I suppose you're correct in the sense that there is no directly proven link to C02 vs. Temperature (which is why the global warming scare carries as much weight with me as the scare concerning micro black holes and world destruction), but the CO2 levels are higher than they should be according to geological records. It doesn't hurt to try and curb that, seeing as the predicted effects are dire and that there may be potentially worse unknown effects.
Meanwhile, note that the US has not signed Kyoto, but instead has opted for a marketable permits system for reducing their CO2 emissions. This is good, as it promotes economic efficiency (those who can reasonably afford to reduce do. Those who can't, pay another way). It's bad because of the low-income area issues, but lets face it: factories in low-income areas would be shirking anyway, thinking they'd get away with it. Still, all of them have to eventually reduce, as the permits dry up.
As a practical environmentalist, I'm kinda for individual conservation. I'm saying use LED or compact flourescent instead of incandescent. I'm saying slap some solar on your house, if you can afford the initial costs (you know, rather than buying that hummer). I'm saying stick a brick in your toilet tank (the water offset is greater than you imagine). Grow your own vegetables, if you've the time and correct shade of thumb. Get a solar-assisted water heater. If you're not a gamer/3d modeller/someone else who needs a muscle computer, buy a mini-itx based solution (usually uses under 80W in total).
I'm not saying stop driving, I'm saying stop buying Hummers (or as I like to call them, the 'Short Bus').
<tangent>No, seriously. What the hell is the point of a hummer? They're expensive to buy, expensive to drive, rediculous looking, too big to effectively drive in the city, and overall just a badly designed vehicle.</tangent>
Good ideas for future developments: When DEFC based vehicles are released, seriously consider it over an ICE based vehicle (don't let the product die out, creating another 30-year gap between electric vehicle solutions). If you can find one, get/build a fuel still and flesh out your gasoline with it (saves on garbage and gas price. Yes, you can burn ethanol in your tank. No, it's not as efficient, but it's not gonna damage your car). Do a lot of short 1-2 person trips? Get a cheap motorcycle; you burn less fuel, pay less in insurance.
I dunno. It's like, anymore, it's more economically efficient to be ecologically sound. Still, people aren't doing it. It fucks my head up.
While I can smell the sweet pungent aroma of sarcasm dripping like syrup from your post, I gotta say two things:
You don't need an oil well to make your own diesel.
And, while Greenpeace aren't exactly sissies, I must state that they're insane. They make practical environmentalists (those who are environmental because it's better for personal finance and convenience) look bad.
It all really depends on how heavy the black holes created end up being. I mean, to even get an event horizon with a radius defining a sphere the size of a proton, you'd need a mass something on the order of 10^13 kilograms (I did the math yesterday, but I kinda tossed it. I think it was 1 and change.) I think that falls well outside the range of what CERN's doing.
"BTW, for the record, real programmers start indexing at 0, so there's realy only 01 types of people when the measurement criteria is the understanding (or lack thereof) of binary. You sir/madam are, I believe, of the 'not understanding' variety."
Real programmers start indexing at 0, but when you go for the sizeof(), you still end up with 02d/10b.
Still, this is a really dumbass argument about a seriously lame joke.
The little brats around my house seem to be playing all the time. Loudly, obnoxiously playing. They have skateboards and play random pretend games (average age here, about 7). Sometimes they'll pass messages using their Nintendo DS's.
Ok, this is annoying me, so I'll explain it basically.
A black hole is an object which is smaller than the sphere defined by its schwartzchild radius (the radius at which escape velocity is greater than light speed). The prevailing theory is that black holes evaporate.
The mechanism by which this works involves the continual creation and destruction of virtual particle pairs. At a certain radius of the black hole, a virtual particle pair is created. The antimatter particle is more attracted to the black hole than the particle, and falls in. Its mate becomes real, and registers as hawking radiation outside the black hole. Slowly, as mass is evaporated from the black hole, its schwartzchild radius becomes smaller (because its mass decreases, it has less and less gravity). When the sphere defined by its schwartzchild radius becomes smaller than the object, that object is, by definition, no longer a black hole.
Now, the first point. This is assuming that hawking radiation is not real.
We're talking about a black hole that has less mass than a proton. As such, its schwartzchild radius must be smaller than the radius of a proton. What happens when it hits the nucleus of an atom?
Well, charge is preserved, and mass is preserved, so even if the entire nucleus is consumed, we just have a slightly heavy atom with somewhat odd behavior. It can't eat other atoms, for much the same reason that fusion doesn't occur in normal circumstances: eletrical forces prevent it (the hole is still held in place by its electron shell).
Meanwhile, the faster it moves, the more likely it is to slam into another atom (we're still talking a very low chance per second). Since there's very little actual cross section, but still an event horizon (which is smaller than the cross section it would have if it had a normal cross section), the other atom may get drawn in (and the electron cloud gets combined). So, ten or twenty occruences of this unlikely event, and you have a black hole equivalent to, say, a uranium atom, but that still behaves like its stable (gravity > weak force; the atom is nonradioactive, in the classical sense), and has a schwartzchild cross-section equivalent to the cross-section of an electron (I'm probably wrong here. I know that my schwartzchild radius, based on my mass, is subatomic in size).
Eventually, if the black atom is moving at, say, just under earth's escape velocity, yes, you could end up with a world-eater. But considering the amount of empty space between atoms, and the liklihood of smacking a black atom into one under normal circumstances, it'll take a very very large number of years. I'd do the statistical math (get the percent average volumetric density of normal matter, get the volume of a cylinder with radius==schwartzchild and length==earth escape*1sec, derive to 0-length and determine the percent chance per instant that the black atom will capture another atom. Use that to extrapolate how long it would take to get the schwartzchild radius to extend past the second electron shell (for carbon, as that's probably the atom most people would regret losing). That number is the danger zone - i.e., that's when our black atom can start eating other atoms without having to bust through their electron clouds first. At that point, the black atom is a potential worry.), but I'm really not that worried about it.
Well, not much, really. Linux has wider adoption, and is more likely to go with experimental things (in 2.6), but to genercize the question a little more, how would things have turned out if Microsoft had started contributing to OSS at the kernel level, using it as their core, back in the late ninties?
'Again, I'm not sure how you get this, "Well, the mass accrued depends on its velocity, but, worst case scenario, it turns into a full-on macroscopic black hole well after the sun explodes." or how this process works, "At some point, the lowered density brings the schwartzchild radius below the radius of the object, and it, at that point, is no longer a black hole." Do you have a write up of this that you can point me to?'
No.
And I'm not going to bother doing a full write up of basic classical physics or QED just so you can grasp the obvious. There's a limit to the amount of work that goes into educating slashdotters, and part of that limit is when they should start looking on Wikipedia.
Makes you wonder what would have happened if MS accepted open source a while ago, used the Linux Kernel as the core for a largely proprietary OS (e.g.Linux and its driver model get worked on by MS as a commodity, and they run proprietary apps on top of it, like OSX does with BSD).
Where would they both be now if they stopped fighting in, say, 1999?
Well, the mass accrued depends on its velocity, but, worst case scenario, it turns into a full-on macroscopic black hole well after the sun explodes.
Hawking radiation is what causes the evaporation of a black hole. At some point, the lowered density brings the schwartzchild radius below the radius of the object, and it, at that point, is no longer a black hole.
Outside the sub-phenoscopic event horizon? How on EARTH would they do that?
Not to mention that if the event horizon were, you know, tangibly large, building a concrete barrier around it would only serve to give more matter to the hole (there is a gravity effect OUTSIDE the event horizon, you know. And, since the barrier would be static, it would be mighty difficult for it to escape).
"something that had a small chance of destroying the world"
It doesn't. Not enough mass. To destroy the earth, you'd need at least a kilotonne's mass sqwooged into the space of a flea's left gonad. Then you'd still have to wait about five years before it was massive enough to cause a noticable effect on the earth itself.
Low-mass black holes should, theoretically have sub-fennoscopic event horizons.
So?
Well, the event-sphere is actually small enough to fit between two atoms and not even touch their electrons. If the black-hole passed through the earth, it would come out the other side with about half velocity and about twice its original mass. And that's only if Hawking radiation is fallacious. If it's not, then the black hole will only have an event horizon until the decrease in mass causes its schwartzchild radius to drop below its volumetric radius - at which point, it's not a black hole anymore, it's just shitlessly dense regula-ass matter.
Actually, I've been working on something like this for some time. The primary issue is being able to update an ISO9660 filesystem without having to move all the structures. The best way I've found to do it is to cache all the TOC information and keep track of where data is. Even so, you end up with some seriously bad issues with fragmentation, not to mention the ugly kludge it is to try and read and write the same CD at the same time.
Heh. In my linux, my first action is usually to remove the extra desktops; I usually get annoyed hunting for running stuff when I've got multiple desks.
That's not to say I don't use multiple X servs. I have a headless Win machine and a headless Mac Mini that I VLC to on ctrl-alt-3 and 4 (1 is linux console). I find it's worlds better than triple-booting or VMWaring, and since I use all low-power componenets (60W PSU with mini-itx boards, laptop drives and DVD-RWs) on the non-macs, I use about as much juice as a normal desktop (and, the way I have them stacked and fanned, they are about the same size as a beige box). The Linux machine has the biggest drive, so I've got/root (since I run as it. No I don't have a problem with that.) set up as a Samba share.
Yes, I'm behind a router. No, I don't run any downloaded programs as root (I use the user 'sandbox' for that) until I've verified them.
The answer lay in the way CDR's work. You can't randomly write to them, because of the difficulties in laser tracking and the slow speed at which the laser head writes. As such, providing write access to the device would be irresposible (and, more importantly, not POSIX compliant) for the Linux dev's to do.
Not POSIX compliant, because a read/write driver must provide fseek capability for block devices. Since it's on a disk channel, it must be a block device (under linux). Also, direct writing to the CD wouldn't put in any of the lower-than-iso-spec (ie: redbook) stuff.
In 2.4, the SCSI interface is perfect, because direct SCSI access is done via character device.
I'm not sure exactly how things work under the hood in 2.6, but you do specify/dev/hd? as the devname for cdrecord (which does make life easier, but is far more confusing).
Yes. I'm sure you're right. I'm certain that anyone that says anything negative about Apple as a company and Mac as a platform is pathologically confrontational.
Or, perhaps, he picked the platform that is percieved by its users to be most secure in order to alert everyone to the dangers of 'mystery blob' drivers.
God, watch the video. The man says that it's not a problem with OSX, and that the problem exists in the reference drivers for both Linux and Windows as well. Using a Mac was just to make a point that even the most secure can be compromised by using unknown code.
Course, you, being a zealot, obviously see any criticism of the source of your gonads to be a particularly nasty slight and an insult to your intelligence. Unlike this, which, while not criticizing of Apple, is a well deserved belittling of your barely-active noggin.
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose you're correct in the sense that there is no directly proven link to C02 vs. Temperature (which is why the global warming scare carries as much weight with me as the scare concerning micro black holes and world destruction), but the CO2 levels are higher than they should be according to geological records. It doesn't hurt to try and curb that, seeing as the predicted effects are dire and that there may be potentially worse unknown effects.
Meanwhile, note that the US has not signed Kyoto, but instead has opted for a marketable permits system for reducing their CO2 emissions. This is good, as it promotes economic efficiency (those who can reasonably afford to reduce do. Those who can't, pay another way). It's bad because of the low-income area issues, but lets face it: factories in low-income areas would be shirking anyway, thinking they'd get away with it. Still, all of them have to eventually reduce, as the permits dry up.
As a practical environmentalist, I'm kinda for individual conservation. I'm saying use LED or compact flourescent instead of incandescent. I'm saying slap some solar on your house, if you can afford the initial costs (you know, rather than buying that hummer). I'm saying stick a brick in your toilet tank (the water offset is greater than you imagine). Grow your own vegetables, if you've the time and correct shade of thumb. Get a solar-assisted water heater. If you're not a gamer/3d modeller/someone else who needs a muscle computer, buy a mini-itx based solution (usually uses under 80W in total).
I'm not saying stop driving, I'm saying stop buying Hummers (or as I like to call them, the 'Short Bus').
<tangent>No, seriously. What the hell is the point of a hummer? They're expensive to buy, expensive to drive, rediculous looking, too big to effectively drive in the city, and overall just a badly designed vehicle.</tangent>
Good ideas for future developments: When DEFC based vehicles are released, seriously consider it over an ICE based vehicle (don't let the product die out, creating another 30-year gap between electric vehicle solutions). If you can find one, get/build a fuel still and flesh out your gasoline with it (saves on garbage and gas price. Yes, you can burn ethanol in your tank. No, it's not as efficient, but it's not gonna damage your car). Do a lot of short 1-2 person trips? Get a cheap motorcycle; you burn less fuel, pay less in insurance.
I dunno. It's like, anymore, it's more economically efficient to be ecologically sound. Still, people aren't doing it. It fucks my head up.
While I can smell the sweet pungent aroma of sarcasm dripping like syrup from your post, I gotta say two things:
You don't need an oil well to make your own diesel.
And, while Greenpeace aren't exactly sissies, I must state that they're insane. They make practical environmentalists (those who are environmental because it's better for personal finance and convenience) look bad.
Please mod parent up.
It all really depends on how heavy the black holes created end up being. I mean, to even get an event horizon with a radius defining a sphere the size of a proton, you'd need a mass something on the order of 10^13 kilograms (I did the math yesterday, but I kinda tossed it. I think it was 1 and change.) I think that falls well outside the range of what CERN's doing.
Mac users don't read log files. They merely sit in the corner, make stuff with Photoshop, and drink Starbucks coffee.
*hint* There's a reason Macs have a rep for being stable. Their users don't know they're crashing.
"BTW, for the record, real programmers start indexing at 0, so there's realy only 01 types of people when the measurement criteria is the understanding (or lack thereof) of binary. You sir/madam are, I believe, of the 'not understanding' variety."
Real programmers start indexing at 0, but when you go for the sizeof(), you still end up with 02d/10b.
Still, this is a really dumbass argument about a seriously lame joke.
I dunno.
The little brats around my house seem to be playing all the time. Loudly, obnoxiously playing. They have skateboards and play random pretend games (average age here, about 7). Sometimes they'll pass messages using their Nintendo DS's.
I don't see what this dude's on about.
Ok, this is annoying me, so I'll explain it basically.
A black hole is an object which is smaller than the sphere defined by its schwartzchild radius (the radius at which escape velocity is greater than light speed). The prevailing theory is that black holes evaporate.
The mechanism by which this works involves the continual creation and destruction of virtual particle pairs. At a certain radius of the black hole, a virtual particle pair is created. The antimatter particle is more attracted to the black hole than the particle, and falls in. Its mate becomes real, and registers as hawking radiation outside the black hole. Slowly, as mass is evaporated from the black hole, its schwartzchild radius becomes smaller (because its mass decreases, it has less and less gravity). When the sphere defined by its schwartzchild radius becomes smaller than the object, that object is, by definition, no longer a black hole.
Now, the first point. This is assuming that hawking radiation is not real.
We're talking about a black hole that has less mass than a proton. As such, its schwartzchild radius must be smaller than the radius of a proton. What happens when it hits the nucleus of an atom?
Well, charge is preserved, and mass is preserved, so even if the entire nucleus is consumed, we just have a slightly heavy atom with somewhat odd behavior. It can't eat other atoms, for much the same reason that fusion doesn't occur in normal circumstances: eletrical forces prevent it (the hole is still held in place by its electron shell).
Meanwhile, the faster it moves, the more likely it is to slam into another atom (we're still talking a very low chance per second). Since there's very little actual cross section, but still an event horizon (which is smaller than the cross section it would have if it had a normal cross section), the other atom may get drawn in (and the electron cloud gets combined). So, ten or twenty occruences of this unlikely event, and you have a black hole equivalent to, say, a uranium atom, but that still behaves like its stable (gravity > weak force; the atom is nonradioactive, in the classical sense), and has a schwartzchild cross-section equivalent to the cross-section of an electron (I'm probably wrong here. I know that my schwartzchild radius, based on my mass, is subatomic in size).
Eventually, if the black atom is moving at, say, just under earth's escape velocity, yes, you could end up with a world-eater. But considering the amount of empty space between atoms, and the liklihood of smacking a black atom into one under normal circumstances, it'll take a very very large number of years. I'd do the statistical math (get the percent average volumetric density of normal matter, get the volume of a cylinder with radius==schwartzchild and length==earth escape*1sec, derive to 0-length and determine the percent chance per instant that the black atom will capture another atom. Use that to extrapolate how long it would take to get the schwartzchild radius to extend past the second electron shell (for carbon, as that's probably the atom most people would regret losing). That number is the danger zone - i.e., that's when our black atom can start eating other atoms without having to bust through their electron clouds first. At that point, the black atom is a potential worry.), but I'm really not that worried about it.
Well, not much, really. Linux has wider adoption, and is more likely to go with experimental things (in 2.6), but to genercize the question a little more, how would things have turned out if Microsoft had started contributing to OSS at the kernel level, using it as their core, back in the late ninties?
'Again, I'm not sure how you get this, "Well, the mass accrued depends on its velocity, but, worst case scenario, it turns into a full-on macroscopic black hole well after the sun explodes." or how this process works, "At some point, the lowered density brings the schwartzchild radius below the radius of the object, and it, at that point, is no longer a black hole." Do you have a write up of this that you can point me to?'
No.
And I'm not going to bother doing a full write up of basic classical physics or QED just so you can grasp the obvious. There's a limit to the amount of work that goes into educating slashdotters, and part of that limit is when they should start looking on Wikipedia.
I mean, seriously. Why do we keep futzing with rockets? Just build a space elevator and be done with it.
A sandbox takes time to build. Probably quite a bit with a fresh API.
Makes you wonder what would have happened if MS accepted open source a while ago, used the Linux Kernel as the core for a largely proprietary OS (e.g.Linux and its driver model get worked on by MS as a commodity, and they run proprietary apps on top of it, like OSX does with BSD).
Where would they both be now if they stopped fighting in, say, 1999?
Well, the mass accrued depends on its velocity, but, worst case scenario, it turns into a full-on macroscopic black hole well after the sun explodes.
Hawking radiation is what causes the evaporation of a black hole. At some point, the lowered density brings the schwartzchild radius below the radius of the object, and it, at that point, is no longer a black hole.
Outside the sub-phenoscopic event horizon? How on EARTH would they do that?
Not to mention that if the event horizon were, you know, tangibly large, building a concrete barrier around it would only serve to give more matter to the hole (there is a gravity effect OUTSIDE the event horizon, you know. And, since the barrier would be static, it would be mighty difficult for it to escape).
Right. And lots of alchemists actually made matter out of air, wind, fire and water.
Silence. You're just another one of the "I don't know what you're doing, so obviously neither do you." camp.
Death by Kittens is a far more likely cause of the loss of a civilization than by miniature black hole.
"something that had a small chance of destroying the world"
It doesn't. Not enough mass. To destroy the earth, you'd need at least a kilotonne's mass sqwooged into the space of a flea's left gonad. Then you'd still have to wait about five years before it was massive enough to cause a noticable effect on the earth itself.
Low-mass black holes should, theoretically have sub-fennoscopic event horizons.
So?
Well, the event-sphere is actually small enough to fit between two atoms and not even touch their electrons. If the black-hole passed through the earth, it would come out the other side with about half velocity and about twice its original mass. And that's only if Hawking radiation is fallacious. If it's not, then the black hole will only have an event horizon until the decrease in mass causes its schwartzchild radius to drop below its volumetric radius - at which point, it's not a black hole anymore, it's just shitlessly dense regula-ass matter.
Yeah! Fuck the power! ...
I dunno. I think somone's seen 'Fight Club' one too many times.
Actually, I've been working on something like this for some time. The primary issue is being able to update an ISO9660 filesystem without having to move all the structures. The best way I've found to do it is to cache all the TOC information and keep track of where data is. Even so, you end up with some seriously bad issues with fragmentation, not to mention the ugly kludge it is to try and read and write the same CD at the same time.
Heh. In my linux, my first action is usually to remove the extra desktops; I usually get annoyed hunting for running stuff when I've got multiple desks.
/root (since I run as it. No I don't have a problem with that.) set up as a Samba share.
That's not to say I don't use multiple X servs. I have a headless Win machine and a headless Mac Mini that I VLC to on ctrl-alt-3 and 4 (1 is linux console). I find it's worlds better than triple-booting or VMWaring, and since I use all low-power componenets (60W PSU with mini-itx boards, laptop drives and DVD-RWs) on the non-macs, I use about as much juice as a normal desktop (and, the way I have them stacked and fanned, they are about the same size as a beige box). The Linux machine has the biggest drive, so I've got
Yes, I'm behind a router. No, I don't run any downloaded programs as root (I use the user 'sandbox' for that) until I've verified them.
Think of it as a KVM switch with an OS attached.
The answer lay in the way CDR's work. You can't randomly write to them, because of the difficulties in laser tracking and the slow speed at which the laser head writes. As such, providing write access to the device would be irresposible (and, more importantly, not POSIX compliant) for the Linux dev's to do.
/dev/hd? as the devname for cdrecord (which does make life easier, but is far more confusing).
Not POSIX compliant, because a read/write driver must provide fseek capability for block devices. Since it's on a disk channel, it must be a block device (under linux). Also, direct writing to the CD wouldn't put in any of the lower-than-iso-spec (ie: redbook) stuff.
In 2.4, the SCSI interface is perfect, because direct SCSI access is done via character device.
I'm not sure exactly how things work under the hood in 2.6, but you do specify
Yes. I'm sure you're right. I'm certain that anyone that says anything negative about Apple as a company and Mac as a platform is pathologically confrontational.
Or, perhaps, he picked the platform that is percieved by its users to be most secure in order to alert everyone to the dangers of 'mystery blob' drivers.
God, watch the video. The man says that it's not a problem with OSX, and that the problem exists in the reference drivers for both Linux and Windows as well. Using a Mac was just to make a point that even the most secure can be compromised by using unknown code.
Course, you, being a zealot, obviously see any criticism of the source of your gonads to be a particularly nasty slight and an insult to your intelligence. Unlike this, which, while not criticizing of Apple, is a well deserved belittling of your barely-active noggin.
Twit.
Not true. I used a 'where' clause, meaning I could have typed 'z', as long as I stated in the where clause that z=planck's constant.