Don't forget vehicle exhausts as a potential source of nitrogen oxides.
Perhaps we should get rid of modern three-way catalytic converters and bring back the old two-way ones, in the interests of saving the planet and/or growing mutant super trees.
SNAP-10A is also still up there in a stable orbit, although it's no longer functional or complete - a failure in an electrical system, plus the beryllium neutron reflector was ejected.
Somebody (NASA? Or, if you're not keen, how about giving the Chinese or the Indians all the design specs) should be looking at this thing. It's already up there, and won't require a launch of radioactive materials. Worst case, it may be possible to simply re-use the fuel rods in another reactor - one with another 44 years of advances and design experience behind it. It's also been up there for 44 years - admittedly in mothballs rather than functional - and may provide some insights into the effects of long-term exposure to space for those kinds of systems.
What are the salvage laws, as applicable to space? Would China or India even need permission to simply take the fissionable material for re-use in another reactor? NASA "Parked" it, but could it be considered "abandoned"?
In the convenience of your own home, or similar to the right to access clean drinking water you find in some places?
The wording is something to the effect of no household being more than 2 kilometres from a high-speed connection. Are we talking about a pipe to the house, or having to line up to use the communal pump and carry your buckets of bits back home with you?
Click jacking, cross site scripting, buffer overflows that install keygrabbing services, any number of reasons.
Of course, but I think you missed my bit about "Provided they do their banking before visiting russianmafiasite.com they're safe" and my comments on why data persistence can be a bad thing.
People are big on rituals. Make one "You boot this CD, you type www.anz.com.au in the browser, you do your banking, then you shut down AND DON'T DO ANYTHING ELSE WITH THIS, EVER" and you've got Safe Internet Banking for Grandma. I'm not suggesting that you wouldn't want to keep a general-purpose environment up to date, but an environment being used solely for banking and which is completely volative and loads from read-only media on each start is a huge step up security-wise from the usual malware-ridden PC. If you can convince Grandma to do her banking off the "special CD", it shouldn't be too hard to convince her that that's ALL she should do through it.
Who cares if the browser on the LiveCD is out of date? What really matters is that it provides a known clean OS and browser. Provided they do their banking before visiting russianmafiasite.com they're safe.
Same goes with most of the rest of the software, especially these days when the machine is likely to be protected from the big bad internet to some extent by the ADSL router and the magic of NAT. If someone uses a two-year-old Ubuntu disc for their online banking (and only their banking), they're still safer than if they use XP and Internet Exploder for banking and surfing porn and downloading warez and downloading movies and...
A USB-based installation that allows the browser to be updated can also be subverted, at least in theory. The beauty of a LiveCD is that it's static.
Friday the 13th part n - you know, chainsaw-and-hockey-mask-and-beating-one-camper-to-death-with-the-corpse-of-another-camper movies.
If you want a real WTF, see the last in the series - Jason X. Lexa Doig, Lisa Ryder and David Cronenberg do battle with Jason...in space...in the 25th century.
Yes, nuclear power could go a long way. But even the faintest knowledge of human history should help to convince pretty much everyone: We're just too stupid to handle it.
I'm well aware that there's more than enough stupid to go around; I was just under the impression, perhaps mistaken, that there were new ways to design reactors and fuel cycles that made it much more difficult to divert material to weapon production. I also assumed that, in the long run, that was exactly the kind of technology we should be looking at helping states like Iran and even North Korea use.
Also, congrats to the GP, 30 years with one vehicle is impressive.
I actually got it second-hand, about 14 year ago.
The engine was replaced with a second-hand unit from a slightly newer model about 140000km ago, after a sparkplug disintegrated and destroyed the rings in one cylinder - still ran, but with reduced power and too much black smoke. The head replacement was about 20000km ago (yeah, I do about 20000km a year) and about 40000km after a catastrophic loss of coolant that resulted in a continuous slow loss of coolant that increased over time. Plus there were the kinds of things that are just as "consumable" as tyres are if you keep any vehicle long enough - like the exhaust system and the driveshafts, which were replaced around the same time the engine was. I still figure I've spent far less on that car over time than I would have if I'd replaced the vehicle every time something major happened.
Builders use commercial grade battery powered drills with multiple pluggable battery packs. Construction sites have places for charging tools. Maybe the generally short usage cycles of taxis will suit shorter range vehicles. How about a battery pack with enough charge to do one job, but with faster charging capability.
One job could be from East Melbourne to the Royal Melbourne Hospital, or it could be from Scoresby to Werribee - plus however far you drove before it, plus however far you have to drive to get to a charging station.
Interchangeable battery packs with a very short swapout time at central depot might go some way towards helping with this, but being able to take a job from one end of the city to the other and knowing that you can fill up anywhere if you need to is likely to remain important to commercial operators.
People will drive their cars and people will eventually switch but 2 years is MUCH too soon to think that we can start tearing down gas stations.
I expect that I'll still be driving the same car in five years, at which time it will be 30 years old.
Would I drive a new car if I could afford it? Possibly. Would it benefit me financially to do so? Probably not.
I've done some reasonably major repairs in the last couple of years - a reconditioned cylinder head, a wheel bearing, the distributor - but I've still spent far less in higher fuel consumption and those repairs than I'd have spent in interest on a loan and lost in depreciation on a newer vehicle.
Yeah, it'd be nice to have a lower carbon footprint from a more fuel-efficient hybrid. It'd be even nicer to have a slightly lower carbon footprint from an all-electric vehicle (we use brown coal for most of our electricity in my corner of Australia), and even better once our Illustrious Leaders convince the Great Unwashed to let us go nuclear. Trouble is, for all intents and purposes we're a single-income household (one adult is a disability pensioner - car, diesel spill, lamp post) with two kids and all the expenses that go with that. If it's a choice between environmental righteousness and actually maintaining a functional household, the household wins. Even on purely financial terms, without using my family as a rationalisation, keeping my old car going wins.
I spend all night charging my mobile phone. Its such a pain, sitting there and waiting for it to finish.
What about situations where lack of a quick turn-around might be more of an inconvenience - like taxi fleets, or independent taxi operators? For the fleets it's probably less of an issue, as they'll have quieter times and will probably be able to rotate some of their vehicles out during those, but the smaller operators might have a problem. If you've got a taxi (as in vehicle, rather than drivers) licence and one or a few vehicles, you'll probably want to hire other drivers to keep them on the road as much of any given day as possible - there's no 12-hour downtime while you eat and sleep, or eight-hour downtime as you sit in your office, in which to plug it in at home or at the car park. Hybrids or fuelcell vehicles are likely to be more important than battery-only vehicles in those kinds of applications until a five minute recharge to 70-80% of 500-mile battery's capacity is possible.
Interesting. I've never seen that before, and I'm not sure I accept everything it implies, but it explains quite a lot about observed interactions between the sexes.
Just buying into this for the sake of argument, I believe I'd be on her friends ladder - but that's okay because everyone else on the planet is so unbeliveably below SWMBO on my ladder that they may as well not even exist. I also note that Ladder Theory doesn't seem to make allowance for things like sibling relationships, which would be important to most people outside Kentucky or Tasmania.
Linux has less low-hanging crapware for the plucking than Windows, but that's no reason to switch. If she switches for that reason then she still hasn't addressed the underlying problem of clicking YES YES YES YES to everything, and it's going to screw her over in Linux land eventually.
The reason she switched was that I was sick of the endless rebuild-pwned-rebuild cycle from that low-hanging crapware, and Microsoft's updates are completely unworkable on dial-up. I'd come up with a way to provide her with updates on DVDs every couple of months, or as required, and that hasn't happened as often as it should have, but in practice hasn't been much of an issue. If she had a faster connection I'd just point the thing at a local mirror and let it hassle her when stuff needed updating, but her occasionally-updated Ubuntu system has been a lot better behaved than her occasionally-updated Windows ones were. And yeah, I'm aware that some of this is likely to be due to security-through-obscurity.
Also, I don't believe she was clicking YES YES YES YES to everything, and was moderately discerning (for end-user values of discerning). I seem to recall things improving significantly when I managed to move her off Outhouse Express and Internet Exploder too, without significant changes in browsing habits, but still not to the point of having stuff "just work" for two years.
And what, use a fresh drive image every time you boot up the virtual machine?
It's still the same problem except it's possible to detect virtual rootkits from the host OS.
No, only use the VM for specific, limited purposes where there is no easily-usable Linux alternative. Although the snapshots or fresh image idea sounds promising too...
A couple of years ago, a friend I've ended up doing free support for (c'mon, we all have a few) wanted a new computer. She ended up with a nice new dual-core machine with 2 gig RAM and Ubuntu. Virtualbox and XP went on there in case she "needed" windows for anything - it was way faster than any Windows install she'd had on real hardware - and it turns out that the only thing she ever uses the XP virtual machine for is her tax return because the Australian Tax Office requires a Microsoft environment. She knows better than to use the XP VM for casual browsing too, as I've cleaned a metric fuckload of malware off her windows machines in the past. I figure I'll need to upgrade her machine to Karmic once the dust settles, but I don't remember the last time I went six months without having to do something serious to her machine - let alone two years.
I hope that the Indians are able to establish a lunar colony; they certainly have the expertise.
The casinos might take off, that's a business that will attract customers no matter where you build one. If they've gone and bought Rotary Rocket's intellectual property, the ATV is certainly the right shape too. But there are precious few bison up there...
In Australia, under government-sponsored reforms intended to reduce duplication of effort and make the local car industry more sustainable that started in the mid-80s, there was a lot of collaboration between the local GM subsidiary and Nissan and Toyota. The Family II engines, as used in a number of Holden and Opel and Vauxhaul models (sorry, not familar with what they went into in the US), were sold to Nissan for use in various locally-built models. Locally-built Toyotas were badge-engineered and sold as Holdens to fill a small-to-mid-size niche. Holden's Commodore was at one point badge-engineered to become the Toyota Lexcen.
If Ford asked Toyota for engines, they'd probably get them. And that goes both ways.
Nope! The iPlayer has a 200+MHz arm9 in it which makes it possible to just flat out run the emulator on the flashcart. This isn't so much an emulator for the DS, as much as the DS is being used as a screen for the iPlayer, just as if the iPlayer was playing a video. Not exactly the most exciting conclusion, but at least it runs?
Hmmm... how long until someone ports one of the DS emulators to this, at which point the iPlayer would become THE device for the Eyepatch Brigade?
Or, approaching it from another angle, how long until a hacked loader beccomes available for this that permits the loading of "backups"? Didn't that happen with one of the early Datel homebrew/media cards?
Newly hired employees are tested for nicotine as part of a pre-employment panel of medical tests.
That'll be interesting in the future - discrimination on the grounds of disability or medical condition, perhaps?
There's some evidence that nicotine delivered by patch can help with things like parkinsons, alzheimers, depressive conditions, ADD and a whole lot of other things. Various native peoples have ingested tobacco to treat constipation and wom infestations, and I see no reason why people using it exclusively as a herbal remedy for these or other conditions should be penalised. I'm a non-smoker and won't take it up - I think it's disgusting - but if nicotine patches were safe and effective and cheap when compared with other medication I'd use them and take my prospective employers to court if need be. I'd also be the guy passing around the poppseed bagels, fwiw...
Secure the PC & software you're going to use in the presentation, just to keep pranksters or jealous peers from having fun at your expense. Terribly embarrassing to give a talk on security while boobies are flashing on the screen behind you.
...but great for getting the audience's attention. Between the "Oooh, Pwnies" commenters, "Hahaha, Boobies" leerers and "Help, I'm being harrassed" brigade (and yes, I expect there will be representatives of all genders and orientations in all three groups if the audience is large enough), it'll *definitely* be *noticed*. Possibly career-limiting, but *definitely* noticed.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget vehicle exhausts as a potential source of nitrogen oxides.
Perhaps we should get rid of modern three-way catalytic converters and bring back the old two-way ones, in the interests of saving the planet and/or growing mutant super trees.
SNAP-10A is also still up there in a stable orbit, although it's no longer functional or complete - a failure in an electrical system, plus the beryllium neutron reflector was ejected.
Somebody (NASA? Or, if you're not keen, how about giving the Chinese or the Indians all the design specs) should be looking at this thing. It's already up there, and won't require a launch of radioactive materials. Worst case, it may be possible to simply re-use the fuel rods in another reactor - one with another 44 years of advances and design experience behind it. It's also been up there for 44 years - admittedly in mothballs rather than functional - and may provide some insights into the effects of long-term exposure to space for those kinds of systems.
What are the salvage laws, as applicable to space? Would China or India even need permission to simply take the fissionable material for re-use in another reactor? NASA "Parked" it, but could it be considered "abandoned"?
More buzzwords and concepts for Trek to abuse.
...that whizzing sound is my karma, flying out the window.
In the convenience of your own home, or similar to the right to access clean drinking water you find in some places?
The wording is something to the effect of no household being more than 2 kilometres from a high-speed connection. Are we talking about a pipe to the house, or having to line up to use the communal pump and carry your buckets of bits back home with you?
Click jacking, cross site scripting, buffer overflows that install keygrabbing services, any number of reasons.
Of course, but I think you missed my bit about "Provided they do their banking before visiting russianmafiasite.com they're safe" and my comments on why data persistence can be a bad thing.
People are big on rituals. Make one "You boot this CD, you type www.anz.com.au in the browser, you do your banking, then you shut down AND DON'T DO ANYTHING ELSE WITH THIS, EVER" and you've got Safe Internet Banking for Grandma. I'm not suggesting that you wouldn't want to keep a general-purpose environment up to date, but an environment being used solely for banking and which is completely volative and loads from read-only media on each start is a huge step up security-wise from the usual malware-ridden PC. If you can convince Grandma to do her banking off the "special CD", it shouldn't be too hard to convince her that that's ALL she should do through it.
Who cares if the browser on the LiveCD is out of date? What really matters is that it provides a known clean OS and browser. Provided they do their banking before visiting russianmafiasite.com they're safe.
Same goes with most of the rest of the software, especially these days when the machine is likely to be protected from the big bad internet to some extent by the ADSL router and the magic of NAT. If someone uses a two-year-old Ubuntu disc for their online banking (and only their banking), they're still safer than if they use XP and Internet Exploder for banking and surfing porn and downloading warez and downloading movies and...
A USB-based installation that allows the browser to be updated can also be subverted, at least in theory. The beauty of a LiveCD is that it's static.
Friday the 13th part n - you know, chainsaw-and-hockey-mask-and-beating-one-camper-to-death-with-the-corpse-of-another-camper movies.
If you want a real WTF, see the last in the series - Jason X. Lexa Doig, Lisa Ryder and David Cronenberg do battle with Jason...in space...in the 25th century.
That's now at www.wsusoffline.net
So it installs linux?
Yes, and kills problem users.
They did even better: they used SECAM, outrageous accent and all!
Ah yes, the "System Engineered by a Committee of AMphibians".
"I got really pissed last night, and ended up blowing Chunks."
"That's not so bad, we all do that from time to-"
"No, you don't understand - Chunks is my dog."
Yes, nuclear power could go a long way. But even the faintest knowledge of human history should help to convince pretty much everyone: We're just too stupid to handle it.
I'm well aware that there's more than enough stupid to go around; I was just under the impression, perhaps mistaken, that there were new ways to design reactors and fuel cycles that made it much more difficult to divert material to weapon production. I also assumed that, in the long run, that was exactly the kind of technology we should be looking at helping states like Iran and even North Korea use.
Also, congrats to the GP, 30 years with one vehicle is impressive.
I actually got it second-hand, about 14 year ago.
The engine was replaced with a second-hand unit from a slightly newer model about 140000km ago, after a sparkplug disintegrated and destroyed the rings in one cylinder - still ran, but with reduced power and too much black smoke. The head replacement was about 20000km ago (yeah, I do about 20000km a year) and about 40000km after a catastrophic loss of coolant that resulted in a continuous slow loss of coolant that increased over time. Plus there were the kinds of things that are just as "consumable" as tyres are if you keep any vehicle long enough - like the exhaust system and the driveshafts, which were replaced around the same time the engine was. I still figure I've spent far less on that car over time than I would have if I'd replaced the vehicle every time something major happened.
Builders use commercial grade battery powered drills with multiple pluggable battery packs. Construction sites have places for charging tools. Maybe the generally short usage cycles of taxis will suit shorter range vehicles. How about a battery pack with enough charge to do one job, but with faster charging capability.
One job could be from East Melbourne to the Royal Melbourne Hospital, or it could be from Scoresby to Werribee - plus however far you drove before it, plus however far you have to drive to get to a charging station.
Interchangeable battery packs with a very short swapout time at central depot might go some way towards helping with this, but being able to take a job from one end of the city to the other and knowing that you can fill up anywhere if you need to is likely to remain important to commercial operators.
People will drive their cars and people will eventually switch but 2 years is MUCH too soon to think that we can start tearing down gas stations.
I expect that I'll still be driving the same car in five years, at which time it will be 30 years old.
Would I drive a new car if I could afford it? Possibly. Would it benefit me financially to do so? Probably not.
I've done some reasonably major repairs in the last couple of years - a reconditioned cylinder head, a wheel bearing, the distributor - but I've still spent far less in higher fuel consumption and those repairs than I'd have spent in interest on a loan and lost in depreciation on a newer vehicle.
Yeah, it'd be nice to have a lower carbon footprint from a more fuel-efficient hybrid. It'd be even nicer to have a slightly lower carbon footprint from an all-electric vehicle (we use brown coal for most of our electricity in my corner of Australia), and even better once our Illustrious Leaders convince the Great Unwashed to let us go nuclear. Trouble is, for all intents and purposes we're a single-income household (one adult is a disability pensioner - car, diesel spill, lamp post) with two kids and all the expenses that go with that. If it's a choice between environmental righteousness and actually maintaining a functional household, the household wins. Even on purely financial terms, without using my family as a rationalisation, keeping my old car going wins.
I spend all night charging my mobile phone. Its such a pain, sitting there and waiting for it to finish.
What about situations where lack of a quick turn-around might be more of an inconvenience - like taxi fleets, or independent taxi operators? For the fleets it's probably less of an issue, as they'll have quieter times and will probably be able to rotate some of their vehicles out during those, but the smaller operators might have a problem. If you've got a taxi (as in vehicle, rather than drivers) licence and one or a few vehicles, you'll probably want to hire other drivers to keep them on the road as much of any given day as possible - there's no 12-hour downtime while you eat and sleep, or eight-hour downtime as you sit in your office, in which to plug it in at home or at the car park. Hybrids or fuelcell vehicles are likely to be more important than battery-only vehicles in those kinds of applications until a five minute recharge to 70-80% of 500-mile battery's capacity is possible.
Interesting. I've never seen that before, and I'm not sure I accept everything it implies, but it explains quite a lot about observed interactions between the sexes.
Just buying into this for the sake of argument, I believe I'd be on her friends ladder - but that's okay because everyone else on the planet is so unbeliveably below SWMBO on my ladder that they may as well not even exist. I also note that Ladder Theory doesn't seem to make allowance for things like sibling relationships, which would be important to most people outside Kentucky or Tasmania.
Either the data was gather over a period somewhat more than a year, or the guy effectively worked 7 days per week for about a year.
"Honey, I need to go to the office - something just came up..."
Linux has less low-hanging crapware for the plucking than Windows, but that's no reason to switch. If she switches for that reason then she still hasn't addressed the underlying problem of clicking YES YES YES YES to everything, and it's going to screw her over in Linux land eventually.
The reason she switched was that I was sick of the endless rebuild-pwned-rebuild cycle from that low-hanging crapware, and Microsoft's updates are completely unworkable on dial-up. I'd come up with a way to provide her with updates on DVDs every couple of months, or as required, and that hasn't happened as often as it should have, but in practice hasn't been much of an issue. If she had a faster connection I'd just point the thing at a local mirror and let it hassle her when stuff needed updating, but her occasionally-updated Ubuntu system has been a lot better behaved than her occasionally-updated Windows ones were. And yeah, I'm aware that some of this is likely to be due to security-through-obscurity.
Also, I don't believe she was clicking YES YES YES YES to everything, and was moderately discerning (for end-user values of discerning). I seem to recall things improving significantly when I managed to move her off Outhouse Express and Internet Exploder too, without significant changes in browsing habits, but still not to the point of having stuff "just work" for two years.
And what, use a fresh drive image every time you boot up the virtual machine?
It's still the same problem except it's possible to detect virtual rootkits from the host OS.
No, only use the VM for specific, limited purposes where there is no easily-usable Linux alternative. Although the snapshots or fresh image idea sounds promising too...
A couple of years ago, a friend I've ended up doing free support for (c'mon, we all have a few) wanted a new computer. She ended up with a nice new dual-core machine with 2 gig RAM and Ubuntu. Virtualbox and XP went on there in case she "needed" windows for anything - it was way faster than any Windows install she'd had on real hardware - and it turns out that the only thing she ever uses the XP virtual machine for is her tax return because the Australian Tax Office requires a Microsoft environment. She knows better than to use the XP VM for casual browsing too, as I've cleaned a metric fuckload of malware off her windows machines in the past. I figure I'll need to upgrade her machine to Karmic once the dust settles, but I don't remember the last time I went six months without having to do something serious to her machine - let alone two years.
I hope that the Indians are able to establish a lunar colony; they certainly have the expertise.
The casinos might take off, that's a business that will attract customers no matter where you build one. If they've gone and bought Rotary Rocket's intellectual property, the ATV is certainly the right shape too. But there are precious few bison up there...
Toyota and Ford could easily work together, and haven't been averse to the idea in the past..
In Australia, under government-sponsored reforms intended to reduce duplication of effort and make the local car industry more sustainable that started in the mid-80s, there was a lot of collaboration between the local GM subsidiary and Nissan and Toyota. The Family II engines, as used in a number of Holden and Opel and Vauxhaul models (sorry, not familar with what they went into in the US), were sold to Nissan for use in various locally-built models. Locally-built Toyotas were badge-engineered and sold as Holdens to fill a small-to-mid-size niche. Holden's Commodore was at one point badge-engineered to become the Toyota Lexcen.
If Ford asked Toyota for engines, they'd probably get them. And that goes both ways.
Nope! The iPlayer has a 200+MHz arm9 in it which makes it possible to just flat out run the emulator on the flashcart. This isn't so much an emulator for the DS, as much as the DS is being used as a screen for the iPlayer, just as if the iPlayer was playing a video. Not exactly the most exciting conclusion, but at least it runs?
Hmmm... how long until someone ports one of the DS emulators to this, at which point the iPlayer would become THE device for the Eyepatch Brigade?
Or, approaching it from another angle, how long until a hacked loader beccomes available for this that permits the loading of "backups"? Didn't that happen with one of the early Datel homebrew/media cards?
Newly hired employees are tested for nicotine as part of a pre-employment panel of medical tests.
That'll be interesting in the future - discrimination on the grounds of disability or medical condition, perhaps?
There's some evidence that nicotine delivered by patch can help with things like parkinsons, alzheimers, depressive conditions, ADD and a whole lot of other things. Various native peoples have ingested tobacco to treat constipation and wom infestations, and I see no reason why people using it exclusively as a herbal remedy for these or other conditions should be penalised. I'm a non-smoker and won't take it up - I think it's disgusting - but if nicotine patches were safe and effective and cheap when compared with other medication I'd use them and take my prospective employers to court if need be. I'd also be the guy passing around the poppseed bagels, fwiw...
Secure the PC & software you're going to use in the presentation, just to keep pranksters or jealous peers from having fun at your expense. Terribly embarrassing to give a talk on security while boobies are flashing on the screen behind you.
...but great for getting the audience's attention. Between the "Oooh, Pwnies" commenters, "Hahaha, Boobies" leerers and "Help, I'm being harrassed" brigade (and yes, I expect there will be representatives of all genders and orientations in all three groups if the audience is large enough), it'll *definitely* be *noticed*. Possibly career-limiting, but *definitely* noticed.