In what dreamworld? the constitution is the supreme law. International treaties themselves are just paper - it is only local laws that implement those treaties that hold any force, and they are also subject to the constitution.
You know --- this statement is really, really scary. This is the classic example of why other countries find the US so damned frightening.
International law is just that. International law. The US Constitution is just that: the US constitution. It is completely irrelevant off American soil. It's just a bunch of words that some people in some country way over there think is important. It's not important to me. I doubt you would think the Magna Carta was important, either, but it's the fundamental basis of our government.
What do you think law is? It's not some divine order handed down by the gods. It's a bunch of people getting together and saying, these are the rules to which we agree to abide. No more. All the US constitution is is a set of principles that the US as a whole thinks is a good idea to base its laws on.
But likewise, once you've said that you'll agree to those rules, you don't get to pick and choose which rules you want to comply with. I can't drive down the wrong side of the road; explaining when I get pulled over that I've decided that that particular law doesn't apply to me just doesn't wash. I have to coexist with the other drivers; the price for being allowed to use the road is that I have to follow the rules.
You want to trade with other countries? You need to follow the rules. All the rules. That's the price you pay. If you don't like them, try to get them changed, but if you just turn up your nose and say doesn't-apply-to-me, you'll really piss off the people you trade with. It makes you unpredictable, and by the definition of your own president, a rogue state. Piss them off too much and eventually they'll stop trading with you.
Of course, international law is a very fuzzy thing, and it only applies when crossing borders. Originally it only governed the way countries related to each other, and didn't apply to anything that happened inside those borders. These days, there's so much international trade on the purely informational level that having, say, 20 year copyright in one country and 100 in another just makes a headache for everyone involved. Some laws have to be applied inside a country too, and that's what organisations like the WIPO's for, to sort out that kind of thing. I don't agree with how they do it but what they do is important.
It makes matters even more complicated that there is no international law enforcement body. This makes it feasible for individual countries to push the limits of what their neighbours will allow; breaking international law to such a degree that it gives the country in question an advantage, but not so much that it's worth the hassle for its neighbours to intervene. This is dangerous because it's horribly destabilising.
But, to get back to the original point, I find it highly unnerving that the country that claims to be the world's foremost democracy holds democratic ideals in such low regard. If the majority of countries decides one thing, why does the US so often do the exact opposite? I get the impression sometimes that a lot of the population of the US doesn't believe that anything outside its borders really matters. I find it very symptomatic that American presidents since I can remember hardly ever use the world people. They always say Americans instead.
Now maybe nuclear tech maybe a way to solve this particual problem better, however in general we know today it's a dead end. Nuclear power does not pay of in the long run! [....] Why do I call it a dead end? Because when economically clalculating nuclear powerplants as project novists always calculate the break-even point. Thats a wrong calculation. You always have to take into account ALL payments that a project involves even those after break even point, and those after closure of the plant. And they are enourmous (e.g. to dismantle a nuclear powerplant costs more than 20 times than the costs to build it first place. Also we have nuclear waste FOREVER, with every year into all future we've to carry the costs. (calculated as irredeemable costs).
This is a gross simplification, I'm afraid. Yes, you do have to factor in decomissioning costs. But these days people do. It costs vast amounts of money to decommission a sixties-era reactor, sure, because they weren't designed to be decomissioned (despite being lousy ways to design a nuclear reactor anyway --- Chernobyl was such a disaster because its fail-safes were completely useless). Modern reactors are far safer, more reliable, cheaper (apart from beaurocratic and licensing costs) and more efficient --- take a look at pebble-bed reactors, for example.
The numbers I've seen indicate that the overall cost of electricity produced by a modern fission reactor is about the same as conventional power (it depends who you ask, and as you say, it's quite hard to find out whether decomissioning costs are factored in). The environmental cost, however, is far less, because the total amount of waste produced is very small and, let's face it, nuclear waste is just not that dangerous.
Nuclear waste doesn't glow, it doesn't cause three headed fish, it won't kill you if you just look at it. The wildlife around Chernobyl is doing really well. The really dangerous stuff, like plutonium, is far too valuable to throw away (plutonium's mainly dangerous because it's extremely poisonous chemically --- but it's less poisonous than arsenic, and lots of that is pumped into the sea, and arsenic doesn't decay).
There's basically three grades of nuclear waste produced by a fission reactors: the low-grade stuff, like the plastic gloves mentioned above; medium-grade stuff, like the materials that make up the reactor's plumbing, which is been irradiated; and the very small amounts of high-grade waste, your actual fission byproducts. Most of these are recycled because it's too valuable to throw away.
The safest thing to do with the rest is to seal the whole lot up into vitrified blocks and make a big pile in the middle of some desert somewhere. It won't get into the ecosystem, there are no animals or people to interfere, and you've got easy access in case you need it. It'll just sit there.
Alternative solutions are to put the stuff at the bottom of a very deep hole in a subduction zone: eventually it'll get sucked into the mantle and dissipite. Since the mantle is loaded with radioactive isotopes anyway, then it's pretty much gone. Or you could take it off the planet entirely. This would actually be cheap, safe, and would get rid of it once and for all --- but there's perfectly sensible ways of recycling the bulk of it that would be even cheaper.
As for solar power --- yeah, very neat, but you get an absolute maximum of 1kW/m^2, and only during the day when it's sunny. Solar power is no use to me (I live in Britain). Seeing as a kilowatt is about 1.3 horsepower, try calculating the area of solar panel you'd need to run that SUV...
a) the thing blows up in launch before you get it out into space. = some shit on the bottom of a sea bed somewhere (yes I know there is little risk of it going into the atmosphere.)
They're in really, really tough boxes. If your booster explodes, you comb through the debris, find the RTG still intact in its box, and recycle it --- they're expensive. (This has actually happened.)
b) you get nuclear waste "stuck" somewhere on top of a rock.
It's in a really, really tough box. It's not going anywhere and it won't leak.
c) you use a shortcut with nuclear fuel. Sure it might be better "now" but in principle running things of solar is damned fine engineering. Not only that, but any tech advancements that are made for space (remember the public is paying for all your little space toys, while people starve no less) can filter down to people everywhere.
I'm sorry, this paragraph makes no sense. RTGs are made of nuclear fuel, that's how they work. Yes, solar panels are good engineering, but RTGs are far more suitable for solving the job at hand. Yes, the public is paying, but space exploration is a pathetically tiny amount of money compared to what's spent on welfare or the armed forces, and the extra knowledge gained by extending the lifespan of the probe probably outweighs the (tiny) extra expense. Yes, technology trickles down, but solar panels are fundamentally only useful for certain specialised tasks on Earth, and they're approaching the theoretical maximum efficiency anyway; there are a lot of tasks for which RTGs --- even on Earth --- would be really handy. And there isn't any research being done into those because people think 'nuclear' rhymes with 'evil'.
I'm afraid everything you've said indicates that you've bought into the anti-nuclear propaganda. Try doing some research and getting an opinion of your own.
Can you go into more details about this registry hack? I'm in exactly the same position you're in. I suspect I'd rather use UDF than ISO9660, but I certainly don't want to use FAT.
Can you put your primary Windows filesystem on a ISO9660 or UDF volume?
Actually, in some countries pounds are defined as a unit of mass. You might be thinking of poundals; one poundal (abbreviated to lbf) is defined as the force one pound exerts under normal gravity.
Of course, that's only some countries. Others treat the pound as a unit of force, defined as a constant value in Newtons. Which leads to that very familiar sensation whenever you try and deal in imperial units of not knowing what the hell people are talking about. (Ever tried to trade miles-per-gallon figures with someone in another country? Do you know whether their gallons are the same size as yours? What about their miles? Are you sure?)
Back in the days when Sun was a cool company, they produced a windowing system based around Display Postscript that was marginally X-compatible; OpenWindows. You may have heard of it.
One of the example programs was, allegedly, written by a bunch of hackers in the back of one of their offices in the middle of the night. It was so cool they cleaned it up a bit and released it.
Meet pizzatool. It'll let you pick one of several varieties of standard pizza, or make your own. It knows about different sizes. It would fax off your order for you. It came preprogrammed for their favourite pizza delivery place (I bet that place really regretted it when OpenWindows got distributed worldwide). And... it had a preview mode. It drew your pizza for you, right there on the screen.
And you could spin it with the mouse... but if you spun it too fast, all the toppings would run...
pizzatool was written entirely in object-oriented Postscript for the NeWS toolkit on OpenWindows. It's a shame that died; it was very, very cool...
Cure is one thing, what's the prevention for all this? And I ask this, not for informed, knowledgeable users, but naive home users who don't know any better?
There isn't one. I'm afraid it's that simple.
The real villain is the computing model used. Windows (and Unix, and OS X) has a pretty simple security model: programs are either trusted, where they can run and use local resources, or they're not, in which case they can't.
This means that in order for the user to execute ThisMayBeAGame that it's downloaded from some random web site, the user has to tell the OS to trust ThisMayBeAGame. At which point the user is screwed, because it's got no way of determining what ThisMayBeAGame is actually doing.
...and before you jump on me: yes, I know that all the operating systems I'm talking about support fine-grained access control. Unfortunately, it's only in some areas. Linux only supports it in the filesystem. You can restrict a process to be able to touch some files only, but you can't restrict it to being able to open sockets to certain addresses only or to use no more than X mips of CPU time. Window is even worse because most people (myself included) disable file system access control entirely because it's just too inconvenient; the default user can do anything. I don't know about OS X but since it's based on BSD I assume it's like Linux.
...and yes, I know that you can get high-security patches for some operating systems that do provide this sort of control, but they're not used.
What's needed is a radically different computing model. Instead of a brittle system where all running software is trusted and you have prophylactic systems in place to distinguish between trusted software and untrusted software, you need a failsafe system where it simply doesn't matter if you run malicious code because it can't do any harm.
Managed systems like.NET and Java are a step in the right direction but things need to go much further. Imagine a computing system where your desktop computer simply provides computing resources to a whole ecosystem of interacting software agents. Some of these you put there; some of them arrived as part of other people's documents; some just wandered in off the local network. Some of them may be helpful, some may be malicious. They're all managed by a high-level system that doles out system resources depending on what the user's doing. An agent that's attached to the screen gets more CPU time and real memory than one that's not. An agent that's resident on the machine's local storage gets storage space, an agent that's arrived from the network doesn't. A transient agent can only make network connections to a host if it can present proof that it actually has something to do with that host... and so on.
Such a system would be far more resilient than the current ones. It would also work rather differently, but that's no bad thing. A lot of security issues would simply go away. Of course, there would be other problems that you wouldn't get with one of today's system --- notably, your software ecosystem would waste lots of resources --- but I think that's eminently affordable.
Now, I suppose, all I have to do is to go away and write it...
Modern spacesuits are pretty dire; they're a bad compromise between a full constant-pressure hardsuit and a zero-volume skinsuit. This means that they tend to blow up when they're pressurised, which means they resist movement. This makes them very hard work to actually move around in. They're also very complicated.
Constant-pressure hardsuits would be one alternative, but as they require complex joints for all the limbs you won't be exactly agile in one.
A more interesting alternative is the skinsuit. This consists of a very close-fitting elastic body stocking that provides pressure on the skin to protect you from vacuum, while not actually containing any air. (The only hollow part is the rigid helmet.) These would --- probably --- be much more comfortable, restricting motion much less, probably be more reliable, certainly simpler to construct, etc. Although they might be rather hard to put on.
Unfortunately, I can't find any references to skinsuits, although I gather they've been tried in prototype --- can anyone confirm this?
What happens when these robots gain the level of AI where they no longer view us as 'masters'? I hate to sound like I'm placing faith in movies like the Matrix and others, but seriously, I can understand what she's saying about robots and how they'll take the jobs we don't want, and create jobs which will effectively be creating/manufacturing them... fine and dandy, until they acquire, invent or evolve to the point where they can produce and manufacture themselves. Then they don't need us to *make* them anymore.
Isn't this just xenophobia? After all, my neighbours don't need me to reproduce themselves, either, and they're not planning to kill me. At least, I don't think they are (although they might be planning to drive me mad given their taste in music).
Any human-grade hypothetical AI will most likely have human sensibilities, otherwise it would be just too alien to deal with our world. Therefore it will have to have the ability to empathise with humans. This means that provided humans don't give them a reason to hate us, such as mistreating them, they probably won't want to hurt us. Hell, they might even be grateful that we made them. Revere us as ancestors, that sort of thing.
Why the assumption that they'll hate us? Be nice to them. Game theory indicates it's in their own best interests to be nice to us.
There's also Texmacs, which I prefer. It's got, IMO, better mathematics support. Plus it uses the TeX fonts throught so it looks gorgeous on screen.
Texmacs has a built-in renderer if you don't want to run stuff through LaTeX. It's got links to computer algebra systems --- never used it as I don't do maths any more, but it sounds suspiciously like a Mathematica Light built in to your word processor... and there's even a Windows version.
I wrote a multiplayer web game in MOO-code; Stellation. (Now defunct. Server not running, web page very out of date, but the source is still available from CVS on Sourceforge.)
It's a nice language. A bit baroque in places, but it has lots of nice features if you're programming this kind of thing; persistance (never need to worry about storing your data on disk!); incremental updates (connect to the server and fiddle with the code while it's up and running and serving requests!); a nice threading model (cooperative multitasking with teeth --- your thread has complete control until it suspends, but if you wait too long the thread's killed)... The VM is sophisticated enough that the game server runs its own web server.
The language itself is sort-of garbage collected (parts are, parts aren't), object oriented with pure dynamic dispatch, has some very nice security measures which I didn't use in Stellation because I wasn't letting users program it, and generally behaves like a slightly gothic Smalltalk with C syntax. Very easy to get used to.
If you're interested, check it out. I was really rather pleased with that game, and at its peak I got a reasonable number of players. It needs redesigning from the ground up, but I've yet to find a VM that's quite as nice as LambdaMOO for doing it in.
Exceptions are wonderful --- in garbage collected languages. In languages with manual memory allocation, they're a pain.
The problem is that exceptions short-circuit the return path in non-obvious ways. Say we have a chain of functions a calling b calling c. c throws an exception. a catches it. Does b need to care?
Well, yeah, if b allocates some memory that needs to be freed on an error condition. It needs to catch the exception, clean up, and rethrow --- work that needs to be done whether you're using exceptions or not. And using exceptions usually results in more and more complex code than just returning an error code.
C++ attempts to get around this by calling the destructors of any auto variables on the stack as it works its way up the return path. This works great, except when dealing with pointers, which still need to be done manually. It may be possible to do something scary with smart pointers and templates, but that is, as I said, scary.
(Part of the problem with C++ is that it's such a huge language that it's only possible to thoroughly know and use a subset of it. I don't doubt that there are ways of using exceptions with dynamically allocated memory safely... but I don't know them, and every time I've tried to find out, I've come back with a headache and a renewed determination not to use exceptions. The only time I've ever actually used the things was in a daemon that deliberately did not dynamically allocate anything, and they were brilliant. YMMV.)
But in a garbage collected language, you don't have to worry about this sort of cleanup except in very rare cases, and it all works very nicely. Anything b allocates will be orphaned and just vanish, magically.
Assuming Dactyl is a sphere 1.5km in diameter, then the volume is (4/3) pi r^3 == 1.8x10^9 cubic metres. 2.5 g/cm^3 is 2500 kg/m^3 (standard units are your friend), which gives Dactyl a mass of 4.5x10^12 kg.
The acceleration due to gravity is Gm/r^2. r, in this case, is the surface of Dactyl, 750m. That gives 0.5x10^-3 m/s^2, or 0.005% of an Earth gee.
That is, of course, assuming I've managed to do all my arithmetic correctly...
(Pity Slashdot doesn't support super, or I could make the above look much cleaner. MathML would be nice, too...)
...considering that all the email will have been delivered across the 'net by insecure, plain-text SMTP anyway? All you need is secure authentication via CRAM-MD5 or some such thing. There's no real need to go for a fully-fledged SSL connection just for email.
(Unless, of course, its own personal 'net connection is compromised, but then it has bigger problems.)
I find Ursula LeGuin's books utterly painful, the most boring things this side of, well, Robert Heinlein. Even Left Hand of Darkness, pretty much a consensus all-time top ten, bored the hell out of me.
You should be aware that Ursula LeGuin has an evil twin, Skippy. Quite a lot of her books were in fact written by Skippy.
For example: the original Earthsea trilogy was written by Ursula LeGuin, and is wonderful. Tehanu, on the other hand, was written by Skippy.
Likewise, The Eye of the Heron is by Skippy, The Lathe of Heaven is by Ursula. The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness are collaborations, however.
Basically, while Skippy is not necessarily a bad writer, she's so concerned about pushing her message that the plot suffers immensely. Tehanu just doesn't fit in Earthsea: but instead of designing a new world were the message could fit comfortably, Earthsea got twisted until the message could be wedged in somehow. In my opinion I think the book's terrible. (The huge deus ex machina at the end is just clumsy, too.)
But when Ursula manages to keep Skippy under control, she can be fabulous. You didn't like The Left Hand of Darkness, but I love it. There's a message, but it fits so beautifully...
What tangible benefits has Hubble provided us? Other then advancing our knowledge of and expanding the "pure-sciences" involved how has humanity improved by this telescope?
Because, put very simply, there is no such thing is irrelevant scientific research. Everything comes in useful, in one way or anything, eventually.
Taking the Hubble in particular: it's used to study cosmology (among other things). Cosmology is the study of the universe in the large. Except that the universe in the large is very much related to the universe in the small, and research into the universe in the small has direct implications into such things as microelectronics.
Say the Hubble manages to find something interesting and unexpected about the very early universe. This would require our theories to be modified to fit the observation. Some of these modifications might require changes to our basic physical models. Some of these modifications might have consequences that can be testable and exploitable in the small; but we'd only get clued into them by observing them in the large.
To put it another way: blue-sky scientific research is the only investment that pays dividends for eternity. Can you afford not to spend money on it?
The knives use Bluetooth to announce each other to the other pocket-knife fans in the vicinity. This is useful because frequently you find that you don't have quite the right tool for the job --- but with wireless networking you can find a fellow knife-wielder who happens to have to right one. (It's also useful to try and find someone who hasn't lost their tweezers.)
It's a great way to pick up... uh, guys, too.
And it's encrypted, of course, because otherwise They will find out you have a pen-knife and confiscate it (US versions only).
Is this a full driver or is the firmware a subtle way of making a closed-source driver?
That's a rather more complicated question than you might think.
The way most wireless cards work is that there's some radio hardware, hooked up to a microprocessor on the card that handles the low-level 802.11 frames, and some host software that talks to the microprocessor.
The microprocessor --- which tends to be an embedded ARM, these days --- runs a tiny nearly-an-operating-system out of flash or RAM. If RAM, then you need to download the microprocessor's code when you power up the card. That's the firmware.
This has a number of advantages: it means that the crucial, real-time processing is done with a custom processor that doesn't have to worry about running user code; it means that the vendor can change the hardware without having to change the driver, because the driver's just talking to a well-defined interface provided by the microprocessor; and it means that it's much easier to make cross-platform drivers.
It also means that the vendor can hide stuff in the firmware that they really, really don't want the user to play with. Such as the power, channel and timing settings that are mandated by the FCC.
I don't know if there are any wireless vendors out there who actually release source code to their firmware. (I'd be interested to find out if there are.) Which means that the answer to your question is both yes and no: the firmware's not open source, but the driver is.
Err... Illegal to skip a government document? Well, in the UK, it's completely legal to do whatever with the disc, as long as you don't copy it or alter its contents without permission. We don't have a government warning, and if it weren't for the fact that my DVD player doesn't appear to support enforced viewing (ie/ watching the adverts) then I'd certainly be hacking a PC to play the movie, or at least mashing the keys to work out how to skip the commercial when you put the disc in...
I bought my DVD player last year from ASDA. (Walmart, for the Merkins among us.) It cost me 49.95 UKP. It's a Pacific 1002.
It's brilliant. It plays everything on all media; DVD, DVD-R, CDR, CDRW, you name it. (Haven't tried the more exotic rewritable DVD formats). I burn stuff onto VCD and SVCD and it just works. Picture quality is good, navigation is decent, it's got all the ports I want on the back. It'll play MP3 files burnt onto a CD, plus miniDVD discs.
But I keep finding new features. Region unlockable? Open the tray, type three numbers followed by the region you want, or 0 to completely unlock it.
One feature I discovered by accident recently: put in a DVD. It'll start playing automatically, working through the menus and those ghastly unskippable warnings. Press STOP, and the PLAY again. It'll start playing... but from the beginning of the first title. Which, in most cases, is the actual movie.
It's quite, quite clear that the DVD player manufacturers, or at least the bottom end ones, know exactly where the money is: their customers want devices that will let them watch what they want. And what they want is not what the studios want them to watch.
The only downsides to my shiny new DVD player are that it looks ugly, the seek time is slow (making interactive content a bit clunky --- like I care), and I can't turn Macrovision off. Which I'm surprised at.
It's interesting to compare with a friend's more expensive Sony DVD player; it has fewer features, won't play CD-R media, isn't region code switchable, etc. It also cost about six times as much as mine, although this was a few years ago.
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You know --- this statement is really, really scary. This is the classic example of why other countries find the US so damned frightening.
International law is just that. International law. The US Constitution is just that: the US constitution. It is completely irrelevant off American soil. It's just a bunch of words that some people in some country way over there think is important. It's not important to me. I doubt you would think the Magna Carta was important, either, but it's the fundamental basis of our government.
What do you think law is? It's not some divine order handed down by the gods. It's a bunch of people getting together and saying, these are the rules to which we agree to abide. No more. All the US constitution is is a set of principles that the US as a whole thinks is a good idea to base its laws on.
But likewise, once you've said that you'll agree to those rules, you don't get to pick and choose which rules you want to comply with. I can't drive down the wrong side of the road; explaining when I get pulled over that I've decided that that particular law doesn't apply to me just doesn't wash. I have to coexist with the other drivers; the price for being allowed to use the road is that I have to follow the rules.
You want to trade with other countries? You need to follow the rules. All the rules. That's the price you pay. If you don't like them, try to get them changed, but if you just turn up your nose and say doesn't-apply-to-me, you'll really piss off the people you trade with. It makes you unpredictable, and by the definition of your own president, a rogue state. Piss them off too much and eventually they'll stop trading with you.
Of course, international law is a very fuzzy thing, and it only applies when crossing borders. Originally it only governed the way countries related to each other, and didn't apply to anything that happened inside those borders. These days, there's so much international trade on the purely informational level that having, say, 20 year copyright in one country and 100 in another just makes a headache for everyone involved. Some laws have to be applied inside a country too, and that's what organisations like the WIPO's for, to sort out that kind of thing. I don't agree with how they do it but what they do is important.
It makes matters even more complicated that there is no international law enforcement body. This makes it feasible for individual countries to push the limits of what their neighbours will allow; breaking international law to such a degree that it gives the country in question an advantage, but not so much that it's worth the hassle for its neighbours to intervene. This is dangerous because it's horribly destabilising.
But, to get back to the original point, I find it highly unnerving that the country that claims to be the world's foremost democracy holds democratic ideals in such low regard. If the majority of countries decides one thing, why does the US so often do the exact opposite? I get the impression sometimes that a lot of the population of the US doesn't believe that anything outside its borders really matters. I find it very symptomatic that American presidents since I can remember hardly ever use the world people. They always say Americans instead.
We had to destroy their lives in order to save them.
This is a gross simplification, I'm afraid. Yes, you do have to factor in decomissioning costs. But these days people do. It costs vast amounts of money to decommission a sixties-era reactor, sure, because they weren't designed to be decomissioned (despite being lousy ways to design a nuclear reactor anyway --- Chernobyl was such a disaster because its fail-safes were completely useless). Modern reactors are far safer, more reliable, cheaper (apart from beaurocratic and licensing costs) and more efficient --- take a look at pebble-bed reactors, for example.
The numbers I've seen indicate that the overall cost of electricity produced by a modern fission reactor is about the same as conventional power (it depends who you ask, and as you say, it's quite hard to find out whether decomissioning costs are factored in). The environmental cost, however, is far less, because the total amount of waste produced is very small and, let's face it, nuclear waste is just not that dangerous.
Nuclear waste doesn't glow, it doesn't cause three headed fish, it won't kill you if you just look at it. The wildlife around Chernobyl is doing really well. The really dangerous stuff, like plutonium, is far too valuable to throw away (plutonium's mainly dangerous because it's extremely poisonous chemically --- but it's less poisonous than arsenic, and lots of that is pumped into the sea, and arsenic doesn't decay).
There's basically three grades of nuclear waste produced by a fission reactors: the low-grade stuff, like the plastic gloves mentioned above; medium-grade stuff, like the materials that make up the reactor's plumbing, which is been irradiated; and the very small amounts of high-grade waste, your actual fission byproducts. Most of these are recycled because it's too valuable to throw away.
The safest thing to do with the rest is to seal the whole lot up into vitrified blocks and make a big pile in the middle of some desert somewhere. It won't get into the ecosystem, there are no animals or people to interfere, and you've got easy access in case you need it. It'll just sit there.
Alternative solutions are to put the stuff at the bottom of a very deep hole in a subduction zone: eventually it'll get sucked into the mantle and dissipite. Since the mantle is loaded with radioactive isotopes anyway, then it's pretty much gone. Or you could take it off the planet entirely. This would actually be cheap, safe, and would get rid of it once and for all --- but there's perfectly sensible ways of recycling the bulk of it that would be even cheaper.
As for solar power --- yeah, very neat, but you get an absolute maximum of 1kW/m^2, and only during the day when it's sunny. Solar power is no use to me (I live in Britain). Seeing as a kilowatt is about 1.3 horsepower, try calculating the area of solar panel you'd need to run that SUV...
a) the thing blows up in launch before you get it out into space. = some shit on the bottom of a sea bed somewhere (yes I know there is little risk of it going into the atmosphere.)
They're in really, really tough boxes. If your booster explodes, you comb through the debris, find the RTG still intact in its box, and recycle it --- they're expensive. (This has actually happened.)
b) you get nuclear waste "stuck" somewhere on top of a rock.
It's in a really, really tough box. It's not going anywhere and it won't leak.
c) you use a shortcut with nuclear fuel. Sure it might be better "now" but in principle running things of solar is damned fine engineering. Not only that, but any tech advancements that are made for space (remember the public is paying for all your little space toys, while people starve no less) can filter down to people everywhere.
I'm sorry, this paragraph makes no sense. RTGs are made of nuclear fuel, that's how they work. Yes, solar panels are good engineering, but RTGs are far more suitable for solving the job at hand. Yes, the public is paying, but space exploration is a pathetically tiny amount of money compared to what's spent on welfare or the armed forces, and the extra knowledge gained by extending the lifespan of the probe probably outweighs the (tiny) extra expense. Yes, technology trickles down, but solar panels are fundamentally only useful for certain specialised tasks on Earth, and they're approaching the theoretical maximum efficiency anyway; there are a lot of tasks for which RTGs --- even on Earth --- would be really handy. And there isn't any research being done into those because people think 'nuclear' rhymes with 'evil'.
I'm afraid everything you've said indicates that you've bought into the anti-nuclear propaganda. Try doing some research and getting an opinion of your own.
Can you go into more details about this registry hack? I'm in exactly the same position you're in. I suspect I'd rather use UDF than ISO9660, but I certainly don't want to use FAT. Can you put your primary Windows filesystem on a ISO9660 or UDF volume?
Actually, in some countries pounds are defined as a unit of mass. You might be thinking of poundals; one poundal (abbreviated to lbf) is defined as the force one pound exerts under normal gravity.
Of course, that's only some countries. Others treat the pound as a unit of force, defined as a constant value in Newtons. Which leads to that very familiar sensation whenever you try and deal in imperial units of not knowing what the hell people are talking about. (Ever tried to trade miles-per-gallon figures with someone in another country? Do you know whether their gallons are the same size as yours? What about their miles? Are you sure?)
There's a reason why metric is so popular...
However, they went on to say that Clippy was still intact. They're going to try again using a bigger catapult and with a concrete-reinforced barrier.
One of the example programs was, allegedly, written by a bunch of hackers in the back of one of their offices in the middle of the night. It was so cool they cleaned it up a bit and released it.
Meet pizzatool. It'll let you pick one of several varieties of standard pizza, or make your own. It knows about different sizes. It would fax off your order for you. It came preprogrammed for their favourite pizza delivery place (I bet that place really regretted it when OpenWindows got distributed worldwide). And... it had a preview mode. It drew your pizza for you, right there on the screen.
And you could spin it with the mouse... but if you spun it too fast, all the toppings would run...
pizzatool was written entirely in object-oriented Postscript for the NeWS toolkit on OpenWindows. It's a shame that died; it was very, very cool...
There isn't one. I'm afraid it's that simple.
The real villain is the computing model used. Windows (and Unix, and OS X) has a pretty simple security model: programs are either trusted, where they can run and use local resources, or they're not, in which case they can't.
This means that in order for the user to execute ThisMayBeAGame that it's downloaded from some random web site, the user has to tell the OS to trust ThisMayBeAGame. At which point the user is screwed, because it's got no way of determining what ThisMayBeAGame is actually doing.
...and before you jump on me: yes, I know that all the operating systems I'm talking about support fine-grained access control. Unfortunately, it's only in some areas. Linux only supports it in the filesystem. You can restrict a process to be able to touch some files only, but you can't restrict it to being able to open sockets to certain addresses only or to use no more than X mips of CPU time. Window is even worse because most people (myself included) disable file system access control entirely because it's just too inconvenient; the default user can do anything. I don't know about OS X but since it's based on BSD I assume it's like Linux.
...and yes, I know that you can get high-security patches for some operating systems that do provide this sort of control, but they're not used.
What's needed is a radically different computing model. Instead of a brittle system where all running software is trusted and you have prophylactic systems in place to distinguish between trusted software and untrusted software, you need a failsafe system where it simply doesn't matter if you run malicious code because it can't do any harm.
Managed systems like .NET and Java are a step in the right direction but things need to go much further. Imagine a computing system where your desktop computer simply provides computing resources to a whole ecosystem of interacting software agents. Some of these you put there; some of them arrived as part of other people's documents; some just wandered in off the local network. Some of them may be helpful, some may be malicious. They're all managed by a high-level system that doles out system resources depending on what the user's doing. An agent that's attached to the screen gets more CPU time and real memory than one that's not. An agent that's resident on the machine's local storage gets storage space, an agent that's arrived from the network doesn't. A transient agent can only make network connections to a host if it can present proof that it actually has something to do with that host... and so on.
Such a system would be far more resilient than the current ones. It would also work rather differently, but that's no bad thing. A lot of security issues would simply go away. Of course, there would be other problems that you wouldn't get with one of today's system --- notably, your software ecosystem would waste lots of resources --- but I think that's eminently affordable.
Now, I suppose, all I have to do is to go away and write it...
Constant-pressure hardsuits would be one alternative, but as they require complex joints for all the limbs you won't be exactly agile in one.
A more interesting alternative is the skinsuit. This consists of a very close-fitting elastic body stocking that provides pressure on the skin to protect you from vacuum, while not actually containing any air. (The only hollow part is the rigid helmet.) These would --- probably --- be much more comfortable, restricting motion much less, probably be more reliable, certainly simpler to construct, etc. Although they might be rather hard to put on.
Unfortunately, I can't find any references to skinsuits, although I gather they've been tried in prototype --- can anyone confirm this?
Nope, doesn't work...
Isn't this just xenophobia? After all, my neighbours don't need me to reproduce themselves, either, and they're not planning to kill me. At least, I don't think they are (although they might be planning to drive me mad given their taste in music).
Any human-grade hypothetical AI will most likely have human sensibilities, otherwise it would be just too alien to deal with our world. Therefore it will have to have the ability to empathise with humans. This means that provided humans don't give them a reason to hate us, such as mistreating them, they probably won't want to hurt us. Hell, they might even be grateful that we made them. Revere us as ancestors, that sort of thing.
Why the assumption that they'll hate us? Be nice to them. Game theory indicates it's in their own best interests to be nice to us.
Texmacs has a built-in renderer if you don't want to run stuff through LaTeX. It's got links to computer algebra systems --- never used it as I don't do maths any more, but it sounds suspiciously like a Mathematica Light built in to your word processor... and there's even a Windows version.
It's a nice language. A bit baroque in places, but it has lots of nice features if you're programming this kind of thing; persistance (never need to worry about storing your data on disk!); incremental updates (connect to the server and fiddle with the code while it's up and running and serving requests!); a nice threading model (cooperative multitasking with teeth --- your thread has complete control until it suspends, but if you wait too long the thread's killed)... The VM is sophisticated enough that the game server runs its own web server.
The language itself is sort-of garbage collected (parts are, parts aren't), object oriented with pure dynamic dispatch, has some very nice security measures which I didn't use in Stellation because I wasn't letting users program it, and generally behaves like a slightly gothic Smalltalk with C syntax. Very easy to get used to.
If you're interested, check it out. I was really rather pleased with that game, and at its peak I got a reasonable number of players. It needs redesigning from the ground up, but I've yet to find a VM that's quite as nice as LambdaMOO for doing it in.
(Anyone want to adopt it?)
The problem is that exceptions short-circuit the return path in non-obvious ways. Say we have a chain of functions a calling b calling c. c throws an exception. a catches it. Does b need to care?
Well, yeah, if b allocates some memory that needs to be freed on an error condition. It needs to catch the exception, clean up, and rethrow --- work that needs to be done whether you're using exceptions or not. And using exceptions usually results in more and more complex code than just returning an error code.
C++ attempts to get around this by calling the destructors of any auto variables on the stack as it works its way up the return path. This works great, except when dealing with pointers, which still need to be done manually. It may be possible to do something scary with smart pointers and templates, but that is, as I said, scary.
(Part of the problem with C++ is that it's such a huge language that it's only possible to thoroughly know and use a subset of it. I don't doubt that there are ways of using exceptions with dynamically allocated memory safely... but I don't know them, and every time I've tried to find out, I've come back with a headache and a renewed determination not to use exceptions. The only time I've ever actually used the things was in a daemon that deliberately did not dynamically allocate anything, and they were brilliant. YMMV.)
But in a garbage collected language, you don't have to worry about this sort of cleanup except in very rare cases, and it all works very nicely. Anything b allocates will be orphaned and just vanish, magically.
The acceleration due to gravity is Gm/r^2. r, in this case, is the surface of Dactyl, 750m. That gives 0.5x10^-3 m/s^2, or 0.005% of an Earth gee.
That is, of course, assuming I've managed to do all my arithmetic correctly...
(Pity Slashdot doesn't support super, or I could make the above look much cleaner. MathML would be nice, too...)
(Unless, of course, its own personal 'net connection is compromised, but then it has bigger problems.)
You should be aware that Ursula LeGuin has an evil twin, Skippy. Quite a lot of her books were in fact written by Skippy.
For example: the original Earthsea trilogy was written by Ursula LeGuin, and is wonderful. Tehanu, on the other hand, was written by Skippy.
Likewise, The Eye of the Heron is by Skippy, The Lathe of Heaven is by Ursula. The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness are collaborations, however.
Basically, while Skippy is not necessarily a bad writer, she's so concerned about pushing her message that the plot suffers immensely. Tehanu just doesn't fit in Earthsea: but instead of designing a new world were the message could fit comfortably, Earthsea got twisted until the message could be wedged in somehow. In my opinion I think the book's terrible. (The huge deus ex machina at the end is just clumsy, too.)
But when Ursula manages to keep Skippy under control, she can be fabulous. You didn't like The Left Hand of Darkness, but I love it. There's a message, but it fits so beautifully...
Because, put very simply, there is no such thing is irrelevant scientific research. Everything comes in useful, in one way or anything, eventually.
Taking the Hubble in particular: it's used to study cosmology (among other things). Cosmology is the study of the universe in the large. Except that the universe in the large is very much related to the universe in the small, and research into the universe in the small has direct implications into such things as microelectronics.
Say the Hubble manages to find something interesting and unexpected about the very early universe. This would require our theories to be modified to fit the observation. Some of these modifications might require changes to our basic physical models. Some of these modifications might have consequences that can be testable and exploitable in the small; but we'd only get clued into them by observing them in the large.
To put it another way: blue-sky scientific research is the only investment that pays dividends for eternity. Can you afford not to spend money on it?
But can you run usermode Linux on usermode Linux?
More to the point, can you run usermode Linux on top of Line on top of Windows?
Haven't you heard of PKML? Pen Knife Markup Language. It's a mechanism for allowing you to describe the layout of your penknife.
(I can't seem to indent the above. Bummer.)
The knives use Bluetooth to announce each other to the other pocket-knife fans in the vicinity. This is useful because frequently you find that you don't have quite the right tool for the job --- but with wireless networking you can find a fellow knife-wielder who happens to have to right one. (It's also useful to try and find someone who hasn't lost their tweezers.)
It's a great way to pick up... uh, guys, too.
And it's encrypted, of course, because otherwise They will find out you have a pen-knife and confiscate it (US versions only).
That's a rather more complicated question than you might think.
The way most wireless cards work is that there's some radio hardware, hooked up to a microprocessor on the card that handles the low-level 802.11 frames, and some host software that talks to the microprocessor.
The microprocessor --- which tends to be an embedded ARM, these days --- runs a tiny nearly-an-operating-system out of flash or RAM. If RAM, then you need to download the microprocessor's code when you power up the card. That's the firmware.
This has a number of advantages: it means that the crucial, real-time processing is done with a custom processor that doesn't have to worry about running user code; it means that the vendor can change the hardware without having to change the driver, because the driver's just talking to a well-defined interface provided by the microprocessor; and it means that it's much easier to make cross-platform drivers.
It also means that the vendor can hide stuff in the firmware that they really, really don't want the user to play with. Such as the power, channel and timing settings that are mandated by the FCC.
I don't know if there are any wireless vendors out there who actually release source code to their firmware. (I'd be interested to find out if there are.) Which means that the answer to your question is both yes and no: the firmware's not open source, but the driver is.
Hey, what's the big deal? It's just a fucking machine...
(With apologies to Ken Macleod!)
mplayer mms://wmbcast.nasa-global.speedera.net/\
wmbcast.nasa-global/wmbcast_nasa-global_jan\
212004_1021_53608
(Watch out for the \ that mark line continuations!)
Frame rate is low, but the audio's nicely in sync and is certainly decent enough for watching press releases.
Beware, though, that as I post, NASA TV is broadcasting some ghastly children's programme. You have been warned...
I bought my DVD player last year from ASDA. (Walmart, for the Merkins among us.) It cost me 49.95 UKP. It's a Pacific 1002.
It's brilliant. It plays everything on all media; DVD, DVD-R, CDR, CDRW, you name it. (Haven't tried the more exotic rewritable DVD formats). I burn stuff onto VCD and SVCD and it just works. Picture quality is good, navigation is decent, it's got all the ports I want on the back. It'll play MP3 files burnt onto a CD, plus miniDVD discs.
But I keep finding new features. Region unlockable? Open the tray, type three numbers followed by the region you want, or 0 to completely unlock it.
One feature I discovered by accident recently: put in a DVD. It'll start playing automatically, working through the menus and those ghastly unskippable warnings. Press STOP, and the PLAY again. It'll start playing... but from the beginning of the first title. Which, in most cases, is the actual movie.
It's quite, quite clear that the DVD player manufacturers, or at least the bottom end ones, know exactly where the money is: their customers want devices that will let them watch what they want. And what they want is not what the studios want them to watch.
The only downsides to my shiny new DVD player are that it looks ugly, the seek time is slow (making interactive content a bit clunky --- like I care), and I can't turn Macrovision off. Which I'm surprised at.
It's interesting to compare with a friend's more expensive Sony DVD player; it has fewer features, won't play CD-R media, isn't region code switchable, etc. It also cost about six times as much as mine, although this was a few years ago.
Moral: cheaper is not always worse.