Joe Biden told NBC a “message” would be sent to Russian President Vladimir Putin over the alleged hacking, with the channel saying the CIA was preparing a retaliatory cyber attack “designed to harass and ’embarrass’ the Kremlin leadership.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov immediately denounced Biden’s remarks, saying Moscow would take precautions to safeguard its interests in the face of the increasing “unpredictability and aggressiveness of the United States”.
Even though it is a tough engineering problem, i'm sure that there are solutions out there.
For instance I have heard many times the nuclear industry to claim that they have solved harder problems with their molten-salt breeder designs.
So if they have found a way to handle super-heated, radioactively saturated, oxidizing salts, how much difficult would be to handle sea-salts at standard temperatures?
They US authorities on '60s started trying gravity on various types of reactors for many years (passive cooling) and it failed miserably all times. Download the excellent BBC's 1992 documentary on the subject A is for Atom, or watch it on YouTube.
It was after they had confirmed the problem that they started installing diesel generators to operate the cooling pumps. The problem was discovered also in USSR. Chernobyl erupted during an experiment to test the cooling apparatus while disconnecting the plant from grid.
The root cause of all this was that they designed the commercial Nuclear Plants by scaling the 60cm diameter Submarine Reactors into 3 meter or even more. That way, the multiplied the fuel mass x1000, and disregarded that fact they were no longer 100 meters deep below the ocean surface, something that would guarantee passive cooling simply by hydrostatic pressure.
SemanticMediaWiki(SMW) can utilize triple-stores (proper RDF databases). But even without using one you can make still run queries from within wiki. You create the new query by using a special query-page and after you are satisfied with it, you embed it in any wiki-page. Next, whenever you view this page, the semantic-results come always fresh on that page. Compared to a RelationDB, SMW comes bundled with UI. You just have to learn a new syntax for running the queries.
Now to get the results in different formats you have multiple choices. I remind you that each wiki-page is at the same time a REST API. And SMW follows this path, providing specific query-parameters for getting query-results as CSV, as XML, as text, as html-tables, or any html-structure. And there are numerous extensions for embeding the results into google-maps(assuming they are geo-coords), event-calendars (assuming dates), graphs, trees, and many more.
Actually nobody likes to be reminded of the hierarchy above him or her. And most of the times the official hierarchy-diagram does not denote the complete command-and-control relations. Therefore, i skipped the political part of the "fairly accurate reflection of the way the business itself is organized" and concentrated on the technical aspects of the business, some of which i described above. Assuming that all technical data were complete, you could grasp the way the busines is organised by running queries resulting in cluster of related entities (hosts, subroutines, data-flows, developers and their capabilities, projects, etc). That way you get the *actual* picture, but only indirectly. But that assumption does not alwayd stand...
Regarding the "gaps", you are quite right. Those departments that lack proper documentation, usually avoid the semantic-wiki altogether. And those that participate in the wikie, spot and fill-in the gaps. I expect that these attitudes come with the territory of beaurocratic companies.
Another interesting observation is the quality of content that each department genarates. Those involved in the marketing produce the most vague page-entities with less interconnections, quite the opposite from the technical stuff that makes a good and innovative use of the wiki. Whenever an administrational person participates, good(tm) things happen, such as resolving HR problems, deciding on postponed decisions, and so on. But those people have hardly the time required to participate.
Last year i used MediaWiki's SemanticWiki to describe the systems, projects, human-resources, external-urls and their dependencies of a telecom.
Besides trivial parent-child relations among developers/employees, departments, etc,
i described system dependencies as semantic-relationsships with names like this: part of, invokes, build by, implements, deployed on, etc.
I described developer responsibilities with names like this: maintained by, coded by, external contact, etc.
Finally, the documentation pages and the refs to external-URLs of projects were reorganized by semantic-relations, like this: javadoc, docUrl, webApp, section of, help page, etc.
I'd also like to point out that you have been eating GM plants your entire life. Wheat? Hundreds of years of selective growing of only the best stock. Its the same thing it's just been done on a farm instead of in a lab.
Do not spread diss-information.
These are not genetically modified, crops, they are artificially-sellected crops.
Had they been in the middle of decommissioning when the quake/tsunami hit there could have been 6 reactor's worth of screaming hot rods in the upper containment pools.
But then they wouldn't need electricity to operate those high-pressure pumps, a simple hose on each one of the 6 reactors would do the job, or even simpler, they could have done it with buckets of sea-water!
OTOH, a Nuclear Core tightly sealed inside a Containenment Vessel is different beast to cool.
Re:Motion blur and bloom effects
on
Framerates Matter
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Speaking of Physics - the properties of a game's physics engine have the properties of a Riemann sum where n=fps. so the higher your FPS the more accurate your physics simulation, even if your monitor cannot discretely display all those frames.
[note: only applies in games where physics ticks/sec are tied to framerate... which is almost all games]
Actually all decent FPS engines have geometry/physics engines quite distinct from the graphics-pipeline!
The geometry/physics engines work on body bounding-boxes and their respective velocity-vectors describing their trajectories, and they try to solve the intersection-problem among all bodies with regard to time, by responding with a timestamp - the collision-timestamp - to questions like this:
"When is body A going to hit body B?"
And on that collision-timestamp an event is scheduled, for the game-logic to kick-in, to calculate the new body-trajectories, or deaths, new body births, sarpnels, whatever.
The physics/geometry usually runs on the game-server *simultanesous* with the clients to avoid sending back-and-forth excessive info into the network. The server is only authoritative for the game-logic decisions. Yet the client runs additionally the graphics-pipeline which uses the next-frame's timestamp to calculate the body-positions on the 3D space.
But sometimes there is a slight delay between the collision-timestamp and the response from the server about what to do next (the game-logic's decision), that may allow a body to be drawn past its collisions point, and this is what make us think that FPS affects physics.
To sum it up, fps has nothing to do with physics, even if some times it seems that way.
The other major problem with nuclear power is it's massive carbon footprint. An average nuclear plant will have about 75%-80% the footprint of a gas/coal powered station. This is due in no small part to the 'carbon cost' of extracting the nuclear ore from the ground, shipping, enriching, shipping, turning into fuel rods, shipping
...
Solar thermal is a much more efficient system of 'nuclear power' and it is very very very clean, with the nuclear reactor being 93 million miles away.:)
It is ok to archive those pirctures, as long as you have taken all precautions to avoid too-easy exposure.
For instance, the wikipedia's page should not include the pictures unprotected,
but should rather use CSS to hide them with a click-of-a-button.
* Some try to define the liberals vs conservatives bipole along the lines of *statism*. * Some (including the parent post) assume it as the ammount of *conservatism*. * Others consider it just for the *authority* included.
In order to define the bipole i prefer Castoriadis's definition of Autonomy. (a notion that assumes more than its name suggests)
* Liberals are those that believe the members of a society should actively and *consciously* institute it [the society]. * Conservatives are those that have little faith in self-institution (those that prefer aristocracy).
Therefore, for me it is much more obvious why many people confuse "conservatism" with private incentive. That's because in US traditionally the Republicans (assumed to be conservatives) support the private sector (the statism bipole).
You obviously confuse Liberals with Democrats and Conservatives with Republicans.
If you think of liberalism as freedom-in-general, not only as an ecocomic-theory, and if you consider as a helping aid the anti-vietnam movement and what they demanded for, then you can find certain answers to almost all the questions you 've asked.
Interesting objections! In order to augment this "law-zilla" proposal and accomodate for your valid points i would add the following guidelines: * Oligonomy, in the ancient-greek sense: The public faith that laws should be as few as possible.
* Law-makers and law-testers should be selected by alotment in order to be more neutraly motivated.
* Having an open process where more people can participate through some CMS may actually *speed-up* thinbgs.
* I dont live in a feds state, so i can't think of a safe counter-meausure. But i'm a european citizen and i'm hoping to live long enough to become a world-citizen. And the world is in a badly need for such a law-zilla.
The ancient Athenians (those were the first to devise the term "democracy") insisted that "voting procedures" tend to select those candidates that the public considers them best suited for the job - that is, the "aristoi", the best, hence "aristocratic" measure.
In contrast, democratic measures such as "sortition", educate the members of the "public" and transform them into "citizens" by assigning to them various public tasks.
Whatever the results of this conversation might be, it will not guide us by itself to democracy - nevertheless. participating into conversations about such matters, and acting upon their outcomes, is a genuine democratic behavior.
In general, democracy is not about procedures (Russia has elections also).
What you propose would be a "direct" or "true" democracy . The very worst of all possible systems, IMO. It's pretty obvious that under a direct democracy anyone whose opinion is at variance with the majority loses rights, status, opportunity, etc. The tyranny of Joe Average and all his church learrnin' would be no improvement for our troubled nation.
Please try to separate "decision-making procedures" from "participating politically into our society". The former has to do with voting schemes, the later is about true (direct?) democracy and does not preclude any specific procedure.
Indeed, the flexibility to choose among procedures would be an integral part of a direct democracy.
Also Joe Average is the guy next to you. If you consider him stupid, then allow me to consider you stupid as well, and stop listening to your suggestions. But it is my stance to want to improve society along with its citizens. Therefore i prefer participatory systems that educate Joe Average.
Besides, how can you stand for juries?
According to your attitude, we should delegate juridical decisions to the "specialists", the judges?
While i absolutely agree with your gut feelings, the logic behined the "Those societies [ancient Greece and the Roman Republic] were far from being democratic. Power was held by an oligarchy of patricians who ruled plebeian and slave classes." part is flawed:
The term 'democracy' has primarily been defined against the state organization used by the ancient Athenians (and about 80 other democratic cities that Plato described, but the manuscripts describing them have long been lost). So it is a strong contradiction to not call these sociaties democratic. Propably you give a more wider meaning to democrarcy.
Actually this is a common fallacy we often do. First we tend to attribute moral value to state systems, democracy is good, oligarchy is bad, benevolent dictatorship is better, and so on (see Cornelius Castoriadis). Often we promote democracy to the top of the list and eventually we expect everything from it! Wel, that's actually utopia, not democracy.
Democracy was never meant to be applied to all (men, women, rich, slaves, dogs, sheeps, trees and houses). This is a complete different topic; the catholicity of a democracy, which is part of the human rights appendix of democracy. And indeed, the later notions are contradictory to democracy, that somehow we, as humans, have to compromise! (for instance, we all agree that dogs are not citizens, so we should be allowed to exterminate them with no penalty...or shouldn't we?)
In principal, you can have a democratic way of ruling for an organization (either a revolutionaly party, or a business company, or a city, or a planet) and at the same time, not to allow anyone from outside to participate to your decision-making process. The definition of the outsiders is a very controversial issue.
And think about it for a while: When Athenians devised democracy, they had slaves, as many other cities did, and yet, they were the ones to discover democracy, not the citizens from other cities! Why?
------------------
Ancient Rome is a totally different story! It is a republic, not a democracy! Expect all kinds of differencies here. Apart from the fact that the public did not govern, the public-related decision-making processes were based mostly on majority and voting, while in ancient Athens, the sortion was in widespread use (see Athenian democracy).
It is obvious that you hate exception handling by the way you code it; it does not even compile!
At the finally clause, you invoke fileReader.close().
But fileReader variable is not visible.
The buffered reader is never closed.
Also you throw a new IOException throwing away the original. Thats is bad!
I would code it much more simple:
final INFILE = "foo.in"; FileReader fileReader = new FileReader(INFILE);// The 'final' is unecessary with current compilers. try { BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(fileReader); try { //... do stuff here with 'in'. } finally { in.close();// IT IS NOT OK, when we cannot close the file! } } finally { fileReader.close(); }
Exception Handling is the topic that most java programmers find hard to grasp. Thats why most programms misuse them. It is not a design issue, it is educational.
User ineterface patents are causing much trouble to users! Imagine to start acquiring patents on accesibility technology! This would be an obvious matter our rights online!
In a simpler case, just think that windscreen wiper's switch control is a switch and not a turning knob (continues) just because of a patent.
I assume that the poster thought that you should care more about freedom-of-use than aples's-new-gadgets, and categorized that way.
Slashdot Mirror
Joe Biden told NBC a “message” would be sent to Russian President Vladimir Putin over the alleged hacking, with the channel saying the CIA was preparing a retaliatory cyber attack “designed to harass and ’embarrass’ the Kremlin leadership.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov immediately denounced Biden’s remarks, saying Moscow would take precautions to safeguard its interests in the face of the increasing “unpredictability and aggressiveness of the United States”.
They took pageup/pagedown keys out, used on every page and introduced silly keys. Why is marketing people so stupid? Why do they win every decision?
Even though it is a tough engineering problem, i'm sure that there are solutions out there.
For instance I have heard many times the nuclear industry to claim that they have solved harder problems with their molten-salt breeder designs.
So if they have found a way to handle super-heated, radioactively saturated, oxidizing salts, how much difficult would be to handle sea-salts at standard temperatures?
They US authorities on '60s started trying gravity on various types of reactors for many years (passive cooling) and it failed miserably all times. Download the excellent BBC's 1992 documentary on the subject A is for Atom, or watch it on YouTube.
It was after they had confirmed the problem that they started installing diesel generators to operate the cooling pumps. The problem was discovered also in USSR. Chernobyl erupted during an experiment to test the cooling apparatus while disconnecting the plant from grid.
The root cause of all this was that they designed the commercial Nuclear Plants by scaling the 60cm diameter Submarine Reactors into 3 meter or even more. That way, the multiplied the fuel mass x1000, and disregarded that fact they were no longer 100 meters deep below the ocean surface, something that would guarantee passive cooling simply by hydrostatic pressure.
SemanticMediaWiki(SMW) can utilize triple-stores (proper RDF databases). But even without using one you can make still run queries from within wiki. You create the new query by using a special query-page and after you are satisfied with it, you embed it in any wiki-page. Next, whenever you view this page, the semantic-results come always fresh on that page. Compared to a RelationDB, SMW comes bundled with UI. You just have to learn a new syntax for running the queries.
Now to get the results in different formats you have multiple choices. I remind you that each wiki-page is at the same time a REST API. And SMW follows this path, providing specific query-parameters for getting query-results as CSV, as XML, as text, as html-tables, or any html-structure. And there are numerous extensions for embeding the results into google-maps(assuming they are geo-coords), event-calendars (assuming dates), graphs, trees, and many more.
Actually nobody likes to be reminded of the hierarchy above him or her. And most of the times the official hierarchy-diagram does not denote the complete command-and-control relations. Therefore, i skipped the political part of the "fairly accurate reflection of the way the business itself is organized" and concentrated on the technical aspects of the business, some of which i described above. Assuming that all technical data were complete, you could grasp the way the busines is organised by running queries resulting in cluster of related entities (hosts, subroutines, data-flows, developers and their capabilities, projects, etc). That way you get the *actual* picture, but only indirectly. But that assumption does not alwayd stand...
Regarding the "gaps", you are quite right. Those departments that lack proper documentation, usually avoid the semantic-wiki altogether. And those that participate in the wikie, spot and fill-in the gaps. I expect that these attitudes come with the territory of beaurocratic companies.
Another interesting observation is the quality of content that each department genarates. Those involved in the marketing produce the most vague page-entities with less interconnections, quite the opposite from the technical stuff that makes a good and innovative use of the wiki. Whenever an administrational person participates, good(tm) things happen, such as resolving HR problems, deciding on postponed decisions, and so on. But those people have hardly the time required to participate.
Last year i used MediaWiki's SemanticWiki to describe the systems, projects, human-resources, external-urls and their dependencies of a telecom.
Besides trivial parent-child relations among developers/employees, departments, etc,
i described system dependencies as semantic-relationsships with names like this: part of, invokes, build by, implements, deployed on, etc.
I described developer responsibilities with names like this: maintained by, coded by, external contact, etc.
Finally, the documentation pages and the refs to external-URLs of projects were reorganized by semantic-relations, like this: javadoc, docUrl, webApp, section of, help page, etc.
I'd also like to point out that you have been eating GM plants your entire life. Wheat? Hundreds of years of selective growing of only the best stock. Its the same thing it's just been done on a farm instead of in a lab.
Do not spread diss-information.
These are not genetically modified, crops, they are artificially-sellected crops.
Had they been in the middle of decommissioning when the quake/tsunami hit there could have been 6 reactor's worth of screaming hot rods in the upper containment pools.
But then they wouldn't need electricity to operate those high-pressure pumps,
a simple hose on each one of the 6 reactors would do the job, or even simpler, they could have done it with buckets of sea-water!
OTOH, a Nuclear Core tightly sealed inside a Containenment Vessel is different beast to cool.
Not true!
The http://twitter.com/#!/followfriday is a user and a frequent-trending trend.
The same with: http://twitter.com/TheWalkingDead
Busybox's shell also supports this expansion, though through build-time config options.
Yet, the couple of linux-devices i have in my home, all contain them.
Why do so many programmers are still unaware of Bash's string-parsing built-in capabilities,
and prefer to use the 'basename' command instead?
For the above renaming one would suffice to type:
mv $f ${f%.*}.jpg
See: http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bashref.html#Shell-Parameter-Expansion
Speaking of Physics - the properties of a game's physics engine have the properties of a Riemann sum where n=fps. so the higher your FPS the more accurate your physics simulation, even if your monitor cannot discretely display all those frames.
[note: only applies in games where physics ticks/sec are tied to framerate... which is almost all games]
Actually all decent FPS engines have geometry/physics engines quite distinct from the graphics-pipeline!
The geometry/physics engines work on body bounding-boxes and their respective velocity-vectors describing their trajectories, and they try to solve the intersection-problem among all bodies with regard to time, by responding with a timestamp - the collision-timestamp - to questions like this:
"When is body A going to hit body B?"
And on that collision-timestamp an event is scheduled, for the game-logic to kick-in, to calculate the new body-trajectories, or deaths, new body births, sarpnels, whatever.
The physics/geometry usually runs on the game-server *simultanesous* with the clients to avoid sending back-and-forth excessive info into the network. The server is only authoritative for the game-logic decisions. Yet the client runs additionally the graphics-pipeline which uses the next-frame's timestamp to calculate the body-positions on the 3D space.
But sometimes there is a slight delay between the collision-timestamp and the response from the server about what to do next (the game-logic's decision), that may allow a body to be drawn past its collisions point, and this is what make us think that FPS affects physics.
To sum it up, fps has nothing to do with physics, even if some times it seems that way.
The other major problem with nuclear power is it's massive carbon footprint. An average nuclear plant will have about 75%-80% the footprint of a gas/coal powered station. This is due in no small part to the 'carbon cost' of extracting the nuclear ore from the ground, shipping, enriching, shipping, turning into fuel rods, shipping
...
Solar thermal is a much more efficient system of 'nuclear power' and it is very very very clean, with the nuclear reactor being 93 million miles away. :)
Please, somebody mod parent up as informative.
It is ok to archive those pirctures, as long as you have taken all precautions to avoid too-easy exposure. For instance, the wikipedia's page should not include the pictures unprotected, but should rather use CSS to hide them with a click-of-a-button.
GPL protects the freedom of the many (the *recipients*), since almost all *producers* are recipients of code for any used libs.
* Some try to define the liberals vs conservatives bipole along the lines of *statism*.
* Some (including the parent post) assume it as the ammount of *conservatism*.
* Others consider it just for the *authority* included.
In order to define the bipole i prefer Castoriadis's definition of Autonomy.
(a notion that assumes more than its name suggests)
* Liberals are those that believe the members of a society should actively and *consciously* institute it [the society].
* Conservatives are those that have little faith in self-institution (those that prefer aristocracy).
Therefore, for me it is much more obvious why many people confuse "conservatism" with private incentive.
That's because in US traditionally the Republicans (assumed to be conservatives) support the private sector (the statism bipole).
I consider all three assumptions wrong!
You obviously confuse Liberals with Democrats and Conservatives with Republicans.
If you think of liberalism as freedom-in-general, not only as an ecocomic-theory,
and if you consider as a helping aid the anti-vietnam movement and what they demanded for,
then you can find certain answers to almost all the questions you 've asked.
Interesting objections!
In order to augment this "law-zilla" proposal and accomodate for your valid points i would add the following guidelines:
* Oligonomy, in the ancient-greek sense: The public faith that laws should be as few as possible.
* Law-makers and law-testers should be selected by alotment in order to be more neutraly motivated.
* Having an open process where more people can participate through some CMS may actually *speed-up* thinbgs.
* I dont live in a feds state, so i can't think of a safe counter-meausure.
But i'm a european citizen and i'm hoping to live long enough to become a world-citizen.
And the world is in a badly need for such a law-zilla.
The ancient Athenians (those were the first to devise the term "democracy") insisted that "voting procedures" tend to select those candidates that the public considers them best suited for the job - that is, the "aristoi", the best, hence "aristocratic" measure.
In contrast, democratic measures such as "sortition", educate the members of the "public" and transform them into "citizens" by assigning to them various public tasks.
Whatever the results of this conversation might be, it will not guide us by itself to democracy - nevertheless. participating into conversations about such matters, and acting upon their outcomes, is a genuine democratic behavior.
In general, democracy is not about procedures (Russia has elections also).
Please try to separate "decision-making procedures" from "participating politically into our society". The former has to do with voting schemes, the later is about true (direct?) democracy and does not preclude any specific procedure.
Indeed, the flexibility to choose among procedures would be an integral part of a direct democracy.
Also Joe Average is the guy next to you. If you consider him stupid, then allow me to consider you stupid as well, and stop listening to your suggestions. But it is my stance to want to improve society along with its citizens. Therefore i prefer participatory systems that educate Joe Average.
Besides, how can you stand for juries? According to your attitude, we should delegate juridical decisions to the "specialists", the judges?
While i absolutely agree with your gut feelings, the logic behined the "Those societies [ancient Greece and the Roman Republic] were far from being democratic. Power was held by an oligarchy of patricians who ruled plebeian and slave classes." part is flawed:
The term 'democracy' has primarily been defined against the state organization used by the ancient Athenians (and about 80 other democratic cities that Plato described, but the manuscripts describing them have long been lost). So it is a strong contradiction to not call these sociaties democratic. Propably you give a more wider meaning to democrarcy.
Actually this is a common fallacy we often do. First we tend to attribute moral value to state systems, democracy is good, oligarchy is bad, benevolent dictatorship is better, and so on (see Cornelius Castoriadis). Often we promote democracy to the top of the list and eventually we expect everything from it! Wel, that's actually utopia, not democracy.
Democracy was never meant to be applied to all (men, women, rich, slaves, dogs, sheeps, trees and houses). This is a complete different topic; the catholicity of a democracy, which is part of the human rights appendix of democracy. And indeed, the later notions are contradictory to democracy, that somehow we, as humans, have to compromise!
(for instance, we all agree that dogs are not citizens, so we should be allowed to exterminate them with no penalty...or shouldn't we?)
In principal, you can have a democratic way of ruling for an organization (either a revolutionaly party, or a business company, or a city, or a planet) and at the same time, not to allow anyone from outside to participate to your decision-making process. The definition of the outsiders is a very controversial issue.
And think about it for a while: When Athenians devised democracy, they had slaves, as many other cities did, and yet, they were the ones to discover democracy, not the citizens from other cities! Why?
------------------
Ancient Rome is a totally different story! It is a republic, not a democracy! Expect all kinds of differencies here. Apart from the fact that the public did not govern, the public-related decision-making processes were based mostly on majority and voting, while in ancient Athens, the sortion was in widespread use (see Athenian democracy).
At least, here in Crete, at the first Philosophical convention (International Conference on Ethics & Politics, http://www.philosophycrete.edu.gr/dyncat.cfm?catid =1018), a 5-days event has no speaker with a CS curriculum.
Isn't that provokative ?
It is obvious that you hate exception handling by the way you code it; it does not even compile!
I would code it much more simple:
Exception Handling is the topic that most java programmers find hard to grasp. Thats why most programms misuse them. It is not a design issue, it is educational.
User ineterface patents are causing much trouble to users! Imagine to start acquiring patents on accesibility technology! This would be an obvious matter our rights online!
In a simpler case, just think that windscreen wiper's switch control is a switch and not a turning knob (continues) just because of a patent.
I assume that the poster thought that you should care more about freedom-of-use than aples's-new-gadgets, and categorized that way.