The result should at least not be to ban the possession of geiger counters. Instead it should be a requirement that they have to be quality controlled, and combine that with information about possible causes for irregular measurements.
Or maybe it would be enough to specify RTFM before screaming.
So essentially - all is cool if you stay cool and not pour water on it. Oxidized sodium is of course a bigger problem, but not even that is a big issue.
The big issue here seems to be not the coolant itself - it seems to be a relatively good coolant to use - but the fact that the accident happened. The larger problem that could have occurred would have been a core meltdown instead, and that would have been serious.
This stresses the fact that nuclear power has it's dangers, and that it's necessary to watch the handling processes thoroughly to avoid major disasters.
Another question is if it's really worth the cost or not to run nuclear power, but that's a different issue.
Basically, Sweden may be a good place, as long as you don't think about doing child pornography or actively breaking the law with actions that can awake RIAA, MPAA or the Swedish STIM, but from the question I assume that this is mostly a political issue. Of course you may not actively push for violent actions either (like blowing up the electrical grid, Hoover dam or Mt Rushmore. But being an annoyance like peeing on the flag or similar actions are just ignored.
There are some laws that loosely requests that members of a bulletin board shall be known, but I have never heard about anyone being even brought to court in such cases and the verification is at most an email address, and considering the volatility of email addresses that's no big problem. The "Freedom of speech" is relatively strong, and as long as you don't actively push for breaking the law in ways that can be considered worthy to being brought to court it's no big issue.
Having a system with a moderation (maybe like the Slashdot moderation) may still be a good idea to be able to cool down anything that goes over the edge.
There have been some fuzz earlier about the Swedish site Flashback for promoting cracks and computer criminality, but it actually hasn't ended up into anything of substance. Maybe you even can have your own forum at that site! In most cases the police will just look and thing "Well - another set of nuts - and go for some more coffee...". Considering that there are bigger fish to fry and the end result of the Pirate Bay story it will take a lot of pressure before anything happens if somebody in the US wants to do a crackdown. And it's likely to hit the newspapers too even before there is time to do something... And essentially the police is more into the watching part and avoids the acting part since it means paperwork. And they have better things to watch for than a bulletin board where the most of the discussion will fall under the freedom of speech anyway.
Crimes that will put you on the radar of the police are more like driving under the influence (0.02% limit), speeding (fixed speed cameras at random locations on major roads) and drugs, both narcotics and illegal sales of prescription drugs but I don't think that the first two of these will apply for a web server hosting anyway.
Not necessarily - it will dig into the account of the patent office if a patent isn't scrutinized enough, and that means that the patent fees probably have to rise to cover for it to some extent, but it also means that the all too generous granting of troll-patents will decrease considerably.
If you purchased them it's not a problem, and it's a 5 day "buffer" that the question is about.
The problem with "domain name tasting" is that domain names can get blocked and abused during the period. If all domain names had to be paid for then there would have been less problems with domain kidnapping...
Actually - to put an end to this - if a patent fails the patent office shall be equal liable to pay any costs arisen from giving an invalid patent.
This patent should have been dropped dead due to both prior art and obviousness. I just hope that the courts are going to dismiss the claims completely.
But that would fail because they probably couldn't pack as much DRM on them to protect the "content". Actually - it will be the opposite - they may go that way to be able to protect their content even harder! Add a chip that decrypts when the correct key is given, insert time-limiting factors etc. No limit on how hard you can limit the content access then.
OK - you want subtitles - pay!, You want Spanish language - pay!, You want original language - pay! (or you will be stuck with the Indian guy talking bad English for all the actors in the film).
They may even be able to store the same film in different cuttings on the same media and just provide different indexes. Can mean that you can control the content rating of a film from open to 18+ just by selecting the scenes to display. Or if the religious zealots gets their way deflate all women's chests and cut out any possible bulges but still show ways of how to blow your brain out!
So don't think that just because it's solid state it's less safe.
The reason I say they need burners in high volume asap, is that whether they like it or not piracy is often times a real boost to sales.
And don't forget about "nature films" and the purpose of using the media/format for computer data backup, even if it is insufficient for larger volumes today.
Both formats are dead. Neither will come up to the level of success that DVD has had.
Several reasons:
Pricing is a lot higher - higher than what the provided quality actually provides. (OK, DVD:s suffered from the same in the beginning)
They have competition from the classic DVD:s and need a real smash hit on blue-ray/HD-DVD only to really get going.
The competition from the net is a factor to count on. Today you can download and play on your PC and monitors are available at 1920/1200 for a reasonable price - which means that as soon as cameras get higher resolution your home PC is able to play...
The advantage of optical disks has been lost and hard disks are way ahead of the optical and solid state disks are catching up fast and will overtake the capacity of optical disks. This means that the need/use for optical disks as a backup medium is now over and this will result in a lower demand for burnable Blue-ray and HD-dvd drives/media.
So - this is a case of shooting yourself in the foot while barking up the wrong tree.
Anyway - the formats aren't completely dead - they are just not good enough. There will always be buyers/users, but don't expect them to be as mainstream as the DVD.
But as it is a scripting language it isn't good at everything.
And over the time new tools has emerged that makes the use of Perl more limited. One of the drawbacks is that it is possible to be very obscure when writing in Perl. But it may at the same time be very efficient.
To Write web applications I have stuck on Java and build the web pages using ECS. Unfortunately the use of ECS really brings out the BAD section of Java's inability to do explicit object deletion. It may be that ECS also could have been written in a better way - so anyway maybe I'm just whining.
The advantage is that I will get a really good HTML which will pass the W3C validator without too much fuzz. The disadvantage is that it's not that easy to introduce the ordinary HTML hacker into the world of ECS. (but why should the world be easy?)
And ultimately - there is a difference between tools and tools. If you have a tool like Eclipse you may use it to edit more than just Java and somebody else may go in afterwards with Emacs, VI or (horrible thought) Visual Studio to continue the work since the code isn't really aware of which tool I use. On the other hand - a programming language is a tool too. If somebody comes in and say that I need DIBOL for a certain task even though everything else is written in COBOL, then you may want to think twice about the mind of that person...
Any "Church" that charges for its teachings and also has them copyrighted to prevent free distribution is not a church it's a scam at best and a dangerous cult at worst.
The best solution would be to have a law that says that you can either have copyright protection or you can have protection and benefits of a religion but NEVER ever both. (but you may select to have none, that's YOUR problem not anybody elses...)
Germany has stated that "...the chief purpose of Scientology is not religious, but economical in nature...", which is probably the closest thing to consider. And don't forget that both Tom Cruise and John Travolta are members of that outfit. (I wouldn't even call it Cult...)
And the myth as it seems that there was a wager between Heinlein and Hubbard about starting a religion, it seems to be half-true. But I don't think that Heinlein ever planned on catching up on starting a religion... He would probably gotten himself into FSF or some other outfit instead with his statement of "Pay it forward" if he had been born at a later date. (Today it's more than 100 years since Heinlein was born, he was born 7 July 1907!)
Especially the "Pay it forward" approach is important. Even if you do someone a service and that person isn't able to return the favor you can always set the "pay it forward" approach to the problem.
But I don't think that we are going to see much of that special tag anyway since those who care about standards will shy it and those who doesn't will ignore it anyway and continue with their broken pages...
But wasn't Microsoft going to push Silverlight (or whatever they call it) instead???
At least - we need this tag and the circumventions for special pages about as much as we need severe dandruff...
Instead of adding more modes to the browser they should add a warning in the same manner as the popup-blocker specifying that "This page does not conform to W3C standards - content may not display correctly".
By doing this as soon as something wrong is detected you will be certain that all those badly written web pages will trickle away. (slowly and with a lot of whining in the beginning, but it will be a great difference after a while.)
With the current approach it's just getting into a deeper bog of dirt than it was before...
Because the real substance that Sun bought was the ownership of the products and by that also the rights to the products in the portfolio.
If you add up the amount of man-hours put into the product you end up with a different figure.
Another factor is that by having a well-known database in their portfolio they can actually benefit from having a better chance on the market when offering solutions. (Customers like to have a single place to leave their complaints!:-) )
From my experience I have found that if anything - start with a simple language and then step into an object-oriented language.
For this reason I have figured out that using a real classic language like Pascal to begin with is probably the best thing you can do. And I mean classic Pascal, not Delphi or anything remotely object-oriented. This is very similar to programming in assembly on a processor without interrupt handling. You have to decide yourself where to branch off and what to do. Basic will do almost as well.
Next step is to increase the difficulty by introducing C. This will introduce a new set of problems where pointers has to be managed in a correct way. (OK, you can do pointers in Pascal too, but it's really awkward). If you do it on a machine without any memory protection at all you can end up almost anywhere in space and not knowing why, so doing it on a machine with memory protection is a lot better since the program usually dies where the error is (not always). Add some Assembly language programming into this segment and see how it integrates with C.
Some may argue that C++ is the next logical step - but it is NOT. Not only is the syntax different from C, it is a different kind of animal that can create a really tiresome situation. The language is not really consistent but varies somewhat from platform to platform and the runtime library packages are varying wildly. OK, you may use this language, but it's not really consistent enough and can be written very cryptic. (OK, you can write cryptic in C too). The next logical step is instead Java or Ada. For practical reasons Java is the better alternative.
So Java is a better alternative - but why? Well - it is more wide-spread than Ada, and is supported on a variety of platforms. And it is also possible to execute on different platforms without recompiling. It is relatively simple to create an usable application in Java, and it's relatively like C so anybody familiar with C will have a flying start. The big issue is to think object-oriented instead. An alternative to Java is C# (As I usually call it C-Hash) but I argue against it - it's bound to the Microsoft platforms and to the platforms where Mono is ported. Another issue to select Java is that there is a good support for it in development tools like Eclipse. Licensing costs is also a factor to consider - especially during education. And don't forget that many enterprise-sized projects actually use Java.
Of course - you have a different set of languages too that's worth learning. Lisp is mentioned, and it may have some uses, but I would also recommend that Erlang is used in education. The important issue here is that Erlang is used commercially which means that the probability of getting involved in a project where Erlang is used probably is higher than a project for Lisp or Prolog.
For those that wants to get their fingers really dirty there are still a few languages left like classic Basic and Cobol. Here Cobol may be useful to know, but Basic is actually used in several systems too, especially some embedded systems and control systems. The advantage here is that Basic is relatively "safe" when it comes to wild pointers and things, but it's still possible to do I/O in an easy manner.
And still - some may argue that why classic Basic and not Visual Basic? Well - VB is better replaced with C# if it comes to that. The reason is that in classic Basic you have a relatively limited set of data types and you can keep them all in your head and it's relatively easy to figure out what's happening, but in VB there is no requirement at all to declare variables unless you say that you want it required. This means that you can get strange effects of conflicting data types and all kinds of evil effects. So PLEASE do us all a favor and skip VB and it's sub-variant VBScript.
A language slightly better than VBScript is JavaScript, however it's not really a good language due to it's weak data typing. The good thing about it is that it's more widely supported than
and if they get what they want then tomorrow there are some other gang that pushes their opinion through, let's say creationists that wants the educational institutions to abolish evolution altogether. Follow this by teaching each student to be a good American supporting the US army in the war against terrorism (or whatever the next "war" is called).
Maybe McCarthy would have really loved the abilities we have today?
Just blanking a site doesn't say much - it can be anything from the last M$ update to a hardware failure.
And if you are going to hack a site, why not keep the site but insert and modify the pages just slightly so that the meaning of some statements will be slightly off the target. Harder to do, harder to spot but a lot mor fun for the world to figure out.
Even better if no backups exists for the site... Or if it isn't spotted until the backups are recycled!
It sure seems to be some kind of glitch - either software or hardware.
If the hardware weren't redundant then somebody has to be responsible for that and at least get a good kick in the ass. Probably at the economic department...
A software glitch may be triggered by borderline limits exceeded and started a default mode in which the engines were shut down or at least put to idle mode. Since this was at an unfortunate position this was triggering an accident. At a higher altitude there would have been ample time for the pilots to go manual and recover or initiate better reserve procedures.
The difference is that a manned moon-base is relatively resource-demanding while asteroid missions not necessarily has to be manned. It can be more of a problem doing a manned asteroid mission than a robotic one.
The only problem with an unmanned asteroid mission is that it may require some human decision from time to time - but normally there is no problem with time delays there. Not much that's in a hurry on an asteroid unless it's heading for Earth. Just put the robot to sleep for a while and recharge the batteries. Keep in mind that there may have to be different robots there compared to the robots we have on Mars.
The thing that's more interesting with a permanent moon-base is that there is a possibility that a lot of the material found on the moon can be used as construction material. It will require a processing plant - and it can't be used for everything, but it's there. Much of the soil is composed from oxides - which means that you can extract oxygen. Allocation of area for growth is no big problem either. The catch is that all this may have a high cost. But what is the cost when the Chinese decides that it's their turn to go to the moon?
when we want to have human-like robots with initiative ability.
I wonder what will happen if the factor "punishment" comes into play. Maybe we get some robots that like humans doesn't respond to punishment?
Serial-killer robots would be a new high (or low) in the evolution.
One couldn't help but to realize that the need for the Three Laws of Robotics is closing in! It's no need for those laws in a controlled environment like where this occurred, but when it's robots in the society we are talking about it's a different issue. Even if they aren't humanoid (or especially). What about a robot mind in a school bus that suddenly figures out that kids are mean and considers suicide by jumping off a bridge?
Works for standalone equipment, but an electrical grid is normally centrally controlled from a control center and they are either using radio links, leased lines or VPN to connect. VPN over a DSL connection is the cheapest alternative today. And any VPN needs some firewalls and if the firewalls leaks... You may have an intrusion.
Slashdot Mirror
Or maybe it would be enough to specify RTFM before screaming.
The big issue here seems to be not the coolant itself - it seems to be a relatively good coolant to use - but the fact that the accident happened. The larger problem that could have occurred would have been a core meltdown instead, and that would have been serious.
This stresses the fact that nuclear power has it's dangers, and that it's necessary to watch the handling processes thoroughly to avoid major disasters.
Another question is if it's really worth the cost or not to run nuclear power, but that's a different issue.
There are some laws that loosely requests that members of a bulletin board shall be known, but I have never heard about anyone being even brought to court in such cases and the verification is at most an email address, and considering the volatility of email addresses that's no big problem. The "Freedom of speech" is relatively strong, and as long as you don't actively push for breaking the law in ways that can be considered worthy to being brought to court it's no big issue.
Having a system with a moderation (maybe like the Slashdot moderation) may still be a good idea to be able to cool down anything that goes over the edge.
There have been some fuzz earlier about the Swedish site Flashback for promoting cracks and computer criminality, but it actually hasn't ended up into anything of substance. Maybe you even can have your own forum at that site! In most cases the police will just look and thing "Well - another set of nuts - and go for some more coffee...". Considering that there are bigger fish to fry and the end result of the Pirate Bay story it will take a lot of pressure before anything happens if somebody in the US wants to do a crackdown. And it's likely to hit the newspapers too even before there is time to do something... And essentially the police is more into the watching part and avoids the acting part since it means paperwork. And they have better things to watch for than a bulletin board where the most of the discussion will fall under the freedom of speech anyway.
Crimes that will put you on the radar of the police are more like driving under the influence (0.02% limit), speeding (fixed speed cameras at random locations on major roads) and drugs, both narcotics and illegal sales of prescription drugs but I don't think that the first two of these will apply for a web server hosting anyway.
The worst losers here will be the patent lawyers.
The problem with "domain name tasting" is that domain names can get blocked and abused during the period. If all domain names had to be paid for then there would have been less problems with domain kidnapping...
This patent should have been dropped dead due to both prior art and obviousness. I just hope that the courts are going to dismiss the claims completely.
The next thing is that you have to have a license to operate a search engine.
Just go figure what this is about...
OK - you want subtitles - pay!, You want Spanish language - pay!, You want original language - pay! (or you will be stuck with the Indian guy talking bad English for all the actors in the film).
They may even be able to store the same film in different cuttings on the same media and just provide different indexes. Can mean that you can control the content rating of a film from open to 18+ just by selecting the scenes to display. Or if the religious zealots gets their way deflate all women's chests and cut out any possible bulges but still show ways of how to blow your brain out!
So don't think that just because it's solid state it's less safe.
Several reasons:
- Pricing is a lot higher - higher than what the provided quality actually provides. (OK, DVD:s suffered from the same in the beginning)
- They have competition from the classic DVD:s and need a real smash hit on blue-ray/HD-DVD only to really get going.
- The competition from the net is a factor to count on. Today you can download and play on your PC and monitors are available at 1920/1200 for a reasonable price - which means that as soon as cameras get higher resolution your home PC is able to play...
- The advantage of optical disks has been lost and hard disks are way ahead of the optical and solid state disks are catching up fast and will overtake the capacity of optical disks. This means that the need/use for optical disks as a backup medium is now over and this will result in a lower demand for burnable Blue-ray and HD-dvd drives/media.
So - this is a case of shooting yourself in the foot while barking up the wrong tree.Anyway - the formats aren't completely dead - they are just not good enough. There will always be buyers/users, but don't expect them to be as mainstream as the DVD.
It may be that this guy really is into a pounding from two camps instead of one...
Does that also apply to GPLv2?
And over the time new tools has emerged that makes the use of Perl more limited. One of the drawbacks is that it is possible to be very obscure when writing in Perl. But it may at the same time be very efficient.
To Write web applications I have stuck on Java and build the web pages using ECS. Unfortunately the use of ECS really brings out the BAD section of Java's inability to do explicit object deletion. It may be that ECS also could have been written in a better way - so anyway maybe I'm just whining.
The advantage is that I will get a really good HTML which will pass the W3C validator without too much fuzz. The disadvantage is that it's not that easy to introduce the ordinary HTML hacker into the world of ECS. (but why should the world be easy?)
And ultimately - there is a difference between tools and tools. If you have a tool like Eclipse you may use it to edit more than just Java and somebody else may go in afterwards with Emacs, VI or (horrible thought) Visual Studio to continue the work since the code isn't really aware of which tool I use. On the other hand - a programming language is a tool too. If somebody comes in and say that I need DIBOL for a certain task even though everything else is written in COBOL, then you may want to think twice about the mind of that person...
Germany has stated that "...the chief purpose of Scientology is not religious, but economical in nature...", which is probably the closest thing to consider. And don't forget that both Tom Cruise and John Travolta are members of that outfit. (I wouldn't even call it Cult...)
And the myth as it seems that there was a wager between Heinlein and Hubbard about starting a religion, it seems to be half-true. But I don't think that Heinlein ever planned on catching up on starting a religion... He would probably gotten himself into FSF or some other outfit instead with his statement of "Pay it forward" if he had been born at a later date. (Today it's more than 100 years since Heinlein was born, he was born 7 July 1907!)
Especially the "Pay it forward" approach is important. Even if you do someone a service and that person isn't able to return the favor you can always set the "pay it forward" approach to the problem.
But I don't think that we are going to see much of that special tag anyway since those who care about standards will shy it and those who doesn't will ignore it anyway and continue with their broken pages...
But wasn't Microsoft going to push Silverlight (or whatever they call it) instead???
At least - we need this tag and the circumventions for special pages about as much as we need severe dandruff...
By doing this as soon as something wrong is detected you will be certain that all those badly written web pages will trickle away. (slowly and with a lot of whining in the beginning, but it will be a great difference after a while.)
With the current approach it's just getting into a deeper bog of dirt than it was before...
If you add up the amount of man-hours put into the product you end up with a different figure.
Another factor is that by having a well-known database in their portfolio they can actually benefit from having a better chance on the market when offering solutions. (Customers like to have a single place to leave their complaints! :-) )
For this reason I have figured out that using a real classic language like Pascal to begin with is probably the best thing you can do. And I mean classic Pascal, not Delphi or anything remotely object-oriented. This is very similar to programming in assembly on a processor without interrupt handling. You have to decide yourself where to branch off and what to do. Basic will do almost as well.
Next step is to increase the difficulty by introducing C. This will introduce a new set of problems where pointers has to be managed in a correct way. (OK, you can do pointers in Pascal too, but it's really awkward). If you do it on a machine without any memory protection at all you can end up almost anywhere in space and not knowing why, so doing it on a machine with memory protection is a lot better since the program usually dies where the error is (not always). Add some Assembly language programming into this segment and see how it integrates with C.
Some may argue that C++ is the next logical step - but it is NOT. Not only is the syntax different from C, it is a different kind of animal that can create a really tiresome situation. The language is not really consistent but varies somewhat from platform to platform and the runtime library packages are varying wildly. OK, you may use this language, but it's not really consistent enough and can be written very cryptic. (OK, you can write cryptic in C too). The next logical step is instead Java or Ada. For practical reasons Java is the better alternative.
So Java is a better alternative - but why? Well - it is more wide-spread than Ada, and is supported on a variety of platforms. And it is also possible to execute on different platforms without recompiling. It is relatively simple to create an usable application in Java, and it's relatively like C so anybody familiar with C will have a flying start. The big issue is to think object-oriented instead. An alternative to Java is C# (As I usually call it C-Hash) but I argue against it - it's bound to the Microsoft platforms and to the platforms where Mono is ported. Another issue to select Java is that there is a good support for it in development tools like Eclipse. Licensing costs is also a factor to consider - especially during education. And don't forget that many enterprise-sized projects actually use Java.
Of course - you have a different set of languages too that's worth learning. Lisp is mentioned, and it may have some uses, but I would also recommend that Erlang is used in education. The important issue here is that Erlang is used commercially which means that the probability of getting involved in a project where Erlang is used probably is higher than a project for Lisp or Prolog.
For those that wants to get their fingers really dirty there are still a few languages left like classic Basic and Cobol. Here Cobol may be useful to know, but Basic is actually used in several systems too, especially some embedded systems and control systems. The advantage here is that Basic is relatively "safe" when it comes to wild pointers and things, but it's still possible to do I/O in an easy manner.
And still - some may argue that why classic Basic and not Visual Basic? Well - VB is better replaced with C# if it comes to that. The reason is that in classic Basic you have a relatively limited set of data types and you can keep them all in your head and it's relatively easy to figure out what's happening, but in VB there is no requirement at all to declare variables unless you say that you want it required. This means that you can get strange effects of conflicting data types and all kinds of evil effects. So PLEASE do us all a favor and skip VB and it's sub-variant VBScript.
A language slightly better than VBScript is JavaScript, however it's not really a good language due to it's weak data typing. The good thing about it is that it's more widely supported than
Maybe McCarthy would have really loved the abilities we have today?
And if you are going to hack a site, why not keep the site but insert and modify the pages just slightly so that the meaning of some statements will be slightly off the target. Harder to do, harder to spot but a lot mor fun for the world to figure out.
Even better if no backups exists for the site... Or if it isn't spotted until the backups are recycled!
If the hardware weren't redundant then somebody has to be responsible for that and at least get a good kick in the ass. Probably at the economic department...
A software glitch may be triggered by borderline limits exceeded and started a default mode in which the engines were shut down or at least put to idle mode. Since this was at an unfortunate position this was triggering an accident. At a higher altitude there would have been ample time for the pilots to go manual and recover or initiate better reserve procedures.
The only problem with an unmanned asteroid mission is that it may require some human decision from time to time - but normally there is no problem with time delays there. Not much that's in a hurry on an asteroid unless it's heading for Earth. Just put the robot to sleep for a while and recharge the batteries. Keep in mind that there may have to be different robots there compared to the robots we have on Mars.
The thing that's more interesting with a permanent moon-base is that there is a possibility that a lot of the material found on the moon can be used as construction material. It will require a processing plant - and it can't be used for everything, but it's there. Much of the soil is composed from oxides - which means that you can extract oxygen. Allocation of area for growth is no big problem either. The catch is that all this may have a high cost. But what is the cost when the Chinese decides that it's their turn to go to the moon?
I wonder what will happen if the factor "punishment" comes into play. Maybe we get some robots that like humans doesn't respond to punishment?
Serial-killer robots would be a new high (or low) in the evolution.
One couldn't help but to realize that the need for the Three Laws of Robotics is closing in! It's no need for those laws in a controlled environment like where this occurred, but when it's robots in the society we are talking about it's a different issue. Even if they aren't humanoid (or especially). What about a robot mind in a school bus that suddenly figures out that kids are mean and considers suicide by jumping off a bridge?
Works for standalone equipment, but an electrical grid is normally centrally controlled from a control center and they are either using radio links, leased lines or VPN to connect. VPN over a DSL connection is the cheapest alternative today. And any VPN needs some firewalls and if the firewalls leaks... You may have an intrusion.