I'm so glad to be living in Australia at this time.
Last week we get news that the government is forcing all ISP's to retain metadata information for all usage by all subscribers 'coz of terrorists'. Now we get news that the current data ISP's have, which is only supposed to be used for billing issues, is being used to identify and sue subscribers who had their IP in a torrent tracker 2 years ago!.
I analysed the bill several weeks ago. I wrote to *all* the senators and tried to stop it and I tried to raise awareness, I was on a public forum answering questions and worked pretty much to 3am every night for 2 weeks trying to stop it from passing. I even tried submitting a slashdot story that it was about to pass. It was quite clear to see that it was going after downloaders otherwise why would the ACMA be referenced in the bill.
But it is worse than that, there is little doubt that these systems will be a blackhat's wet dream because the data will be in one place, IMHO a free for all for online fraud. I suspect that most Australians will be furious when they realise that they are being told to pay extra internet fees for a system, that will create new classes of fraud crime against them, is of limited use to police, by businesses who don't want them there to complicate infrastructure who will seek taxpayer assistance to fund and install them.
I tried pretty hard. I won't post the whole letter here, as it is four pages of analysis of an 80 page bill that is deeply flawed and now law. This extract is core to the problems with the bill:
As for the Bill, the criticisms I derive from part one follow:
The 'Implementation Plan' IP under the act is too loosely defined in terms of data encryption and access requirements. The government should implement MANDATORY public key encryption standards for business that promotes business and consumer confidence. The act should also refer to data access standards that produce an audit trail for the Privacy Commission PC so abuses can be tracked and prosecuted, if required.
Encrypted access for law enforcement with revocable keys controlled by the Privacy Commission (P.C) and also accessible by the member of the public who produced the data. Either the Telecommunications Ombudsman (T.O) or the P.C should have the power to review the audit trail of accesses to the data and revoke access based on their findings and satisfactory resolution of a complaint. A person's access to their own data should not be audit-able and a complaint mechanism should exist through both the P.C and the T.O who receive increased powers to prosecute abuses, which would serve to stimulate business and consumer confidence because of the protections offered.
No definition of what the "plan" (under the Bill) requires for access under a Communications Access Controller's CAC - implementing the technology requires 'requirements' and standardisation however the Bill offers none. The public should be able to access the data collected about themselves and have assurances that it has an expiry date.
Clarification and revision based of the Bills inevitable and chilling effects mean consumer and business confidence will be affected for years, policing will receive questionable, if any, benefit. The Bill however is good for centralising data collection techniques for foreign organised crime whose work will be greatly reduced subsequent to the passage of this Bill.
Criticisms of specific sections in Part one:
187AA.3A,3B remove because it introduces the possibility that any e-commerce business that is not a telecommunications provider can be forced to retain data and bare the cost of limiting their business throughput and capacity for expansion. For business this represents a rising linear cost that increases with additional customers.
187B.2 Needs definition of who a CAC role answers to, which department, and limits to retention de
It really sounds more like you're suffering from a case of bad management, so I'll let you vent.
perhaps I needed to vent.
It's more a case of resolving bad business decisions and being the third party witness to the damage done. Often the people who made the decisions try to cover their ass regarding the choices they make and this often snowballs into a critical situation where people's lively hoods are on the line.
The 'reboot' mentality of Windows products shows that, whilst the bar to entry is very low, so to is the bar for failure. Good design practice is mandatory for Windows uptime and remains a hidden cost of the Windows model that is often regarded as unnecessary. Consequently technical debt in MS products is a common failing that is always present. You can try to fix it but the ship is sailing.
In the *ix space, the bar to entry is higher however the bar to failure is very high and technical debt has to be very high to produce failure, which, as opposed to windows systems, manifests in a slow and predictable way that don't result in downtime. Once coupled with the same good design practices *ix based systems are practically unstoppable. They are the internet.
So back to the question, show me a list of 10 common *day to day* operations that can be achieved in 365 but not on LibreOffice?
Nothing sucks quite as bad as being set up to fail
Corporate games are what they are. No one likes them but you have to know how to play to survive. I've worked with MS products since DOS and observed many of the shitty things that they do.
They have to play nice now, because Open Source offerings are a more powerful and flexible paradigm for modern business that yields greater returns over time. The ecosystem of software is larger, growing and permanent because it has its own intrinsic rights.
So much so that the discussion is about which Open Source licence model.
Look there's a lot about MS that I'll call their bullshit on.
The fact they have been found by a court of law to be criminal, engaging in predatory monopolistic practices to maintain their dominance in the market. They have acted that way for about 30 years, they were ok in the beginning however they continued to build antagonistic relationships that business had to submit to.
Business prefers open source because it, by default, doesn't have that practice attached to it. So business does not have to endure the antagonism anymore so, given the opportunity that Open Source gives them, business gets out of that relationship quickly.
I don't hear a lot of great stuff about Windows Server, either.
MS Server products are an also ran, they simply are not taken seriously in high end data center environments. They cannot compete with the agility of the Open Source cost model.
But Nadella is just proving to be highly competent in pushing MS's direction, so in that case we'll see.
Windows provides a great desktop offering with Windows 7 and perhaps 10 will be, we will see how he captains the ship. Microsoft failings though are like tears in the sails though, the wind blows and the ship moves with no regard for who or what is in the way. Much the way it always has it will go forward squashing anything in the way, just more carefully, as most business does not want to work with abusive partners, no matter how nice they are being now.
Thanks for the NASA study, it's a little lighter than I expected. It only talks about carbon deaths and assumes deaths from nuclear effluent do not exist. Also, as I said the IAEA has publishing interdiction orders over the WHO in all matters nuclear which I see cited in the references which automatically bias the report.
From the article:
The study also excludes aspects of nuclear power that cannot be easily quantified, such as deaths from nuclear proliferation.
That is basically all of them.
1. Cancers from bio-accumulation of radio isotopes are not easily quantified because they travel through the food chain for a random period of time and when they are finally ingested by a human there is another 6 years before it gestates into cancer depending where in the body it end up.
2. Transgenic disease that affect subsequent generations via absorption of low level radio isotope emitters that didn't kill the parents and damage DNA.
3. Failed pregnancies from absorption of medium level emitters of radioactivity.
4. Not including deaths from Nuclear proliferation isn't reasonable because U-238 is a by-product of fuel enrichment used in warfare. The radio-isotopes there will continue killing for generations.
That said, I'll go over it again when I have more time to absorb it. I appreciate you sending it to me.
As I said, it uses the flawed results of the Vattenfal study:
I'm not certain what NASA/UN studies you refer to? I do know that some rely on a document sponsored by the nuclear industry player Vattenfal, as does the IPCC, which gives them an overly optimistic picture of what is achievable with Nuclear.
Which is exactly what the bloomberg you have sent me indirectly does, as I've already read the study the UN and IPPC based their findings on.
Not if dealt with correctly.
And yet it still isn't being dealt with correctly and every day the Nuclear Industry releases more radio isotopes into the environment. I'm not interested in talking about another fuel cycle until this one is managed.
Um... What journal was that published? Who reviewed that?
The original report was prepared for the Dutch government. The report of 1982 and its methodology has been peer reviewed by the publication of a short version in Energy Policy in 1985 [Q2]. It was also referenced by the European Parliament and updated in 2000/2001, again in 2005,2008 and 2012 before it was published on the web. It has been cited over 70 times.
All I see is a website that seems to be dedicated to anti-nuclear. Some of the reports listed at the end are in journals.
If your position is pro-nuclear then you'll characterize the information that way. They are scientists. If you read the thing they tell you they start with no fixed position and examine the lesser known parts of the industry.
Your assumptions are based on a flawed study that has not been peer reviewed and will soon been out of date. It is often used in the way you have used it, however if you read it you'll discover how flawed it is (and now, difficult to find). I'm not criticizing you, btw, it's a deception that was played on all of us. I didn't buy it and it did not take much research to see what a fragile house of cards it was.
Still, it will be interesting to see what happens over the next 4 years or whenever the next IPCC document is due.
LibreOffice is at least a decade behind MS Office and I can't believe I ever thought them equal. People here are probably going to think I'm some shill for MS but I'm not, I'm just not afraid to throw a good product under the bus without ever trying it and getting a grip.
That's because you are a shill, maybe not paid, but still a shill. After being locked into Word and its inconcrappable file formats *with itself* and having to reinstall older versions of the software to restore documents, output them in text and reformat them *yeah* there is a BIG reason to stop using MS Anything. 80% of people out there use 20% of the functionality of a Word Processor like LibreOffice or Office 365.
Show me a list of 10 common *day to day* operations that can be achieved in 365 but not on LibreOffice because the UK government disagrees with you and being locked into MS Word products. Even their support of ODF was something they are unwilling to do voluntarily so until you have experienced the costs of freeing yourself from such a lock I respectfully suggest you STFU.
And I know there's a lot of MS hate from IT people, and sure, I hear you, they could do a lot more to make it better for all you tech wizards that know networking like the back of your hand. It's probably that which is clouding your judgment of their system.
Professionally my judgement of Microsoft came from experiencing the heavy handed way they dealt with customers, their vendors, the ruthless way in which they dispatched both their competition and worse, anyone who ever partnered with Microsoft have the intellectual assets of many good start-ups who just wanted to get a good idea out there and make a living from it, plundered.
I have seen businesses, who put their faith in Microsoft, destroyed by Microsoft and everyday businesses who had nothing to do with them, aside for it being on their desktop, be the subject of audits for licensing, which Microsoft would resolve by squeezing that customer for everything they could get simply because they didn't know how to handle their software licenses.
Microsoft has mercilessly bashed, berated, ridiculed, marginalized, litigated and patent harassed the open source community for over a decade all the while using whatever BSD and apache licensed software they could get away with not crediting in widows.
Any company smaller than a government were harassed with lawsuits and endless appeals on the details until MS got their way, making it easier for many to just not fight and give Microsoft what they wanted.
And if you were a government, like the US government, lobbying and whatever sleight of hand could be used from the dirty tricks department to again, get their way.
Fortunately the GPL is seeding the exact type of business models that Microsoft cannot compete with or touch. They may always be around, but every day they get less relevant and because of that the growth of Information Technology can shed the atrophy attached with being shackled to the Windows paradigm.
That's what I really get from people on the MS hate train, just a common lack of understanding about what the non-programmer thinks and feels.
Until you have worked 36 hours, non stop trying to rescue a business who are going to go under and everyone is going to loose their jobs, stop telling me I should spend my time 'understanding about what the non-programmer thinks and feels'. Try and have a little empathy for the programmer who worked all night so you could get paid when payroll was down, then came in in the morning, looking like shit, to make sure everything is ok only to cop a serve about how much effort he puts into his appearance.
In case you didn't realize it wasting time trolling through registry entries or recovering data or work out why NTFS filesystem performance falls off after some timed license event ain't how I want to spend my day. Making IT easy for you, is hard work and, occasionall
Nuclear waste - The federal government charged a mandatory fee in exchange for a promise to dispose of the nuclear waste. Yucca Mountain never opened, ergo the federal government renegaded on it's deal, but it's still collecting the fees.
I would look at Yucca like a very valuable prototyping exercise for a facility that goes back to the original DOE 'defence in depth' specification. I would think that some very valuable lessons were learned there and there might be some things it is suitable for.
Having the money available to do such a thing is a good first starting place and it makes sense to collect the money from the entities creating this externality, especially when you consider that the coal industry has, and continues, to get away with not paying for their externalities for so long.
If the Nuclear Industry continues to pay that fee and lobbies hard for a proper DOE facility to be constructed then perhaps they can claim a moral victory over the coal industry. Continuing to collect fees from them to build a facility is the right thing to do.
Without them stepping in, the power companies would have figured something out themselves.
Industry has a very poor record of dealing with its externalities and the Nuclear Industry has already expressed its resistance to paying for the handling of spent fuel. I don't see that happening, Dixie Lee Ray's comments decades ago highlighted the need for collecting the fees from the Nuclear Industry for spent fuel containment.
Lead is highly toxic by way of being a heavy metal and most versions of it are perfectly stable.
Yes, and look how long it took for us to get to handling that properly, industry had to be told what to do because of the harm it caused.
My opinion is that if we bury it X deep, that any future humans that go digging it up should be able to determine that it's toxic and mildly radioactive and know how to handle it if they're going that deep into the ground.
I think that there are different grades of materials at different levels of toxicity. As long as the approach to placing and designing the disposal facility uses good scientific and engineering principles (as opposed to political and lobbying principles) then I have no problem with that.
You're forgetting the 'more radioactive = shorter halflife' thing. The problem with nuclear waste and current standards isn't the short lived isotopes, it's the less radioactive long half life isotopes.
No, I'm not. I'm considering the life of the reactor vs the amount of fissile ash it produces over its lifespan.
Pull out the long-life ones, feed them through the reactors again until there's only short half-life isotopes left. Yes, they'd be radioactive as all hell. But only for a short period of time. "A Candle that burns twice as bright burns for half as long" type thing.
If you consider such an infrastructure you are going to be handling both types of materials, fuel and fissile ash, in the same facility. The reason to do it that way is to be able to fuel, de-fuel, operate and, dispose of the reactor, it situ, so there is no need to use energy to disassemble it move or disturb it. You derive maximum energetic efficiency from the reactor, handle fuel containment, re-processing and, fissile ash disposal in the same facility.
Oh, and I disagree with you on our ability to construct a facility that would last 10k years. It'd be expensive, but we can do it rather easily.
Well I would like to see that, which is why I support collecting the fees from the operators who produce the waste product. Not doing so is effectively taxing future generation. I would like to see the political will to actually do something that bypasses political and commercial concerns and actu
It wouldn't matter if the Republican party nominated a Hispanic Lesbian to run against her. Feinstein is part of the machine and will return again and again.
I work at NASA and you would be surprised how accurate your statement is.
That's pretty much the modus operandi for many government departments and quite a hilarious thing to watch sometimes. Have you considered positioning your projects to take advantage of these moronic times to secure the equipment you need?
I love the work NASA does, that you do - even though I don't know the specifics. I just wish your work wasn't interfered with so much and used for porq. I think the risk adversity has handicapped the organizations capacity to achieve. With the amount of interference you guys suffer I'm amazed at what you are able to achieve while the goal posts are shifted around in front of you. Bravo to you sir!
It would have been more entertaining if the core "novel" part of the story (surprise, it wasn't a game after all!) actually did surprise you.
The surprise wasn't about whether the war was real or not, it was the human condition of Ender so that you had no choice but to emapthize for him when he finally found out what was going on.
Of course they are the question about the loss is whether there is habitat loss or not.
* After wildfires, trees naturally re-grow.
The issue here is the increasing intensity of wildfires and bushfires as global temperatures rise and forests dry out.
Fire is generally a welcome component of the functioning of some types of forests, like bushland, burning off old growth and releasing minerals back into the soil, burning seed casings for new growth with older trees surviving and growing back in about 2-5 years. In other type of forests, like rainforest, fire is not a component. Alpine forests also behave differently.
From my understanding the measurement is done with a metal square placed on the subject forest floor and the leaf letter from the trees containing sticks, seeds and leaves, which provides habitat for bugs and the creatures that eat them, is measured. In bushland it's used to figure out how much fuel will be burnt and topsoil remaining afterwards. In rainforest, the depth of the leaf litter and the water content. In alpine environments seeds and seedlings.
So while the commonly held notion is that, yes the forest regrows, the underlying and important thing to grasp is how long does it take to regrow to provide habitat and if the forest floor was destroyed.
The things that have been occuring is that bushland is burning with greater ferocity which has been destroying the older trees and burning the seed and casing, in rainforest lower water content and the fires burning to a much deeper level of the forest floor exposing the roots of very large trees so the rainforest slowly dies. In alpine regions, again the fires are more intense, burning seeds so there is a much lower density of seedlings growing over the previous measurements after fires, In alpine forests, the seedlings are becoming rarer.
All these things are signs of the natural processes being impacted enough so that they don't recover and that habitat is lost, so the natural forests have a persistant and permanent loss that is not restored.
The reason why that is concerning is because forests aren't growing back after natural events.
* Some deforestation is replaced with new trees, but not all.
However the habitat is gone and all the crreatures that live there are also dead with survivors putting pressure on other habitat. Also some deforestation, for cash crops, is counted as forest even when the forest floor and the habitat it supported is still gone. So there is less habitat *available*
This is what leads to extinction of species, such as Orangutag whose habitat is destroyed for palm plantations.
* After development, trees are usually planted - sometimes where there used to be no trees.
Again, habitat destroyed because the trees are where the animals and insects live. If you have ever seen 2 D10 dozers clear felling land with a hundred metres of ship anchor chain between them, tearing trees down. The tress are chipped and the forest floor is bulldozed into a pile then, usually, burnt.
You see the habitat that was there is now dead and it isn't coming back.
What is the net gain/loss of trees across ALL development, not just development taking place in a forest...
Actually the question is what percentage of that loss is permanent habitat loss. Developments are already lost habitat. Tree Canopy loss is the first sign of a permanent loss of habitat, which indicates that the percentage of habitat permantly lost that year is related to the type of loss that occurred in the forest in question.
To turn it upside down you could look at the measurements this way: if we stopped the deforestation now we could have saved 30,000 hectares of habitat on 70,000 hectares of cano
I would kindly suggest you follow your own advice.
Well he does have a point about the zirconium cladding around the fuel rod. That is activated and becomes an emitter in its own right . So it does contribute to the radio active waste steam as opposed to fissionable material.
Second of all there is good reason not to like MOX in a reactor, because the fuel is more toxic and accident scenarios where that is the fuel (like Unit 3 or 4 IIRC of Fukushima) and can be released into the environment. Pretty much a nightmare scenario because of the toxicity and that it is readily bio-concentrated into the food chain.
I think you summed it up phantomfive. I'm just wetting my self laughing that your mod as troll for enjoying something geeky sums up just how lame all these haters have been made to look.
The people modded up are the ones that look like jerks. I hope I get modded down too.
Ok. Here we are HHG2TG. Great series, just too much ridiculous fun, great movie. Marvin reminds me that all the haters have a 'brain the size of a planet' and haven't worked out that the long arm of the geek turning them into a bunch of whining sock puppets. I'm laughing to think those posts can't be undone, does reddit let you do that?
Frankly the last two weeks for me have been filled with messaging systems, state based machines, programming signal processors, doing intelligence tests, psychometric tests, reasoning tests, language tests, reading and analyzing a bill of law, speaking in public, writing to politicians to stop something dumb, on top of being eaten by mites, 36 hours without sleep, my bedroom flooding and now I am sleeping on the floor in another room. So don't mind the geek distraction.
A great opportunity for an on topic discussion about a geeky puzzle to figure out the movie/book and enjoy it. I don't mind playing, I loved this series. I am geek! I didn't read the books though - loved the BBC series. Great work on the movie.
I haven't figured out the next puzzle yet so maybe I haven't seen this one, but so far my geek credentials are pretty high. Yes people who used to play Dungeons and Dragons used to be as lame as you think this all is and just didn't care what you think, still don't. Great puzzle/. I think I'm missing 2 so far.
Yep, people just don't seem to 'get' it. Like the Kanye west in south park when he's about to kill the dood and he goes 'just get it man!!!" - I gotta say you're dead on that the whole thing is fucking hilarious.
Moan Moan, the geeks didn't entertain you today with knowledge, it's all about what geeks love and the haters have been totally had - fucking hilarious!!!!
At the big bang.
That lead to more 'normal' matter and less anti-matter, which lead to everything else. Likely the only way an imbalance could be created was another big bang, which had 42 more positrons, leading to an alternate universe, with the same starting point, so like is identical in every way.
That is a *fucking awesome* explanation!!! Bravo, Sir!
Relax:), why don't you just think of them like puzzles? Try to figure out what movie it is as a game, I haven't been able to get them all, but it is pretty geeky.
And I know I could probably run a simulator on a raspberry pi, but looking at V'Ger's availability as Freed open source software, I feel it's appropriate to say:
I was wondering the same thing when I saw this. I think it was because it was written in a simpler time for a different audience.
I thought maybe if the 'aliens' were also carbon based in a similar way to us they would be preyed upon by the same biology as we are. After all microscopic stuff doesn't care how big we are or where we're from, just if they can eat us or live in us.
I thought about other life forms maybe, silicon based and if our planet would even be suitable for them so I figured that aliens would only want to come to our planet because they had a similar biosphere and could survive in ours. So maybe it would go both ways, whatever can kill them can kill us too.
I thought the flaw was that if you were that advanced to get here you wouldn't have met a few bugs before and known, having been in space for a long time, planned to have immunity cause they only had one shot to make it work. So why didn't they start by sending scout ships to check things out, be a little more patient - there are some dumb arrogant generals in that alien ship.
The most embarrassing Invasion ever - do you think they still have assets in space or were they dumb enough to commit everything?
Absolutely! Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide. Absolutely brilliant Sci Fi.
I was happy with the movie too, all the hooks were subtle, though they made him a little older in the movie because I don't think people can wrap their heads around a child being that ruthless killing machine he was made to be.
Awesome book, and a movie which didn't disappoint someone who enjoyed the book.
Disney can't make a movie without pasting on a happy ending
I thought the part of the ending where Reinhardt is fused to Maximillian, trapped and unable to move while surrounded by the fires of Hell was a pretty dark part of the ending. The wormhole sequence makes sense, but I could have done without the robed figure. While your point about Disney endings is well taken, The Black Hole is one of their few movies that I'd think ended the way it should have.
Yep, it's a great movie another classic, cute friendly AI and mean nasty AI robots. Loved this movie
Wow, an on topic way to talk about, maybe not the most popular but certainly the greatest movie of all time, well at least IMHO.
I hear people say it's about AI watching us but I think they miss the bigger and more subtle message that it's about Humans evolving into their next form, a godlike star child.
And it's not that the AI was murdered either, it too had an opportunity to evolve into pure consciousness.
If that's not the ultimate geek movie, I don't know what is (although there are plenty of good ones!). Everything about it is awesome. Thanks Arthur C. Clarke for the story and thank you Stanley Kubrick for making it into a movie.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm so glad to be living in Australia at this time.
Last week we get news that the government is forcing all ISP's to retain metadata information for all usage by all subscribers 'coz of terrorists'. Now we get news that the current data ISP's have, which is only supposed to be used for billing issues, is being used to identify and sue subscribers who had their IP in a torrent tracker 2 years ago!.
I analysed the bill several weeks ago. I wrote to *all* the senators and tried to stop it and I tried to raise awareness, I was on a public forum answering questions and worked pretty much to 3am every night for 2 weeks trying to stop it from passing. I even tried submitting a slashdot story that it was about to pass. It was quite clear to see that it was going after downloaders otherwise why would the ACMA be referenced in the bill.
But it is worse than that, there is little doubt that these systems will be a blackhat's wet dream because the data will be in one place, IMHO a free for all for online fraud. I suspect that most Australians will be furious when they realise that they are being told to pay extra internet fees for a system, that will create new classes of fraud crime against them, is of limited use to police, by businesses who don't want them there to complicate infrastructure who will seek taxpayer assistance to fund and install them.
I tried pretty hard. I won't post the whole letter here, as it is four pages of analysis of an 80 page bill that is deeply flawed and now law. This extract is core to the problems with the bill:
As for the Bill, the criticisms I derive from part one follow:
The 'Implementation Plan' IP under the act is too loosely defined in terms of data encryption and access requirements. The government should implement MANDATORY public key encryption standards for business that promotes business and consumer confidence. The act should also refer to data access standards that produce an audit trail for the Privacy Commission PC so abuses can be tracked and prosecuted, if required.
Encrypted access for law enforcement with revocable keys controlled by the Privacy Commission (P.C) and also accessible by the member of the public who produced the data. Either the Telecommunications Ombudsman (T.O) or the P.C should have the power to review the audit trail of accesses to the data and revoke access based on their findings and satisfactory resolution of a complaint. A person's access to their own data should not be audit-able and a complaint mechanism should exist through both the P.C and the T.O who receive increased powers to prosecute abuses, which would serve to stimulate business and consumer confidence because of the protections offered.
No definition of what the "plan" (under the Bill) requires for access under a Communications Access Controller's CAC - implementing the technology requires 'requirements' and standardisation however the Bill offers none. The public should be able to access the data collected about themselves and have assurances that it has an expiry date.
Clarification and revision based of the Bills inevitable and chilling effects mean consumer and business confidence will be affected for years, policing will receive questionable, if any, benefit. The Bill however is good for centralising data collection techniques for foreign organised crime whose work will be greatly reduced subsequent to the passage of this Bill.
It really sounds more like you're suffering from a case of bad management, so I'll let you vent.
perhaps I needed to vent.
It's more a case of resolving bad business decisions and being the third party witness to the damage done. Often the people who made the decisions try to cover their ass regarding the choices they make and this often snowballs into a critical situation where people's lively hoods are on the line.
The 'reboot' mentality of Windows products shows that, whilst the bar to entry is very low, so to is the bar for failure. Good design practice is mandatory for Windows uptime and remains a hidden cost of the Windows model that is often regarded as unnecessary. Consequently technical debt in MS products is a common failing that is always present. You can try to fix it but the ship is sailing.
In the *ix space, the bar to entry is higher however the bar to failure is very high and technical debt has to be very high to produce failure, which, as opposed to windows systems, manifests in a slow and predictable way that don't result in downtime. Once coupled with the same good design practices *ix based systems are practically unstoppable. They are the internet.
So back to the question, show me a list of 10 common *day to day* operations that can be achieved in 365 but not on LibreOffice?
Nothing sucks quite as bad as being set up to fail
Corporate games are what they are. No one likes them but you have to know how to play to survive. I've worked with MS products since DOS and observed many of the shitty things that they do.
They have to play nice now, because Open Source offerings are a more powerful and flexible paradigm for modern business that yields greater returns over time. The ecosystem of software is larger, growing and permanent because it has its own intrinsic rights.
So much so that the discussion is about which Open Source licence model.
Look there's a lot about MS that I'll call their bullshit on.
The fact they have been found by a court of law to be criminal, engaging in predatory monopolistic practices to maintain their dominance in the market. They have acted that way for about 30 years, they were ok in the beginning however they continued to build antagonistic relationships that business had to submit to.
Business prefers open source because it, by default, doesn't have that practice attached to it. So business does not have to endure the antagonism anymore so, given the opportunity that Open Source gives them, business gets out of that relationship quickly.
I don't hear a lot of great stuff about Windows Server, either.
MS Server products are an also ran, they simply are not taken seriously in high end data center environments. They cannot compete with the agility of the Open Source cost model.
But Nadella is just proving to be highly competent in pushing MS's direction, so in that case we'll see.
Windows provides a great desktop offering with Windows 7 and perhaps 10 will be, we will see how he captains the ship. Microsoft failings though are like tears in the sails though, the wind blows and the ship moves with no regard for who or what is in the way. Much the way it always has it will go forward squashing anything in the way, just more carefully, as most business does not want to work with abusive partners, no matter how nice they are being now.
http://blogs.scientificamerica...
Thanks for the NASA study, it's a little lighter than I expected. It only talks about carbon deaths and assumes deaths from nuclear effluent do not exist. Also, as I said the IAEA has publishing interdiction orders over the WHO in all matters nuclear which I see cited in the references which automatically bias the report.
From the article:
The study also excludes aspects of nuclear power that cannot be easily quantified, such as deaths from nuclear proliferation.
That is basically all of them.
1. Cancers from bio-accumulation of radio isotopes are not easily quantified because they travel through the food chain for a random period of time and when they are finally ingested by a human there is another 6 years before it gestates into cancer depending where in the body it end up.
2. Transgenic disease that affect subsequent generations via absorption of low level radio isotope emitters that didn't kill the parents and damage DNA.
3. Failed pregnancies from absorption of medium level emitters of radioactivity.
4. Not including deaths from Nuclear proliferation isn't reasonable because U-238 is a by-product of fuel enrichment used in warfare. The radio-isotopes there will continue killing for generations. That said, I'll go over it again when I have more time to absorb it. I appreciate you sending it to me.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...
As I said, it uses the flawed results of the Vattenfal study:
I'm not certain what NASA/UN studies you refer to? I do know that some rely on a document sponsored by the nuclear industry player Vattenfal, as does the IPCC, which gives them an overly optimistic picture of what is achievable with Nuclear.
Which is exactly what the bloomberg you have sent me indirectly does, as I've already read the study the UN and IPPC based their findings on.
Not if dealt with correctly.
And yet it still isn't being dealt with correctly and every day the Nuclear Industry releases more radio isotopes into the environment. I'm not interested in talking about another fuel cycle until this one is managed.
Um... What journal was that published? Who reviewed that?
The original report was prepared for the Dutch government. The report of 1982 and its methodology has been peer reviewed by the publication of a short version in Energy Policy in 1985 [Q2]. It was also referenced by the European Parliament and updated in 2000/2001, again in 2005,2008 and 2012 before it was published on the web. It has been cited over 70 times.
All I see is a website that seems to be dedicated to anti-nuclear. Some of the reports listed at the end are in journals.
If your position is pro-nuclear then you'll characterize the information that way. They are scientists. If you read the thing they tell you they start with no fixed position and examine the lesser known parts of the industry.
Your assumptions are based on a flawed study that has not been peer reviewed and will soon been out of date. It is often used in the way you have used it, however if you read it you'll discover how flawed it is (and now, difficult to find). I'm not criticizing you, btw, it's a deception that was played on all of us. I didn't buy it and it did not take much research to see what a fragile house of cards it was.
Still, it will be interesting to see what happens over the next 4 years or whenever the next IPCC document is due.
LibreOffice is at least a decade behind MS Office and I can't believe I ever thought them equal. People here are probably going to think I'm some shill for MS but I'm not, I'm just not afraid to throw a good product under the bus without ever trying it and getting a grip.
That's because you are a shill, maybe not paid, but still a shill. After being locked into Word and its inconcrappable file formats *with itself* and having to reinstall older versions of the software to restore documents, output them in text and reformat them *yeah* there is a BIG reason to stop using MS Anything. 80% of people out there use 20% of the functionality of a Word Processor like LibreOffice or Office 365.
Show me a list of 10 common *day to day* operations that can be achieved in 365 but not on LibreOffice because the UK government disagrees with you and being locked into MS Word products. Even their support of ODF was something they are unwilling to do voluntarily so until you have experienced the costs of freeing yourself from such a lock I respectfully suggest you STFU.
And I know there's a lot of MS hate from IT people, and sure, I hear you, they could do a lot more to make it better for all you tech wizards that know networking like the back of your hand. It's probably that which is clouding your judgment of their system.
Professionally my judgement of Microsoft came from experiencing the heavy handed way they dealt with customers, their vendors, the ruthless way in which they dispatched both their competition and worse, anyone who ever partnered with Microsoft have the intellectual assets of many good start-ups who just wanted to get a good idea out there and make a living from it, plundered.
I have seen businesses, who put their faith in Microsoft, destroyed by Microsoft and everyday businesses who had nothing to do with them, aside for it being on their desktop, be the subject of audits for licensing, which Microsoft would resolve by squeezing that customer for everything they could get simply because they didn't know how to handle their software licenses.
Microsoft has mercilessly bashed, berated, ridiculed, marginalized, litigated and patent harassed the open source community for over a decade all the while using whatever BSD and apache licensed software they could get away with not crediting in widows.
Any company smaller than a government were harassed with lawsuits and endless appeals on the details until MS got their way, making it easier for many to just not fight and give Microsoft what they wanted.
And if you were a government, like the US government, lobbying and whatever sleight of hand could be used from the dirty tricks department to again, get their way.
Fortunately the GPL is seeding the exact type of business models that Microsoft cannot compete with or touch. They may always be around, but every day they get less relevant and because of that the growth of Information Technology can shed the atrophy attached with being shackled to the Windows paradigm.
That's what I really get from people on the MS hate train, just a common lack of understanding about what the non-programmer thinks and feels.
Until you have worked 36 hours, non stop trying to rescue a business who are going to go under and everyone is going to loose their jobs, stop telling me I should spend my time 'understanding about what the non-programmer thinks and feels'. Try and have a little empathy for the programmer who worked all night so you could get paid when payroll was down, then came in in the morning, looking like shit, to make sure everything is ok only to cop a serve about how much effort he puts into his appearance.
In case you didn't realize it wasting time trolling through registry entries or recovering data or work out why NTFS filesystem performance falls off after some timed license event ain't how I want to spend my day. Making IT easy for you, is hard work and, occasionall
Prisoner: You're a little short for a stormtrooper
I would look at Yucca like a very valuable prototyping exercise for a facility that goes back to the original DOE 'defence in depth' specification. I would think that some very valuable lessons were learned there and there might be some things it is suitable for.
Having the money available to do such a thing is a good first starting place and it makes sense to collect the money from the entities creating this externality, especially when you consider that the coal industry has, and continues, to get away with not paying for their externalities for so long.
If the Nuclear Industry continues to pay that fee and lobbies hard for a proper DOE facility to be constructed then perhaps they can claim a moral victory over the coal industry. Continuing to collect fees from them to build a facility is the right thing to do.
Industry has a very poor record of dealing with its externalities and the Nuclear Industry has already expressed its resistance to paying for the handling of spent fuel. I don't see that happening, Dixie Lee Ray's comments decades ago highlighted the need for collecting the fees from the Nuclear Industry for spent fuel containment.
Yes, and look how long it took for us to get to handling that properly, industry had to be told what to do because of the harm it caused.
I think that there are different grades of materials at different levels of toxicity. As long as the approach to placing and designing the disposal facility uses good scientific and engineering principles (as opposed to political and lobbying principles) then I have no problem with that.
No, I'm not. I'm considering the life of the reactor vs the amount of fissile ash it produces over its lifespan.
If you consider such an infrastructure you are going to be handling both types of materials, fuel and fissile ash, in the same facility. The reason to do it that way is to be able to fuel, de-fuel, operate and, dispose of the reactor, it situ, so there is no need to use energy to disassemble it move or disturb it. You derive maximum energetic efficiency from the reactor, handle fuel containment, re-processing and, fissile ash disposal in the same facility.
Well I would like to see that, which is why I support collecting the fees from the operators who produce the waste product. Not doing so is effectively taxing future generation. I would like to see the political will to actually do something that bypasses political and commercial concerns and actu
because you can't plead the 1st.
It wouldn't matter if the Republican party nominated a Hispanic Lesbian to run against her. Feinstein is part of the machine and will return again and again.
So thought crimes are not far away then.
I work at NASA and you would be surprised how accurate your statement is.
That's pretty much the modus operandi for many government departments and quite a hilarious thing to watch sometimes. Have you considered positioning your projects to take advantage of these moronic times to secure the equipment you need?
I love the work NASA does, that you do - even though I don't know the specifics. I just wish your work wasn't interfered with so much and used for porq. I think the risk adversity has handicapped the organizations capacity to achieve. With the amount of interference you guys suffer I'm amazed at what you are able to achieve while the goal posts are shifted around in front of you. Bravo to you sir!
If they were really smart, they would adopt the Linux kernel and develop a Windows Desktop, in much the same way that we have GNOME, KDE, etc.
Pretty much said this a few years ago and the M$ fanbois gave me a serve.
It would have been more entertaining if the core "novel" part of the story (surprise, it wasn't a game after all!) actually did surprise you.
The surprise wasn't about whether the war was real or not, it was the human condition of Ender so that you had no choice but to emapthize for him when he finally found out what was going on.
Just stop doing anything to do with space then the budget will be saved!!
OR increase NASA's budget!!
Of course they are the question about the loss is whether there is habitat loss or not.
The issue here is the increasing intensity of wildfires and bushfires as global temperatures rise and forests dry out.
Fire is generally a welcome component of the functioning of some types of forests, like bushland, burning off old growth and releasing minerals back into the soil, burning seed casings for new growth with older trees surviving and growing back in about 2-5 years. In other type of forests, like rainforest, fire is not a component. Alpine forests also behave differently.
From my understanding the measurement is done with a metal square placed on the subject forest floor and the leaf letter from the trees containing sticks, seeds and leaves, which provides habitat for bugs and the creatures that eat them, is measured. In bushland it's used to figure out how much fuel will be burnt and topsoil remaining afterwards. In rainforest, the depth of the leaf litter and the water content. In alpine environments seeds and seedlings.
So while the commonly held notion is that, yes the forest regrows, the underlying and important thing to grasp is how long does it take to regrow to provide habitat and if the forest floor was destroyed.
The things that have been occuring is that bushland is burning with greater ferocity which has been destroying the older trees and burning the seed and casing, in rainforest lower water content and the fires burning to a much deeper level of the forest floor exposing the roots of very large trees so the rainforest slowly dies. In alpine regions, again the fires are more intense, burning seeds so there is a much lower density of seedlings growing over the previous measurements after fires, In alpine forests, the seedlings are becoming rarer.
All these things are signs of the natural processes being impacted enough so that they don't recover and that habitat is lost, so the natural forests have a persistant and permanent loss that is not restored.
The reason why that is concerning is because forests aren't growing back after natural events.
However the habitat is gone and all the crreatures that live there are also dead with survivors putting pressure on other habitat. Also some deforestation, for cash crops, is counted as forest even when the forest floor and the habitat it supported is still gone. So there is less habitat *available*
This is what leads to extinction of species, such as Orangutag whose habitat is destroyed for palm plantations.
Again, habitat destroyed because the trees are where the animals and insects live. If you have ever seen 2 D10 dozers clear felling land with a hundred metres of ship anchor chain between them, tearing trees down. The tress are chipped and the forest floor is bulldozed into a pile then, usually, burnt.
You see the habitat that was there is now dead and it isn't coming back.
Actually the question is what percentage of that loss is permanent habitat loss. Developments are already lost habitat. Tree Canopy loss is the first sign of a permanent loss of habitat, which indicates that the percentage of habitat permantly lost that year is related to the type of loss that occurred in the forest in question.
To turn it upside down you could look at the measurements this way: if we stopped the deforestation now we could have saved 30,000 hectares of habitat on 70,000 hectares of cano
I would kindly suggest you follow your own advice.
Well he does have a point about the zirconium cladding around the fuel rod. That is activated and becomes an emitter in its own right . So it does contribute to the radio active waste steam as opposed to fissionable material.
Second of all there is good reason not to like MOX in a reactor, because the fuel is more toxic and accident scenarios where that is the fuel (like Unit 3 or 4 IIRC of Fukushima) and can be released into the environment. Pretty much a nightmare scenario because of the toxicity and that it is readily bio-concentrated into the food chain.
It was probably some kind of private enterprise with more ambition than competence. Martians are mostly harmless really.
mostly.
I think you summed it up phantomfive. I'm just wetting my self laughing that your mod as troll for enjoying something geeky sums up just how lame all these haters have been made to look.
The people modded up are the ones that look like jerks. I hope I get modded down too.
Ok. Here we are HHG2TG. Great series, just too much ridiculous fun, great movie. Marvin reminds me that all the haters have a 'brain the size of a planet' and haven't worked out that the long arm of the geek turning them into a bunch of whining sock puppets. I'm laughing to think those posts can't be undone, does reddit let you do that?
Frankly the last two weeks for me have been filled with messaging systems, state based machines, programming signal processors, doing intelligence tests, psychometric tests, reasoning tests, language tests, reading and analyzing a bill of law, speaking in public, writing to politicians to stop something dumb, on top of being eaten by mites, 36 hours without sleep, my bedroom flooding and now I am sleeping on the floor in another room. So don't mind the geek distraction.
A great opportunity for an on topic discussion about a geeky puzzle to figure out the movie/book and enjoy it. I don't mind playing, I loved this series. I am geek! I didn't read the books though - loved the BBC series. Great work on the movie.
I haven't figured out the next puzzle yet so maybe I haven't seen this one, but so far my geek credentials are pretty high. Yes people who used to play Dungeons and Dragons used to be as lame as you think this all is and just didn't care what you think, still don't. Great puzzle /. I think I'm missing 2 so far.
April fool on the haters, absolutely hilarious.
Moan Moan, the geeks didn't entertain you today with knowledge, it's all about what geeks love and the haters have been totally had - fucking hilarious!!!!
At the big bang. That lead to more 'normal' matter and less anti-matter, which lead to everything else. Likely the only way an imbalance could be created was another big bang, which had 42 more positrons, leading to an alternate universe, with the same starting point, so like is identical in every way.
That is a *fucking awesome* explanation!!! Bravo, Sir!
Not even funny. Someone please make it STOP!!!
Relax :), why don't you just think of them like puzzles? Try to figure out what movie it is as a game, I haven't been able to get them all, but it is pretty geeky.
Dammit I've got work to do!!
And I know I could probably run a simulator on a raspberry pi, but looking at V'Ger's availability as Freed open source software, I feel it's appropriate to say:
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those.
I thought maybe if the 'aliens' were also carbon based in a similar way to us they would be preyed upon by the same biology as we are. After all microscopic stuff doesn't care how big we are or where we're from, just if they can eat us or live in us.
I thought about other life forms maybe, silicon based and if our planet would even be suitable for them so I figured that aliens would only want to come to our planet because they had a similar biosphere and could survive in ours. So maybe it would go both ways, whatever can kill them can kill us too.
I thought the flaw was that if you were that advanced to get here you wouldn't have met a few bugs before and known, having been in space for a long time, planned to have immunity cause they only had one shot to make it work. So why didn't they start by sending scout ships to check things out, be a little more patient - there are some dumb arrogant generals in that alien ship.
The most embarrassing Invasion ever - do you think they still have assets in space or were they dumb enough to commit everything?
I was happy with the movie too, all the hooks were subtle, though they made him a little older in the movie because I don't think people can wrap their heads around a child being that ruthless killing machine he was made to be.
Awesome book, and a movie which didn't disappoint someone who enjoyed the book.
Disney can't make a movie without pasting on a happy ending
I thought the part of the ending where Reinhardt is fused to Maximillian, trapped and unable to move while surrounded by the fires of Hell was a pretty dark part of the ending. The wormhole sequence makes sense, but I could have done without the robed figure. While your point about Disney endings is well taken, The Black Hole is one of their few movies that I'd think ended the way it should have.
Yep, it's a great movie another classic, cute friendly AI and mean nasty AI robots. Loved this movie
I hear people say it's about AI watching us but I think they miss the bigger and more subtle message that it's about Humans evolving into their next form, a godlike star child.
And it's not that the AI was murdered either, it too had an opportunity to evolve into pure consciousness.
If that's not the ultimate geek movie, I don't know what is (although there are plenty of good ones!). Everything about it is awesome. Thanks Arthur C. Clarke for the story and thank you Stanley Kubrick for making it into a movie.