If netbooks continue to grow like this, in a mere ten generations they will weigh 158Kg. Clearly the government should intervene and legislate a maximum weight of 100kg.
It's always bothered me that Finland's involvement in WW2 doesn't receive much attention in the Western press. It's a pretty compelling story once you start researching it.
Yup, damn right. It reminds me of the free(well comparatively) Greeks vs the Persians.
What's cool about the Finns is that even though their main ally was Nazi Germany they managed to block German attempts to Nazify Finland whilst at the same time fighting off the Red Army.
Of course you can sneer at Finlandisation post war, but even that seems to me to be the least bad option for Finland.
I'm playing devil's advocate here, but it seems like H1B visas allow some slack in the system. You save "move elsewhere" like it will be hard to do. One notable feature of big companies is that most of them have subsidiaries all over the place. So if you banned H1B workers in the US, they'd just hire people locally in one of their subsidiaries and close down a US office.
The H1B system - which I don't particularly like because it ties H1B holders to one company - offers US companies a sort of compromise where they can hire a few percent foreign employees at a wage somewhere between the US rate and what they'd get at home in return for keeping that US office open.
Logically it seems like they would be far quicker to sack people in the US and other high wage countries and hire in low wage ones without the H1B system. Of course, that's the unintended consequence of most 'nativist' ideas.
Actually Geocities pages have a cool feature. If more than about a dozen people look at them in a week, they go offline with a "this page has exceeded its bandwidth allowance" message.
So all Googlers can tell is that your page was popular, not that it was a mass of spellink mistakes, glitter gifs, rants about your boss and pictures of you shitfaced with a bunch of losers.
I.e, if anyone apart from your drinking buddies start to look at it and post it on 4chan with comments like "GET THIS FUCKER!!1", poof it self destructs.
Geocities - truly webhosting for people who need to reinvent themselves from time to time.
Given that he disagreed with all the other physicists about politics, how do you know he isn't just the victim of character assasination from them?
I remember reading a hatchet job profile of him in Scientific American and thinking he had a much more realistic view of totalitarianism than Communist sympathizers like Openheimer.
Intel has a reputation as one of the most clued-up open source-friendly hardware companies,...
That's interesting, because I've noticed that many of the FOSS folks I know (the ones that seem especially zealous) have a particular disdain for Intel or anything they've touched. Could anyone clue me in regarding why? Usually when one of my FOSS friends goes on a rant about this, he's too worked up to be comprehensible.
Why do you assume that people who are ranting and are 'too worked up to be comprehensible' even have a point?
Counsel for the tribunal:... were rounded up and placed in concentration camps.
Slobodan Milosevic: Objecting! What is it you are saying by meaning these "camps of concentration"? Eh huh? Are you taking me for wet ass pussy? I kill you!
CFTT: "Concentration camps" is a phrase in common usage, referring to inhumane mass civilian imprisonment environments, Mr Milosevic. The term dates back to the second World War and the camps instituted by the Nazi party.
SM: GODWIN'S LAW! YOU LOSE FAGGOT! HAHAHAHA! You mention Nazis! You lose! Bye bye fucksucker!
In a state of some distress, the board of international judges were forced to rule that, on the technical merits of the case, counsel for the tribunal had indeed mentioned the Nazis, and thus that Milosevic was correct to invoke Godwin's Law.
"Something must be done", commented one onlooker.
The situation above was perhaps fictitious, but its online equivalent happens every day of our lives. Someone is caught in possession of an indefensible view, but manages to get out jail free by provoking his interrogator to make reference to the Nazis and then invoking Godwin's Law. Well, not on this site. The official policy on adequacy.org is that we call a rose a rose, a spade a spade and a Nazi a Nazi. Or sometimes a "fucking Nazi", if we're in the appropriate mood. We encourage the posters to our discussion boards to do likewise.
X is still problematic. "We had to do a lot of damage to X," Arjan said. Some of the work involved eliminating the C compiler run by re-using keyboard mappings, but other work was more temporary. The current line of X development, though, puts more of the hardware detection and configuration into the kernel, which should cut the total startup time. Since part of the kernel's time budget is already spent waiting for hardware to initialize, and it can initialize more than one thing at a time, it's a more efficient use of time to have the kernel initialize the video hardware at the same time it does USB and ATA. X developer Keith Packard, in the audience and also an Intel employee, offered help. Setting the video mode in the kernel would not let the kernel initialize it at the same time as the rest of the hardware, as shown in figure 3. The fast-booting system does not use GDM but boots straight to a user session, running the XFCE desktop environment. Instead of GDM, Arjan said later, a distribution could boot to the desktop session of the last user, but start the screensaver right away. If a different user wanted to log in, he or she could use the screensaver's "switch user" button.
Fundamentally, messing around with enforcing something as abstract as copyright law only even makes sense if you can achieve enough basic order in your society to first enforce the basics (e.g., physical property laws) in a more-or-less even-handed and consistent fashion. It's about priorities. For an "emerging market" country like Nigeria, for instance, enforcing copyright law is just not one of the big-ticket issues. They've got more important fish to fry.
China is only just now starting to approach a point where it would potentially be worth their time to address the issue in any significant way, and frankly, they've got more important issues to deal with as well, not least figuring out how to convert most of their agrarian poor into a workforce. (They've been working on this... gradually. But they're very much not done with it yet.) And if Thailand has reached the point where they have nothing more important to address, they've only got there fairly recently.
I really don't agree with this. The idea is that China, Nigeria and Thailand are run by a strict but well meaning elite, who have a checklist of things to do on the way to first world status.
First the elite in these countries is not in any sense well meaning. They want to stay in power because power means money for them. They are much richer than the average in their country, in fact much richer than the average in a first world country. In fact most of them are just plain stinking rich, rich like a medieval monarch. They are not popular, in fact the vast majority of dirt poor people in their country would probably lynch them if they could. That doesn't happen because the elite have control of the military/police/gangsters.
All of which means that a transitiion to a first world country with all that implies politically is not in their interests. Now ideologies follow peoples interests which means when you talk to them (or more likely the politicians who work for them, the real elite don't give interviews), they will come up with a variety of excuses for not reforming. One of them is the 'reform is important, but we have other priorities'. That's a load of self serving crap though.
Designing and building an effective nuclear weapon using reactor-grade plutonium is less convenient than using weapon-grade plutonium, for several reasons.
Some nuclear weapons are typically designed so that a pulse of neutrons will start the nuclear chain reaction at the optimum moment for maximum yield; background neutrons from plutonium-240 can set off the reaction prematurely, and with reactor-grade plutonium the probability of such "pre-initiation" is large. Pre-initiation can substantially reduce the explosive yield, since the weapon may blow itself apart and thereby cut short the chain reaction that releases the energy.
Nevertheless, even if pre-initiation occurs at the worst possible moment (when the material first becomes compressed enough to sustain a chain reaction) the explosive yield of even a relatively simple first-generation nuclear device would be of the order of one or a few kilotons. While this yield is referred to as the "fizzle yield," a one-kiloton bomb would still have a radius of destruction roughly one-third that of the Hiroshima weapon, making it a potentially fearsome explosive. Regardless of how high the concentration of troublesome isotopes is, the yield would not be less.
It's possible that the North Koreans did this. In fact they messed up even more because they got less than one kt.
Soon after the news broke that North Korea claimed to have conducted a nuclear test, experts realized that the blast had been much smaller than is usual for a first device. Nuclear explosions are measured in kilotons, an energy release equivalent to that of thousands of tons of TNT. Most countries' first tests range from five to 25 kilotons. For example, the U.S.'s 1945 "Trinity" test had a yield of about 20 kilotons. Yet estimates of the North Korean test clustered around half a kiloton. Reportedly, North Korean officials had told China to expect a blast of four kilotons.
Sci am speculates they used reactor grade plutonium and didn't do anything clever or that they got the implosion design wrong. Or maybe both.
Plutonium generated from normal reactors have too high a content of Pu-240 to ever be weapons-grade. It gets bombarded with neutrons for too long, Pu-239 + n -> Pu-240. The containment shell makes it quite cumbersome (to the point of shutting down the reactor for weeks, I believe), so you can't just remove it earlier. So, If you have a containment shell around your reactor, you can't really use it to make weapons grade plutonium.
The Department of Energy is providing additional information related to a 1962 underground nuclear test at the Nevada Test Site that used reactor-grade plutonium in the nuclear explosive.
SPECIFICALLY:
A successful test was conducted in 1962, which used reactor-grade plutonium in the nuclear explosive in place of weapon-grade plutonium.
Everyone now knows it's possible to use reactor grade plutonium in a bomb.
Mad scientist: Mein Führer! I announce Project Untermensch. Crowd: stunned silence Mad scientist: (looks confused for a while, and then realises his mistake)Mr President! I announce Project Subhuman. Crowd: enthusiastic applause
Actually I think China and Russia have always been authoritarian apart from a few brief interregnums. Like the joke about women who date nice guys only when they are 'between bastards', China and Russia only have reformist governments when they are between tyrants. Typically those reformist governments collapse under attack from multiple would be tyrants. One tyrant wins and things go back to normal.
Quite. I can see why Putin's nationalist bluster about not needing the outside world might appeal to Joe Vodkabottle types in the sticks in Russia, but I'm surprised it appeals here on/.
If an American President had said it, you'd be mocking him.
Slashdot Mirror
Neat! 16 apps! One I've heard of, and there are tons of replacements for it on every platform (utorrent). Looks like a fun project, though!
I dunno, wishful thinking mixed with hubris like this usually leads to a funny rant on Linux Hater's Blog.
If netbooks continue to grow like this, in a mere ten generations they will weigh 158Kg. Clearly the government should intervene and legislate a maximum weight of 100kg.
"This one time, at Gitmo..."
It's always bothered me that Finland's involvement in WW2 doesn't receive much attention in the Western press. It's a pretty compelling story once you start researching it.
Yup, damn right. It reminds me of the free(well comparatively) Greeks vs the Persians.
What's cool about the Finns is that even though their main ally was Nazi Germany they managed to block German attempts to Nazify Finland whilst at the same time fighting off the Red Army.
Of course you can sneer at Finlandisation post war, but even that seems to me to be the least bad option for Finland.
I'm playing devil's advocate here, but it seems like H1B visas allow some slack in the system. You save "move elsewhere" like it will be hard to do. One notable feature of big companies is that most of them have subsidiaries all over the place. So if you banned H1B workers in the US, they'd just hire people locally in one of their subsidiaries and close down a US office.
The H1B system - which I don't particularly like because it ties H1B holders to one company - offers US companies a sort of compromise where they can hire a few percent foreign employees at a wage somewhere between the US rate and what they'd get at home in return for keeping that US office open.
Logically it seems like they would be far quicker to sack people in the US and other high wage countries and hire in low wage ones without the H1B system. Of course, that's the unintended consequence of most 'nativist' ideas.
Actually Geocities pages have a cool feature. If more than about a dozen people look at them in a week, they go offline with a "this page has exceeded its bandwidth allowance" message.
So all Googlers can tell is that your page was popular, not that it was a mass of spellink mistakes, glitter gifs, rants about your boss and pictures of you shitfaced with a bunch of losers.
I.e, if anyone apart from your drinking buddies start to look at it and post it on 4chan with comments like "GET THIS FUCKER!!1", poof it self destructs.
Geocities - truly webhosting for people who need to reinvent themselves from time to time.
This post is a joke, I know about
http://web.archive.org/web/20040926033349/http://drachenstern.tripod.com/
So the MAFIAA got going in May 2001. By September there were USPTO hearings planned and lots of people were getting ready to testify against them.
And then 9/11 happened?
Given that he disagreed with all the other physicists about politics, how do you know he isn't just the victim of character assasination from them?
I remember reading a hatchet job profile of him in Scientific American and thinking he had a much more realistic view of totalitarianism than Communist sympathizers like Openheimer.
Well if its not a frozen droplet it must be a human built biosphere.
I learned a lot of things by watching videos on Dick & Jane's paysite.
Run Spot!, Run! is a bit disturbing.
Intel has a reputation as one of the most clued-up open source-friendly hardware companies, ...
That's interesting, because I've noticed that many of the FOSS folks I know (the ones that seem especially zealous) have a particular disdain for Intel or anything they've touched. Could anyone clue me in regarding why? Usually when one of my FOSS friends goes on a rant about this, he's too worked up to be comprehensible.
Why do you assume that people who are ranting and are 'too worked up to be comprehensible' even have a point?
Milosevic Goes Free, Thanks to Godwin's Law!
Counsel for the tribunal: ... were rounded up and placed in concentration camps.
Slobodan Milosevic: Objecting! What is it you are saying by meaning these "camps of concentration"? Eh huh? Are you taking me for wet ass pussy? I kill you!
CFTT: "Concentration camps" is a phrase in common usage, referring to inhumane mass civilian imprisonment environments, Mr Milosevic. The term dates back to the second World War and the camps instituted by the Nazi party.
SM: GODWIN'S LAW! YOU LOSE FAGGOT! HAHAHAHA! You mention Nazis! You lose! Bye bye fucksucker!
In a state of some distress, the board of international judges were forced to rule that, on the technical merits of the case, counsel for the tribunal had indeed mentioned the Nazis, and thus that Milosevic was correct to invoke Godwin's Law.
"Something must be done", commented one onlooker.
The situation above was perhaps fictitious, but its online equivalent happens every day of our lives. Someone is caught in possession of an indefensible view, but manages to get out jail free by provoking his interrogator to make reference to the Nazis and then invoking Godwin's Law. Well, not on this site. The official policy on adequacy.org is that we call a rose a rose, a spade a spade and a Nazi a Nazi. Or sometimes a "fucking Nazi", if we're in the appropriate mood. We encourage the posters to our discussion boards to do likewise.
Her name was Poulsbo. She lived in the kernel tree.
http://lwn.net/Articles/299483/
X is still problematic. "We had to do a lot of damage to X," Arjan said. Some of the work involved eliminating the C compiler run by re-using keyboard mappings, but other work was more temporary. The current line of X development, though, puts more of the hardware detection and configuration into the kernel, which should cut the total startup time. Since part of the kernel's time budget is already spent waiting for hardware to initialize, and it can initialize more than one thing at a time, it's a more efficient use of time to have the kernel initialize the video hardware at the same time it does USB and ATA. X developer Keith Packard, in the audience and also an Intel employee, offered help. Setting the video mode in the kernel would not let the kernel initialize it at the same time as the rest of the hardware, as shown in figure 3. The fast-booting system does not use GDM but boots straight to a user session, running the XFCE desktop environment. Instead of GDM, Arjan said later, a distribution could boot to the desktop session of the last user, but start the screensaver right away. If a different user wanted to log in, he or she could use the screensaver's "switch user" button.
C Compiler? WTF?
Fundamentally, messing around with enforcing something as abstract as copyright law only even makes sense if you can achieve enough basic order in your society to first enforce the basics (e.g., physical property laws) in a more-or-less even-handed and consistent fashion. It's about priorities. For an "emerging market" country like Nigeria, for instance, enforcing copyright law is just not one of the big-ticket issues. They've got more important fish to fry.
China is only just now starting to approach a point where it would potentially be worth their time to address the issue in any significant way, and frankly, they've got more important issues to deal with as well, not least figuring out how to convert most of their agrarian poor into a workforce. (They've been working on this... gradually. But they're very much not done with it yet.) And if Thailand has reached the point where they have nothing more important to address, they've only got there fairly recently.
I really don't agree with this. The idea is that China, Nigeria and Thailand are run by a strict but well meaning elite, who have a checklist of things to do on the way to first world status.
First the elite in these countries is not in any sense well meaning. They want to stay in power because power means money for them. They are much richer than the average in their country, in fact much richer than the average in a first world country. In fact most of them are just plain stinking rich, rich like a medieval monarch. They are not popular, in fact the vast majority of dirt poor people in their country would probably lynch them if they could. That doesn't happen because the elite have control of the military/police/gangsters.
All of which means that a transitiion to a first world country with all that implies politically is not in their interests. Now ideologies follow peoples interests which means when you talk to them (or more likely the politicians who work for them, the real elite don't give interviews), they will come up with a variety of excuses for not reforming. One of them is the 'reform is important, but we have other priorities'. That's a load of self serving crap though.
Bulk that up a bit and you could get work for the Register.
You mean five bags of cheetos per day, a twinkie for lunch and an xkcd T shirt every Christmas?
Come to think of it ads for tampons and breast enhancement are a better insult.
My dear marketing chums, what ads will people with their middle fingers extended at the camera be forced to enjoy?
Burberry
Not condoms, Penis extension ads.
Well one approach would be to not do anything and live with a reduced yield, i.e. 1kt-3kt (depending on who you believe) rather than 10kt.
http://www.ccnr.org/plute.html
Designing and building an effective nuclear weapon using reactor-grade plutonium is less convenient than using weapon-grade plutonium, for several reasons.
Some nuclear weapons are typically designed so that a pulse of neutrons will start the nuclear chain reaction at the optimum moment for maximum yield; background neutrons from plutonium-240 can set off the reaction prematurely, and with reactor-grade plutonium the probability of such "pre-initiation" is large. Pre-initiation can substantially reduce the explosive yield, since the weapon may blow itself apart and thereby cut short the chain reaction that releases the energy.
Nevertheless, even if pre-initiation occurs at the worst possible moment (when the material first becomes compressed enough to sustain a chain reaction) the explosive yield of even a relatively simple first-generation nuclear device would be of the order of one or a few kilotons. While this yield is referred to as the "fizzle yield," a one-kiloton bomb would still have a radius of destruction roughly one-third that of the Hiroshima weapon, making it a potentially fearsome explosive. Regardless of how high the concentration of troublesome isotopes is, the yield would not be less.
It's possible that the North Koreans did this. In fact they messed up even more because they got less than one kt.
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=kims-big-fizzle
Soon after the news broke that North Korea claimed to have conducted a nuclear test, experts realized that the blast had been much smaller than is usual for a first device. Nuclear explosions are measured in kilotons, an energy release equivalent to that of thousands of tons of TNT. Most countries' first tests range from five to 25 kilotons. For example, the U.S.'s 1945 "Trinity" test had a yield of about 20 kilotons. Yet estimates of the North Korean test clustered around half a kiloton. Reportedly, North Korean officials had told China to expect a blast of four kilotons.
Sci am speculates they used reactor grade plutonium and didn't do anything clever or that they got the implosion design wrong. Or maybe both.
Plutonium generated from normal reactors have too high a content of Pu-240 to ever be weapons-grade. It gets bombarded with neutrons for too long, Pu-239 + n -> Pu-240. The containment shell makes it quite cumbersome (to the point of shutting down the reactor for weeks, I believe), so you can't just remove it earlier. So, If you have a containment shell around your reactor, you can't really use it to make weapons grade plutonium.
Not true
Thanks to Jimmy Carter declassifying this
http://www.ccnr.org/plute_bomb.html
The Department of Energy is providing additional information related to a 1962 underground nuclear test at the Nevada Test Site that used reactor-grade plutonium in the nuclear explosive.
SPECIFICALLY:
A successful test was conducted in 1962, which used reactor-grade plutonium in the nuclear explosive in place of weapon-grade plutonium.
Everyone now knows it's possible to use reactor grade plutonium in a bomb.
Mad scientist: Mein Führer! I announce Project Untermensch.
Crowd: stunned silence
Mad scientist: (looks confused for a while, and then realises his mistake)Mr President! I announce Project Subhuman.
Crowd: enthusiastic applause
Actually I think China and Russia have always been authoritarian apart from a few brief interregnums. Like the joke about women who date nice guys only when they are 'between bastards', China and Russia only have reformist governments when they are between tyrants. Typically those reformist governments collapse under attack from multiple would be tyrants. One tyrant wins and things go back to normal.
Quite. I can see why Putin's nationalist bluster about not needing the outside world might appeal to Joe Vodkabottle types in the sticks in Russia, but I'm surprised it appeals here on /.
If an American President had said it, you'd be mocking him.