The subtext behind this issue of what source of energy does the most damage is control. Nuclear power plants are big, long term projects which require lots of investment from large Governments. Because of this they increase the reliance which people have for those Governments. You are locked in to both the technology and the political environment which brought it in to being. So people who want political independence on a smaller scale (state, local or individual) oppose nuclear power. They want technology they can control. They want it to be within their own reach.
Funny reading a post about people hacking up reactor cooling solutions with radioactive water pooling all over the place on a site called nuclearpoweryesplease.org
I hear that their complaints department is the only part of the company which makes a profit, and that they will be first against the wall when the revolution comes. Can anybody confirm this?
Going from CO2 to C and O2 is an endothermic reaction. You can heat the CO2 and crack it into those components. The heat can come from concentrated solar energy or a fission reactor. Beyond that you would have to look at hypothetical fusion power, etc. Plant life can do the job as well. Thats a different sort of solar power. I doubt that you could get much in the way of earth life to live on Mars as it is now.
You would be better off using your fissile materials at the surface where the heat they generate would be usable to you immediately. I reckon you could actually create a pretty good magnetic field for Mars by working entirely at the surface. Just build a planet spanning electromagnet using superconductors. You would need a lot of energy, but terraforming is going to be expensive anyway. You pretty much have to assume cheap, large scale nuclear fusion.
A mass of solid CO2 would make a great place for a habitat. Tunnel into it and use steam from your fission reactor (you have one of those, right?) to create a dome by sublimation. Coat the inside of the dome with frozen water to keep the CO2 out of your air as much as possible.
I think I have lost my copy of Red Mars. Maybe I should buy it again.
it's criminally negligent to use linked lists to resolve collisions
Really? Back before OO runtimes gave us Vector and Hashtable classes I used to build data structures like this.
Declare an array A of 100 pointers to a struct
Hash each item of data and mod 100 to get an index I into the array
malloc a struct M
Set M->next=&A[I]
Set A[I]=M
Its very fast on write. On read you get the hash, mod by 100 and do a linear search on the linked list. If the lists look like getting too long then increase the size of the array to 1000 or something. Its quick and dirty. I don't think I ever deleted items from the linked lists. I usually put an invalid flag on records I didn't want, but my applications usually just grew until the program exited.
Mixing hashes and linked lists is basically an indexed sequential database. Not revolutionary stuff.
Makes me wonder if IBM and DEC/HP have good, well documente prior art. Maybe there is no benefit for them in getting involved in this. Memory management and file system code in RSX and VMS from the 1970s to 1980s should have plenty of examples.
the record search means including a means for identifying and removing at least some of the expired ones of the records from the linked list when the linked list is accessed,
Now this bit is just bad design. Garbage collection should not be a side effect of searching. It might make sense to do garbage collection on write if space is limited, but deleting expired records should happen as part of a distinct operation.
Unless I am reading this wrong. I wonder if the infringing code in linux could be rewritten around this?
More to the point, can I boot this device from the SD card slot? My eeepc can do that. Thats how I install ubuntu. Maybe its not so bad to not have root access on a phone (I still want it though) but its pretty important to me on a laptop.
Yeah I think the lesson from Australia is that you have to make a quick, clean change. Don't leave the old system in place to make it easier. Change all the signs on the designated day and recycle the old ones. The only half way solution I recall was the 75km/h speed limits. It took a long while to change those to multiples of 10km/h.
The local cricket club has a machine for pitching cricket balls. You drop a ball in a hole at the back and it flies out a hole on the other side. I assume it gets squished between two rotating wheels. Don't they use these in base ball?
All the signs would need changing, all the measurements in laws, all the schools, and much of the culture. For a smaller country it's more practical to change those all over in a short period, but for a larger country like the US it would be very expensive and take a long time.
Sorry I disagree with you on this. My country (Australia) changed in the early 1970s. Our land area is almost as much as the US while we have less than a tenth of the US population. Because of our lower population density the job must have been more difficult for us. One problem seems to have been regressive private schools. They used any loophole they could find to keep teaching imperial units. When I started college many students who had been to private schools suddenly had a lot of problems with metric units.
Incidentally I read somewhere that the US has a federal office for metric conversion. It is staffed with three people.
But its not hard enough now. The US should invent their own totally novel system of measures and lock it down with patents, trademarks and copyrights. Charge a steep fee to foreign companies who want to use it. That'l show those nasty foreigners!
Slashdot Mirror
The subtext behind this issue of what source of energy does the most damage is control. Nuclear power plants are big, long term projects which require lots of investment from large Governments. Because of this they increase the reliance which people have for those Governments. You are locked in to both the technology and the political environment which brought it in to being. So people who want political independence on a smaller scale (state, local or individual) oppose nuclear power. They want technology they can control. They want it to be within their own reach.
Funny reading a post about people hacking up reactor cooling solutions with radioactive water pooling all over the place on a site called nuclearpoweryesplease.org
I think its too late for digg to gain from this. However I have been spending more time on slashdot in the last couple of days...
I hear that their complaints department is the only part of the company which makes a profit, and that they will be first against the wall when the revolution comes. Can anybody confirm this?
Concurrent access: Trying to make a clean distinction between read only and read/write transactions.
Dealing with load: do your garbage collection when things are quiet.
The labor party seem to have shelved it though filtering is still an official policy for the future. Note that I used present tense.
Going from CO2 to C and O2 is an endothermic reaction. You can heat the CO2 and crack it into those components. The heat can come from concentrated solar energy or a fission reactor. Beyond that you would have to look at hypothetical fusion power, etc. Plant life can do the job as well. Thats a different sort of solar power. I doubt that you could get much in the way of earth life to live on Mars as it is now.
Brings to mind the presumed drop of water on the phoenix lander strut. And yeah, that is a short supply.
CO2 ice is more volatile than water ice, which is why it is being seen at the south pole. There should be more water ice than CO2 ice on Mars.
You would be better off using your fissile materials at the surface where the heat they generate would be usable to you immediately. I reckon you could actually create a pretty good magnetic field for Mars by working entirely at the surface. Just build a planet spanning electromagnet using superconductors. You would need a lot of energy, but terraforming is going to be expensive anyway. You pretty much have to assume cheap, large scale nuclear fusion.
A mass of solid CO2 would make a great place for a habitat. Tunnel into it and use steam from your fission reactor (you have one of those, right?) to create a dome by sublimation. Coat the inside of the dome with frozen water to keep the CO2 out of your air as much as possible.
I think I have lost my copy of Red Mars. Maybe I should buy it again.
I would like to think New Zealand's web is more open than Australia's we do have a filter but it has not been forced on ISPs.
How is that more open? Australia doesn't have a filter at all.
Or in fact if you want to host a porn site. The restrictions are pretty serious. Better to look overseas.
I believe there is a patent on the wheel here in Australia but there is also a law against frivolous litigation.
it's criminally negligent to use linked lists to resolve collisions
Really? Back before OO runtimes gave us Vector and Hashtable classes I used to build data structures like this.
Its very fast on write. On read you get the hash, mod by 100 and do a linear search on the linked list. If the lists look like getting too long then increase the size of the array to 1000 or something. Its quick and dirty. I don't think I ever deleted items from the linked lists. I usually put an invalid flag on records I didn't want, but my applications usually just grew until the program exited.
Mixing hashes and linked lists is basically an indexed sequential database. Not revolutionary stuff.
Makes me wonder if IBM and DEC/HP have good, well documente prior art. Maybe there is no benefit for them in getting involved in this. Memory management and file system code in RSX and VMS from the 1970s to 1980s should have plenty of examples.
the record search means including a means for identifying and removing at least some of the expired ones of the records from the linked list when the linked list is accessed,
Now this bit is just bad design. Garbage collection should not be a side effect of searching. It might make sense to do garbage collection on write if space is limited, but deleting expired records should happen as part of a distinct operation.
Unless I am reading this wrong. I wonder if the infringing code in linux could be rewritten around this?
More to the point, can I boot this device from the SD card slot? My eeepc can do that. Thats how I install ubuntu. Maybe its not so bad to not have root access on a phone (I still want it though) but its pretty important to me on a laptop.
With removable cards I can carry a lot of data around in my wallet.
Cricket balls would do more damage ;)
Still there's lessons there to be learnt
Yeah I think the lesson from Australia is that you have to make a quick, clean change. Don't leave the old system in place to make it easier. Change all the signs on the designated day and recycle the old ones. The only half way solution I recall was the 75km/h speed limits. It took a long while to change those to multiples of 10km/h.
The local cricket club has a machine for pitching cricket balls. You drop a ball in a hole at the back and it flies out a hole on the other side. I assume it gets squished between two rotating wheels. Don't they use these in base ball?
All the signs would need changing, all the measurements in laws, all the schools, and much of the culture. For a smaller country it's more practical to change those all over in a short period, but for a larger country like the US it would be very expensive and take a long time.
Sorry I disagree with you on this. My country (Australia) changed in the early 1970s. Our land area is almost as much as the US while we have less than a tenth of the US population. Because of our lower population density the job must have been more difficult for us. One problem seems to have been regressive private schools. They used any loophole they could find to keep teaching imperial units. When I started college many students who had been to private schools suddenly had a lot of problems with metric units.
Incidentally I read somewhere that the US has a federal office for metric conversion. It is staffed with three people.
But its not hard enough now. The US should invent their own totally novel system of measures and lock it down with patents, trademarks and copyrights. Charge a steep fee to foreign companies who want to use it. That'l show those nasty foreigners!
A metre can be divided into 1000, 500, 250, 200, 100, 50, 20, 10, 5, 2 millimetres, and so on.