I also remember when their case was before the DOJ and they said that remedies against them would hurt the economy. Well, I guess we don't have to worry about that anymore. Phew!
Well, profitability IS more important than abiding by ethics or laws. And outsourcing is good for our economy, right? Let's give them a tax break.
Yeah, us felons love to vote democrat (when we're not traveling through time, that is). Whereas criminals never favor republicans, and republicans never nominate convicted criminals to influential positions in government.
But I might as well blame republicans for the imaginary voting habits of felons, since republicans blame people like me for the existence of the AIDS virus, the decline of marriage, and the world's ability to distinguish between defense and de facto.
thaaaat's right... I remember that now. And you make a good point about electrolysis. I don't understand why you got modded down, since teh story is about nuclear cleanup, which is one-off from discussing cleaner energy alternatives, but, I chose to post not moderate so I'll s/u now:)
I used to wonder why the DOJ let Microsoft off the hook. Then Bush spurned the Taliban's offer to give us bin Laden. Must be one of those "conservative values" thingies.
I have gay friends and they use the term "gay" in a jokey way to describe things that are "lame", "suck", etc.
I don't follow suit, because it makes me self conscious. I can see why someone might get offended but it doesn't seem to me that Bill, Shooter of Bul is attacking non-heterosexuals.
(white) People used to use the "n" word to describe black people. Then black people started using it to refer to each other. Now, it Trent Lott says the "n" word, I figure it's cause he's a jerk. If my buddy (who is black) calls me "his n-gga", it's not offensive to me. Okay, maybe I don't like to hear it anyway, but I know he's not attacking me. Likewise, homosexual people use the word "queer" with each other. I don't use the n-word at all. I say "gay" but not around my gay friends. It's more about consideration, I think, than grammar and vocabulary.
On the one hand, no one likes being labeled. On the other hand, words are just words. On the third hand, it all depends on context. I thought I had a point, but it's gone now....
It's easy to take offense, or to see offense where it was not intended. It's also easy to unintentionally offend.
Here here. I usually don't mention Solar. We already have a high-output nuclear reactor that will operate more or less maintenance free for the next ~4 billion years.
The downside of Solar is that unused energy has to be stored (batteries... yuck) and that the amount of energy corresponds directly to an Area you can fill with solar cells. Solar cells are not efficient, nor cheap, nor do they last very long (without maintenance).
However, they don't explode, create waste (after being built) and are much simpler than a reactor.
I still think a reactor is more likely to be a serviceable project because humans emphasize the short term over the long term, and a reactor would give us more in the short term. I think it's a more realistic short term goal.
Remember "Red Mars" (I think) where the author posits these GIANT foil mirrors in space, that redirect the sunlight to points on the planet? If we could launch a few hundred giant mirrors, the energy harvest might be enough short term to get it off the ground. A nuclear reactor on the other hand, is easy to explain to politicians.
heh, yeah, that's true, the sun's not exactly putting out distilled water up there. At the same time, I personally don't know what would happen if we started dumping our waste into the solar wind such that it comes right back. Maybe it would not hurt us... I just don't know so, thinking safe..
Yes, it would indeed suck if we sent a rocket up full of radioactive crud and it came raining down on us. Yes, that would suck.
In addition, just getting it into space isn't solely the answer to the waste problem. How much would it suck to try to colonize say, the moon 150 years from now, only to find it's logistically impossible because the surface is covered in radioactive sludge? So I'm saying, let's fire that stuff at Mercury. It's not really habitable near term, so no loss there. An even better way (in my non-solar scientist opinion) would be to lob it toward the sun, on a trajectory that would see it vaporized on the far side or even better, at a pole, so the vaporized waste gets blown out of our solar system.
My point was that we could build the reactors themselves in space, thus mediating the danger of polluting our ecosystem.
We store acids in glass beakers because the acids don't eat the glass. The problem with radioactive "waste" is that the radiation acts to wear out the container over the long term. Right now I think we mostly mix the waste in with glass, which is better than just pouring it into a metal drum because the metal drum would wear out faster (than glass).
Radioactive materials are sometimes called "hot"; they can be warm to the touch; this comes from the fact that as decay occurs particles come shooting out of the nucleus. These particles can hit other nuclei and jostle molecules around.
IIRC, the most recent containment technology is based on storing the "waste" in crystals, eg Zircon. The upswing of crystal storage is that the "hot" material in the center of the crystal degrades the inner part of the crystal, which reacts by forming a "wall" instead of cracking or oozing. Kind of like when you crumple a piece of paper, and there's a limit to how much smaller you can make it by squeezing. Okay, maybe that's a poor analogy, since the "squeezing" comes from the inside, but you get the idea.
FWIW, if we had a space elevator, would anyone object to putting nuclear plants on it? It's not in anyone's backyard, and it's well placed to sling the crud into space... if we can find a target. I say Mercury.
Nuclear is one option we should pursue. We should also keep working on bio-fuelcells and wind/wave. It all comes from the sun (well, A sun...) anyway. This is all going to be moot once we bootstrap a stellar economy.. there's more methane and natural gas to be had than well, even humans could waste (okay, maybe not, but there's a lot).
Yeah, you make the best point. Even if the cars are perfectly controlled the machine could break down. So somewhere there's a balance between throughput and failure, with a risk of massive pileup.
I'm trying to think of a way the cars could connect to each other, so that if one fails after the point of no return for entry to the intersection, it would be pulled through by the other car. That way you could mediate the danger of pile up due to failure, by increasing the required distance between the passing cars.
As several have pointed out, my post is highly annoying. Maybe even Urkel annoying.
I can't mod myself down:} Would someone please mod me down? Or, you could look at it from another viewpoint, that an annoying post is ontopic for a thread titled, "Are you annoying?" And mod it up, but I would prefer that it be modded down. But I guess I didn't express anythin worth expressing so probably mod down.
Wow. I'm really sorry. I'm gonna keep all my newfound insight to myself here, but, geez, sorry.
All sarcasm aside (really) I'm trying to express that dealing with annoying people by being aggressive or insulting is just as bad, in general, as being annoying in the first place.
You're right, I was really annoying in my post. I appreciate that you pointed out my transgression, without attacking me. I really do. Yeah, I came off "just as bad", so I apologize. I made the mistake of being holier than thou in my original post. Sorry.
>>Well, that certainly does a bang-up job of demolishing the stereotype that IT people are insufferable blowhards with fragile egos and incredibly poor social skills. Good work.
Oh yeah, oops. Sorry. Actually that's not a wholly inaccurate picture of me (though I'm working on it...)
You know, it's funny? Actually it's not the attitude that got me picked on. Being quiet and a doormat is what did that.
You know what? I feel annoyed. Does that mean you're annoying?
Thanks for cooking me. I will tone it down. I don't appreciate the "deserved it part", but I see much flames. Oh well. live and learn (as opposed to get annoyed get even)
why offtopic? I think it is a joke (I laughed..) I can't tell if he's trolling but neither did whoever moded him down,,... I already posted so can't mod him funny
No one turns. In addition to safety concerns, dogs, breakdowns, drunk drivers, etc, you hit on something another AC pointed out above (he's at 0, someone mod him up?) that "highways don't have intersections, eh". Really I think this is more applicable to a situation with all-computer control, not really partial or total human control.
Hypothetically, lets say that turning just boils down to scheduling a longer interval in the area where you turn at. So more cars slow down for someone to turn than just cars zipping through. I think the demo was maybe going for "wow" effect.. i think we probably mostly think this would result in accidents. Presuming it is intended for extensive application, I think we are talking about an "autodrive" system with people as passengers not pilots.
dystopian police state arrests passengers in their own cars, free reg required, news at 11, blah blah blah
I guess it would cost a lot to install this on a large scale and in every car, so NoYes19, I guess I would agree with you that better road design may be more agreeable short term.
Maybe long term, if shipping, mail and passenger transport becomes highly integrated, our roads will become more like a well run train system, and (at least in heavy traffic or high speed long haul situations) we drivers will sit back and sleep until Brooklyn.:)
One other comment, did you watch the simulation for a minute... the cars together tend to take up diagonal line formations. I'm thinking of a 4way with a stop sign or a roundabout as similar to ethernet as this simulation is to ATM (where time is scheduled ahead of transmission) and it got me thinking, what if the cars grouped together in steady patterns instead of (what appears to me to be) an emergent pattern of diagnonal lines (or is that on purpose?) mixed with apparently random scattering of cars through each other? BTW, props to the researchers.
Oh, poor baby. Do the people who used to ridicule me and exlude me based on my looks, interests, intellect, vocabulary, or beliefs, feel that I am annoying? Oh, let me cuddle your fragile egos. NOT!!
The only reason I try not to piss people off at work is that I know if I lost my job and live out my dream to poison-gas my high-school reunion, it'll be more work than if I just keep my mouth shut.
Gee, I don't see anything about how annoying cab drivers, waiters, construction workers, football fans, etc, can be. So personally I'm doing s/IT/human/ and fuck the bullshit.
Seriously, this article takes the one group of people who are generally shat on all through their youth and then gets the joy of being blamed for problems due to low budget not lack of foresight and we *still* can't say I told you so, WE'RE annoying? STFU, whores. You'd best believe I can do a lot more than annoy the in-duh-viduals and cow-workers around me. ALL PEOPLE ARE ANNOYING. At least the article bothers to allude to such when they say that "some acts annoy some people and sail right past others"... translation: EVERYONE ANNOYS SOMEONE. Speaking from experience here, if you can't put up with someone who's "annoying", then you're even worse off than they are. The workplace isn't fucking kindergarten. Maybe that person is actively trying to be friendly and for whatever reason, they have different values and strengths than you. I know I'd be annoyed as hell if someone came into my cube and started talking football for half an hour. I still wouldn't tell them to "fuck off", I'd let them know that I wasn't interested. How about this for annoying: people who write articles about IT workers foibles in such a way as to imply that "IT == Geek == Annoying == deserves to lose job". How about this: "Geek == IT worker == I barely have the coping skills to not sever your ugly head and use the blood to paint my bathroom, and you're calling me annoying? Then stay the hell away 'cause I find your pulse and breathing abhorrent". Fuck this article. And fuck all the ex-jocks, ex-cheerleaders, ex-popular assmonkeys who read this and think "Gee, why don't those loser nerds and geeks in IT just act the way I act? I'm perfect (as evidenced by my popularity and physical beauty) so obviously the problem with/those people/ is that nerds and geeks choose to be unliked and so they deserve to be made fun of/ridiculed as annoying/blamed for problem X..."
MOTHER *&@#^(*&@^#*&@ BITCHES!!!! AAAAAGHGHHGHH I HATE STUPID PEOPLE (yet somehow I manage to live with them. Imagine that)
if a chimp would recognize "techno" music as communication, or as enviromental noise? When I hear a modem doing handshake, I know what's happening but if I didn't I think I'd probably dismiss it. I think our biggest problem in deciphering any message will have less to do with weeding out stellar noise and more to do with our intellectual capacity (or lack therof). We might decode a message in 10 minutes if it's a chemical recipe for oh say, plastic. An alien treatise on philosophy or religion might be totally beyond our reach in the same way Differential Equations are beyond the reach of oh say, a trout. We might physically lack the apparatii for comprehending the information payload.
Remember the episode of STTNG where Q loses his powers and hides out on the Enterprise, and a moon is going to crash into the planet, and Picard asks him for advise? Q's response is "Oh, just change the gravitational constant of the universe.." Picard goes "How?" and Q says "What do you mean how? you just do it". Try explaining the nature of the Schroedinger's Cat Paradox to a 2 year old. If the kids a freakin' genius, (s)he might understand part of it. That's the relationship we're hoping for. Now, try to explain it to a fruitfly. We might discover that we are that fruitfly.
It may well be that we pick up on "spam". Sure our first contact might be a recipe for a super duper power source or stardrive or weapon. Or it could be a grocery list. Hell, the first message we get could be "FP!!!1!", heh.:)
Or, our first intercept might be something like "If you can read this, you are too close, and we are dispatching the Vogon Constructor Fleet.";)
Or how about, "....indicates that the new species is attempting to observe our communications. Shows tendency to grow without regard for available resources. Unstable, shows potential, frequently inflicts harm on itself and surrounding life forms. Please advise. ~Gloobanerb Exterminators, Inc"
Getting even wackier, maybe the first message will be "...ooooooooooo! woooaaaaaaaooooouaaaoooooo!! oooooooooaooooooouaaooooo!" Captain, we're receiving whale song!;-) Or, "....are likely to be eaten by a Grue./n 71/80hp> _"
Hell, we've been broadcasting for ~50 years now... maybe message one will just be "SHUT UP!!!"
Slashdot Mirror
I can tell you don't appreciate being shortchanged. You knocked that one outa the park! 8)
Nah, just buy Fusjitsu. They never fail. *wink*
Well, profitability IS more important than abiding by ethics or laws. And outsourcing is good for our economy, right? Let's give them a tax break.
Yeah, us felons love to vote democrat (when we're not traveling through time, that is). Whereas criminals never favor republicans, and republicans never nominate convicted criminals to influential positions in government.
But I might as well blame republicans for the imaginary voting habits of felons, since republicans blame people like me for the existence of the AIDS virus, the decline of marriage, and the world's ability to distinguish between defense and de facto.
~A liberal, and therefore un, American.
right?
thaaaat's right... I remember that now. And you make a good point about electrolysis. I don't understand why you got modded down, since teh story is about nuclear cleanup, which is one-off from discussing cleaner energy alternatives, but, I chose to post not moderate so I'll s/u now :)
May I inquire.. er... how you got into that or failing that, how does one interpret the symbolism?
I used to wonder why the DOJ let Microsoft off the hook. Then Bush spurned the Taliban's offer to give us bin Laden. Must be one of those "conservative values" thingies.
discrimination=ignorance=fear=weaknessc eptance=love=wisdom=growth
ac
I don't follow suit, because it makes me self conscious. I can see why someone might get offended but it doesn't seem to me that Bill, Shooter of Bul is attacking non-heterosexuals.
(white) People used to use the "n" word to describe black people. Then black people started using it to refer to each other. Now, it Trent Lott says the "n" word, I figure it's cause he's a jerk. If my buddy (who is black) calls me "his n-gga", it's not offensive to me. Okay, maybe I don't like to hear it anyway, but I know he's not attacking me. Likewise, homosexual people use the word "queer" with each other. I don't use the n-word at all. I say "gay" but not around my gay friends. It's more about consideration, I think, than grammar and vocabulary.
On the one hand, no one likes being labeled. On the other hand, words are just words. On the third hand, it all depends on context. I thought I had a point, but it's gone now....
It's easy to take offense, or to see offense where it was not intended. It's also easy to unintentionally offend.
Damn, what's this soap box doing under my feet?
The downside of Solar is that unused energy has to be stored (batteries... yuck) and that the amount of energy corresponds directly to an Area you can fill with solar cells. Solar cells are not efficient, nor cheap, nor do they last very long (without maintenance).
However, they don't explode, create waste (after being built) and are much simpler than a reactor.
I still think a reactor is more likely to be a serviceable project because humans emphasize the short term over the long term, and a reactor would give us more in the short term. I think it's a more realistic short term goal.
Remember "Red Mars" (I think) where the author posits these GIANT foil mirrors in space, that redirect the sunlight to points on the planet? If we could launch a few hundred giant mirrors, the energy harvest might be enough short term to get it off the ground. A nuclear reactor on the other hand, is easy to explain to politicians.
Hey, we'll see what happens.
heh, yeah, that's true, the sun's not exactly putting out distilled water up there. At the same time, I personally don't know what would happen if we started dumping our waste into the solar wind such that it comes right back. Maybe it would not hurt us... I just don't know so, thinking safe..
In addition, just getting it into space isn't solely the answer to the waste problem. How much would it suck to try to colonize say, the moon 150 years from now, only to find it's logistically impossible because the surface is covered in radioactive sludge? So I'm saying, let's fire that stuff at Mercury. It's not really habitable near term, so no loss there. An even better way (in my non-solar scientist opinion) would be to lob it toward the sun, on a trajectory that would see it vaporized on the far side or even better, at a pole, so the vaporized waste gets blown out of our solar system.
My point was that we could build the reactors themselves in space, thus mediating the danger of polluting our ecosystem.
A boy can dream, anyway.
Radioactive materials are sometimes called "hot"; they can be warm to the touch; this comes from the fact that as decay occurs particles come shooting out of the nucleus. These particles can hit other nuclei and jostle molecules around.
IIRC, the most recent containment technology is based on storing the "waste" in crystals, eg Zircon. The upswing of crystal storage is that the "hot" material in the center of the crystal degrades the inner part of the crystal, which reacts by forming a "wall" instead of cracking or oozing. Kind of like when you crumple a piece of paper, and there's a limit to how much smaller you can make it by squeezing. Okay, maybe that's a poor analogy, since the "squeezing" comes from the inside, but you get the idea.
Here's a link.
FWIW, if we had a space elevator, would anyone object to putting nuclear plants on it? It's not in anyone's backyard, and it's well placed to sling the crud into space... if we can find a target. I say Mercury.
Nuclear is one option we should pursue. We should also keep working on bio-fuelcells and wind/wave. It all comes from the sun (well, A sun...) anyway. This is all going to be moot once we bootstrap a stellar economy.. there's more methane and natural gas to be had than well, even humans could waste (okay, maybe not, but there's a lot).
(-1, offtopic)
I'm trying to think of a way the cars could connect to each other, so that if one fails after the point of no return for entry to the intersection, it would be pulled through by the other car. That way you could mediate the danger of pile up due to failure, by increasing the required distance between the passing cars.
I can't mod myself down :} Would someone please mod me down? Or, you could look at it from another viewpoint, that an annoying post is ontopic for a thread titled, "Are you annoying?" And mod it up, but I would prefer that it be modded down. But I guess I didn't express anythin worth expressing so probably mod down.
Blech. I do feel kinda sick.
All sarcasm aside (really) I'm trying to express that dealing with annoying people by being aggressive or insulting is just as bad, in general, as being annoying in the first place.
You're right, I was really annoying in my post. I appreciate that you pointed out my transgression, without attacking me. I really do. Yeah, I came off "just as bad", so I apologize. I made the mistake of being holier than thou in my original post. Sorry.
I'm in a hole. Gonna stop digging now.
Oh yeah, oops. Sorry. Actually that's not a wholly inaccurate picture of me (though I'm working on it...)
Sorry, sorry. ...sorry.
You know what? I feel annoyed. Does that mean you're annoying?
Thanks for cooking me. I will tone it down. I don't appreciate the "deserved it part", but I see much flames. Oh well. live and learn (as opposed to get annoyed get even)
Heh. Well I think of it as anger, but I can't argue with your point :)
why offtopic? I think it is a joke (I laughed..) I can't tell if he's trolling but neither did whoever moded him down,,... I already posted so can't mod him funny
No one turns. In addition to safety concerns, dogs, breakdowns, drunk drivers, etc, you hit on something another AC pointed out above (he's at 0, someone mod him up?) that "highways don't have intersections, eh". Really I think this is more applicable to a situation with all-computer control, not really partial or total human control.
Hypothetically, lets say that turning just boils down to scheduling a longer interval in the area where you turn at. So more cars slow down for someone to turn than just cars zipping through. I think the demo was maybe going for "wow" effect.. i think we probably mostly think this would result in accidents. Presuming it is intended for extensive application, I think we are talking about an "autodrive" system with people as passengers not pilots.
dystopian police state arrests passengers in their own cars, free reg required, news at 11, blah blah blah
I guess it would cost a lot to install this on a large scale and in every car, so NoYes19, I guess I would agree with you that better road design may be more agreeable short term.
Maybe long term, if shipping, mail and passenger transport becomes highly integrated, our roads will become more like a well run train system, and (at least in heavy traffic or high speed long haul situations) we drivers will sit back and sleep until Brooklyn. :)
One other comment, did you watch the simulation for a minute... the cars together tend to take up diagonal line formations. I'm thinking of a 4way with a stop sign or a roundabout as similar to ethernet as this simulation is to ATM (where time is scheduled ahead of transmission) and it got me thinking, what if the cars grouped together in steady patterns instead of (what appears to me to be) an emergent pattern of diagnonal lines (or is that on purpose?) mixed with apparently random scattering of cars through each other? BTW, props to the researchers.
preview? ..bah
The only reason I try not to piss people off at work is that I know if I lost my job and live out my dream to poison-gas my high-school reunion, it'll be more work than if I just keep my mouth shut.
Gee, I don't see anything about how annoying cab drivers, waiters, construction workers, football fans, etc, can be. So personally I'm doing s/IT/human/ and fuck the bullshit.
Seriously, this article takes the one group of people who are generally shat on all through their youth and then gets the joy of being blamed for problems due to low budget not lack of foresight and we *still* can't say I told you so, WE'RE annoying? STFU, whores. You'd best believe I can do a lot more than annoy the in-duh-viduals and cow-workers around me. ALL PEOPLE ARE ANNOYING. At least the article bothers to allude to such when they say that "some acts annoy some people and sail right past others"... translation: EVERYONE ANNOYS SOMEONE. Speaking from experience here, if you can't put up with someone who's "annoying", then you're even worse off than they are. The workplace isn't fucking kindergarten. Maybe that person is actively trying to be friendly and for whatever reason, they have different values and strengths than you. I know I'd be annoyed as hell if someone came into my cube and started talking football for half an hour. I still wouldn't tell them to "fuck off", I'd let them know that I wasn't interested. How about this for annoying: people who write articles about IT workers foibles in such a way as to imply that "IT == Geek == Annoying == deserves to lose job". How about this: "Geek == IT worker == I barely have the coping skills to not sever your ugly head and use the blood to paint my bathroom, and you're calling me annoying? Then stay the hell away 'cause I find your pulse and breathing abhorrent". Fuck this article. And fuck all the ex-jocks, ex-cheerleaders, ex-popular assmonkeys who read this and think "Gee, why don't those loser nerds and geeks in IT just act the way I act? I'm perfect (as evidenced by my popularity and physical beauty) so obviously the problem with /those people/ is that nerds and geeks choose to be unliked and so they deserve to be made fun of/ridiculed as annoying/blamed for problem X..."
MOTHER *&@#^(*&@^#*&@ BITCHES!!!! AAAAAGHGHHGHH I HATE STUPID PEOPLE (yet somehow I manage to live with them. Imagine that)
Remember the episode of STTNG where Q loses his powers and hides out on the Enterprise, and a moon is going to crash into the planet, and Picard asks him for advise? Q's response is "Oh, just change the gravitational constant of the universe.." Picard goes "How?" and Q says "What do you mean how? you just do it". Try explaining the nature of the Schroedinger's Cat Paradox to a 2 year old. If the kids a freakin' genius, (s)he might understand part of it. That's the relationship we're hoping for. Now, try to explain it to a fruitfly. We might discover that we are that fruitfly.
Or, our first intercept might be something like "If you can read this, you are too close, and we are dispatching the Vogon Constructor Fleet." ;)
Or how about, "....indicates that the new species is attempting to observe our communications. Shows tendency to grow without regard for available resources. Unstable, shows potential, frequently inflicts harm on itself and surrounding life forms. Please advise. ~Gloobanerb Exterminators, Inc"
Getting even wackier, maybe the first message will be "...ooooooooooo! woooaaaaaaaooooouaaaoooooo!! oooooooooaooooooouaaooooo!" Captain, we're receiving whale song! ;-) Or, "....are likely to be eaten by a Grue. /n 71/80hp> _"
Hell, we've been broadcasting for ~50 years now... maybe message one will just be "SHUT UP!!!"