Yes, the RBMK style reactor isn't as safe as the CANDU or the pebble bed reactors. However, any reactor that can go critical (basically all but the pebble bed) can suffer from Chernobyl's problem - blatant disregard for safety procedures and nuclear physics. They attempted to simulate no load, turned off the automatic safeties, and turned off the coolant. Boom! What a suprise! The fact is no normal usage of the reactor could have produced that situation, but they were interested in studying the outcome, somehow not realizing how bad it could be. A combination of poor oversight and an inability to recognize dangerous situations, along with trial and error engineering with a nuclear reactor produced the tragedy. Yes a better reactor might have handled the disaster differently, but every kind of reactor except for pebble bed would still have had some serious problems.
Basically, he's talking about a content distributer using hard drives instead of dvd's to send the content to a customer. Think of this another way - it is a network connection, much like ethernet, where packets of data get sent to customers.
The comments that I have read seem to be missing his main thrust - why keep to a static transport layer (dvd's) when instead you can have that layer improve in bandwidth as time goes on. While there are some issues with content control, I think he is completely right - dvd's are placing themselves out of the market cost at 20 bucks a pop. 2 years from now, why buy a 5 gb dvd for 20 bucks when you can buy a 20 gb usb keychain drive for the same? This is about flexibility and scalability, something that the current dvd (and the earlier vhs) distribution model do not have. This guy is a genius, and he's got the money to use his idea effectively.
I can think of all kinds of applications straight out of sci-fi, such as faster-than-light travel, inertial dampers, and tractor beams.
I assume you are trying to be modded + funny:-). Too bad I've already posted because otherwise I'd mod you up. We've never seen anything like those in nature.
Exactly. There are almost certainly missing elements in the model for gravity, for quantum mechanics, and so on. Maybe sometime in the future someone will come up with a quantum - relativistic super duper theory that brings disparate theories together. Yes, some of that is what string theory is trying to do. In the end though, it is going to take a LOOONG time before advances in science can be applied to engineering. Finding new particles, finding dark matter, and finding where missing socks go have no real life application right now - and I can't even imagine one. Just as math was (and still is) far ahead of where science can go, science is far ahead of where engineering can go. The missing elements of models would be useful for abstract knowledge, but have no practical use right now or probably in the next century.
BTW did you know that the olympic torch relay was actually thought up by the NAZIs for their Olympics?
Yes and Wagner (composer of flight of the valkyries) was an anti-semite. Does that mean that we shouldn't listen to it? Does the olympic torch coming from Nazis mean we shouldn't do it? Personally I'm kinda pissed that Hitler ruined a perfectly good moustache - but I guess with all the bad stuff he did throwing that on there won't make much of a difference.
I don't think the "showing only events the US has won" deserves a response, but I'll give one anyway. The events that NBC shows are the ones that US citizens are interested in, and because they are interested in them, it is more likely that a US athelete will participate. Do you think the US is going to win the women's diving events? Almost certainly not, but we still watch it.
It takes a special kind of person to deride an international event based on the ideals of self improvement, national pride, and respect for other countries.
[Intelligence] was apparently a package deal with the gullibility gene
What? I didn't sign any sort of package deal! I didn't sign any sort of deal at all! I demand to see who has been making deals behind my back, especally about my genous IQ!
On the other hand, a hero he is not. He got in a traffic accident and lost his life in a car that should never have been driven in traffic. Saying that the vehicle is the image of progress and green compliance is unrealistic at best - if all cars were as light and underpowered as that solar car had been, gasoline consumption would be less than a tenth of what it is today. The sad truth of it is, he died demonstrating something that we all know already - that the solar cars are nothing more than pie in the sky dreams. Only by removing crash survivability as a design criterion are they able to produce something that can get you from one place to another. Progress is not trading our safety for some environmental activists' peace of mind. I find myself both sad and angry - he was clearly a giver instead of a taker, but he was giving his time doing the wrong thing.
You could make a case saying that even if you were able to pay less for a TCO from a Microsoft offering than for OSS, it would be worthwhile to go with OSS because then you have access to the code and the improvements that the state agencies make can be for the public good. Not that I'd complain if MS decided to charge less money;-)
Clearly you have not even read the comments. Numerous replies say that all raw TCP packets are blocked, and incomplete raw UDP packets are blocked. This breaks things like nmap, kazaa, and current DDoS programs. Saying that they have fabricated evidence is a bold, unsubstatiated claim - so far it looks like most of the comments are positive and the limitations are being discussed rationally. Yes the article summary is a little lopsided, but if you're not new here, quit your whining. You should be used to this.
Due to the actions of the Statue of Liberty's caretaker organization, maybe they should instead replace it with a statue of a masked man wearing a striped shirt sneaking away with a sack with a $ on it.
If you didn't already know (this is a local-ish thing) the caretaker organization said that they had no money to remodel the statue to prevent terrorism, and that they needed public donations to get it running again. The truth was, they had plenty of money, they just didn't want to spend it because the more money they have the more money the people in the organization get paid. When people found out, they were (understandably) pissed. What makes it worse for those assholes running it is that Mayor Bloomburg donated $100k personally to the fund... And that's not the sort of guy you want to swindle.
that these people are pretty much "gambling" on the stock market, something that is pretty much gambling in and of itself.
This is entirely incorrect. They are creating a futures market for Google before the underlying (Google stock) can be bought or sold. This is extremely useful to investors who want to pin down a price for Google's IPO. For example, let's pretend that I'm a medium sized speculator. From looking at all sorts of data and building my own model, I think that Google's IPO is going to be overpriced. I could simply sell call options on Google (a call option is a contract that allows someone to buy a stock at an agreed upon price). If I sold a call option, then I get money right away, and someone else has the ability to force me to buy Google shares at the current market price and then sell the shares to whoever owns the contract at the agreed upon price. This means that if the stock price for Google goes through the roof, I can get screwed big time. Here's where the futures market comes in - I buy some contracts in this pre-IPO market and now, if the price for Google goes up, so does my futures contract, so I'm in the clear.
It's like gambling on someone else playing the slot machine. o.O O.o What's the point?
Contrary to many people's beliefs, the stock market is not gambling. It can be gambling if an investor has no idea what he or she is doing. Every once in awhile the stock market becomes very popular and people who have no clue start throwing their money into it, hoping to hit it big. Maybe a few of them do. But all of the experienced traders should be able to shear most of the new flock of sheep. The stock market is not a zero sum game, but you can make a lot of money by taking money away from stupid people.
My examples are a little simplistic, but hopefully you have a small idea of what's going on in the stock market now.
Just use your peripheral vision to look at your monitor (look away from the monitor and see if it flickers at the off-center/edge of your vision) - if you can detect a flicker or unsteadiness then the refresh rate isn't high enough to fool your eyes.
What, exactly is the point of this exercise? Do you use only your peripheral vision when using a computer? Do you use your peripheral vision at all?
The whole 30 fps thing is misinterpreted, not wrong. In our intro electrical engineering class we took an LED and had it blink at an adjustable rate. There is a point where your eye can't distinguish between blinking and staying constantly on - this is about 30 Hz. What this means is that your eye interprets things as continuous when they are above 30 Hz and discontinuous below. That doesn't mean it won't look different. If you put two videos side by side, one 30 and the other 60 you will easily be able to tell the difference. But you will not be able to see an update.
What you are most likely seeing in the screen flicker is the difference between the 55-60 Hz lightbulb in your room and the refresh rate in the monitor - your eyes do funny things with ambient light. As an example go outside and move your hand quickly in front of your eyes. It will be a continuous movement. Do the same in front of a light bulb, and it will flicker. If you are using a CRT (which you seem to be) then it will also work in front of the monitor. Just don't confuse the beat frequencies between your lights and your monitor with some sort of refresh rate test. All you'll do is "like" things around 60, 120, 180 Hz. Maybe 30, 90, 150 too. Try getting rid of all non-natural light sources in your room and then see if you can detect a screen flicker. Bet ya can't.
Next they'll ask us to keep recordings of all our phone conversations?
Actually trading corporations (like Bear Sterns or Bloomburg) are required to record all conversations relating to market orders. That means that some phone lines are always being recorded at all times. This is required by the SEC. You'd be suprised what restrictions are already in place to prevent things like insider trading from happening.
Well I'm the UAV team captain's second cousin's best friend's girlfriend's half brother. I hear all sorts of stories about how they actually used black magic to make the plane fly and sacrifice goats and midgets to the devil every time it goes up. No wonder they had a fire - the power transfer pentagram got smudged and the imp got loose for awhile before they could kill it with a fire axe.
I was just about to say the exact same thing. The first day of electrical engineering they told us that a good engineer is a lazy engineer. Pure research is completely different than engineering - engineering is focused on solutions to problems, whereas research sees if something is possible. Engineers have to be economical - conserving money, time, and resources. It is far more economical to take off the shelf components, both money and timewise. Sure they pay a little with resources probably, but they made the tradeoff for legitamate reasons. Engineers should have taken some economics courses in college. They should work with their feet firmly on the ground, otherwise there will be no place for them in today's working environment.
90%? Sure. But THAT is the problem. There's always the one little detail that won't work without knowledgable tweaking.
I agree completely - there has never been a single time that I can recall where I didn't have to go and do SOMETHING weird to get some random peice of software working. I've installed debian many times, red had, fedora, mandrake, and gentoo. I've used old hardware and new hardware. Eventually they tend to fix and adapt to the problems that I have to fix by hand, but by then there are new ones. First it was very awkward usb support in debian. Then another debian didn't recognize my network card unless I did an expert install, and changed no options and it worked. Next sound doesn't work correctly in the gentoo install. RHN doesn't work right coming out of the box. There's always something wrong. With windows there are no problems with install, yes, the updating is annoying but honestly has a better interface than even apt, and does a pretty good job of the same. I think the biggest difference between windows and linux is that I have to work to get linux running in the beginning, after which it is fine, whereas windows is fine in the beginning, but I have to work to keep it running later. (spybot s&d, av software, etc.) Linux needs much better out of the box support. I don't even care if the support is limited to a select group of packages - just get them all working fine on any hardware.
I'm going to go ahead and burn my karma here, but there's one thing that always ticks me off. "Software Engineers" are not engineers. Engineering is a profession, like medicine or law. To practice it, you have to be certified (and not that bullshit cisco, microsoft, oracle certification). If something goes wrong with something that you made (building falls down, a person dies) then you are held accountable in a court of law and can serve jail time. When was the last time a software engineer went to prison for accidently programming in a bug? Only when software engineers are held to the same standards and penalties will they be engineers. Until then, it dilutes the name.
Maybe it is something as simple as that they designed MESSENGER years ago when ion drives were not fully tested. Once they had designed it and started construction and programming etc., they would have been required to rebuild the thing from scratch to use ion drives, possibly costing more money than saved. Or maybe this was some big shot's pet project and it just went through. In the future I expect NASA will use more ion drives but they've got something that works now, and there is no huge rush to see Mercury close up. We are used to quick changes in the software industry but for things like rocket science, I imagine they are more conservative with the application of new ideas. (Tests, more tests, always tests!)
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, the RBMK style reactor isn't as safe as the CANDU or the pebble bed reactors. However, any reactor that can go critical (basically all but the pebble bed) can suffer from Chernobyl's problem - blatant disregard for safety procedures and nuclear physics. They attempted to simulate no load, turned off the automatic safeties, and turned off the coolant. Boom! What a suprise! The fact is no normal usage of the reactor could have produced that situation, but they were interested in studying the outcome, somehow not realizing how bad it could be. A combination of poor oversight and an inability to recognize dangerous situations, along with trial and error engineering with a nuclear reactor produced the tragedy. Yes a better reactor might have handled the disaster differently, but every kind of reactor except for pebble bed would still have had some serious problems.
Yeah I'll get back to work on that slashdot firewall as soon as I'm done here...
Interesting how a post titled funny can be rated insightful!
Basically, he's talking about a content distributer using hard drives instead of dvd's to send the content to a customer. Think of this another way - it is a network connection, much like ethernet, where packets of data get sent to customers.
The comments that I have read seem to be missing his main thrust - why keep to a static transport layer (dvd's) when instead you can have that layer improve in bandwidth as time goes on. While there are some issues with content control, I think he is completely right - dvd's are placing themselves out of the market cost at 20 bucks a pop. 2 years from now, why buy a 5 gb dvd for 20 bucks when you can buy a 20 gb usb keychain drive for the same? This is about flexibility and scalability, something that the current dvd (and the earlier vhs) distribution model do not have. This guy is a genius, and he's got the money to use his idea effectively.
I can think of all kinds of applications straight out of sci-fi, such as faster-than-light travel, inertial dampers, and tractor beams.
:-). Too bad I've already posted because otherwise I'd mod you up. We've never seen anything like those in nature.
I assume you are trying to be modded + funny
Exactly. There are almost certainly missing elements in the model for gravity, for quantum mechanics, and so on. Maybe sometime in the future someone will come up with a quantum - relativistic super duper theory that brings disparate theories together. Yes, some of that is what string theory is trying to do. In the end though, it is going to take a LOOONG time before advances in science can be applied to engineering. Finding new particles, finding dark matter, and finding where missing socks go have no real life application right now - and I can't even imagine one. Just as math was (and still is) far ahead of where science can go, science is far ahead of where engineering can go. The missing elements of models would be useful for abstract knowledge, but have no practical use right now or probably in the next century.
BTW did you know that the olympic torch relay was actually thought up by the NAZIs for their Olympics?
Yes and Wagner (composer of flight of the valkyries) was an anti-semite. Does that mean that we shouldn't listen to it? Does the olympic torch coming from Nazis mean we shouldn't do it? Personally I'm kinda pissed that Hitler ruined a perfectly good moustache - but I guess with all the bad stuff he did throwing that on there won't make much of a difference.
I don't think the "showing only events the US has won" deserves a response, but I'll give one anyway. The events that NBC shows are the ones that US citizens are interested in, and because they are interested in them, it is more likely that a US athelete will participate. Do you think the US is going to win the women's diving events? Almost certainly not, but we still watch it.
It takes a special kind of person to deride an international event based on the ideals of self improvement, national pride, and respect for other countries.
[Intelligence] was apparently a package deal with the gullibility gene
What? I didn't sign any sort of package deal! I didn't sign any sort of deal at all! I demand to see who has been making deals behind my back, especally about my genous IQ!
trying for my first +5 funny
If only there was a +1, Pity...
I agree that his death is tragic.
On the other hand, a hero he is not. He got in a traffic accident and lost his life in a car that should never have been driven in traffic. Saying that the vehicle is the image of progress and green compliance is unrealistic at best - if all cars were as light and underpowered as that solar car had been, gasoline consumption would be less than a tenth of what it is today. The sad truth of it is, he died demonstrating something that we all know already - that the solar cars are nothing more than pie in the sky dreams. Only by removing crash survivability as a design criterion are they able to produce something that can get you from one place to another. Progress is not trading our safety for some environmental activists' peace of mind. I find myself both sad and angry - he was clearly a giver instead of a taker, but he was giving his time doing the wrong thing.
You could make a case saying that even if you were able to pay less for a TCO from a Microsoft offering than for OSS, it would be worthwhile to go with OSS because then you have access to the code and the improvements that the state agencies make can be for the public good. Not that I'd complain if MS decided to charge less money ;-)
Clearly you have not even read the comments. Numerous replies say that all raw TCP packets are blocked, and incomplete raw UDP packets are blocked. This breaks things like nmap, kazaa, and current DDoS programs. Saying that they have fabricated evidence is a bold, unsubstatiated claim - so far it looks like most of the comments are positive and the limitations are being discussed rationally. Yes the article summary is a little lopsided, but if you're not new here, quit your whining. You should be used to this.
Due to the actions of the Statue of Liberty's caretaker organization, maybe they should instead replace it with a statue of a masked man wearing a striped shirt sneaking away with a sack with a $ on it.
If you didn't already know (this is a local-ish thing) the caretaker organization said that they had no money to remodel the statue to prevent terrorism, and that they needed public donations to get it running again. The truth was, they had plenty of money, they just didn't want to spend it because the more money they have the more money the people in the organization get paid. When people found out, they were (understandably) pissed. What makes it worse for those assholes running it is that Mayor Bloomburg donated $100k personally to the fund... And that's not the sort of guy you want to swindle.
What, you mean my joystick too?
You could call it that.
that these people are pretty much "gambling" on the stock market, something that is pretty much gambling in and of itself.
This is entirely incorrect. They are creating a futures market for Google before the underlying (Google stock) can be bought or sold. This is extremely useful to investors who want to pin down a price for Google's IPO. For example, let's pretend that I'm a medium sized speculator. From looking at all sorts of data and building my own model, I think that Google's IPO is going to be overpriced. I could simply sell call options on Google (a call option is a contract that allows someone to buy a stock at an agreed upon price). If I sold a call option, then I get money right away, and someone else has the ability to force me to buy Google shares at the current market price and then sell the shares to whoever owns the contract at the agreed upon price. This means that if the stock price for Google goes through the roof, I can get screwed big time. Here's where the futures market comes in - I buy some contracts in this pre-IPO market and now, if the price for Google goes up, so does my futures contract, so I'm in the clear.
It's like gambling on someone else playing the slot machine. o.O O.o What's the point?
Contrary to many people's beliefs, the stock market is not gambling. It can be gambling if an investor has no idea what he or she is doing. Every once in awhile the stock market becomes very popular and people who have no clue start throwing their money into it, hoping to hit it big. Maybe a few of them do. But all of the experienced traders should be able to shear most of the new flock of sheep. The stock market is not a zero sum game, but you can make a lot of money by taking money away from stupid people.
My examples are a little simplistic, but hopefully you have a small idea of what's going on in the stock market now.
my computer's electricity bill and my winter heating bill just became synonymous. ;)
Watch out for your summer A/C bill!
Just use your peripheral vision to look at your monitor (look away from the monitor and see if it flickers at the off-center/edge of your vision) - if you can detect a flicker or unsteadiness then the refresh rate isn't high enough to fool your eyes.
What, exactly is the point of this exercise? Do you use only your peripheral vision when using a computer? Do you use your peripheral vision at all?
The whole 30 fps thing is misinterpreted, not wrong. In our intro electrical engineering class we took an LED and had it blink at an adjustable rate. There is a point where your eye can't distinguish between blinking and staying constantly on - this is about 30 Hz. What this means is that your eye interprets things as continuous when they are above 30 Hz and discontinuous below. That doesn't mean it won't look different. If you put two videos side by side, one 30 and the other 60 you will easily be able to tell the difference. But you will not be able to see an update.
What you are most likely seeing in the screen flicker is the difference between the 55-60 Hz lightbulb in your room and the refresh rate in the monitor - your eyes do funny things with ambient light. As an example go outside and move your hand quickly in front of your eyes. It will be a continuous movement. Do the same in front of a light bulb, and it will flicker. If you are using a CRT (which you seem to be) then it will also work in front of the monitor. Just don't confuse the beat frequencies between your lights and your monitor with some sort of refresh rate test. All you'll do is "like" things around 60, 120, 180 Hz. Maybe 30, 90, 150 too. Try getting rid of all non-natural light sources in your room and then see if you can detect a screen flicker. Bet ya can't.
Next they'll ask us to keep recordings of all our phone conversations?
Actually trading corporations (like Bear Sterns or Bloomburg) are required to record all conversations relating to market orders. That means that some phone lines are always being recorded at all times. This is required by the SEC. You'd be suprised what restrictions are already in place to prevent things like insider trading from happening.
In retrospect I may be playing too much Doom 3.
Well I'm the UAV team captain's second cousin's best friend's girlfriend's half brother. I hear all sorts of stories about how they actually used black magic to make the plane fly and sacrifice goats and midgets to the devil every time it goes up. No wonder they had a fire - the power transfer pentagram got smudged and the imp got loose for awhile before they could kill it with a fire axe.
I was just about to say the exact same thing. The first day of electrical engineering they told us that a good engineer is a lazy engineer. Pure research is completely different than engineering - engineering is focused on solutions to problems, whereas research sees if something is possible. Engineers have to be economical - conserving money, time, and resources. It is far more economical to take off the shelf components, both money and timewise. Sure they pay a little with resources probably, but they made the tradeoff for legitamate reasons. Engineers should have taken some economics courses in college. They should work with their feet firmly on the ground, otherwise there will be no place for them in today's working environment.
90%? Sure. But THAT is the problem. There's always the one little detail that won't work without knowledgable tweaking.
I agree completely - there has never been a single time that I can recall where I didn't have to go and do SOMETHING weird to get some random peice of software working. I've installed debian many times, red had, fedora, mandrake, and gentoo. I've used old hardware and new hardware. Eventually they tend to fix and adapt to the problems that I have to fix by hand, but by then there are new ones. First it was very awkward usb support in debian. Then another debian didn't recognize my network card unless I did an expert install, and changed no options and it worked. Next sound doesn't work correctly in the gentoo install. RHN doesn't work right coming out of the box. There's always something wrong. With windows there are no problems with install, yes, the updating is annoying but honestly has a better interface than even apt, and does a pretty good job of the same. I think the biggest difference between windows and linux is that I have to work to get linux running in the beginning, after which it is fine, whereas windows is fine in the beginning, but I have to work to keep it running later. (spybot s&d, av software, etc.) Linux needs much better out of the box support. I don't even care if the support is limited to a select group of packages - just get them all working fine on any hardware.
I'm going to go ahead and burn my karma here, but there's one thing that always ticks me off. "Software Engineers" are not engineers. Engineering is a profession, like medicine or law. To practice it, you have to be certified (and not that bullshit cisco, microsoft, oracle certification). If something goes wrong with something that you made (building falls down, a person dies) then you are held accountable in a court of law and can serve jail time. When was the last time a software engineer went to prison for accidently programming in a bug? Only when software engineers are held to the same standards and penalties will they be engineers. Until then, it dilutes the name.
Chaney to learn the secrets of the Dark Side and become horribly disfigured...
Ok one down, two to go.
Maybe it is something as simple as that they designed MESSENGER years ago when ion drives were not fully tested. Once they had designed it and started construction and programming etc., they would have been required to rebuild the thing from scratch to use ion drives, possibly costing more money than saved. Or maybe this was some big shot's pet project and it just went through. In the future I expect NASA will use more ion drives but they've got something that works now, and there is no huge rush to see Mercury close up. We are used to quick changes in the software industry but for things like rocket science, I imagine they are more conservative with the application of new ideas. (Tests, more tests, always tests!)