought off by your immune system. One of the reasoning behind it could be to force you into higher housing cost situations, the other to help the health care business every time you show up in the emergency room feeling sick, all aimed at undermining you economically. Because you're not allowed to make it, that's already guaranteed. We'll shoot your tires out on the highway to make you catch a taxi, we'll sell you a remote control car to smack you into an accident on the highway, but you will not make it, to where you accomplish a low cost comfortable living, and an income to basic expense ratio of at least 20x. That's a big no no. Then everyone else would want that for themselves, and the exploitation of everybody stuck in a 1.2-1.5x income to basic expense ratio would stop, and everyone would become free, and go in a thousand different direction doing whatever they feel like, instead of what they are forced to do by their circumstances. It all starts with one bad apple that spoils the bunch.
Correction: It's not 1!+2!+3!=4!-1, but 1*1!+2*2!+3*3!=4!-1, as in 1*1+2*2+3*6=1+4+18=23, which is 24-1. My memory failed me there, but the point is there is a different way to represent digits that gets full granularity of integers without gaps in it, other than just the geometric progression Indian/Arabic/Mayan method.
How about if you tried to apply Roman numerals instead of Indian/Arabic binary representation for each digit? Would it get terser, as an overall sum, where you could surpass the Indian/Arabic fixed base geometric progression with the factoradic variable base progression? After all, you only need one character to represent 1000, M, from a lookup table, so you have M, D, C, L, X, V, I, or 7 different values, and a maximum craziness of MMMDCCCLXXXVIII, or 3888 requiring 15 digits within its usual representation space, instead of a uniform 4 for all digits with Indian/Arabic numerals with space to blow to 9999, but 1900 only MCM, 3 digits, so near the focusing points, you get terser, at the cost of more verbose at the extreme of 3888. For one roman numerals require something like 2.9 bit representations for each digit out of 7 possibilities, while Arabic/Indian need 10 digits so like 3.1 bit digits for the same space. And overall, roman numerals are are much busier with more digits, even if less bit per digit, in the space to 3999, than Arabic ones. But right now, I feel too stupid, tired and lazy to keep on thinking like this. Maybe someone can carry on the philosophical discussion, and tell me why I feel like a dog chasing his tail? I keep thinking maybe one day I might catch it:)
Well the important thing is, that when doing 168 pin RAM sticks, and looking at the pipe of data coming through them, on each line, if they come through in say decimal representation, with 10 voltage values each, then you can get 10^168-1 values out of it (like you can 0 to 9999 from a 4 digit bicycle lock, not 10,000, or 0-255 from 8 bits, not 256, but with factoradic representation with variable base, the highest allowed digit on the 168th line is 168, as in 1,2,3..A,B,C (you run out after 10 digits plus 26 Roman letters, so you go alpha, beta, gamma, etc, pile on everything you know til you get a 168 base digit), so you'd have a number like gamma x 168!+L x 167!+... +3 x 3! + 2x2! + 1x1!, according to their rules in Wikipedia, which is still fully granular, but much huger number, as 168! > 10^168 by a whole lot, and the situation becomes even more stark when you compare 168! > 2^168, as in binary, the only issue being that each digit must be represented by 168 possible digits, which in binary takes up 256 or 8 bits, with room to spare above 168 to 255, so you divide 168/8=21, so you can really only go up to 21!, which may still be bigger than 10^168, but still get full granularity of integers. But it's not, as 21! = 5.11x10^19 according to google, which is a whole lot less than 2^168-1= 3.74x10^50. So at 168 pins the variable base factoradic representation is not more efficient than the fixed based Indian/Arabic geometric progression. Hmm.
But that gives me the Idea, that you don't have to divide 168 by 8, as for the initial digits you only need less room, and 8 bits are wasted, so you need for 1, 2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11.... etc 1/1 bit, 2/2 bits, 2/3 , 3/4, 3/5, 3/6,3/7, 4/8,4/9,4/10,4/11,4/12,4/13,4/4/14,4/15, 5/16,5/17,5/18,5/19,5/20,5/21,5/22,5/23,5/24.5/25,5/26,5/27,5/28,5/29,5/30,5/31,6/32,6/33,6/34,etc, and I'm too lazy to calculate how many you need, but if you use binary geometric progression encoding of the factoradic digits, you only need 7 digits to get the numbers under 127, 6 under 64, 5 under 32, 4 under 16, 3 under 8, 2 under 4 and 1 under 2, so (168-127)x8+(127-63)x7+(63-31)x6+ etc = (1097 I got at convertit.com, but I'm stupid because that's not how many digits you get, but instead =) 41/8+64/7+32/6+16/5+8/4+4/3+2/2+1/1 = 1+2*2+3*4+4*8+5*16+6*32 etc, as far as you can go, to stay under 168 available pins on the RAM stick, I make a Microsoft Works spreadsheet that came with my HP Mini Recovery DVD, that looks like this
So it shows that 129 is the highest number under 168, so you need 129 pin to carry all factoradic variable base digits up to the 4 digit ones, now I'm confused, so let's go back, you need 1+2+2+3+3+3+3+4+4+4+4+4+4 eight times, etc.. so I'm going back to make a different spreadsheet,
So you can get up to 37! with 165 pins, which is 1.38x10^43, which is much less than 2^168-1=3.74x10^50. Hmm. Eventually it's gotta get better with factoradic, which tends to infinity much faster than a fixed base raised to power, such as n^n > a^n over a certain threshold of n. But 165 pins is not past that critical point. Who can find the critical point where factoradic becomes a more efficient way to store numbers, than
Now I went to the Wikipedia page, and it says you're allowed digits only up to the position number at each position in the factoradic, such as Radix 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Place val 7! 6! 5! 4! 3! 2! 1! 0! Plcv decl 5040 720 120 24 6 2 1 1 Highest 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 digit allowed
I thought since both 0! and 1! equal 1, you start from 1, not 0, and also that you could go to 5039 in digits at 7!, right before you hit 5040, in a variable base, just like you can go up to 9, right before you hit 10, in digits in a fixed base geometric progression. Or to 23 in digits right before you hit 4!., as in 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,A,B,C,D,E,F(15 of hexa), G, H, I, J,K(icosa),L,M,N(23, of tricosa), so you could have a number like L511 meaning Lx4!+5x3!+1x2!+1x1!. Something is not right here, because the 1x2! and 1x1! only allow 1 as the highest digits, hmm. So anyway the number then is 23x24+5x6+1x2+1x1=552+30+2+1=585, which is much higher than the next up number, 5!=120, so you'd end up with multiple representations for the same number above 121, plus you'd need variable storage space, as you need 120 digits by the next round, and the 26 letters of the alphabet are not enough, so it may not be better after all. The important thing is to try, and keep trying for better. And I'm not smart enough to figure all this out anyway. In any case you can't go up to 9999 in digits when you represent 10000, for the second position at 1x000, but only to 9, or doing so does not cut down on storage costs, by the time you're done representing those digits.
It's more complicated than what I made it sound, because each position has a variable base as opposed to a fixed base in geometric progression, b, so you could in theory reserve more room than a base for higher numbers. The situation is similar to decimal hex, or binary coded decimal, where your base is F, but you only go up to 9, and lose the available representation space between 10 and 16. With a fixed base, factoradic loses the representation space available for each digit, on the other hand it takes up a fixed amount of memory per digit, so there is various mixes and matches between fixed base geometric, fixed base factoradic, and variable base factoradic, and variable base factoradic might be the most efficient with full granularity encompassing all natural numbers in a range for huge numbers, while fixed based factoradic might be more efficient for intermediate numbers, and fixed base geometric series Indian/Arabic for small numbers.
I just figured that one out, or more like I just got the divine revelation, even though "they" teased me with the same thing before, in 2009, but mind controlled me not to realize it.
I just had this idea that in programming, Roman numerals might be more efficient than Arabic/Indian, but only when you can guarantee gaps, or granularity. Such as when dealing with bytes, each being 8bits, or 2^8=256, and wasting space, granularity when you only need to represent 17, which can be done in 2^5=32, but not in 2^4=16. Similar things are FAT cluster sizes, that waste space on clustering, in the name of Roman numeral style efficiency. In this sense, in roman numerals you only represent the centuries by a few characters, such as MM for 2000, MCM for 1900, MDCCC for 1800, MDCC 1700, MD1500, MCD 1400, MCCC for 1300,..etc. and MC 1100, M 1000, CM 900, DCCC 800, etc. You could cut this down to 3 digits, to lose even more granularity, but your granularity is maximum near the KB or MB levels, right near the cluster size, and instead have options of MM, MCM, MDC, MD, MCD, MC, M, CM, DC, D, CD, which work near the 500 level, and some granularity nearby it, but are inefficient away from the 500 cluster level. If you could get more terse like that, in expression, as in military units one would be M, other D, other D, other L, other X, then V, and the individual soldier, I, so with cutting down to one character or two characters instead of 4 characters required by Indian/Arabic, you could get some bandwidth, terseness of conveyed information, and less parallel lines to carry that bandwidth, to memory for instance. This is illustrated in datatypes, which also lose granularity, but are the equivalents of M, D, C, L, X, V, I, in most typed programming languages. So I'm just adding this thought of how the Roman numerals are stupid to do math calculations, but in certain circumstances they make sense, such as counting available military units.
I just got curious what the letter for 5000 would be, so I looked it up in Wikipedia. There is no such number, and the ancient system is only good for 3999, and there are two methods to get higher numbers, one draw a bar above a number meaning it's multiplied by M, or 1000, so you can represent up to 3,999,000 or almost 4,000,000, and most millionaires could not count their money like that, but then you can keep adding more lines to keep getting higher multiples. The other method, more complicated, but descended from Etruscan tradition that Roman numerals came from, cannot be printed here, because Slashdot eats the funky backward C characters, and you have to read it at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
So these are the two known methods of number representation, there is also an option for factoradic, with full granularity, where 1!+2!+3!+...+n!=(n+1)!-1, n!=1x2x3..xn, 1!=1, 2!=2, 3!=1x2x3=6, 4!=1x2x3x4=24, 5!=120, 6!=720, etc, but it's not more efficient than Arabic/Indian, because that uses the rule applied to geometric progressions, of b^0+b^1+b^2+b^3+..+b^n=b^(n+1)-1, and as long as you have your highest base, b, there is no reason at each positional representation not to go all the way up to that highest point. For instance when we say 3528 we mean 8x10^0+2x10^1+5x10^2+3x10^3=8x1+2x10+5x100+3x1000=8+20+500+3000=3528. In factoradic representation you'd only be able to go up to n! at each position, not the full base, such as 3528 being 8x1!+2x2!+5x3!+3x4!=8x1+2x2+5x6+3x24=8+4+30+72=114, a very slow and inefficient way to store numbers, because you could have used each position to store at the highest base available, such as 10 base, implicitly understood, and get much better storage capacity while you still get the full granularity of representation, for each natural number, unlike with chopped roman numerals, or even scientific notation for Indian/Arabic numbers, which we call floating point representation, which is full of holes and cannot represent every single integer to its highest limits. With factoradic you can only go up to n! times the decimal base at each position, while with Indian/Arabic you can go up to base^position, and only for very high numbers do factorials surp
Yeah, I forgot the part where the copperheads advance to 9dans, and destroy the system from within. The situation then becomes similar to the French Revolution, where the 30kyu peasantry rebels against the 9dan monarch and 5 dan nobility, and guillotine their heads. If a 9d copperhead is caught, after getting away with things for a long time, just like the nobles/kings could in France, but eventually there'd be massive flame-wars about it, in a rebellion style, where it becomes obvious you have to roll out the guillotine and have some heads roll. Of course this situation can be abused too, to where someone like Linus or Alan Cox could be ousted, and then it's up in the air whether the rebels are paid by Microsoft, to kill Linux, or there is a true problem with a rotten leadership. Of course it's hard to see Linus intentionally damage Linux, on the other hand he does look like he's the cousin of Bill Gates, and he lives in Oregon too, not too far. So ya never know these things. That's right, I pick on everyone equally without exception, nobody is safe from the terror of my words, even Linus. But if it bothers you, you can ignore, and get on with your life. Nobody forces you to read all this.
Also, computing already follows similar simplicity at the core as life does. Everything in life is A C T G, and everything in computing is 0,1. But we're dealing with the complexity issues arising at higher levels, than 0,1. In particular, the closer you are to 0,1 the simpler and more straight forward, the more "Unix" the procedures should be, and the farther away you are, the more variety, the greater flamboyance, the greater exuberance of rococo, such as menu options, flamboyant colors, and richness of decoration. For instance, a colorful lizard is flamboyant at the user interface, appearance to the external world, but adheres to the principles of all eukaryotes, in how it functions closer to the ACTG level. Similarly, KDE should be flamboyant at the user interface level, or VB Classic/VBA Macros can be flamboyant in what all is implemented in them, at the user interface level, but simple at the vbrun60.dll level. All eukaryotes adhere to the principles of having a cellular unit with a nucleus, mitochondria, etc, and in this trees and grass and lizards and you and I are similar. It does not mean that the principle is a correct one, for instance a totally mindless and dumb prokaryote might evolve that does not have a nucleus, and chew and digest off Alien's face, digest up all trees, all other lifeforms, and in a sense, prevail in the competition to survive by becoming the new top predator. Being a eukaryote means you believe that it's efficient, and stick to it, but that belief is not a guarantee, and you can have raging debates about it, or even might have some human cells where it might make economic sense to be prokaryote instead of eukaryote for some of the specialized cells, but in the meantime everyone sticks to this guiding principle, not because it's correct, or good, but because it is what it is. Similarly, in an aerobic, oxygen atmosphere, for multicellular life other than bugs, which have no blood but a tracheal lung system that penetrates all the way to individual cells and brings oxygen directly, so for multicellular lifeforms that do have blood, hemoglobin based on iron has arisen as the dominant and only standard, being the most efficient life could come up with. There are exceptions with blue blooded molluscs, like octopi, which sometimes live in depths of great oxygen depravation, and at those oxygen concentrations the copper based blue blood is more efficient, but all fish, all reptiles, all birds and mammals have red blood. Red blood might be complex in an of itself, but it became a standard everyone follows because we don't know anything more efficient. In the biotech future there might be artificial synthesis of something more efficient, and human derived artificial people based on them, such as green blood or orange blood, who can win olympics, but for now life is stuck at hemoglobin, which is both complex and efficient, and maximum state of the art. Similarly all vision systems are based on a vitamin A derived molecule, already at the limits of theoretical efficiency, as in 4 photons able to trigger a visual response in the brain, but there might be inventions where a single photon does it - and it may not be the molecule itself, because, in theory, that changes conformation from a single photon, but the overhead circuitry, which, may be damping out and filtering single photon detection on purpose - but once you got single photon detection, you know you can't get any better than that, maybe less expensive molecules to be used. In number systems around the world we use the positional Hindu/Arabic system as opposed to the Roman, and we have nothing better so far, so it's a universal standard.
(By the way the positional system is encoded instinctively into words such as 10, 20, 30, 40, and such things as 31,32, 33,... then 41, 42, 43, so it's weird that the Greeks and Romans could not come up with 4something to represent 40, with zero. But the french have quatre vingt huit for 88, literally meaning 4-20-8, as in 4x20+8, so some number systems don't follow the simple rules that would yield
On common dumb phrase in Unix is "Everything is a file." How can you say a piece of hardware is like a file on a disk, when it obviously has various features? That's the whole point, ignore, ignore, ignore the features to utter terseness in the interface, beat it down with a club into a uniform, system wide dumb mode first, then add the features and complexities later, but preserve the uniform text interface in everything, don't customize into a myriad of unique and non-compliant standards. If I remember right, in later versions of Linux I had issues treating items under/dev and especially/proc as regular files, they forgot about implementing the core principles of behavior. But I don't claim to understand the reasoning behind it, which may be reasonable. It is still nice to be able to dd if=/dev/cdrom of=./file.iso , from hardware. You can't do that in windows, or dos, from simple command line, but in Unix everything is a file, that you can read from and possibly write to, precious data. That's what a computer is for: helping me massage my data. And in that, I'd like to reserve my 1 TB portable disk for pictures of butterflies, or videos, and would prefer if the code that got everything accomplished stayed under 150KB. I realize that's not possible, but what's happening in today's computing environment, when it comes to multi megabyte code size that massages the 1TB data, is simply a joke. There was this saying back in the day, at IBM, that 1 MB should be enough for everyone. And by that I think they meant for code size, not data, as I wish to store months and months worth of compressed videos, and I would have no problem with code that could massage it to all my needs, AND stay under that 1MB. If nothing else, self generated code from simple rules, could accomplish starting from an under 1MB seed. However self generated code brings about the danger of mutations and AI. And AI, along the movie of "Screamers" from 1996, is the biggest threat humanity is facing today, bigger than biotech or nuclear holocaust, because you can run away from those two into outer space, but not from an AI cleverer than you set out to chase you and hunt you down. That movie might seem funny at first, but it's really not funny. Everyone who programs computers, and automates designs, similar to how life automates mutations as new Monte-Carlo designs and selection from them, should always keep that movie in the back of their minds. And in this sense they should set limits on computing power available in laptops and desktops, and the relentless drive for more supercomputing, and more bloated software like KDE4 and higher, when even KDE3's biggest problem is codesize and performance, compared to windows. For instance, when copying files in Konqueror, Windows 2000 ran circles around KDE 3, but not in command prompt of course. So how do I get user friendliness out of Unix, and performance at the same time? All I see is bloat bloat bloat these days, that refuses to run on older hardware, when in my mind progress in software science would mean increased speed even on older hardware, because, as far as the features go, I'm not seeing any tremendous advances, it's all just the same thing, with a different face slapped on it, 10x slower than 10 years ago. Like MS Office 97 can accomplish pretty much everything that Office 2010 can, and even do so more efficiently, plus in a way I find awkward because I got used to the old ways, so why should I get used to the new ones when I get no benefit at all from it. In fact I have to click twice to get to a menu item that used to take one click on the tool bar.. Similar gripes of I used to be able to do this and that in Linux, and all of a sudden they took it away, and got something "better"? Really? That much better that it's worth constantly switching ways of doing things? How are businesses to rely on that kind of Unix, that won't last the full carrier of 30 years of one of their freshly hired college grads? They never get the chance to get expert at it, or create software
And Unix is defined by being simple. Which Linux, it no longer is.
They should worry less about authenticating who contributes, and then finding the scapegoat to blame for the mess ups, but instead they should try to go back to core principles, and clear up the mess and establish a system where mess ups are impossible. It's not the individual programmers who are messing up, but the leadership at the top who fails to implement core principles, who have allowed themselves to stray far from them, under the pressure of features, and patching the patches that patch the patches that patched we don't even remember what anymore. The herd simply just follows the command of the shepherd through his dogs. You can't blame the ewe. You can't blame the dogs. If both the ewe and the dogs each follow command as they are supposed to. That's how a military works. Chain of command. Battle of Jutland is a good read on military and controlling chaos into musical and dance-like order. Jellicoe's formation of the ships, where they almost hit each other while assuming positions, "flying" by each other at only a few miles per hour. Battle about turn to starboard, by Scheer, a motion by complete mess-prone chaotic-prone beings executing it in unison, from prior practice. That is the way to beat down chaos, in middle of a messy battle, which by definition is chaos itself. Top down chain of command, following orders, everyone moving in unison.
The basic problem with Linux is complexity. I've stopped using Linux ever since kernel 2.6.26 or so, anything new that boots does just way way too much. It's obvious what a hopeless mess it is just from the boot up messages. Damn Small Linux is trying to get back to core principles, but it's hopeless with the present code size of the kernel. The basic principle of Unix is the KISS principle. Quoting from the Wikipedia page:
The principle most likely finds its origins in similar concepts, such as Occam's razor, Leonardo da Vinci's "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication", Mies Van Der Rohe's "Less is more", or Antoine de Saint Exupéry's "It seems that perfection is reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away". Colin Chapman, the founder of Lotus Cars, urged his designers to "Simplify, and add lightness". Rube Goldberg's machines, intentionally overly-complex solutions to simple tasks or problems, are humorous examples of "non-KISS" solutions.
An alternative view - "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler." - is attributed to Albert Einstein. That is a warning that even the KISS principle should not be abused, though maximized as much as possible.
In all of them the basic principle of Unix is simplicity, clarity, modularity, human readability, beating complexity down with a club anywhere you can, if you can find clever ways to get something accomplish, forget about it, it's too complex, do it cleanly, neatly, simply, and even brute force. Don't be clever, be stupid, and expect everyone to be stupid. In Unix, every program does one thing, and does it extremely well. If you need features, you write a different program. Then these programs come together and interact through extremely simple interfaces, and this soup of experts interacting simply to accomplish any needed complex task in the world is what you call Unix. The swiss army knife of software. Which also goes for C, as C and Unix are the same thing.
The first thing the Linux developers have to accomplish is to beat down the complexity mess they've created, to gut the whole thing to bare bones, throw awa
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Any diplomatic treaty is like that - fluff, air. But even that 0.0001% difference that it makes is better than nothing. By the way a common phrase to describe diplomacy is : good dog, nice dog, and keeping the dog down with talk while I'm looking to get a stick.
Which is why we have to put up space stations and live on them. The biotech threat of artificial miltary weapon diseases escaping the lab and killing everybody trumps the nuclear holocaust threat, because that one lacks intelligence.
The order of threats to humanity are:
1. Artificial intelligence that happens to not cooperate with you, but go against you, and try to eat you - what are the chances of that, - against which you cannot run away to outer space, unless you take 70,000 year trips to nearby stars, they you might buy some time, and call it semi -escape. This is the only true threat without solutions, all the others have easy solutions.
2. Biotech weapon diseases that eat up all eukaryotes, or computer virus like hackers fucking up all life on Earth. Living on huge Earth-orbit or Sun-orbit rotating cylinder space stations is a workable defense against this threat.
3. Nuclear. Everything else is peanuts, piece of cake compared to the other two, and this includes a total nuclear global holocaust - there are issues at Chernobyl, but it's not really a desert either. Life adapts, and it's easier to adapt to radiation, than to a semi-intelligent biotech disease. Of course at the height of the Cold War nuclear arms-race the two superpowers, USA and Soviet Union amassed so many nukes that some said there was enough to erase all life 7 times over on the planet. You can get out of proportion with that too, but the issue with small scale nuclear terrorism is nowhere near as bad as two superpowers, or many superpowers, building up stocks for a mutually assured destruction threat-counterthreat. And of course living on space stations is a solution to this threat too.
4. Global warming. The Earth adapts. Increased temperatures mean increased desertification, which mean increase solar reflectance. Some places, like Siberia or Russia, might even like it, however the water stored at the poles high up in the air as icebergs or Antarctica mountains, and on top of mountains that have snow peaks throughout the world, cause a global sea level rise to where people in Venice have to walk in thigh-high boots (they say it's cuz Venice is sinking constantly). The Kilimanjaro no longer has snow peaks, Lake Chad is gone, so with global warming if much of Antarctica melts, Florida and the like might go under water completely, including all major population centers that are ports, such as NY, SF, LA, DC, London, Paris, Hamburg, etc., etc, etc. Global warming has many easy solutions. One is to run away onto space stations, and then you don't give a fuck, if there are 7 billion people living on space stations, they are not really affected by the 7 billion down here screwing things up. The other solution is to put up shades, to artificially control the climate to a desired temperature, but it would require a massive scale buildup unheard of even to the ancient Egyptian pyramid builders. Another solution is to switch to carbon-neutral fuels, but I have a feeling people are too stupid, and once we're out of all oil, then all gas, then we'll go after all coal, and put it up into the atmosphere, increasing deserts even further and causing sea level rise. There is probably at least 200 years for that to happen, and there might be some global economic collapse that forces people to stop consuming so much, and shipping fuel back and forth stops, then everyone will be forced to survive sustainably, based on green grass and trees and food renewable energy sources. That's what you call a zombie apocalypse though, and it's not pleasant living through it.
And even nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not conducted properly. The military did not listen to Leo Sz. and the scientists asking for a demo. They said the chance for a demo failure is too high, so let's bomb. A demo might have stopped any civilian use, or at the very least a demo + Hiroshima would have definitely ended the war, saving Nagasaki. When it only happened to Hiroshima, the japs were wondering if it was a natural disaster like a meteorite hit, necessitating a 2nd bomb. Similar to how a plane colliding with a WTC might be thought of as an accident, or something strange out of the ordinary, but when it's duplicated, it's obviously not a mere accident. Without a demo there was automatic need for duplicate bombs.
By the way, if fuel cells are nonworkable, because the huge membrane surfaces leak constantly, and you have to use internal combustion engines, hdyrogen as combined with ammonia does not burn, but it burns in air. Even in air the oxygen is too diluted with nitrogen, and the oxyhydrogen blowpipe can get super high temperature by excluding the air nitrogen from the flame. It's easy to separate the nitrogen diluent from hydrogen in ammonia, but it's not easy to do the same from the oxygen in air.
To separate the nitrogen, and get pure hydrogen, you first have to split NH3 back to N2 + H2, ammonia (aka trihydrogen-mononitride, or nitrogen-hydride, etc,) back to nitrogen and hydrogen. There was a post earlier a few months back on Slashdot of some R&D team in the UK using the NaNH2 sodium amide pathway. Frankly, you don't have to get that complicated. Ammonia barely has a forward pushing "free energy change" of formation in the Haber-Bosch process, to where the lower the temperature, the better the equilibrium concentration, but slower the reaction rate, so a balance is obtained, with like 10% of the feed reacting, and the 90% unreacted parts separated recycled for many rounds through the reactor before they get to react too. So at high temperature the entropy dominates the free energy term, as in deltaG=deltaH - Temp*deltaS, where H is enthalpy(heating value), S is entropy(something that has to do with why processes that have negative heating value go forward in nature, such as when mixing 0C ice + 0C table salt, the temperature drops to -20C, and you get cooling, negative heat out of the process, and it goes forward, even if it consumes heat, let alone give off heat. The reason is mixing, entropy, randomness, that naturally happens at any temperature greater than absolute 0 of 0K=-273.15C, and the higher the temperature, the greater the internal motions and mixing, and processes go forward even if they consume energy from their environment, especially when such energy is plenty.) So to get to the point, ammonia does have a minute deltaH, heating value of formation, but the entropy term is huge as 2NH3-->N2+3H2, you get 4 molecules out of 2, and the more molecules a reaction generates, the greater disorder it generates, as uniting many molecules into one is called order, organizing them, splitting them to pieces and mixing them around is called disorder. So to get to the point, all you need to split ammonia is temperature. Such as an incandescent tungsten, platinum, iridium, heck even iron filament. They don't reform ammonia on cooling.
To separate the hydrogen from the nitrogen after it's molecularly split into elements, you're lucky that there are many metals that dissolve hydrogen but not nitrogen, and dissolve it to great extent with high speed. Palladium, platinum, and even nickel-metal-hydride battery cathodes (I think titanium(magnesium) hydride and the like). So all you need is a chamber under pressure, with a thin membrane of palladium, supported by a tight mesh of great strength that can hold the pressure, and the hydrogen will escape through the walls of the chamber to a partial pressure equivalent to the one outside, and you can pump the remaining N2+small amount of H2 out. It does generate H2 waste, and if vented to the atmosphere, it might create a constant hydrogen leak into outer space, over the centuries, but outer space solar wind is mostly hydrogen, so it's complicated. But you can get 100% pure hydrogen at 99% recovery if your pressure ratio is 100:1 or that order of magnitude.
Unfortunately there is no similar separation for oxygen from the nitrogen in the air. A hemoglobin-like liquid might help with the concentrating, but at the cost of a high weight and complex chemical plant lugged along in an automobile.
Internal combustion engines are extrememly sensitive to flame temperature diluents when it comes to mpg, such as extra inert nitrogen, both from air and ammonia, to the point of noncombustion at all. In fact that's why 85% gasoline + ethanol blends are worse than put
I disagree. I think every country has the right to self defense, and possess these. However I'd be a big fan of a global nuclear weapon's ban that everybody signs.
PS. What are the Scots thinking of trying to be independent? If I were them I'd be happy to be ganged up with England, as long as England is not exploiting me economically because I'm Scot, nor does it restrict my liberties such as freedom of expression, or practicing my own Gaelic mother tongue. tradition. But hey. they are the Scots, and you have to let them decide for themselves. I just think they are proving themselves stupid. Instead of separation, they should be trying to liberties and while united, and only if that's impossible while being united, when push comes to shove, do you have to lower your expectations and strive for independence. But they might be misjudging England, and its willingness to allow for broad reaching internal freedoms, within the UK, such as practicing your own language, etc. United is usually better than divided. The proverb says together we stand, alone we fall. But there are of course many exceptions.
If Tesla has stock, there might be a most opportune moment to sell in the future, right when reality of $20,000 just for the battery, smacks everyone in the face. Unfortunately my broker won't let me sell short, he won't give me a margin account, I keep applying, and get no reply. But it'd be really easy money, say 2 or 5 years from now. Of course it's gonna sell like candy at the beginning, due to the hype it gets fr,om Slashdot and the media, and even the California government, for say $40,000 - $80,000 range. It can never compete with a Corolla for instance.
If you ever play Railroad Tycoon II the 2nd Century, you learn that the more you progress away from the heyday of steam, even with available electric and diesel locomotive engines, (and of course competition for passengers from airplanes and cars and trucks for freight being the real killer of rail), you cannot make ends meet, because of engine cost. There is a single theme for RRII 2nd century, is that you get all this wonderful tech, but you cannot afford it, The only way to win in late years, such as past 2010, is to optimize and get the cheapest but still decent engines available. Which is like a prophecy to anyone living under today's minimum wage economy, even with a Corolla, you absolutely cannot afford a $20,000 brand new Corolla on minimum wage, and your only hope is mediocre, but very cost effective used cars, such as mid 90's Saturns with sticks, which you can get for under $2000, which is an order of magnitude. But that is a common theme of the future, for anyone trying to stay out of bankruptcy, engine cost engine cost engine cost. Even with today's fuel prices, it's still the engine cost that makes or breaks your bank account. After housing, which is the worst thing out of what with the economy and inability to compete in the global market place against unfair competition who does not have the same housing and transportation costs that we do, so instead we go home, and sit and cry, boo hoo, unfair competition, we can't compete because our cost of living is high. All you need to fix that high cost of living issue is to buy one of these Tesla's.
It's a friggin inconvenience to park at a gas station when you're car is outta juice, and they have to have an enterntainment park next to every one of them to keep you busy while you wait the "superfast" recharce of 30 minutes. They can't really exchance Li-ion batteries, like they can propane cylinders, because propane cylinders are relatively cheap, but with an electric vehicle Li-ion you're talking at least $20,000, so how you're gonna drop of your perfectly good $20,000 battery, and exchange it for someone else's crappy one, that's been abused, and it's only worth $1,500. That's a big deal, you can't swallow a cost like that like you can for propane exchange cylinders for instance.
The other big deal of EV's is the limited range, with huge batteries. The energy density of all batteries, including Li-ion is much smaller than fuels, by at least an order of magnitude - i.e. 0.3-1.0 MJ/kg for a battery, and 44 MJ/kg for gasoline and diesel including biodiesel, and something like 20 MJ/kg for Ethanol/Methanol/Liquid Ammonia. Nuclear powerplant generated liquid ammonia is the fuel of the future, because it's carbon neutral. It's the answer to the storage problems of the hydrogen economy - tag it on to nitrogen, and you got no hydrogen storage problem. I don't understand what's so complicated about this.
By the way most movies coming out of Hollywood are action movies, where something happens, somebody either gets killed, or something blows up, or there is a car chase, or in general it's about guns, sex, and violence. That's what sells, so if you can see that in a movie, why not this one? Wait, one is "fictional" grueling details of historical events, such as King Henry the VIII's wives' heads rolling, vs. this one that's "real" in the more near present history. don't really understand what's the big deal in watching the gruely details of a video - which I haven't watched, nor interested in it - when people who want to see nasty things can watch, for instance a surgery movie, to see guts. Or go work in a butcher shop, where you get to slice and dies cows or chickens for bloody body parts, and even just going to the supermarket, it's fully of bloody meat everywhere.
Maybe multiple 9mm shots are preferable to behading, on the beheadee's part, because, as during the French revolution they found out, people could keep blinking after their head was cut, for various lengths, but most around 35 seconds or so. So you don't die instantly, and experience horror for at least 35 seconds.
Btw the UK may not have a Freedom of Speech 1st amendment right for it's population, it's good to live in the USA, where you can say anything. At least I try to say anything on Slashdot, and I'm still not dead yet, nor in jail over it.
By the way I found illustrative examples of what Unix should be like, on the pussy analogy:
First of all, here is a rococo-pussy (this is not what you want Unix to look like):
http://nudes13.hegre-art.com/h...
It's dark, mysterious, full of features, difficult to debug.
Here it is for closer inspection, under the hood, it's still dark, mysterious and difficult to find the fleas in it:
http://nudes13.hegre-art.com/h...
Compared the above to this unix-pussy:
http://content8.pureandsexy.or...
It's light, simple, low on features, easy to debug.
And for closer inspection, under the hood:
http://content8.pureandsexy.or...
It's still not that complicated, streamlined, and follows Einstein's principle of make it as simple as possible, but not simpler. It still has all the features of a pussy, properly implemented, headache free. You cannot get any simpler than that, or it's no longer a pussy.
When it comes to pussy, both are equally gorgeous, and functional. Variety is the spice of life. But when it comes to Unix, only the light, simple, easy to see, understand and debug, nonmysterious, low on complications but still getting everything done variety is what's beautiful.
The Chinese government remembers the opium wars, and exploitation of China over profits, and disregard for their welfare in it. What do you think would happen with GMO plants that you don't own, and not only in the intellectual property sense, where it could be pirated, but you don't own it because it's not fertile seed, and you have to keep going back to the original manufacturer for a survival, after he successfully convinced you to get rid of all seeds able to produce fertile seeds themselves, so you no longer have a means to go back to them if seed prices go up, by, mm, say 10 million times of their present cost? And that price is not an overstatement, there is a huge amount of money to be made blackmailing the whole world's population over their stomachs. Everybody has to eat, no matter what the price, therefore the price, in absence of excess supply, which of course would be artificially created by withholding GMO seeds, tends to infinity. To withhold GMO seeds all you have to do is create artificial catastrophies around the available funds of seeds, and lose much of the supply like that. Supply/demand, with a hard demand, is a really easy way to make money if you can cut the supply hard and fast. But only after the alternatives to run to, such as traditional fertile seeds have been abandoned, and it's not possible to have them as an option.
You still, get to keep some of your data on your cellphone memory. True cloud computing is where you can get blackmailed for access to your data, plus government snooping is automated, with common sense network traffic monitoring therefore inspection at each access instance to your data by you, as opposed to the feds raiding your house to look at your hard drives, which in the old days required a warrant, so you could keep accessing your own data for free, without having to pay ransom for it constantly. For now you don't get blackmailed over your cloud stored data, because there are many legal, offline competitor alternatives. Alternatives which have to be eliminated by those pent up on blackmailing you for some good ransom money in the future. It's so hard to make money on software, by trying to sell you an operating system as a subscription service with daily security patches that patch the patches that patch the patches.. it's a joke, so a business model where the operating system is free, but you hand over the data and pay each time you access it, sounds like a much more workable one, to those whose daily bread comes from computer software related things..Why work hard to make new software when the old stuff was much better, when you can just sit back and get fat collecting over cloud data storage ransom fees? Of course there is a fair price, in that they do have to provide the cloud infrastructure, they buy the harddrives and you get to rent them, as opposed to having your own, and there is sometimes a fair rent price, but in the free market the usual question is not what a fair, economic benefit and accordingly price such a service should carry, but instead, what is the price the market is willing to bear under blackmailing situations? Only the commies would ever dream of calculating fair prices, and assigning them to everything in the economy, as in absolute 100% price control on everything, instead of letting the free market manage it, and as their case proved, instead of economic efficiency and fairness and justice, all they created were empty stores and people standing in line at the stores, because the prices were so cheap, and miscalculated, that every time it arrived at the store it fully sold out. In a blackmail prone situation, as in, if you're a city dweller, you have to stand in line for bread, no matter what the price of bread, you're getting blackmailed. Usually in the commie era it was the self reliant independently able to exist without a job or even a government villages, where free independent growing of food still went on anyway, and they were the ones who constantly kept the city dwellers decently fed. The only issue a village has is military security, for which it needs a city like contraption, or at the very least a monastery like scientific advancement zone, to where the villagers provide the excess production to sustain these "parasites" who can defend them against an invasion
The whole main posting topic is similar to business provided cars vs. rental cars. At one point in time I was stuck renting cars to get to work for a while, my boss keeping under so much stress and uncertainty about the future that I never got to the point to making the jump into purchasing a car, right after college, for months on and on. And they teased me to go to some scale manufacturer, with my own car, and were waiting for me to raise the miles done under business hours using a personal car issue, but of course I shrugged it off, last thing you need when you're trying to get hired on so you can jump into buying a car, is to bring whether you should be hired over making dumb decisions like that. It was supposed to be 4 months temp to hire, with enough pay in to temporarily afford a rental, unlike a minimum wage job, but pretty much all that pay went into this extended temporary situation of not knowing what the fuck I'm gonna be doing next week. As soon as I jumped into debt to get a reliable car, I would have been fired, it was just so much in the air. When they told me after 6 months that they like what I'm doing in some respect, but they can't hire me for at least another 6 months I quit. It was not a very healthy job anyway, always inhaling fumed silica dust and solvent in the lab, and that silica dust depositing on my eyeglass frames that were supposedly titanium, chewed it up, it was weird. Plus the lab coats I wore all had a spot of some kind of burning chemical half way up the arm, in an, let's annoy you kinda way, plus they announced a hiring freeze, then told you about the 6 months, because of the hiring freeze, then they post other college grads getting hired straight out college, without being temps first, during the hiring freeze, on the bulletin board posting saying that their greatest skill is drinking the most beer at keg parties. So it was like a general agreement it was time to go without actually getting fired.
So the point is would you charge a business for the gas cost and car cost it takes you to conduct your employment? There are rules that if you're on the clock they might reimburse you on car cost, but that's so up in the air, how about when you're not on the clock? Everyone is expected to have their own cars from their salaries, their own clothes, unless there are company provided uniforms, and in this sense a phone sometimes may be in the same ballpark as the clothes, so are you gonna charge the company for the wear and tear from the use of your shoes and clothes while being on the clock? That's how I'd consider looking at it. Own clothes vs. uniforms provided by the company, own car vs. company car, own phone vs. company provided phone. And out of those using your own car for business while on the clock is the most reasonable, but there are these exempt and non-exempt rules about overtime too, where managers are exempt from being paid overtime for the hours they work over 40 each week, instead they get a monthly salary (which in Feb is nice.) But if you work hours for free, and dedicating yourself to the company like that, then why nitpick on getting paid for using your car while doing regular work during non-overtime hours, and instead managing your personal affairs from the hopefully big salary the company is able to give you, without being bogged down the paperwork overhead of calculating how much they owe you over it. But of course the rule is that there is no rule. And it's easy to see how it can lead to exploitation, but the ultimate answer to that is that nobody forces you to work a job you don't like to work, or want to work, it's only exploitation if you're forced to work, as in you can't find a low cost of living for yourself, and you have to accept any exploiting job thrown at you, you have to keep up with the other dogs jumping higher for that piece of bacon, which is the general trend in the present unemployment atmosphere. There are no jobs, therefore all jobs are highly vulnerable to exploitation, so the court may have that on their side. If the economy picks up an
Catholic
There are lots of portable x-ray devices , usually for on the road or nursing home type fell and broke a bone situations, and it's friggin lovely when the neighbors use it on you. At my previous residence there was not a single spot in the whole place where I could be and not be sick, I usually ended up in the entrance lobby or the kitchen area, never in the bedroom, as, I figured out lately why, but not back then, there was a contractor van with two black dudes that always looked at me weird when they came out of the driveway right when I walked by on the sidewalk, and I did not understand why back then. I guess everyone got a job to do, and I'm not an angel either. So lucky me, I got a thick cast iron metal tub now on a top floor, so the only way to really irradiate me with microwaves or x-rays or whatever the heck goes through wooden houses like they are paper, so the only way to get me now is from an airplane, or if someone climbed the roof. But the house is really tall, so dark hour drone strikes are most feasible, but the good thing about that is that if they are low power, because you can't take up a huge amount of electric power, unless the plane itself is huge. But lately it's been getting better, I mean last week or so, a couple weeks ago the hits were really bad. But just like Chernobyl proves, like can take a whole lot of radiation dose, as long as it's within tolerance limits, and you get breaks to recuperate. Worst is when you get a job where they make you sit in one place or stand in one place, and xray you there too, then when you come home, it's the same thing, and you don't get enough breaks to recuperate, and get things like, swollen gums and loose teeth, stinky breath, tooth cavities, and cancer in your skin and meat that doesn't get fought off by your immune system. One of the reasoning behind it could be to force you into higher housing cost situations, the other to help the health care business every time you show up in the emergency room feeling sick, all aimed at undermining you economically. Because you're not allowed to make it, that's already guaranteed. We'll shoot your tires out on the highway to make you catch a taxi, we'll sell you a remote control car to smack you into an accident on the highway, but you will not make it, to where you accomplish a low cost comfortable living, and an income to basic expense ratio of at least 20x. That's a big no no. Then everyone else would want that for themselves, and the exploitation of everybody stuck in a 1.2-1.5x income to basic expense ratio would stop, and everyone would become free, and go in a thousand different direction doing whatever they feel like, instead of what they are forced to do by their circumstances. It all starts with one bad apple that spoils the bunch.
Correction: It's not 1!+2!+3!=4!-1, but 1*1!+2*2!+3*3!=4!-1, as in 1*1+2*2+3*6=1+4+18=23, which is 24-1. My memory failed me there, but the point is there is a different way to represent digits that gets full granularity of integers without gaps in it, other than just the geometric progression Indian/Arabic/Mayan method.
How about if you tried to apply Roman numerals instead of Indian/Arabic binary representation for each digit? Would it get terser, as an overall sum, where you could surpass the Indian/Arabic fixed base geometric progression with the factoradic variable base progression? After all, you only need one character to represent 1000, M, from a lookup table, so you have M, D, C, L, X, V, I, or 7 different values, and a maximum craziness of MMMDCCCLXXXVIII, or 3888 requiring 15 digits within its usual representation space, instead of a uniform 4 for all digits with Indian/Arabic numerals with space to blow to 9999, but 1900 only MCM, 3 digits, so near the focusing points, you get terser, at the cost of more verbose at the extreme of 3888. For one roman numerals require something like 2.9 bit representations for each digit out of 7 possibilities, while Arabic/Indian need 10 digits so like 3.1 bit digits for the same space. And overall, roman numerals are are much busier with more digits, even if less bit per digit, in the space to 3999, than Arabic ones. But right now, I feel too stupid, tired and lazy to keep on thinking like this. Maybe someone can carry on the philosophical discussion, and tell me why I feel like a dog chasing his tail? I keep thinking maybe one day I might catch it :)
Well the important thing is, that when doing 168 pin RAM sticks, and looking at the pipe of data coming through them, on each line, if they come through in say decimal representation, with 10 voltage values each, then you can get 10^168-1 values out of it (like you can 0 to 9999 from a 4 digit bicycle lock, not 10,000, or 0-255 from 8 bits, not 256, but with factoradic representation with variable base, the highest allowed digit on the 168th line is 168, as in 1,2,3..A,B,C (you run out after 10 digits plus 26 Roman letters, so you go alpha, beta, gamma, etc, pile on everything you know til you get a 168 base digit), so you'd have a number like gamma x 168!+L x 167!+... +3 x 3! + 2x2! + 1x1!, according to their rules in Wikipedia, which is still fully granular, but much huger number, as 168! > 10^168 by a whole lot, and the situation becomes even more stark when you compare 168! > 2^168, as in binary, the only issue being that each digit must be represented by 168 possible digits, which in binary takes up 256 or 8 bits, with room to spare above 168 to 255, so you divide 168/8=21, so you can really only go up to 21!, which may still be bigger than 10^168, but still get full granularity of integers. But it's not, as 21! = 5.11x10^19 according to google, which is a whole lot less than 2^168-1= 3.74x10^50. So at 168 pins the variable base factoradic representation is not more efficient than the fixed based Indian/Arabic geometric progression. Hmm.
But that gives me the Idea, that you don't have to divide 168 by 8, as for the initial digits you only need less room, and 8 bits are wasted, so you need for 1, 2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11.... etc 1/1 bit, 2/2 bits, 2/3 , 3/4, 3/5, 3/6 ,3/7, 4/8,4/9,4/10,4/11,4/12,4/13,4/4/14,4/15, 5/16,5/17,5/18,5/19,5/20,5/21,5/22,5/23,5/24.5/25,5/26,5/27,5/28,5/29,5/30,5/31,6/32,6/33,6/34,etc, and I'm too lazy to calculate how many you need, but if you use binary geometric progression encoding of the factoradic digits, you only need 7 digits to get the numbers under 127, 6 under 64, 5 under 32, 4 under 16, 3 under 8, 2 under 4 and 1 under 2, so (168-127)x8+(127-63)x7+(63-31)x6+ etc = (1097 I got at convertit.com, but I'm stupid because that's not how many digits you get, but instead =) 41/8+64/7+32/6+16/5+8/4+4/3+2/2+1/1 = 1+2*2+3*4+4*8+5*16+6*32 etc, as far as you can go, to stay under 168 available pins on the RAM stick, I make a Microsoft Works spreadsheet that came with my HP Mini Recovery DVD, that looks like this
n 2^n (n+1)*2^n Partial Sum
0 1 1 1
1 2 4 5
2 4 12 17
3 8 32 49
4 16 80 129
5 32 192 321
So it shows that 129 is the highest number under 168, so you need 129 pin to carry all factoradic variable base digits up to the 4 digit ones, now I'm confused, so let's go back, you need 1+2+2+3+3+3+3+4+4+4+4+4+4 eight times, etc.. so I'm going back to make a different spreadsheet,
Numeral Pins Subtotal
1 1 1
2 2 3
3 2 5
4 3 8
5 3 11
6 3 14
7 3 17
8 4 21
9 4 25
10 4 29
11 4 33
12 4 37
13 4 41
14 4 45
15 4 49
16 5 54
17 5 59
18 5 64
19 5 69
20 5 74
21 5 79
22 5 84
23 5 89
24 5 94
25 5 99
26 5 104
27 5 109
28 5 114
29 5 119
30 5 124
31 5 129
32 6 135
33 6 141
34 6 147
35 6 153
36 6 159
37 6 165
38 6 171
So you can get up to 37! with 165 pins, which is 1.38x10^43, which is much less than 2^168-1=3.74x10^50. Hmm. Eventually it's gotta get better with factoradic, which tends to infinity much faster than a fixed base raised to power, such as n^n > a^n over a certain threshold of n. But 165 pins is not past that critical point. Who can find the critical point where factoradic becomes a more efficient way to store numbers, than
Now I went to the Wikipedia page, and it says you're allowed digits only up to the position number at each position in the factoradic, such as
Radix 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Place val 7! 6! 5! 4! 3! 2! 1! 0!
Plcv decl 5040 720 120 24 6 2 1 1
Highest 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0
digit allowed
I thought since both 0! and 1! equal 1, you start from 1, not 0, and also that you could go to 5039 in digits at 7!, right before you hit 5040, in a variable base, just like you can go up to 9, right before you hit 10, in digits in a fixed base geometric progression. Or to 23 in digits right before you hit 4!., as in 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,A,B,C,D,E,F(15 of hexa), G, H, I, J,K(icosa),L,M,N(23, of tricosa), so you could have a number like L511 meaning Lx4!+5x3!+1x2!+1x1!. Something is not right here, because the 1x2! and 1x1! only allow 1 as the highest digits, hmm. So anyway the number then is 23x24+5x6+1x2+1x1=552+30+2+1=585, which is much higher than the next up number, 5!=120, so you'd end up with multiple representations for the same number above 121, plus you'd need variable storage space, as you need 120 digits by the next round, and the 26 letters of the alphabet are not enough, so it may not be better after all. The important thing is to try, and keep trying for better. And I'm not smart enough to figure all this out anyway. In any case you can't go up to 9999 in digits when you represent 10000, for the second position at 1x000, but only to 9, or doing so does not cut down on storage costs, by the time you're done representing those digits.
It's more complicated than what I made it sound, because each position has a variable base as opposed to a fixed base in geometric progression, b, so you could in theory reserve more room than a base for higher numbers. The situation is similar to decimal hex, or binary coded decimal, where your base is F, but you only go up to 9, and lose the available representation space between 10 and 16. With a fixed base, factoradic loses the representation space available for each digit, on the other hand it takes up a fixed amount of memory per digit, so there is various mixes and matches between fixed base geometric, fixed base factoradic, and variable base factoradic, and variable base factoradic might be the most efficient with full granularity encompassing all natural numbers in a range for huge numbers, while fixed based factoradic might be more efficient for intermediate numbers, and fixed base geometric series Indian/Arabic for small numbers.
I just figured that one out, or more like I just got the divine revelation, even though "they" teased me with the same thing before, in 2009, but mind controlled me not to realize it.
I just had this idea that in programming, Roman numerals might be more efficient than Arabic/Indian, but only when you can guarantee gaps, or granularity. Such as when dealing with bytes, each being 8bits, or 2^8=256, and wasting space, granularity when you only need to represent 17, which can be done in 2^5=32, but not in 2^4=16. Similar things are FAT cluster sizes, that waste space on clustering, in the name of Roman numeral style efficiency. In this sense, in roman numerals you only represent the centuries by a few characters, such as MM for 2000, MCM for 1900, MDCCC for 1800, MDCC 1700, MD1500, MCD 1400, MCCC for 1300, ..etc. and MC 1100, M 1000, CM 900, DCCC 800, etc. You could cut this down to 3 digits, to lose even more granularity, but your granularity is maximum near the KB or MB levels, right near the cluster size, and instead have options of MM, MCM, MDC, MD, MCD, MC, M, CM, DC, D, CD, which work near the 500 level, and some granularity nearby it, but are inefficient away from the 500 cluster level. If you could get more terse like that, in expression, as in military units one would be M, other D, other D, other L, other X, then V, and the individual soldier, I, so with cutting down to one character or two characters instead of 4 characters required by Indian/Arabic, you could get some bandwidth, terseness of conveyed information, and less parallel lines to carry that bandwidth, to memory for instance. This is illustrated in datatypes, which also lose granularity, but are the equivalents of M, D, C, L, X, V, I, in most typed programming languages. So I'm just adding this thought of how the Roman numerals are stupid to do math calculations, but in certain circumstances they make sense, such as counting available military units.
I just got curious what the letter for 5000 would be, so I looked it up in Wikipedia. There is no such number, and the ancient system is only good for 3999, and there are two methods to get higher numbers, one draw a bar above a number meaning it's multiplied by M, or 1000, so you can represent up to 3,999,000 or almost 4,000,000, and most millionaires could not count their money like that, but then you can keep adding more lines to keep getting higher multiples. The other method, more complicated, but descended from Etruscan tradition that Roman numerals came from, cannot be printed here, because Slashdot eats the funky backward C characters, and you have to read it at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
So these are the two known methods of number representation, there is also an option for factoradic, with full granularity, where 1!+2!+3!+...+n!=(n+1)!-1, n!=1x2x3..xn, 1!=1, 2!=2, 3!=1x2x3=6, 4!=1x2x3x4=24, 5!=120, 6!=720, etc, but it's not more efficient than Arabic/Indian, because that uses the rule applied to geometric progressions, of b^0+b^1+b^2+b^3+..+b^n=b^(n+1)-1, and as long as you have your highest base, b, there is no reason at each positional representation not to go all the way up to that highest point. For instance when we say 3528 we mean 8x10^0+2x10^1+5x10^2+3x10^3=8x1+2x10+5x100+3x1000=8+20+500+3000=3528. In factoradic representation you'd only be able to go up to n! at each position, not the full base, such as 3528 being 8x1!+2x2!+5x3!+3x4!=8x1+2x2+5x6+3x24=8+4+30+72=114, a very slow and inefficient way to store numbers, because you could have used each position to store at the highest base available, such as 10 base, implicitly understood, and get much better storage capacity while you still get the full granularity of representation, for each natural number, unlike with chopped roman numerals, or even scientific notation for Indian/Arabic numbers, which we call floating point representation, which is full of holes and cannot represent every single integer to its highest limits. With factoradic you can only go up to n! times the decimal base at each position, while with Indian/Arabic you can go up to base^position, and only for very high numbers do factorials surp
Yeah, I forgot the part where the copperheads advance to 9dans, and destroy the system from within. The situation then becomes similar to the French Revolution, where the 30kyu peasantry rebels against the 9dan monarch and 5 dan nobility, and guillotine their heads. If a 9d copperhead is caught, after getting away with things for a long time, just like the nobles/kings could in France, but eventually there'd be massive flame-wars about it, in a rebellion style, where it becomes obvious you have to roll out the guillotine and have some heads roll. Of course this situation can be abused too, to where someone like Linus or Alan Cox could be ousted, and then it's up in the air whether the rebels are paid by Microsoft, to kill Linux, or there is a true problem with a rotten leadership. Of course it's hard to see Linus intentionally damage Linux, on the other hand he does look like he's the cousin of Bill Gates, and he lives in Oregon too, not too far. So ya never know these things. That's right, I pick on everyone equally without exception, nobody is safe from the terror of my words, even Linus. But if it bothers you, you can ignore, and get on with your life. Nobody forces you to read all this.
Also, computing already follows similar simplicity at the core as life does. Everything in life is A C T G, and everything in computing is 0,1. But we're dealing with the complexity issues arising at higher levels, than 0,1. In particular, the closer you are to 0,1 the simpler and more straight forward, the more "Unix" the procedures should be, and the farther away you are, the more variety, the greater flamboyance, the greater exuberance of rococo, such as menu options, flamboyant colors, and richness of decoration. For instance, a colorful lizard is flamboyant at the user interface, appearance to the external world, but adheres to the principles of all eukaryotes, in how it functions closer to the ACTG level. Similarly, KDE should be flamboyant at the user interface level, or VB Classic/VBA Macros can be flamboyant in what all is implemented in them, at the user interface level, but simple at the vbrun60.dll level. All eukaryotes adhere to the principles of having a cellular unit with a nucleus, mitochondria, etc, and in this trees and grass and lizards and you and I are similar. It does not mean that the principle is a correct one, for instance a totally mindless and dumb prokaryote might evolve that does not have a nucleus, and chew and digest off Alien's face, digest up all trees, all other lifeforms, and in a sense, prevail in the competition to survive by becoming the new top predator. Being a eukaryote means you believe that it's efficient, and stick to it, but that belief is not a guarantee, and you can have raging debates about it, or even might have some human cells where it might make economic sense to be prokaryote instead of eukaryote for some of the specialized cells, but in the meantime everyone sticks to this guiding principle, not because it's correct, or good, but because it is what it is. Similarly, in an aerobic, oxygen atmosphere, for multicellular life other than bugs, which have no blood but a tracheal lung system that penetrates all the way to individual cells and brings oxygen directly, so for multicellular lifeforms that do have blood, hemoglobin based on iron has arisen as the dominant and only standard, being the most efficient life could come up with. There are exceptions with blue blooded molluscs, like octopi, which sometimes live in depths of great oxygen depravation, and at those oxygen concentrations the copper based blue blood is more efficient, but all fish, all reptiles, all birds and mammals have red blood. Red blood might be complex in an of itself, but it became a standard everyone follows because we don't know anything more efficient. In the biotech future there might be artificial synthesis of something more efficient, and human derived artificial people based on them, such as green blood or orange blood, who can win olympics, but for now life is stuck at hemoglobin, which is both complex and efficient, and maximum state of the art. Similarly all vision systems are based on a vitamin A derived molecule, already at the limits of theoretical efficiency, as in 4 photons able to trigger a visual response in the brain, but there might be inventions where a single photon does it - and it may not be the molecule itself, because, in theory, that changes conformation from a single photon, but the overhead circuitry, which, may be damping out and filtering single photon detection on purpose - but once you got single photon detection, you know you can't get any better than that, maybe less expensive molecules to be used. In number systems around the world we use the positional Hindu/Arabic system as opposed to the Roman, and we have nothing better so far, so it's a universal standard.
(By the way the positional system is encoded instinctively into words such as 10, 20, 30, 40, and such things as 31,32, 33,... then 41, 42, 43, so it's weird that the Greeks and Romans could not come up with 4something to represent 40, with zero. But the french have quatre vingt huit for 88, literally meaning 4-20-8, as in 4x20+8, so some number systems don't follow the simple rules that would yield
On common dumb phrase in Unix is "Everything is a file." How can you say a piece of hardware is like a file on a disk, when it obviously has various features? That's the whole point, ignore, ignore, ignore the features to utter terseness in the interface, beat it down with a club into a uniform, system wide dumb mode first, then add the features and complexities later, but preserve the uniform text interface in everything, don't customize into a myriad of unique and non-compliant standards. If I remember right, in later versions of Linux I had issues treating items under /dev and especially /proc as regular files, they forgot about implementing the core principles of behavior. But I don't claim to understand the reasoning behind it, which may be reasonable. It is still nice to be able to dd if=/dev/cdrom of=./file.iso , from hardware. You can't do that in windows, or dos, from simple command line, but in Unix everything is a file, that you can read from and possibly write to, precious data. That's what a computer is for: helping me massage my data. And in that, I'd like to reserve my 1 TB portable disk for pictures of butterflies, or videos, and would prefer if the code that got everything accomplished stayed under 150KB. I realize that's not possible, but what's happening in today's computing environment, when it comes to multi megabyte code size that massages the 1TB data, is simply a joke. There was this saying back in the day, at IBM, that 1 MB should be enough for everyone. And by that I think they meant for code size, not data, as I wish to store months and months worth of compressed videos, and I would have no problem with code that could massage it to all my needs, AND stay under that 1MB. If nothing else, self generated code from simple rules, could accomplish starting from an under 1MB seed. However self generated code brings about the danger of mutations and AI. And AI, along the movie of "Screamers" from 1996, is the biggest threat humanity is facing today, bigger than biotech or nuclear holocaust, because you can run away from those two into outer space, but not from an AI cleverer than you set out to chase you and hunt you down. That movie might seem funny at first, but it's really not funny. Everyone who programs computers, and automates designs, similar to how life automates mutations as new Monte-Carlo designs and selection from them, should always keep that movie in the back of their minds. And in this sense they should set limits on computing power available in laptops and desktops, and the relentless drive for more supercomputing, and more bloated software like KDE4 and higher, when even KDE3's biggest problem is codesize and performance, compared to windows. For instance, when copying files in Konqueror, Windows 2000 ran circles around KDE 3, but not in command prompt of course. So how do I get user friendliness out of Unix, and performance at the same time? All I see is bloat bloat bloat these days, that refuses to run on older hardware, when in my mind progress in software science would mean increased speed even on older hardware, because, as far as the features go, I'm not seeing any tremendous advances, it's all just the same thing, with a different face slapped on it, 10x slower than 10 years ago. Like MS Office 97 can accomplish pretty much everything that Office 2010 can, and even do so more efficiently, plus in a way I find awkward because I got used to the old ways, so why should I get used to the new ones when I get no benefit at all from it. In fact I have to click twice to get to a menu item that used to take one click on the tool bar.. Similar gripes of I used to be able to do this and that in Linux, and all of a sudden they took it away, and got something "better"? Really? That much better that it's worth constantly switching ways of doing things? How are businesses to rely on that kind of Unix, that won't last the full carrier of 30 years of one of their freshly hired college grads? They never get the chance to get expert at it, or create software
And Unix is defined by being simple. Which Linux, it no longer is.
They should worry less about authenticating who contributes, and then finding the scapegoat to blame for the mess ups, but instead they should try to go back to core principles, and clear up the mess and establish a system where mess ups are impossible. It's not the individual programmers who are messing up, but the leadership at the top who fails to implement core principles, who have allowed themselves to stray far from them, under the pressure of features, and patching the patches that patch the patches that patched we don't even remember what anymore. The herd simply just follows the command of the shepherd through his dogs. You can't blame the ewe. You can't blame the dogs. If both the ewe and the dogs each follow command as they are supposed to. That's how a military works. Chain of command. Battle of Jutland is a good read on military and controlling chaos into musical and dance-like order. Jellicoe's formation of the ships, where they almost hit each other while assuming positions, "flying" by each other at only a few miles per hour. Battle about turn to starboard, by Scheer, a motion by complete mess-prone chaotic-prone beings executing it in unison, from prior practice. That is the way to beat down chaos, in middle of a messy battle, which by definition is chaos itself. Top down chain of command, following orders, everyone moving in unison.
The basic problem with Linux is complexity. I've stopped using Linux ever since kernel 2.6.26 or so, anything new that boots does just way way too much. It's obvious what a hopeless mess it is just from the boot up messages. Damn Small Linux is trying to get back to core principles, but it's hopeless with the present code size of the kernel. The basic principle of Unix is the KISS principle. Quoting from the Wikipedia page:
The principle most likely finds its origins in similar concepts, such as Occam's razor, Leonardo da Vinci's "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication", Mies Van Der Rohe's "Less is more", or Antoine de Saint Exupéry's "It seems that perfection is reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away". Colin Chapman, the founder of Lotus Cars, urged his designers to "Simplify, and add lightness". Rube Goldberg's machines, intentionally overly-complex solutions to simple tasks or problems, are humorous examples of "non-KISS" solutions.
An alternative view - "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler." - is attributed to Albert Einstein.
That is a warning that even the KISS principle should not be abused, though maximized as much as possible.
I did a google search on "core principles of unix," and I came up with this:
http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/...
http://undeadly.org/cgi?action...
http://people.fas.harvard.edu/...
etc, etc.
In all of them the basic principle of Unix is simplicity, clarity, modularity, human readability, beating complexity down with a club anywhere you can, if you can find clever ways to get something accomplish, forget about it, it's too complex, do it cleanly, neatly, simply, and even brute force. Don't be clever, be stupid, and expect everyone to be stupid. In Unix, every program does one thing, and does it extremely well. If you need features, you write a different program. Then these programs come together and interact through extremely simple interfaces, and this soup of experts interacting simply to accomplish any needed complex task in the world is what you call Unix. The swiss army knife of software. Which also goes for C, as C and Unix are the same thing.
The first thing the Linux developers have to accomplish is to beat down the complexity mess they've created, to gut the whole thing to bare bones, throw awa