I felt later I bought a DVD player too soon. I bought when they hit $300 for a good one; they plummeted after that and I realized I'd had time to watch about 10 movies before they hit $100. In short, I paid $20 each, besides the rental, to watch those 10 movies that year rather than the next year.
Most people are conservative about these things. Wait until the price drops. It has to STOP dropping before you buy.
And then there's the recession. Only one/. poster above "1" score has mentioned the word, as an add-on point. Then I googled the two words "recession" and "blu-ray" and there was a page of articles about how analysts in 2008 and 2009 felt the recession had sabotaged BR's uptake. The recession is only marginally better so far this year.
It's not the few extra percent out of work, it's the 20% or more that are *worried* about their jobs and not likely to make purchases that aren't needed. Which is not just the BR player, it's the HDTV..which also have only stopped dropping recently, after a bewildering period of 720p vs 1080i and have finally stabilized on everybody being able to afford 1080p. Which is the only grade that you can only see with BR.
If the recession and the tech changes have been holding back demand, then it could suddenly jump up as people gain confidence. That's happening slowly, so I'm thinking at least 2012, possibly even 2013, before you'll know if this is a result of economics and reluctance to get caught behind on the technology, or a genuine lack of interest in BR's features.
I clicked on your link, and it looks to me that the "pulses" are not even bits, much less full pixels. However the nerve works, he works that 200 out to "15 to 20 images to the brain each second". Which is why 16 fps looked like motion, minimally.
Whether you "need" 48 or 60 or 72 or 96 will always be a matter of judgement. At some point, nobody will pay to have a higher frame rate, and that one will be the last. I don't think 48 fps is it. I'd be surprised if it went past 72, astonished if past 96.
What I really mean is, can we run a train before we drive a car in traffic? Trains have a pretty predictable path, and their only traffic problem is the pretty clear case of obstructions (moving or not) on the track.
In Calgary, we just had our local light rail "C-Train" system fire a driver because he was doing crosswords while driving: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/story/2011/03/14/calgary-transit-ctrain-driver-crossword-puzzle.html...that suggests to me it is easier to automate. Why do you get a 3-car LRT or subway train every fifteen minutes (when all the cars are separately electrically-powered), rather than a single car every five minutes? Cost of drivers.
Next up: buses. One "problem" with robot cars is that they would scrupulously obey every speed law and light and make conservative safety decisions (and save all those lives) but would cost time. People in a hurry cut those corners and would continue to do so. But bus drivers already drive like that NOW, so its not a "service reduction" like it would be perceived with a car. Automating them would again allow smaller buses that run much more frequently. The more-convenient mass transit systems would lure people away from cars - and thereby also save lives.
Lastly, only when those easier automations are proven successful, will you be able to build a market for driverless cars.
Everybody hates to buy nuclear reactors that their country didn't make. Canada has never sold a reactor to a reactor-building nation, I doubt the US has, either. Still, for laughs, skim this:
Please note the bits about "if the fuel rods start to melt, the reaction stops because it only works with the right fuel-rod geometry" (because they use unenriched uranium...why the IAEA doesn't just tell Iran they have to build CANDUs I don't know). Not to mention, the heat sink they're sitting in is large. And if it drains away, that ALSO stops the reaction because you need the heavy water to slow down fast neutrons so they react at all. I hate to rule out any possible Bad Thing happening, but I'm fairly sure they Just. Can't. Melt. Down.
The IFR is *probably* great, but nobody's built one. We built two CANDUs in China in about 63 months flat; they've been running great for 8 and 11 years, respectively.
From our point of view, we totally agree America should stop building their reactors.
They should start building ours.
I feel better, even though that will never happen.
"Whenever the question is, 'why don't they...', the answer is, money" - Heinlein (roughly)
Wikipedia "Candu". The article runs down all the special features. It's the multi-fuel stove of reactors, able to burn other reactor's waste, old nuclear weapons. The last comment, after enthusing about that, is that it can "breed fuel from thorium". So it's an extra step, and thorium isn't cheap enough (or uranium is) to make it worthwhile.
Still, it's bonus that they're proof against the year of Peak Uranium.
I don't watch a lot of Goodman, either, basically a segment here and there recommended by other sites and linked to the middle of one of her broadcasts. Generally because the link notes she has hard information, an interview, that nobody else dug up.
Still, it seems a little harsh to mention in the same sentence (which tends to imply equivalence), somebody who runs a tiny operation with web-only access and a shoestring budget, and has won several really major awards for journalism, stories that got her beaten up in Indonesia, arrested (charges all dropped), and so forth....with a TV guy who makes $30+ million per year promoting theories like the ones under discussion...and never has to risk a thing to get his "stories".
Or, to put it another way, if that's the best "equivalent" to Glenn Beck you can come up with, you just gave the "liberal media" vs "conservative media" comparison a gigantic boost for liberalism.
I'm pretty much a "have a lot of structured directories" guy myself; I don't see your complaint about rising file sizes, or even total number of files. They've pretty much increased linearly in number while the speed of the linux "locate" command has gone up exponentially with Moore's Law. It's the other way around from management trouble - with TB hard drives, I have so much space I leave around TV shows and other media files I'll likely never watch again, "just in case".
At work, the search problems are harder, because I've got quite the multi-tasking job where I may spend just minutes on some problem, then be asked for an update months later, totally skeptical that I ever addressed the issue. And my favourite file-management with that is the most insane-sounding of all: one big directory. I sort it by date and rely on the fact that I take time to write out helpful file names like "downtown_condition_assessment_newmall_4_ernie.xlsx" (not actually that long, I use abbrevs in RL). Only files that have a whole lot of subject-matter friends get their own subdirectory; lonely "one-off" files go in the Big Pile.
The "sort the directory by date" uses the theory behind "lifestreams" promoted by Eric Freeman and David Gelernter at Yale. It really is the best thing I've found (same 30 years) to stimulate the memory - seeing the names of other things you did at the same time; you can actually sense yourself getting close to the file as you remember, "Oh yeah, I worked on that in the spring".
An additional word of Fear & Loathing for "document management systems" like LiveLink by Formark. Required to use this by work (shared directories are strictly for 'short-term' storage), it's awful. Terribly slow, the search function approaches useless, and it's hard (and slow, did I mention slow) to even re-sort a directory (sorry, that's a 'filter down' in Livelink's vocab) by name or date or whatever. After promising that photos would be displayed with thumbnails by the great new Version 4 for two years, it came, broke some stuff that was working, and did not provide thumbnails - all media files are unsearchable in any way. I suspect for long-term archiving, putting documents in a database would have advantages, but for active business usage, it's been crippling.
Well, that's a moral argument. The practical argument is that six members of the United States Supreme Court disagreed with him on June 28th, 1971. (New York Times Company v. U.S; Chief Justice Burger and Justices Blackmun and Harlan dissented).
The argument is wrong on another level. The call was not for publication of the leaked documents to be halted, the call was for the publisher to be treated as a terrorist, which has a much, much stronger chilling effect. Given the way that the US has "treated terrorists" (lifelong detention without charges, torture), and given that Ms. Palin is associated with calls for those treatments to continue and be pursued even more vigorously, it's a call for a publisher to be harshly physically punished for speaking, not merely prevented from further doing so. Even if publication of the leaked documents were not protected speech, calling for publication of documents to be punished with life in prison under punitive conditions without trial is a whole new level of discourse in America that I don't think Richard Nixon would have attempted.
Yes! Exactly! Although this need not be something you communicate to the network, but only to your home appliances. All the network needs is to have different rates at different times. Most people think of this in terms of published times (i.e. double-costs 7-10PM), but it can also be a constant communication between the ISP and your home router.
In France, there's some places where you can get lower electrical rates 95% of the time, if you let the utility pick 10 times per year when rates are *triple*. When that happens, a light goes on in your house and you run around turning things off, and helping them load-level.
With bandwidth, this can all be automated. Can't stand to see your favourite show one minute later than its available for download every week? Pay what that costs. The rest of the time, instruct your PVR to wait until costs are below 5 cents per GB to grab it for your hard drive.
It's funny that the talk of a "SmartGrid" is all about doing this for electricity, being even smarter than the trick in France - your fridge turning off and letting the temp go up a few degrees when load is max, your dryer waits until 3AM to start, or your non-essential lights all go out if costs go above 20 cents/kWh... but we aren't talking about that for bandwidth.
Why, do you suppose? We're all over electrical utilities that attempt to scam with rate structures, but ISPs are dangerously close to complete regulatory capture.
No, sorry, 10 cents per GB with no base-cost means everybody who uses less than 250GB/month is getting subsidized wires.
Water utilities have no fixed amount on the bill because very few people use less than half the average. The plain facts of internet usage at present - before we get around to sweeping away the whole TV-broadcast-with-ads system - are that most people don't even use 10 GB/month, and a tiny number are using hundreds of GB.
It's exactly when usage patterns vary by orders of magnitude that you need real-cost-based billing.
A "cap" system can account for fixed costs if the cap is extremely small and the usage-based cost is realistic after that. Cabs do this: you've seen "$4 for the first 1/8th mile". So you COULD do the $30/month for connection plus 5GB, say. That might eliminate usage-based for over half the subscribers and save on some billing effort, but it's a minor tweak.
The word "utility" is practically synonymous with "delivered by network with huge front-end costs". Water, Sewer, Electric, Gas: the big bucks are in burying or stringing all those miles of network connections to your house. The incremental costs per unit of product delivered (sewer: "taken away") are generally small.
Almost no utility can offer unlimited usage of the product, though - unlimited local calling on your telephone network was the first. The incremental cost per local call was so very low, however, that they went with it. That's valuable information, because it tells you that the very common $30/month/house costs for telephone are just a little over the cost of having a phone network come to your house at all.
Everybody else buries the fixed-costs of providing the network in the cost-per-unit of the product, meaning low users get a subsidized network connection, and heavy-volume users subsidize other's networks.
Usage "caps" (they aren't actually caps unless your modem shuts off) - which are really gargantuan markups on incremental costs, do the save thing; but "unlimited" usage does the opposite: low users subsidize heavy ones.
Here's a radical suggestion: why not have the Internet be provided by the first utility.that actually uses FREE MARKET FORCES to match usage with real costs.
So, we have all the information we need for a truly fair billing structure: $30/month, plus a nickel a GB - a dime a GB at peak times. Most people would pay about $32 per month, heavy users $40 or $50. When you compare that to what the ISPs were after, it's plain they were out for a major gouge, which is very typical of privately-owned utilities that achieve regulatory capture and don't have an irate citizenry disrupting the heist.
The notion that anybody should be paying $70 or $80 per month for a bunch of electrical pulses is easily dismissed by the cost of delivering water to your house. In contrast to wires that weigh a few grams per metre, a tonne of sterilized water, cleaned in huge, billion-dollar treatment plants that take hundreds of people to run and pumped long distances, usually uphill from a river by massive pumps, are delivered to your house through heavy, expensively buried cast-iron water mains that break every day at a cost of thousands per break: and your water bill is probably under $50/month for 30 tonnes of water.
But I'm not happy to see caps or unlimited - both are unfair. As a friend of mine put it when "unlimited" cable broadband came in 14 years ago here, "Great; people will leave HDTV streaming for four weeks straight to keep the cat company while they're on a long vacation." Considering HDTV was 10 years in the future at the time, I think he was pretty prescient.
Argh. So much for my probability skills. Make that "lose $4900 if you roll a six". My example was a bad bet even with honest dice. This one is the house letting you make a profit(!) - as long as those seven sixes don't indicate a "trend".
TFA is an article about the scientist's work, written by a journalist. Such writing - even the "direct quotes" which are generally sentences or fragments thereof removed from some paragraphs of context - is notorious for mis-stating the scientist's intent.
I acknowledge the truth of your point that in a set of random numbers, anything can happen, including low-probability clusters or values. However, large sample sizes are NOT required to suggest that the data have a low probability of being random as opposed to showing a real trend.
Your example, for instance: Seven sixes in a row doesn't mean the dice are loaded, it just means you've done something you will do 0.00036% of the time if you roll an honest die seven times in a row.
If you were given a die, and told that the EIGHTH roll would win you $1000 if you rolled 1-5, and cost you $6000 if you rolled a six, and the first seven rolls were to convince you the game was honest, would you bet on that eighth roll?
At the height of the Just-Shoot-Assange media circus, Glenn Greenwald pointed out that the New York Times had just spilled the most forbidden, unlawful, immoral, unforgivable secrets of all, on it's front page: imminent troop movements.
Assange, of course, was being treated as if he'd sent countless troops and allies to their deaths with his leaks, even though the Pentagon disagreed that anybody had been hurt, whenever they were asked. (A few Afghan supporter's names had failed to be redacted in an earlier release of the "war logs"; Wikileaks corrected its processes, and fortunately, there's no news of any of those Afghans being attacked, even verbally.)
The NYT piece - about upcoming covert action in Pakistan - generated no comment of that sort whatsoever. How can that be?
Well, the Pentagon, the ground commanders, the Administration, Congressmen - not one of them said a thing. And why not?
Because it wasn't a "leak": it was a press release that didn't come with any follow-up questions allowed, or any accountability for the plan, the statement, or the subsequent action: completely anonymous.
All the benefits of a leak and none of the downside.
"Sauce for the Goose" would require EVERY leak to be followed up with a serious investigation by impartial detectives, and summary dismissal, at minimum, for the leaker. They would prefer, of course, to have complete control of the information and the ability to use it for any reason - public-serving or just partisan advantage - that they wish. Ask Val Wilson.
When I first saw the acronym, I thought it was about the repeal of "Object-Oriented, Don't Tell", NASA's antiquated requirement for all-procedural programming...
If you want to translate the emotions and attitudes that were attached to the name "Nigger Jim" in the 1800's, today that would be: "Nigger Jim".
"African-American Jim" would be somebody who was fit to use the same washrooms and eat at the same table as white people.
"Slave Jim" would be a *little* lower than "Poor White Trash Jim", as poor southerners worked and lived in circumstances only a notch above the slaves. There was a status called "Indentured" which was very close to slavery, in that your contract could be sold from owner to owner and you had to go work for them to work off your indenture. (Usually a debt; not many people indentured themselves voluntarily except people who had to do it to pay for passage to America). The 'translation' to "Slave Jim" would have us believe Jim had a very close status to an indentured white person.
"Poor White Trash Indentured Jim" would still be far, FAR, higher than "Nigger Jim" because you would cheerfully marry the daughter of "Poor White Trash Jim" if she was pretty enough to make up for the lack of dowry. The daughter of "Nigger Jim" would, of course, not be fit to sit at the table, much less take to the altar.
In short, I flatly disagree: the meaning of "nigger" hasn't changed one iota in 100 years - all that's changed is fewer people use it, precisely because of what it means. If anything, the meaning has changed, *positively*, but strictly for the African-Americans that use it amongst themselves. (Richard Pryor routines from the 1980's are hard to take now.) When white people use it, it means exactly what it used to.
Right. Thanks for the link to the objective science site where paragraph 1 of the home page speaks of "rabid warmist claims"; I'm sure they'll be putting Nature out of the peer-reviewed paper business soon.
To you and the guy below who wrote "PV = nRT", well, yes, if you rapidly compress a gas, it will heat up. Then it will radiate that heat away until it is back to the temperature of its environment. Otherwise, diver's compressed air tanks would be permanently, naturally hot all the time,, forever.
Although crap does show up for short periods from time to time, I'm going to go with the Wikipedia article on Venus instead: "strongest greenhouse effect in the Solar System", just search down to that sentence.
1) Yeah, obviously the Sun is a big driver. And if you keep it's heat in more effectively, that would be an issue.
2) "full greenhouse effect" is obtained on Venus. With a nearly pure CO2 atmosphere. It would appear to be hotter there. Much more so than its closer distance to the Sun would suggest.
3) It's very possible the Earth has been "cooling since 2007", and it makes no difference to a larger trend than the fact that Canada has been cooling since August. The temperature would be this wiggly line on the graph, see, and though there are down-wiggles, they are fewer / smaller than the up-wiggles over the longer term. If it were warmer on Sept 23-27th that it was on September 3-9, would you conclude winter was not coming?
4) There's no chance of current computer models being "correct", the question is whether they are a close enough approximation to be useful for making social policy. The computer models of some 20 years ago were considerably more accurate about today's climate than random chance alone would suggest. That gives them scientific credibility and are the reason that climate researchers have increasingly come to believe them.
The "entirely appropriate and well-reported" article that ticked off Greenwald and brought out the "Nixonian" headline and "sleazy hit piece" description included the paragraph:
Now it is not just governments that denounce him: some of his own comrades are abandoning him for what they see as erratic and imperious behavior, and a nearly delusional grandeur unmatched by an awareness that the digital secrets he reveals can have a price in flesh and blood.
OK, John F. Burns of the Times didn't call Assange crazy, like they attempted with Ellsberg. He only said "nearly delusional".
Following this piece, Burns told Yahoo News: "Burns said he doesn't "recall ever having been the subject of such absolutely, relentless vituperation" following a story in his 35 years at the Times. He said his email inbox has been full of denunciations from readers and a number of academics at top-tier schools such as Harvard, Yale, and MIT. Some, he said, used "language that I don't think they would use at their own dinner table."
In short, it was not just Glenn Greenwald that was incensed at that profile; it was some of the top academics in the country, who were driven to Greenwaldian levels of vitriol that they normally won't stoop to.
For me, that does swing the weight of opinion back to Mr. Greenwald's favour.
None of which matters a rat's ass. Whether Greenwald is a fair-minded, well-intentioned gentleman and scholar or a lyin' yellow journalist, Wired can ignore him and simply address his question of whether they will back up Mr. Lamo's public discussions with information that could confirm or deny.
Their reply does not answer his request for information, nor specifically say that they DO HAVE such information. That is, they don't say "we can't release the chat logs for good reason XXXX, but we can confirm/deny that we have primary-source information that backs Mr. Lamo's public statements so far". Their response, instead, contains a lot of negative comment about Mr. Greenwald, which is rather beside the point. That doesn't look good to me right there.
>>There's a word for that: hypocisy. >No, there's another word for that: diplomacy
Tom-ay-to, to-mah-to.
"Phrasing something diplomatically" in ordinary speech means telling the same truth but using the softest wording. You may be told "we just can't afford an engineer of your caliber in these tough times" rather than "you're fired", but you still leave the meeting understanding you don't show up tomorrow.
Hypocrisy, on the other hand, generally involves lying.
When "lying" is mixed up with "diplomacy", the diplomacy suffers in the long run because people won't trust what you say.
And, by the way, as much as I admire the courage of Morgan Tsvangiri, and concede he's way, way, WAY better than Mugabe, I'm not sure that Zimbabwe will ultimately be served best if he makes it into office on top of a pile of lies. They have a way of coming back to bite.
You can teach people logic statements and procedures and about objects, even - with ENGLISH.
In my grade 8 class, there were no computers except the ones at the University I was by then programming with punch cards using stolen student accounts. But the math teacher asked us to write out our procedure for tying our shoes - in precise, motion-by-motion detail so another student could do it exactly the same way as we did, without help. Most people required over a page, and it was a revelation how excruciating it was. Later, in CompSci 501, I learned about logic statements and predicates and the wonderful Lewis Carrol problems ( 1: All my turtles that are not green are old....) All English.
"Computer Programming" on the other hand, is about making computers do things for you. By hook or by crook, by object or procedure, just get 'er done. I completely agree with the language snobs and detest BASIC. And I do most of my programming in it because you can make Excel about 10X more useful with just a little VBA here and there.
Learning Python or Java is just great if you plan to be a professional programmer one day, those languages can solve very large problems without the codebase becoming unmanageable. If your problem is getting a bunch of kids excited about what computers can do, you have no choice but to use whichever language will produce results with the greatest WOW factor with the shortest learning time.
That cuts out ALL verbose languages, languages that demand typing. The "Hello world" program should be one statement long.
Notice that doesn't chop out Perl or Python. But also notice that at kid-levels, those languages can only take screen input and produce text output. That was cool for me in the 1970's but I think today you'll get better results with something that can go graphical right away. (This also just cut out your original BASIC).
So, if your school has MS-Office on every machine, well, as a FLOSS fan I hate you, but you're crazy if you don't leverage the presence of VBA. You can show them what cool stuff a computer can do with Excel alone, show them some formulas in action and all that. (This, by the way, keeps them from thinking of "computer programming" as necessarily procedural right there - clearly, you are instructing the computer, but you are NOT using a procedure, just setting up conditions for behaviour of the cell objects!)
Then show them procedural programming by modifying the spreadsheet with VBA. This can lead quickly to manipulating the Excel data structure, which is a huge collection of objects with properties and methods. Many can manipulate charts in pretty ways, or turn Excel into "graph paper" with coloured cells in funny shapes, like ASCII art. You can take it all the way to them inventing their own objects in VBA.
AND: It will be useful in a job, even if they only learn to write 10-liners. Bonus.
I think some of that comes down to "zero maintenance" vs "any maintenance". Not a knock on the customers overseas; customers here run their appliances into the ground all the time, if they are "any maintenance".
Your "exploding' in the 70's and 80's was like the "explosive growth" of Apple II computer sales, into the hundreds of thousands, then, gasp Millions, at the same time. The exponential was slower for this than computers, though. We are now up to the start of the "explosive" growth of the IBM PC DOS era when the cheap clones hit, mid-80's. Still to come: the "explosive" growth after Win95 and the Internet made everybody get one. I'm predicting that for post-2015 when the LED's have really dropped in price and improved in colour quality and efficiency, plus the usual incremental solar improvements.
Every part of an exponential curve looks back on the previous bit as "before the explosion *really* started".
Slashdot Mirror
I felt later I bought a DVD player too soon. I bought when they hit $300 for a good one; they plummeted after that and I realized I'd had time to watch about 10 movies before they hit $100. In short, I paid $20 each, besides the rental, to watch those 10 movies that year rather than the next year.
Most people are conservative about these things. Wait until the price drops. It has to STOP dropping before you buy.
And then there's the recession. Only one /. poster above "1" score has mentioned the word, as an add-on point. Then I googled the two words "recession" and "blu-ray" and there was a page of articles about how analysts in 2008 and 2009 felt the recession had sabotaged BR's uptake. The recession is only marginally better so far this year.
It's not the few extra percent out of work, it's the 20% or more that are *worried* about their jobs and not likely to make purchases that aren't needed. Which is not just the BR player, it's the HDTV..which also have only stopped dropping recently, after a bewildering period of 720p vs 1080i and have finally stabilized on everybody being able to afford 1080p. Which is the only grade that you can only see with BR.
If the recession and the tech changes have been holding back demand, then it could suddenly jump up as people gain confidence. That's happening slowly, so I'm thinking at least 2012, possibly even 2013, before you'll know if this is a result of economics and reluctance to get caught behind on the technology, or a genuine lack of interest in BR's features.
I clicked on your link, and it looks to me that the "pulses" are not even bits, much less full pixels. However the nerve works, he works that 200 out to "15 to 20 images to the brain each second". Which is why 16 fps looked like motion, minimally.
Whether you "need" 48 or 60 or 72 or 96 will always be a matter of judgement. At some point, nobody will pay to have a higher frame rate, and that one will be the last. I don't think 48 fps is it. I'd be surprised if it went past 72, astonished if past 96.
Well, at least at the high end. According to the page at newegg that came up when I googled 'inflation calculator' :
What cost $400 in 1982 would cost $891.63 in 2010.
What I really mean is, can we run a train before we drive a car in traffic? Trains have a pretty predictable path, and their only traffic problem is the pretty clear case of obstructions (moving or not) on the track.
In Calgary, we just had our local light rail "C-Train" system fire a driver because he was doing crosswords while driving: ...that suggests to me it is easier to automate. Why do you get a 3-car LRT or subway train every fifteen minutes (when all the cars are separately electrically-powered), rather than a single car every five minutes? Cost of drivers.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/story/2011/03/14/calgary-transit-ctrain-driver-crossword-puzzle.html
Next up: buses. One "problem" with robot cars is that they would scrupulously obey every speed law and light and make conservative safety decisions (and save all those lives) but would cost time. People in a hurry cut those corners and would continue to do so. But bus drivers already drive like that NOW, so its not a "service reduction" like it would be perceived with a car. Automating them would again allow smaller buses that run much more frequently. The more-convenient mass transit systems would lure people away from cars - and thereby also save lives.
Lastly, only when those easier automations are proven successful, will you be able to build a market for driverless cars.
Everybody hates to buy nuclear reactors that their country didn't make. Canada has never sold a reactor to a reactor-building nation, I doubt the US has, either. Still, for laughs, skim this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candu
Please note the bits about "if the fuel rods start to melt, the reaction stops because it only works with the right fuel-rod geometry" (because they use unenriched uranium...why the IAEA doesn't just tell Iran they have to build CANDUs I don't know). Not to mention, the heat sink they're sitting in is large. And if it drains away, that ALSO stops the reaction because you need the heavy water to slow down fast neutrons so they react at all. I hate to rule out any possible Bad Thing happening, but I'm fairly sure they Just. Can't. Melt. Down.
The IFR is *probably* great, but nobody's built one. We built two CANDUs in China in about 63 months flat; they've been running great for 8 and 11 years, respectively.
From our point of view, we totally agree America should stop building their reactors.
They should start building ours.
I feel better, even though that will never happen.
"Whenever the question is, 'why don't they...', the answer is, money" - Heinlein (roughly)
Wikipedia "Candu". The article runs down all the special features. It's the multi-fuel stove of reactors, able to burn other reactor's waste, old nuclear weapons. The last comment, after enthusing about that, is that it can "breed fuel from thorium". So it's an extra step, and thorium isn't cheap enough (or uranium is) to make it worthwhile.
Still, it's bonus that they're proof against the year of Peak Uranium.
Nelly Furtado, Feist, Leonard Cohen. /FU2
I don't watch a lot of Goodman, either, basically a segment here and there recommended by other sites and linked to the middle of one of her broadcasts. Generally because the link notes she has hard information, an interview, that nobody else dug up.
Still, it seems a little harsh to mention in the same sentence (which tends to imply equivalence), somebody who runs a tiny operation with web-only access and a shoestring budget, and has won several really major awards for journalism, stories that got her beaten up in Indonesia, arrested (charges all dropped), and so forth....with a TV guy who makes $30+ million per year promoting theories like the ones under discussion...and never has to risk a thing to get his "stories".
Or, to put it another way, if that's the best "equivalent" to Glenn Beck you can come up with, you just gave the "liberal media" vs "conservative media" comparison a gigantic boost for liberalism.
I'm pretty much a "have a lot of structured directories" guy myself; I don't see your complaint about rising file sizes, or even total number of files. They've pretty much increased linearly in number while the speed of the linux "locate" command has gone up exponentially with Moore's Law. It's the other way around from management trouble - with TB hard drives, I have so much space I leave around TV shows and other media files I'll likely never watch again, "just in case".
At work, the search problems are harder, because I've got quite the multi-tasking job where I may spend just minutes on some problem, then be asked for an update months later, totally skeptical that I ever addressed the issue. And my favourite file-management with that is the most insane-sounding of all: one big directory. I sort it by date and rely on the fact that I take time to write out helpful file names like "downtown_condition_assessment_newmall_4_ernie.xlsx" (not actually that long, I use abbrevs in RL). Only files that have a whole lot of subject-matter friends get their own subdirectory; lonely "one-off" files go in the Big Pile.
The "sort the directory by date" uses the theory behind "lifestreams" promoted by Eric Freeman and David Gelernter at Yale. It really is the best thing I've found (same 30 years) to stimulate the memory - seeing the names of other things you did at the same time; you can actually sense yourself getting close to the file as you remember, "Oh yeah, I worked on that in the spring".
An additional word of Fear & Loathing for "document management systems" like LiveLink by Formark. Required to use this by work (shared directories are strictly for 'short-term' storage), it's awful. Terribly slow, the search function approaches useless, and it's hard (and slow, did I mention slow) to even re-sort a directory (sorry, that's a 'filter down' in Livelink's vocab) by name or date or whatever. After promising that photos would be displayed with thumbnails by the great new Version 4 for two years, it came, broke some stuff that was working, and did not provide thumbnails - all media files are unsearchable in any way. I suspect for long-term archiving, putting documents in a database would have advantages, but for active business usage, it's been crippling.
Well, that's a moral argument. The practical argument is that six members of the United States Supreme Court disagreed with him on June 28th, 1971. (New York Times Company v. U.S; Chief Justice Burger and Justices Blackmun and Harlan dissented).
The argument is wrong on another level. The call was not for publication of the leaked documents to be halted, the call was for the publisher to be treated as a terrorist, which has a much, much stronger chilling effect. Given the way that the US has "treated terrorists" (lifelong detention without charges, torture), and given that Ms. Palin is associated with calls for those treatments to continue and be pursued even more vigorously, it's a call for a publisher to be harshly physically punished for speaking, not merely prevented from further doing so. Even if publication of the leaked documents were not protected speech, calling for publication of documents to be punished with life in prison under punitive conditions without trial is a whole new level of discourse in America that I don't think Richard Nixon would have attempted.
Yes! Exactly! Although this need not be something you communicate to the network, but only to your home appliances. All the network needs is to have different rates at different times. Most people think of this in terms of published times (i.e. double-costs 7-10PM), but it can also be a constant communication between the ISP and your home router.
In France, there's some places where you can get lower electrical rates 95% of the time, if you let the utility pick 10 times per year when rates are *triple*. When that happens, a light goes on in your house and you run around turning things off, and helping them load-level.
With bandwidth, this can all be automated. Can't stand to see your favourite show one minute later than its available for download every week? Pay what that costs. The rest of the time, instruct your PVR to wait until costs are below 5 cents per GB to grab it for your hard drive.
It's funny that the talk of a "SmartGrid" is all about doing this for electricity, being even smarter than the trick in France - your fridge turning off and letting the temp go up a few degrees when load is max, your dryer waits until 3AM to start, or your non-essential lights all go out if costs go above 20 cents/kWh ... but we aren't talking about that for bandwidth.
Why, do you suppose? We're all over electrical utilities that attempt to scam with rate structures, but ISPs are dangerously close to complete regulatory capture.
No, sorry, 10 cents per GB with no base-cost means everybody who uses less than 250GB /month is getting subsidized wires.
Water utilities have no fixed amount on the bill because very few people use less than half the average. The plain facts of internet usage at present - before we get around to sweeping away the whole TV-broadcast-with-ads system - are that most people don't even use 10 GB/month, and a tiny number are using hundreds of GB.
It's exactly when usage patterns vary by orders of magnitude that you need real-cost-based billing.
A "cap" system can account for fixed costs if the cap is extremely small and the usage-based cost is realistic after that. Cabs do this: you've seen "$4 for the first 1/8th mile". So you COULD do the $30/month for connection plus 5GB, say. That might eliminate usage-based for over half the subscribers and save on some billing effort, but it's a minor tweak.
The word "utility" is practically synonymous with "delivered by network with huge front-end costs". Water, Sewer, Electric, Gas: the big bucks are in burying or stringing all those miles of network connections to your house. The incremental costs per unit of product delivered (sewer: "taken away") are generally small.
Almost no utility can offer unlimited usage of the product, though - unlimited local calling on your telephone network was the first. The incremental cost per local call was so very low, however, that they went with it. That's valuable information, because it tells you that the very common $30/month/house costs for telephone are just a little over the cost of having a phone network come to your house at all.
Everybody else buries the fixed-costs of providing the network in the cost-per-unit of the product, meaning low users get a subsidized network connection, and heavy-volume users subsidize other's networks.
Usage "caps" (they aren't actually caps unless your modem shuts off) - which are really gargantuan markups on incremental costs, do the save thing; but "unlimited" usage does the opposite: low users subsidize heavy ones.
Here's a radical suggestion: why not have the Internet be provided by the first utility.that actually uses FREE MARKET FORCES to match usage with real costs.
Many thanks to the other poster who provided the link to the fact that Netflix seems to be able to buy bandwidth in bulk for 3 cents a GB:
http://blog.streamingmedia.com/the_business_of_online_vi/2009/03/estimates-on-what-it-costs-netflixs-to-stream-movies.html
So, we have all the information we need for a truly fair billing structure: $30/month, plus a nickel a GB - a dime a GB at peak times. Most people would pay about $32 per month, heavy users $40 or $50. When you compare that to what the ISPs were after, it's plain they were out for a major gouge, which is very typical of privately-owned utilities that achieve regulatory capture and don't have an irate citizenry disrupting the heist.
The notion that anybody should be paying $70 or $80 per month for a bunch of electrical pulses is easily dismissed by the cost of delivering water to your house. In contrast to wires that weigh a few grams per metre, a tonne of sterilized water, cleaned in huge, billion-dollar treatment plants that take hundreds of people to run and pumped long distances, usually uphill from a river by massive pumps, are delivered to your house through heavy, expensively buried cast-iron water mains that break every day at a cost of thousands per break: and your water bill is probably under $50/month for 30 tonnes of water.
But I'm not happy to see caps or unlimited - both are unfair. As a friend of mine put it when "unlimited" cable broadband came in 14 years ago here, "Great; people will leave HDTV streaming for four weeks straight to keep the cat company while they're on a long vacation." Considering HDTV was 10 years in the future at the time, I think he was pretty prescient.
Argh. So much for my probability skills. Make that "lose $4900 if you roll a six". My example was a bad bet even with honest dice. This one is the house letting you make a profit(!) - as long as those seven sixes don't indicate a "trend".
TFA is an article about the scientist's work, written by a journalist. Such writing - even the "direct quotes" which are generally sentences or fragments thereof removed from some paragraphs of context - is notorious for mis-stating the scientist's intent.
I acknowledge the truth of your point that in a set of random numbers, anything can happen, including low-probability clusters or values. However, large sample sizes are NOT required to suggest that the data have a low probability of being random as opposed to showing a real trend.
Your example, for instance: Seven sixes in a row doesn't mean the dice are loaded, it just means you've done something you will do 0.00036% of the time if you roll an honest die seven times in a row.
If you were given a die, and told that the EIGHTH roll would win you $1000 if you rolled 1-5, and cost you $6000 if you rolled a six, and the first seven rolls were to convince you the game was honest, would you bet on that eighth roll?
At the height of the Just-Shoot-Assange media circus, Glenn Greenwald pointed out that the New York Times had just spilled the most forbidden, unlawful, immoral, unforgivable secrets of all, on it's front page: imminent troop movements.
Assange, of course, was being treated as if he'd sent countless troops and allies to their deaths with his leaks, even though the Pentagon disagreed that anybody had been hurt, whenever they were asked. (A few Afghan supporter's names had failed to be redacted in an earlier release of the "war logs"; Wikileaks corrected its processes, and fortunately, there's no news of any of those Afghans being attacked, even verbally.)
The NYT piece - about upcoming covert action in Pakistan - generated no comment of that sort whatsoever. How can that be?
Well, the Pentagon, the ground commanders, the Administration, Congressmen - not one of them said a thing. And why not?
Because it wasn't a "leak": it was a press release that didn't come with any follow-up questions allowed, or any accountability for the plan, the statement, or the subsequent action: completely anonymous.
All the benefits of a leak and none of the downside.
"Sauce for the Goose" would require EVERY leak to be followed up with a serious investigation by impartial detectives, and summary dismissal, at minimum, for the leaker. They would prefer, of course, to have complete control of the information and the ability to use it for any reason - public-serving or just partisan advantage - that they wish. Ask Val Wilson.
When I first saw the acronym, I thought it was about the repeal of "Object-Oriented, Don't Tell", NASA's antiquated requirement for all-procedural programming...
If you want to translate the emotions and attitudes that were attached to the name "Nigger Jim" in the 1800's, today that would be: "Nigger Jim".
"African-American Jim" would be somebody who was fit to use the same washrooms and eat at the same table as white people.
"Slave Jim" would be a *little* lower than "Poor White Trash Jim", as poor southerners worked and lived in circumstances only a notch above the slaves. There was a status called "Indentured" which was very close to slavery, in that your contract could be sold from owner to owner and you had to go work for them to work off your indenture. (Usually a debt; not many people indentured themselves voluntarily except people who had to do it to pay for passage to America). The 'translation' to "Slave Jim" would have us believe Jim had a very close status to an indentured white person.
"Poor White Trash Indentured Jim" would still be far, FAR, higher than "Nigger Jim" because you would cheerfully marry the daughter of "Poor White Trash Jim" if she was pretty enough to make up for the lack of dowry. The daughter of "Nigger Jim" would, of course, not be fit to sit at the table, much less take to the altar.
In short, I flatly disagree: the meaning of "nigger" hasn't changed one iota in 100 years - all that's changed is fewer people use it, precisely because of what it means. If anything, the meaning has changed, *positively*, but strictly for the African-Americans that use it amongst themselves. (Richard Pryor routines from the 1980's are hard to take now.) When white people use it, it means exactly what it used to.
Right. Thanks for the link to the objective science site where paragraph 1 of the home page speaks of "rabid warmist claims"; I'm sure they'll be putting Nature out of the peer-reviewed paper business soon.
To you and the guy below who wrote "PV = nRT", well, yes, if you rapidly compress a gas, it will heat up. Then it will radiate that heat away until it is back to the temperature of its environment. Otherwise, diver's compressed air tanks would be permanently, naturally hot all the time,, forever.
Although crap does show up for short periods from time to time, I'm going to go with the Wikipedia article on Venus instead:
"strongest greenhouse effect in the Solar System", just search down to that sentence.
1) Yeah, obviously the Sun is a big driver. And if you keep it's heat in more effectively, that would be an issue.
2) "full greenhouse effect" is obtained on Venus. With a nearly pure CO2 atmosphere. It would appear to be hotter there. Much more so than its closer distance to the Sun would suggest.
3) It's very possible the Earth has been "cooling since 2007", and it makes no difference to a larger trend than the fact that Canada has been cooling since August. The temperature would be this wiggly line on the graph, see, and though there are down-wiggles, they are fewer / smaller than the up-wiggles over the longer term. If it were warmer on Sept 23-27th that it was on September 3-9, would you conclude winter was not coming?
4) There's no chance of current computer models being "correct", the question is whether they are a close enough approximation to be useful for making social policy. The computer models of some 20 years ago were considerably more accurate about today's climate than random chance alone would suggest. That gives them scientific credibility and are the reason that climate researchers have increasingly come to believe them.
The "entirely appropriate and well-reported" article that ticked off Greenwald and brought out the "Nixonian" headline and "sleazy hit piece" description included the paragraph:
OK, John F. Burns of the Times didn't call Assange crazy, like they attempted with Ellsberg. He only said "nearly delusional".
Following this piece, Burns told Yahoo News:
"Burns said he doesn't "recall ever having been the subject of such absolutely, relentless vituperation" following a story in his 35 years at the Times. He said his email inbox has been full of denunciations from readers and a number of academics at top-tier schools such as Harvard, Yale, and MIT. Some, he said, used "language that I don't think they would use at their own dinner table."
In short, it was not just Glenn Greenwald that was incensed at that profile; it was some of the top academics in the country, who were driven to Greenwaldian levels of vitriol that they normally won't stoop to.
For me, that does swing the weight of opinion back to Mr. Greenwald's favour.
None of which matters a rat's ass. Whether Greenwald is a fair-minded, well-intentioned gentleman and scholar or a lyin' yellow journalist, Wired can ignore him and simply address his question of whether they will back up Mr. Lamo's public discussions with information that could confirm or deny.
Their reply does not answer his request for information, nor specifically say that they DO HAVE such information. That is, they don't say "we can't release the chat logs for good reason XXXX, but we can confirm/deny that we have primary-source information that backs Mr. Lamo's public statements so far". Their response, instead, contains a lot of negative comment about Mr. Greenwald, which is rather beside the point. That doesn't look good to me right there.
>>There's a word for that: hypocisy.
>No, there's another word for that: diplomacy
Tom-ay-to, to-mah-to.
"Phrasing something diplomatically" in ordinary speech means telling the same truth but using the softest wording. You may be told "we just can't afford an engineer of your caliber in these tough times" rather than "you're fired", but you still leave the meeting understanding you don't show up tomorrow.
Hypocrisy, on the other hand, generally involves lying.
When "lying" is mixed up with "diplomacy", the diplomacy suffers in the long run because people won't trust what you say.
And, by the way, as much as I admire the courage of Morgan Tsvangiri, and concede he's way, way, WAY better than Mugabe, I'm not sure that Zimbabwe will ultimately be served best if he makes it into office on top of a pile of lies. They have a way of coming back to bite.
You can teach people logic statements and procedures and about objects, even - with ENGLISH.
In my grade 8 class, there were no computers except the ones at the University I was by then programming with punch cards using stolen student accounts. But the math teacher asked us to write out our procedure for tying our shoes - in precise, motion-by-motion detail so another student could do it exactly the same way as we did, without help. Most people required over a page, and it was a revelation how excruciating it was. Later, in CompSci 501, I learned about logic statements and predicates and the wonderful Lewis Carrol problems ( 1: All my turtles that are not green are old....) All English.
"Computer Programming" on the other hand, is about making computers do things for you. By hook or by crook, by object or procedure, just get 'er done. I completely agree with the language snobs and detest BASIC. And I do most of my programming in it because you can make Excel about 10X more useful with just a little VBA here and there.
Learning Python or Java is just great if you plan to be a professional programmer one day, those languages can solve very large problems without the codebase becoming unmanageable. If your problem is getting a bunch of kids excited about what computers can do, you have no choice but to use whichever language will produce results with the greatest WOW factor with the shortest learning time.
That cuts out ALL verbose languages, languages that demand typing. The "Hello world" program should be one statement long.
Notice that doesn't chop out Perl or Python. But also notice that at kid-levels, those languages can only take screen input and produce text output. That was cool for me in the 1970's but I think today you'll get better results with something that can go graphical right away. (This also just cut out your original BASIC).
So, if your school has MS-Office on every machine, well, as a FLOSS fan I hate you, but you're crazy if you don't leverage the presence of VBA. You can show them what cool stuff a computer can do with Excel alone, show them some formulas in action and all that. (This, by the way, keeps them from thinking of "computer programming" as necessarily procedural right there - clearly, you are instructing the computer, but you are NOT using a procedure, just setting up conditions for behaviour of the cell objects!)
Then show them procedural programming by modifying the spreadsheet with VBA. This can lead quickly to manipulating the Excel data structure, which is a huge collection of objects with properties and methods. Many can manipulate charts in pretty ways, or turn Excel into "graph paper" with coloured cells in funny shapes, like ASCII art. You can take it all the way to them inventing their own objects in VBA.
AND: It will be useful in a job, even if they only learn to write 10-liners. Bonus.
I think some of that comes down to "zero maintenance" vs "any maintenance". Not a knock on the customers overseas; customers here run their appliances into the ground all the time, if they are "any maintenance".
Your "exploding' in the 70's and 80's was like the "explosive growth" of Apple II computer sales, into the hundreds of thousands, then, gasp Millions, at the same time. The exponential was slower for this than computers, though. We are now up to the start of the "explosive" growth of the IBM PC DOS era when the cheap clones hit, mid-80's. Still to come: the "explosive" growth after Win95 and the Internet made everybody get one. I'm predicting that for post-2015 when the LED's have really dropped in price and improved in colour quality and efficiency, plus the usual incremental solar improvements.
Every part of an exponential curve looks back on the previous bit as "before the explosion *really* started".