Having belonged to more than one of these organizations at one time I beg to differ. Actually, my membership in some of them would classify me as a terrorist! Oh well, they were already watching me, and no I don't need a tinfoil hat.
The last time I cared about what others thought about me is around the age of 13. I tried to fit in, socially, with the 'in set' at my local high school. After about three weeks I figured out that it 1) wasn't worth it and 2) they were totally vapid. After that I went my own direction which just so happened meant I went to college at that age (13) while they were still playing social games at the local high school. Yep, I was a total geek!
What's strange is that I've spent most of my life doing re-engineering of various processes in the military, business, and government to reduce the amount of resources (personnel, energy, material) required for same, while saving a ton of money, and I do mean a ton of money. So your observation does hit the nail on the head since I seem to feel defensive about what I do/did. Weird. I still have some work to do.
I suppose they could call it a fast fission reactor which is exactly what it is but I don't think that would make much difference in the end. They'd still be squawking about the fact that it produces high grade (bomb grade) nuclear fuel as a by product. Now the fact that this same fuel just so happens to make for efficient downstream reactors with little to no waste seems to escape notice unlike your conventional civilian reactor. Changing the name won't make a bit of difference if they can jump up and down and scream nuclear weapons production with that crowd.
I don't make the universe, I just try to live in it.
Roger that. One of my degrees is in economics. They won't even come close to financial break-even for quite a while, in my not so humble opinion. Aside from up front capital and operational costs you still have those dreaded decommissioning costs. Knowing how people/governments usually behave, I seriously doubt anyone is even thinking about that, yet.
So the scribes are going to go crying to mama-government to get a law passed to prevent Gutenberg from using his printing press. I do hope this bill never goes anywhere but I wouldn't be surprised if it did. They do have very deep pockets and it is an election year after all which means the politicians need lots of cash. If it does pass it will come down to the courts weighing fair use against historic use and I don't put much money on fair use as you can be sure the law will remove that privilege (it was never a right, just another provision of the law).
Let the techno-war begin. Hackers (the good kind) on one side, Neo-Luddit RIAA/MPAA on the other. I think I know which will win (us), but it's going to be messy.
Unfortunately, despite all the advantages of breeder reactors, the first thing the public and especially the eco-freaks think when you say breeder is nuclear weapons material. I don't make the universe, I just take it and engineer solutions within it. The problem with breeders is political, not engineering. Just as the public and some of the eco-freaks hear fusion and start singing hosannas despite the well known engineering problems that they will have (posted above) that they also happen to share with their fission cousins. All politics.
BTW, I used to belong to several of eco-freak organizations and tried to pound some sense into them about the risk/cost/benefit ratios of various means of energy production with zero success. Which is why I parted ways with them. I'm ecologically minded, and well trained in the science and the economics of same, they weren't. Those people are not rational, sadly. It's all about what feels good.
Yeah, I found that quite odd as well since I've known of 'working' Tokamaks for a couple of decades now. Typical reportial misreporting/hype. However, it was enough hype to get it posted here! Sooo.... who's the sucker?
Actually they have successfully achieved fusion in a Tokamak. The problem to date now is achieving what is called 'break-even'. Break-even is achieved when you get at least as much power out as you put into the system. It will be interesting to see if they can finally achieve the holy-grail of fusion.
The reactor vessel is not forever. One problem that you will have, just as we have with civilian and military reactors, is neutron embrittlement of the metals that make up the containment vessel and other equipment. What is happening is that the neutron flux from the reaction is not contained by the superconducting field (makes sense since neutrons have no charge) and those fast neutrons literally knock metals and other materials out of alignment as they go through materials. Eventually, depending on the strength of the neutron flux which will be much higher than in a fission reactor, you'll have to shut down and bury the materials as not only will they be structurally weakened but radioactive as well.
There are no free lunches especially when it comes to nuclear engineering/physics. The promising thing here is that you have the potential to have a much higher power density and cheaper fuel since deuterium, in the form of heavy water recovered from the ocean, is not exactly hard to come by. Desalinization followed by reduction of the water to hydrogen and oxygen and then just gather ye heavy hydrogen in the form of deuterium and tritium. Heck, if they don't use the tritium in the reactor, even though it is a fine lower temperature ignition source, they could always sell it on the open market. It's quite valuable on its own.
No, it has not been struck down as unconstitutional. What SCOTUS ordered was that the issue be returned to the 3rd District Court for trial which is scheduled to begin this October. DoJ is in the discovery phase again and that's why they are going after the search terms for any one given weekly period as well as a random sample of 1,000,000 pages. BTW, not a one of of the companies involved has complied with the subpoena entirely, not that it matters in my book. I'm with Google, the government is on a fishing expedition and requiring this from parties which are not involved with the suit is illegal. Privacy issues are totally irrelevant to the issue at hand.
I don't know what federal budget you've been looking at but the one I've been monitoring has increased funding for education by 86% since Bush II took office. That's readily available to anyone that would bother to look.
Criticize Bush II all you want, but get your facts right.
It's extremely easy to make such blanket assertions when you are sitting safe and sound behind your computer in a free country. I've been in many of the countries over in Asia, at least the ones that are along a coastline, and believe me you tread very lightly in most of them as human rights and human life are not respected. And I had the full faith and force of the US military behind me.
Let me ask you, and everyone else here, something. If you were handed an order to restrict someone's freedom of speech by taking down a blog or face the consequent arrest, and possible execution, of not only yourself but every other worker at your facility as well as your and their families, what would you do? Remember, these people not only shoot you in the back of the head but charge your family for the bullet. Where do you strike the ethical and/or moral balance there?
I've put my life on the line for the freedoms that many in the US and the rest of the world take for granted. Indeed, I'm terminal as a result of disabilities incurred during that service. Unless you are willing to go over there and do a Tianamen Square number, you are only mouthing phrases without the willingness to back it up.
Actually the US is in no way, shape, or form a democracy. It's a republic and a badly functioning one at this time for reasons that Jefferson stated a very long time ago. Still, I'd rather have votes bought with money than bought using aremed force or by the use of famine as a weapon. Way back when, India was one of the nations I was studying closely as part of my international development track.
Eventually when the middle class gets tired of our elites, they'll string up the lot and we'll start the process all over again. It's a natural progression with a long (several thousand year) precedent.
Hate to say it, but all firms worldwide of which I am aware practice two-track ethics. Indeed, if anything the European firms are worse about this. Who do you think built those bunkers for Saddam Hussein and much else of his enforcement infrastructure? Ditto the underground installations that Iran is using to build their nuclear weapons infrastructure? I'll give you a clue, American, Chinese, and Russian firms weren't involved although Russia is helping with the rest of the infrastructure now. Another example that immediately springs to mind is that US firms are forbidden by law from engaging in bribery, large or small. Yet they all do where it is standard practice, even news organizations as a matter of fact. It's a fact of life the world over. Two-track ethics at work. Where I draw the line personally is when it comes to human rights and therein lies the rub.
I already severed my relationship with Yahoo! over their reprehensible behavior. Filtering is one thing, turning someone over to that regime is something else entirely. Now I'm forced to re-evaluate my business relationship with MS, although it's a hard call about whether I should inflict pain on MS as a whole for what may be legal behavior of their MSN China operations. I spent much of my life in the military so human rights are near and dear to my heart (despite what some people think, we aren't blood thirsty thugs). It's a tough call and I'm still thinking about it. Legally, they probably behaved correctly. The ethics are tougher to call due to what I perceive as tensions between various considerations. Morally? No question in my book, it was immoral.
This type of dilemma is why I would never consider either operating in China or taking employment there (as if the US Government would let me). I don't need this type of problem, I have enough dilemmas of my own to deal with.
The removal of the blog contents was done by a Chinese MSN employee in China. The overall Microsoft was not involved in this and as a matter of fact seems to be scrambling in full damage control mode. However, since it was done by a MSN(China) employee in China under a legal request by the government of China, technically everything is kosher. The US Government makes similar requests all the time in the US of US corporations and US employees comply, except in this case we aren't talking about political speech here, we are usually talking about child porn (an abomination in my book). Now we can add sites that support groups that "advocate" terrorism, which is a form of speech. Goose for the gander, folks?
I hope a few people here will take a step back and think for a minute or two before jumping in with all four limbs and barking like mad. These MS employees are in China, not a place on earth exactly noted for recognizing human rights let alone the sanctity of human life. If I were over there and were served with an order to take down that space, I don't exactly think I'd hesitate very long under normal circumstances. [My circumstances are other than normal.]
Frankly, I'd never do business with them for any amount of money in the first place but I'm not exactly in business anymore having spent most of my life defending these rights, but that's me.
Hell, I'm qualified and have worked in over a dozen fields of engineering, including nuclear, here and I'm offended. When I'm not working on something else, I play with superstring theory for entertainment. There's something going on and I don't think that dark matter and dark energy are the solution. I think we are at a similar stage to where we were right after the Michelson-Morley experiment and/or the discovery of the photoelectric effect. Observations that don't make sense in the context of the current standard model so people are trying various fits/corrections to make it work.
I have my own pet theory about what is happening at the quantum level but I keep it to myself. It's so bizarre that even I don't believe it {shrug}.
Naviscope is what I use to solve problems like this. It's a Windows only freebie that is, unfortunately, no longer supported or in development but I've been using it for over five years without any problems save one (more on that later). I'm afraid you'll have to search for it. Version 8.70 was the last.
Naviscope is a web proxy that I have successfully used with IE, FF, and Opera, has programmable prefetch (can be set to delay on page load), DNS caching, and time sync and more. It has a default block setting and you then set altered settings for any sites for which you want different settings (it comes with a few already set so you have working examples, e.g. WindowsUpdate). You can block: ads (this doesn't work as well as in the past), backgrounds, blinking text, pop-ups while page is loading or entirely, system information (UserAgent), last page visited (Referrer), cookies, javascript, and those damned sounds. Now true, FF without or with extensions can do a lot of this now, but you can also cover your other browsers with the same settings and just forget about it.
One feature that I didn't list above that has proved invaluable as a web developer here is that you can monitor both incoming and outgoing traffic, i.e. header traffic and do pings and traceroute on them, in a decent graphical window. You can flip that on and off with a toggle. Very handy!
The one glitch I've seen in all these years is that if you increase the number of simultaneous connections above the normal OS default for the network connection, it will crash. I haven't found this that much of a problem.
It's installed on all my systems here and works on all versions of Windows, 95 to 2003, from personal experience here. For FF and Opera, set the normal port 80 traffic to point to 127.0.0.1 port 81. No idea about Vista but I doubt it given the changes to the TCP/IP stack.
For me it's Toshiba and Ericsson which goes back to a deal they made with the, then, Soviets to provide them with computerized milling equipment that would give them the capability to create precision submarine propellors. Something we only had at the time and they did not. Considering that I was sitting on a destroyer (sub-hunter by design), I kinda had a personal stake in the matter. This was back in the '80's so I can hold a grudge a loooonnngggg time as you can see.
Don't piss me off. I never forget and I never forgive.
Actually we, as a group, do have more power than you think to at least marginally effect their bottom line. Now, personally, I had about $10K that was going to go for Sony products [new 22" workstation monitor, PS3, two new computers, etc.] next year. That's toast now. Where we as a group come in is our influence on others.
Remember, we are geeks. Who do people come to when they ask for a product recommendation? I don't know about anyone else but I'm at the top of list for every one around here and a heck of a lot of the world online. I total it up each year as certain companies are interested in exactly how much in dollar terms I recommend, and it's well north of a million dollars just online. Now I won't actively say "no, don't ever buy Sony" as I don't want to face potential litigation (been there, done that, burned the t-shirt) BUT I can't recommend when someone asks another product and when they ask about a Sony product I can recommend an equally desirable, and frequently cheaper, alternative of which there are many.
Again, we can only effect the margins but even Sony will notice that marginal change on their bottom line and they do answer to shareholders. Something to think about.
No problem on the grep either here. I'll think about it although my plate is always pretty full. One advantage, if I do the port, I can compile the perl.
Huh? Perl is the first language to go on all my systems here be they Windows or anything else and that dates back to the early '80's. As for curl, it's installed all over my Windows systems including within the Konfabulator directory structure. Just an observation.
That really depends on your skills. No hardware company or vendor questions my diagnoses and yes I do have the tools to do it right. I have no problem tracking down the exact cause of the problem and enough spare parts to do a temporary fix to hold until the replacement shows up except for motherboard failure although I'm seriously considering have a spare on-hand for my future servers provided I don't go name brand on those. The reason I mention that qualification is that HP and Sun seem to have woken up recently and they do have some interesting looking machines on the high end with very nice price-points. I'll make that decision when I have my pennies saved up:-).
Actually I've lost more blood and skin, albeit no fingers (yet!), to Dell and HP/Compaq machines to date. When designing/building/buying a white box the design of the case is near the top of the list of decision factors as I frequently do maintenance and repairs myself, and always after the warranties expire.
I agree with your choices to an certain extent although I do like Intel motherboards when I'm working with Pentiums aside from the fact that I know how to change certain settings in the Northbridge and Southbridge that seriously increase performance. Where I differ is on the Maxtor HD recommendation. I'm finished with Maxtor. After seeing four of them die in the same week, two of the drives less than a year old and none of them more than a year and half old, I switched to Seagates. Not the fastest but they do seem reliable as hell so far and I do like the warranty. I'll find out about the return turn-around if one ever dies.
Good advice in that last paragraph. Research is the first item whenever I'm designing a new machine and the purpose for that machine drives the design. Not some wishlist.
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Having belonged to more than one of these organizations at one time I beg to differ. Actually, my membership in some of them would classify me as a terrorist! Oh well, they were already watching me, and no I don't need a tinfoil hat.
What's strange is that I've spent most of my life doing re-engineering of various processes in the military, business, and government to reduce the amount of resources (personnel, energy, material) required for same, while saving a ton of money, and I do mean a ton of money. So your observation does hit the nail on the head since I seem to feel defensive about what I do/did. Weird. I still have some work to do.
I don't make the universe, I just try to live in it.
Roger that. One of my degrees is in economics. They won't even come close to financial break-even for quite a while, in my not so humble opinion. Aside from up front capital and operational costs you still have those dreaded decommissioning costs. Knowing how people/governments usually behave, I seriously doubt anyone is even thinking about that, yet.
Let the techno-war begin. Hackers (the good kind) on one side, Neo-Luddit RIAA/MPAA on the other. I think I know which will win (us), but it's going to be messy.
BTW, I used to belong to several of eco-freak organizations and tried to pound some sense into them about the risk/cost/benefit ratios of various means of energy production with zero success. Which is why I parted ways with them. I'm ecologically minded, and well trained in the science and the economics of same, they weren't. Those people are not rational, sadly. It's all about what feels good.
Yeah, I found that quite odd as well since I've known of 'working' Tokamaks for a couple of decades now. Typical reportial misreporting/hype. However, it was enough hype to get it posted here! Sooo.... who's the sucker?
Actually they have successfully achieved fusion in a Tokamak. The problem to date now is achieving what is called 'break-even'. Break-even is achieved when you get at least as much power out as you put into the system. It will be interesting to see if they can finally achieve the holy-grail of fusion.
There are no free lunches especially when it comes to nuclear engineering/physics. The promising thing here is that you have the potential to have a much higher power density and cheaper fuel since deuterium, in the form of heavy water recovered from the ocean, is not exactly hard to come by. Desalinization followed by reduction of the water to hydrogen and oxygen and then just gather ye heavy hydrogen in the form of deuterium and tritium. Heck, if they don't use the tritium in the reactor, even though it is a fine lower temperature ignition source, they could always sell it on the open market. It's quite valuable on its own.
No, it has not been struck down as unconstitutional. What SCOTUS ordered was that the issue be returned to the 3rd District Court for trial which is scheduled to begin this October. DoJ is in the discovery phase again and that's why they are going after the search terms for any one given weekly period as well as a random sample of 1,000,000 pages. BTW, not a one of of the companies involved has complied with the subpoena entirely, not that it matters in my book. I'm with Google, the government is on a fishing expedition and requiring this from parties which are not involved with the suit is illegal. Privacy issues are totally irrelevant to the issue at hand.
I don't know what federal budget you've been looking at but the one I've been monitoring has increased funding for education by 86% since Bush II took office. That's readily available to anyone that would bother to look.
Criticize Bush II all you want, but get your facts right.
Let me ask you, and everyone else here, something. If you were handed an order to restrict someone's freedom of speech by taking down a blog or face the consequent arrest, and possible execution, of not only yourself but every other worker at your facility as well as your and their families, what would you do? Remember, these people not only shoot you in the back of the head but charge your family for the bullet. Where do you strike the ethical and/or moral balance there?
I've put my life on the line for the freedoms that many in the US and the rest of the world take for granted. Indeed, I'm terminal as a result of disabilities incurred during that service. Unless you are willing to go over there and do a Tianamen Square number, you are only mouthing phrases without the willingness to back it up.
Eventually when the middle class gets tired of our elites, they'll string up the lot and we'll start the process all over again. It's a natural progression with a long (several thousand year) precedent.
I already severed my relationship with Yahoo! over their reprehensible behavior. Filtering is one thing, turning someone over to that regime is something else entirely. Now I'm forced to re-evaluate my business relationship with MS, although it's a hard call about whether I should inflict pain on MS as a whole for what may be legal behavior of their MSN China operations. I spent much of my life in the military so human rights are near and dear to my heart (despite what some people think, we aren't blood thirsty thugs). It's a tough call and I'm still thinking about it. Legally, they probably behaved correctly. The ethics are tougher to call due to what I perceive as tensions between various considerations. Morally? No question in my book, it was immoral.
This type of dilemma is why I would never consider either operating in China or taking employment there (as if the US Government would let me). I don't need this type of problem, I have enough dilemmas of my own to deal with.
I hope a few people here will take a step back and think for a minute or two before jumping in with all four limbs and barking like mad. These MS employees are in China, not a place on earth exactly noted for recognizing human rights let alone the sanctity of human life. If I were over there and were served with an order to take down that space, I don't exactly think I'd hesitate very long under normal circumstances. [My circumstances are other than normal.]
Frankly, I'd never do business with them for any amount of money in the first place but I'm not exactly in business anymore having spent most of my life defending these rights, but that's me.
If you believe India is a democracy, you are sadly mistaken. It puts on a good simulation of the same though, I must admit.
I have my own pet theory about what is happening at the quantum level but I keep it to myself. It's so bizarre that even I don't believe it {shrug}.
Naviscope is a web proxy that I have successfully used with IE, FF, and Opera, has programmable prefetch (can be set to delay on page load), DNS caching, and time sync and more. It has a default block setting and you then set altered settings for any sites for which you want different settings (it comes with a few already set so you have working examples, e.g. WindowsUpdate). You can block: ads (this doesn't work as well as in the past), backgrounds, blinking text, pop-ups while page is loading or entirely, system information (UserAgent), last page visited (Referrer), cookies, javascript, and those damned sounds. Now true, FF without or with extensions can do a lot of this now, but you can also cover your other browsers with the same settings and just forget about it.
One feature that I didn't list above that has proved invaluable as a web developer here is that you can monitor both incoming and outgoing traffic, i.e. header traffic and do pings and traceroute on them, in a decent graphical window. You can flip that on and off with a toggle. Very handy!
The one glitch I've seen in all these years is that if you increase the number of simultaneous connections above the normal OS default for the network connection, it will crash. I haven't found this that much of a problem.
It's installed on all my systems here and works on all versions of Windows, 95 to 2003, from personal experience here. For FF and Opera, set the normal port 80 traffic to point to 127.0.0.1 port 81. No idea about Vista but I doubt it given the changes to the TCP/IP stack.
Just a thought.
Don't piss me off. I never forget and I never forgive.
Remember, we are geeks. Who do people come to when they ask for a product recommendation? I don't know about anyone else but I'm at the top of list for every one around here and a heck of a lot of the world online. I total it up each year as certain companies are interested in exactly how much in dollar terms I recommend, and it's well north of a million dollars just online. Now I won't actively say "no, don't ever buy Sony" as I don't want to face potential litigation (been there, done that, burned the t-shirt) BUT I can't recommend when someone asks another product and when they ask about a Sony product I can recommend an equally desirable, and frequently cheaper, alternative of which there are many.
Again, we can only effect the margins but even Sony will notice that marginal change on their bottom line and they do answer to shareholders. Something to think about.
No problem on the grep either here. I'll think about it although my plate is always pretty full. One advantage, if I do the port, I can compile the perl.
Huh? Perl is the first language to go on all my systems here be they Windows or anything else and that dates back to the early '80's. As for curl, it's installed all over my Windows systems including within the Konfabulator directory structure. Just an observation.
That really depends on your skills. No hardware company or vendor questions my diagnoses and yes I do have the tools to do it right. I have no problem tracking down the exact cause of the problem and enough spare parts to do a temporary fix to hold until the replacement shows up except for motherboard failure although I'm seriously considering have a spare on-hand for my future servers provided I don't go name brand on those. The reason I mention that qualification is that HP and Sun seem to have woken up recently and they do have some interesting looking machines on the high end with very nice price-points. I'll make that decision when I have my pennies saved up :-).
Actually I've lost more blood and skin, albeit no fingers (yet!), to Dell and HP/Compaq machines to date. When designing/building/buying a white box the design of the case is near the top of the list of decision factors as I frequently do maintenance and repairs myself, and always after the warranties expire.
Good advice in that last paragraph. Research is the first item whenever I'm designing a new machine and the purpose for that machine drives the design. Not some wishlist.