"How many people's VCR clocks blink 12:00 becuase (to them) it is too hard to actually set it?"
Since you mention it, our VCR clock blinks 12:00 because the only way to set it depends on the remote, which is dead. The VCR still plays tapes just fine, and records just fine, because those buttons are on the machine, and still work. Since the amount of stuff worth taping (or even watching) has been dropping steadily over the years, there is no point to replacing the VCR.
Liquid fuels for transportation are the bottleneck. Nuclear power isn't going to directly move anything smaller than a ship. Not even considering personal automobiles, rail, truck, and aircraft all take oil, or liquified coal.
Interestingly, my doctor wants me to eat more fresh vegetables and more fish. All of which will have to be hauled from warmer climates or the coast, to me, using oil-powered vehicles. If, sorry, When transport gets much more expensive, there will be some unexpected public health issues.
There was a write up on this, from the UK, called The Busby Report a couple of years ago. Although I didn't agree with all of it's conclusions, it had some good points. I wonder if the Busby people will be in on this?
"the secondary effects include Illinois getting beach front property"
Illinois already has beach front property. It's on the East Side of Chicago north to Wisconsin, which also has beach front property.
Lake Michigan is about 650 ft in elevation, so you can melt every glacier on the planet and still not reach it. Unless the area around Cairo is low enough to get flooded from the Mississippi backing up... Need map with elevation contours.
"Office Clipinator - A random collection of cute, animated icons which will attempt to provide the same clerical output as your average gum-chewing office assistant."
I read that first as "Flipinator", which fits in really well with the rest of the sentence if you have recently read Bellwether by Connie Willis.
The argument won't be solved until 2030. If the climate from say 2025 to 2030 is warmer than now, then the CO2 is causing global warming crowd is correct.
If the climate from say 2025 to 2030 is cooler than now, then the solar cycle crowd is correct, since 2000 to about 2010 is the peak of the current cycle. And we'll probably be on a tobaggon ride to the next glaciation too.
As pointed out elsewhere in these postings the complete lack of controlled experiments makes it impossible to really see what is happening. All you can do is correlate events. As my doctoral dissertation was on mathematical modeling, and I found a very large number of models that trained on existing data arbitrarily well, and predicted the future abysmally, I frankly have little faith in any models not validated against reality.
I've also been wondering about how you can measure CO2 in a 400,000 year old ice bubble when CO2 dissolves in water. It should have had more than enough time to diffuse in or out of there. But that is a different issue.
"They wouldn't have to release these multi-hundreds-of-megabyte horrors. No other operating system does such a thing- Not SunOS, Solaris, the BSDs, Linux, OS X, OS/2- you get nice little security patches and bugfixes on a continual basis."
I downloaded the 10.4.4 update to OS X the other night, and it was 120 megabytes. It was the combo update all the way from 10.4.0, but still, what a whopper. I'm afraid pretty much everyone has to do monster updates these days.
"We're all willing to put up with dozens of repeat articles on cold fusion based on the dream that one day, we'll all be able to extend our middle fingers at ExxonMobilShellAramcoBushCoHalliburtonChevron."
Nice thought, won't happen. They are energy companys, not just oil companys. If it works, and goes commercial, dollars to doughnuts that you would be buying the deuterium from them. Kiloton lots of deuterated acetone (or even heavy water) are not Walmart stock items.
"A nations ability to manufacture real goods is the true measure of its vitality.
Which is why we should all consider learning Cantonese as a second language."
True for the next 20-30 years, then some other cesspit trying to pull itself up will take over the low-end from the Chinese, who will have upgraded their quality in the mean time. Like Japan did in the 60's and Taiwan in the 70's. This is actually the way it is supposed to work.
What I haven't heard is what comes after the information age? The robotic age? Once a robot can pick apples, (a benchmark I use because once they can do that, they can do most of the other low-end jobs as well) what happens next? Does everyone sink into poverty until the revolution comes (and the inventors of the robots are first against the wall) or do we end up so awash in everything that we get a annual check like that Alaskan fund that pays people a cut of the oil revenues?
We live in interesting times. Therefore someone cursed us. I wonder who?
The University of Idaho abolished the College of Mines and Earth Resources just a few year ago. The few programs left in that college were absorbed elsewhere, metallurgical engineering was redefined as materials science and so forth. It happens. Whether to stick it out or transfer is the big question, and depends on the gory details.
About two year's ago, they had a re-evaluation, this quote from the article exists almost verbatim in the U of I's evaluation.
"The university will focus its undergraduate, professional and doctoral programs and research in areas where it has attained, or has the potential to achieve, world-class excellence. It will suspend admission to those programs that do not meet these criteria."
Sounds like the same consultants did the work. Be that as it may, small schools can't be competitive everywhere anymore, so they are consolidating. Soon they will be more colleges than universities. Whether this is good or bad is open to debate. Small liberal arts colleges continue to be important, maybe boutique schools are the wave of the future.
"my gut feeling is that drawing out 8GW of heat energy will cool off a lot of rock real fast."
Most likely. And although renewable over geologic time, it's pretty slow in human time. So basically, you are mining heat, and when the rocks cool, you are done for several thousand years.
What is the current output of the Geysers geothermal plant? They were noticing the cooldown ten years ago.
"I keep seeing these 50+% mortality figures being thrown around, which seems slightly misleading to me. Imagine if 100 people get a disease. 30 might get it asymptomatically. 60 might get the disease to such an extent that they're "sick" (feeling flu-ish, missing work, etc). 10 might get it to the extent that they wind up in the hospital. If 5 of those 10 die, what's the mortality of the disease? It might seem like 50% to a doctor treating these patients, but the actual number would be 5 percent. "
I've been wondering about that for years. For instance, when I got the measles when I was a kid, I was never taken to a hospital, or diagnosed by a doctor. Neither was my brother. So how were we supposed to be counted? And when I got last year's flu, I never did more than call into work of Friday, so I only missed one day. That wasn't in the medical records either.
Does the CDC have some way to back out how many people only have a minor case of the flu from those that get it bad enough to see a doctor?
"There's scant concern about those - diesel engines continue to operate unabated worldwide."
Actually, the Mine Safety and Health Administration has been worried about diesel particulates in underground mines for a decade now. The OSHA-regulated world is just now catching up.
Hint: clean/replace your air filters twice as often.
True story: Nice Inspector; "Your LHD failed the test, but I need to take a leak, and I'll take the second test to verify the result after I get back. Why don't you check when the air filters are due for replacement while I'm away (wink, wink). We change the filters, he wanders back, tests again and it passes. Then does third test, it passes too, so we do not get a citation.)
"titanium is flamable ??? ok, it takes in excess of 4000C to ignite it,"
If you have a jet of pure oxygen, you can light off titanium at 400 F.
At a former job we put three people in the hospital finding this out. "The book" of titanium flammability was wrong in that it did not consider gas jets.
Rhyolitic is the word. And for someone who claims to understand volcanos to not recognize this instantly implies dishonesty somewhere.
Rhyolitic volcanoes are silica rich, and therefor viscous, so they hold lots of dissolved CO2, and tend to go boom more than the usual volcano. Parts of Nevada have 40 foot thick layers of rhyolitic ash tuffs.
"Considering that a HUGE amount of money gets put into research and making/updating the facilities to manufacture these processors, the actual costs are much higher."
Right. The Variable cost is $40 per chip. The Fixed cost could be considerably higher.
To paraphase a line in Demolition Man: "Intel was the last survivor of the processor wars. Now all processors are Intel."
Yup! I remember the "stream the floating wire" (antenna for the Omega system) command over the loudspeaker which usually meant the SINS had puked again, and poor ET1 Burns was going to be spending a few hours toggling in a boot loader by hand, so as to get the paper tape loader working again to read in the real program.
Ah, the bad old days (shudder) of the late '70s.
It should be noted that our SINS was a castoff from an early (mid '60's) boomer. They got the new stuff in that regard. I wonder who got to recycle the 100-odd pounds of platinum-iridium alloy that stabilized the gimbals when they did retire the clunker?
"Your naiveté betrays you -- there is no such thing as "rock solid". Ever.
What if you're talking about rocks?"
I know you are making a joke, but I used to work at a mine that had serious issues with "incompetent rock." And the term means what it says; the rock kept breaking off and falling on people. It had to be held up with metal netting and roof bolts.
New Orleans is sinking due to normal geology (can't blame W for this). Sea level is rising due to a natural cycle that has been amplifed by human activities (Can partly blame W; he didn't start it, but he's not doing much about it either.)
I think it's time to abandon New Orleans. Even if you put it back together this time, another storm is likely to repeat the whole mess, and since it will be even further below sea level by then, the damage will be even worse.
They put the area around Mt. St. Helens off-limits to construction after all. Same reasoning should apply to New Orleans.
"The food choices suck."
Could you like, learn to cook? I saved me when I first moved to Winnemucca, NV. The food situation did improve by the time I left, but it was pretty desperate when I first got there.
As for entertainment, see what the more sober locals do, and go from there. Ignore the bar crowd, all they do is get drunk and fall down a lot.
As for the pickups, is the paint peeling (like mine, Thanks a lot Ford!), or did the mufflers rot out? There isn't much you can do about it in either case, so you'll just have to deal with people who are relatively unconcerned with surface appearances. At worst, use the same skills (Some One Else's Problem Field.) you use to not see the homeless in the big city, and blot them out.
"Debronsky said the town's isolation will help guarantee workers will stick around. "There's no other work within two, three hundred miles," Debronsky said with a smile."
That will backfire quickly. Rural counties tend to run by Good-old-boy networks, and they can be creative about looking out for their own. So if you are an outsider it is best to play very nice for the first several years.
On the other hand, if he is simply tired of workers flitting from job to job on the "grass is always greener" principle, then he probably is right. People in the country may well have longer attention spans.
Slashdot Mirror
"How many people's VCR clocks blink 12:00 becuase (to them) it is too hard to actually set it?"
Since you mention it, our VCR clock blinks 12:00 because the only way to set it depends on the remote, which is dead. The VCR still plays tapes just fine, and records just fine, because those buttons are on the machine, and still work. Since the amount of stuff worth taping (or even watching) has been dropping steadily over the years, there is no point to replacing the VCR.
Liquid fuels for transportation are the bottleneck. Nuclear power isn't going to directly move anything smaller than a ship. Not even considering personal automobiles, rail, truck, and aircraft all take oil, or liquified coal.
Interestingly, my doctor wants me to eat more fresh vegetables and more fish. All of which will have to be hauled from warmer climates or the coast, to me, using oil-powered vehicles. If, sorry, When transport gets much more expensive, there will be some unexpected public health issues.
There was a write up on this, from the UK, called The Busby Report a couple of years ago. Although I didn't agree with all of it's conclusions, it had some good points. I wonder if the Busby people will be in on this?
"the GOP has spent a lot of time and effort enforcing the idea that there is no right to privacy guaranteed in the Constitution."
There isn't. The 4th amendment basically stops at the front door.
Fortunately, there is a solution. Another amendment. It's not easy, but it has been done over two dozen times before. So, let's get started.
Mike.
"the secondary effects include Illinois getting beach front property"
Illinois already has beach front property. It's on the East Side of Chicago north to Wisconsin, which also has beach front property.
Lake Michigan is about 650 ft in elevation, so you can melt every glacier on the planet and still not reach it. Unless the area around Cairo is low enough to get flooded from the Mississippi backing up... Need map with elevation contours.
"Office Clipinator - A random collection of cute, animated icons which will attempt to provide the same clerical output as your average gum-chewing office assistant."
I read that first as "Flipinator", which fits in really well with the rest of the sentence if you have recently read Bellwether by Connie Willis.
Highly recommended book.
The argument won't be solved until 2030. If the climate from say 2025 to 2030 is warmer than now, then the CO2 is causing global warming crowd is correct.
If the climate from say 2025 to 2030 is cooler than now, then the solar cycle crowd is correct, since 2000 to about 2010 is the peak of the current cycle. And we'll probably be on a tobaggon ride to the next glaciation too.
As pointed out elsewhere in these postings the complete lack of controlled experiments makes it impossible to really see what is happening. All you can do is correlate events. As my doctoral dissertation was on mathematical modeling, and I found a very large number of models that trained on existing data arbitrarily well, and predicted the future abysmally, I frankly have little faith in any models not validated against reality.
I've also been wondering about how you can measure CO2 in a 400,000 year old ice bubble when CO2 dissolves in water. It should have had more than enough time to diffuse in or out of there. But that is a different issue.
"They wouldn't have to release these multi-hundreds-of-megabyte horrors. No other operating system does such a thing- Not SunOS, Solaris, the BSDs, Linux, OS X, OS/2- you get nice little security patches and bugfixes on a continual basis."
I downloaded the 10.4.4 update to OS X the other night, and it was 120 megabytes. It was the combo update all the way from 10.4.0, but still, what a whopper. I'm afraid pretty much everyone has to do monster updates these days.
Sigh.
"Now, you and I know that in this day and age, in a country with a professional military, civil insurrection is largely futile anyway."
Please tell that to the Iraqi insurgents.
"We're all willing to put up with dozens of repeat articles on cold fusion based on the dream that one day, we'll all be able to extend our middle fingers at ExxonMobilShellAramcoBushCoHalliburtonChevron."
Nice thought, won't happen. They are energy companys, not just oil companys. If it works, and goes commercial, dollars to doughnuts that you would be buying the deuterium from them. Kiloton lots of deuterated acetone (or even heavy water) are not Walmart stock items.
"Let it die, let it die already!"
True. It has only one virtue. It runs under System 8.1, and netscape 6.2 requires 8.5.
As it happens I have a vintage 7500 running 8.1. So I can surf (barely) from that machine in the shop when I don't want to use the mac in the office.
But I chearfully admit that's not much of a reason.
"A nations ability to manufacture real goods is the true measure of its vitality.
Which is why we should all consider learning Cantonese as a second language."
True for the next 20-30 years, then some other cesspit trying to pull itself up will take over the low-end from the Chinese, who will have upgraded their quality in the mean time. Like Japan did in the 60's and Taiwan in the 70's. This is actually the way it is supposed to work.
What I haven't heard is what comes after the information age? The robotic age? Once a robot can pick apples, (a benchmark I use because once they can do that, they can do most of the other low-end jobs as well) what happens next? Does everyone sink into poverty until the revolution comes (and the inventors of the robots are first against the wall) or do we end up so awash in everything that we get a annual check like that Alaskan fund that pays people a cut of the oil revenues?
We live in interesting times. Therefore someone cursed us. I wonder who?
The University of Idaho abolished the College of Mines and Earth Resources just a few year ago. The few programs left in that college were absorbed elsewhere, metallurgical engineering was redefined as materials science and so forth. It happens. Whether to stick it out or transfer is the big question, and depends on the gory details.
About two year's ago, they had a re-evaluation, this quote from the article exists almost verbatim in the U of I's evaluation.
"The university will focus its undergraduate, professional and doctoral programs and research in areas where it has attained, or has the potential to achieve, world-class excellence. It will suspend admission to those programs that do not meet these criteria."
Sounds like the same consultants did the work. Be that as it may, small schools can't be competitive everywhere anymore, so they are consolidating. Soon they will be more colleges than universities. Whether this is good or bad is open to debate. Small liberal arts colleges continue to be important, maybe boutique schools are the wave of the future.
In other words, the coverup got him, not the original misdeed.
The plot sounds vaguely familiar somehow.
"my gut feeling is that drawing out 8GW of heat energy will cool off a lot of rock real fast."
Most likely. And although renewable over geologic time, it's pretty slow in human time. So basically, you are mining heat, and when the rocks cool, you are done for several thousand years.
What is the current output of the Geysers geothermal plant? They were noticing the cooldown ten years ago.
"I keep seeing these 50+% mortality figures being thrown around, which seems slightly misleading to me. Imagine if 100 people get a disease. 30 might get it asymptomatically. 60 might get the disease to such an extent that they're "sick" (feeling flu-ish, missing work, etc). 10 might get it to the extent that they wind up in the hospital. If 5 of those 10 die, what's the mortality of the disease? It might seem like 50% to a doctor treating these patients, but the actual number would be 5 percent. "
I've been wondering about that for years. For instance, when I got the measles when I was a kid, I was never taken to a hospital, or diagnosed by a doctor. Neither was my brother. So how were we supposed to be counted? And when I got last year's flu, I never did more than call into work of Friday, so I only missed one day. That wasn't in the medical records either.
Does the CDC have some way to back out how many people only have a minor case of the flu from those that get it bad enough to see a doctor?
"There's scant concern about those - diesel engines continue to operate unabated worldwide."
Actually, the Mine Safety and Health Administration has been worried about diesel particulates in underground mines for a decade now. The OSHA-regulated world is just now catching up.
Hint: clean/replace your air filters twice as often.
True story:
Nice Inspector; "Your LHD failed the test, but I need to take a leak, and I'll take the second test to verify the result after I get back. Why don't you check when the air filters are due for replacement while I'm away (wink, wink). We change the filters, he wanders back, tests again and it passes. Then does third test, it passes too, so we do not get a citation.)
"titanium is flamable ??? ok, it takes in excess of 4000C to ignite it,"
:-)
If you have a jet of pure oxygen, you can light off titanium at 400 F.
At a former job we put three people in the hospital finding this out. "The book" of titanium flammability was wrong in that it did not consider gas jets.
Trivia for the day
Rhyolitic is the word. And for someone who claims to understand volcanos to not recognize this instantly implies dishonesty somewhere.
Rhyolitic volcanoes are silica rich, and therefor viscous, so they hold lots of dissolved CO2, and tend to go boom more than the usual volcano. Parts of Nevada have 40 foot thick layers of rhyolitic ash tuffs.
"Considering that a HUGE amount of money gets put into research and making/updating the facilities to manufacture these processors, the actual costs are much higher."
Right. The Variable cost is $40 per chip. The Fixed cost could be considerably higher.
To paraphase a line in Demolition Man:
"Intel was the last survivor of the processor wars. Now all processors are Intel."
"you want Omega (10-14 khz). "
Yup! I remember the "stream the floating wire" (antenna for the Omega system) command over the loudspeaker which usually meant the SINS had puked again, and poor ET1 Burns was going to be spending a few hours toggling in a boot loader by hand, so as to get the paper tape loader working again to read in the real program.
Ah, the bad old days (shudder) of the late '70s.
It should be noted that our SINS was a castoff from an early (mid '60's) boomer. They got the new stuff in that regard. I wonder who got to recycle the 100-odd pounds of platinum-iridium alloy that stabilized the gimbals when they did retire the clunker?
"Your naiveté betrays you -- there is no such thing as "rock solid". Ever. What if you're talking about rocks?" I know you are making a joke, but I used to work at a mine that had serious issues with "incompetent rock." And the term means what it says; the rock kept breaking off and falling on people. It had to be held up with metal netting and roof bolts.
So, if the battery is dead, how do you open the door so you can pull the hood release to attach the jumper cables?
Electric only door locks are a just plain bad idea.
New Orleans is sinking due to normal geology (can't blame W for this). Sea level is rising due to a natural cycle that has been amplifed by human activities (Can partly blame W; he didn't start it, but he's not doing much about it either.)
I think it's time to abandon New Orleans. Even if you put it back together this time, another storm is likely to repeat the whole mess, and since it will be even further below sea level by then, the damage will be even worse.
They put the area around Mt. St. Helens off-limits to construction after all. Same reasoning should apply to New Orleans.
"The food choices suck." Could you like, learn to cook? I saved me when I first moved to Winnemucca, NV. The food situation did improve by the time I left, but it was pretty desperate when I first got there. As for entertainment, see what the more sober locals do, and go from there. Ignore the bar crowd, all they do is get drunk and fall down a lot. As for the pickups, is the paint peeling (like mine, Thanks a lot Ford!), or did the mufflers rot out? There isn't much you can do about it in either case, so you'll just have to deal with people who are relatively unconcerned with surface appearances. At worst, use the same skills (Some One Else's Problem Field.) you use to not see the homeless in the big city, and blot them out.
"Debronsky said the town's isolation will help guarantee workers will stick around. "There's no other work within two, three hundred miles," Debronsky said with a smile." That will backfire quickly. Rural counties tend to run by Good-old-boy networks, and they can be creative about looking out for their own. So if you are an outsider it is best to play very nice for the first several years. On the other hand, if he is simply tired of workers flitting from job to job on the "grass is always greener" principle, then he probably is right. People in the country may well have longer attention spans.