As much as I want to hope, as much as I want to be optimistic and as much as I want to believe, reality kicks me in the face when I consider where humanity is right now. It's like being on a big fast comfortable train looking out the window and seeing that, a few miles ahead, the bridge we are about to cross has collapsed in the middle. You try and tell people "hey the bridge ahead has collapsed - we gotta stop this train", but instead people look at you as if you have committed some massive social fo-par, because the train is comfortable and why would they want to stop.
In itself, technology is a gift that is completely neutral, it can either free or enslave. Unfortunately the current status quo is using that gift to pressure every living system on the face of this small planet, and that includes the human race. The bottom line for all of this is the economic models (that demand the pace of technological development) address natural resources as a subset of the economy, where in fact the reverse is true.
Consider the reality of systemic human activity, in the short or long term it is not sustainable. Now consider this mind numbingly simple fact: Unsustainable systems cannot be sustained.
Our technology has never been designed to be sustainable. When you realise that you realise that technology and progress, which is often demonised as the cause of all our ills, has always been misapplied to consume resources as if they are infinite, therefore, it has always been going backwards. How is that "exponential technological growth" possible with limited resources and *without* sustainability goals?
I'm not saying it's impossible to change, actually, I think change will provide the greatest of technological challenges over the next few decades. But that would be *real* progress and it will be the masses against the vested interest groups who frame such changes as 'not realistic'.
If you consider it critically and honestly the only thing that is 'not realistic' is the high energy/mass consumption configuration of our society. Until we change powers controlling the application human ingenuity and direction of technological development I suspect we are heading for a tailspin no amount of technological prowess will pull us out of.
Is there any reason to believe that a mere 0.5 Mg of this stuff is in any way bad for the atmosphere, which is after all 5e15 Mg?
Evidently you have missed the point of the Montreal protocol, which is the subject of this discussion. To clue you in it's to ban CFC's, maybe all the scientist's and contributors were all collectively deluded and they should have listened to you saying "Nothing to see here move along" back in the '90's.
Please come back when you have an actual argument.
And then what, you'll numb me with your ignorance? I don't think I have the time. I'd suggest you read a statement I prepared earlier that applies to people such as yourself.
Despite the Montreal Act, CFC114, which is also a greenhouse gas 20,000 times more potent than C02, is leaking from Paducah Uranium Enrichment facilities into the atmosphere through hundreds of kilometres of cooling pipes. The average is 1 million pounds (thats 453,592.27 kilograms) PER YEAR since the bans began. That is 8 618 255.03 kilograms (8 Megatons) of CFC114 *since* they were banned. That's the equivalent of 172,365,100,000 kilograms of carbon dioxide from the enrichment process alone and does not include the 1 Gigawatt of coal fired power used to run Paducah.
Going after nitrous oxide emissions is the proverbial trying to plug a hole in a dam with your fingers while it is bursting elsewhere. CFC 114 is still used for enrichment today, and the Nuclear industry is the number one industrial emitter of CFC's in the United States. We can expect up to 1 million pounds of CFC114 to leak into the atmosphere per year whilst enrichment continues.
They should just go back to coal-fired nuclear power plants.
Why is this modded funny? coal fired nuclear is the safest power generation method since ever, the radiation decays overnight and is perfectly safe to use in all of our homes.
... sell you one copy of a game when they can potentially sell you two or three?
Except they did and they still wouldn't talk (then ps2 vs xbox), I had a copy of the game (star wars battlefront) for each platform and they would not f*!k^%g talk to each other on my local network. v.annoying and v.lame!
I also had the game on a pc and was about to experiment to see if the pc could host the game and the xbox and playstation join in. I even asked at the games store and they said 'they use a different network protocol', I just sighed and left.
Makes you wonder if open sourced games would have the same restrictions if hosted on the consoles.
Statistically, what are the chances of a perfect diversity trifecta of asian guy, black guy, and white woman? In an ad, pretty good. In real life, not so much.
I have to disagree with your entire statement. Lawyers are busy people, a lot the local ones are my clients.
There are many forums to conduct the business of shaping democracy. This is their *business*, ask them, show an interest in being part of the democratic process that shapes laws. I'm sure the attitude will change.
They don't have time to learn more about anything other than law.
So have you actually taken the time to formulate an effective question in you mind so you don't waste their time when you ask it. You don't have to be intimidated, everyone is busy.
There is no way to educate someone who doesn't have a desire to learn, or who has themselves convinced that they don't have time to learn.
It appears you are making excuses so you can maintain your apathy. If you don't want to do something then it's a little selfish to undermine the will of those who are prepared to make an effort.
When the expert witnesses get cut off in the middle of their explanations, how in the hell are we supposed to educate anyone?
The courts are not the most effective forum to address these issues. Even the ACLU link above has a Technology and privacy section, start there and if it is not comprehensive enough, join the aclu and expand the scope of the discussion using you expert witness qualifications.
As professionals we can either accept the responsibility that comes with our profession or we can accept the ignorant calls that are made on our behalf. Personally I believe that only by shaping the way technology laws are implemented can the I.T profession garner the respect that it should rightfully carry.
You haven't seen some people who don't want and/or are incapable of learning the most basic scientific facts.
That is irrelevant because the target audience is layers and politicians. They have to be educated or, at the very least, ambitious to be able to perform their work. They don't need all of the details, just the executive summary of the consequences and recommendations of how they should act to achieve the appropriate outcome.
You are not talking to the masses here, you are talking to a select group of people who are professionals, intelligent and used to considering things. We are talking about people who are actually interested in the risks posed to society by ill-founded decisions made law.
This sounds like a classic story if ignorant people making decisions about technical crime and getting scared. I aim that both at the city and at the judge who set the original bail.
There is a saying, There is no such thing as a bad student only a bad teacher. If the legal system is ignorant about how 'technical crime' should be addressed it's because we, as technology professionals, have failed to lobby for the appropriate changes to be made to law to handle these cases properly.
We need special technical trials for things like this within which both the defence and prosecution are allowed to bring in technical witnesses to put the case into perspective for non-technical people (as opposed to "HACKER! Get the pitch forks!").
Why? The framework for all of these things already exist in the legal system. All this world changing technology has been unleashed over the last decade or two and Information Technology is maturing as a profession. It's a bit unrealistic to expect the legal system to make quality decisions about how the law should be adapted to handle those changes while the people responsible for delivering the technology do not get involved in educating those who can codify the law to behave reasonably.
It ridicules us to point the finger and say 'look at how ignorant they are' when in reality we should be more self critical and understand that this is the treatment we should expect if we are too apathetic to influence the legal system appropriately.
However with a stirling engine like that it would make more sense to have the following plants sun powered (mirrors focusing sun light on the engine)
I've been following the research at Glenn for a while and I think that the Stirling engine design and linear alternator design pictured here (the metal bottle shaped assembly is one Stirling engine/alternator) are already used for Terrestrial solar arrays, i.e this design is *already* implemented as a solar array it's just been implemented in a horizontally opposed configuration (perhaps 180 degrees out of phase electrically as well?) for a nuclear heat source. The engines probably get their efficiency from the extreme heat differential of space, i.e the colder it is the more efficient the generator becomes as it can throw away more heat. So before someone asks, that's why it wouldn't work so well in your garage. The terrestrial solar units are probably a lot hotter on the hot side to produce the same heat differential.
Got to admire the engineering involved here, because the working gas in the Stirling engine (no doubt it's Helium) is effectively the secondary cooling loop for the reactor. The waste heat from the tertiary cooling loop (the convector) used for the power piston side of the Stirling is sure to be free of radioactive isotopes and a nice heat source for the spacecraft or base. If the coolant was to become contaminated then the whole system would stop working.
I'm a bit surprised though, I would have thought a device, not a nuclear "reactor" in the sense of a critical mass, using the decay heat of an isotope like plutonium (or even something hotter) as a heat source *within* the stirling engine i.e the displacer piston inside the Stirling engine is actually machined out of pu-239, would have been a simpler, more robust design. I thought that's what they were trying to achieve at Glenn, who knows maybe it was too hard to machine the isotope for use inside the Stirling engine or the Convector was a useful heat source for the spacecraft or base.
Of course, who'd of thought *anyone* could patent rubbing a magnet along a wire to produce an electric current (arrrghhh!), I mean "linear alternator" come on - are you serious - this has actually been patented!!
If it can be launched reliably is should be a fantastic source of power for spacecraft and bases producing heat for instruments and electricity for Ion engines. 40Kw is not unreasonable either, I know of 100Kw research reactors roughly the size of a car engine and despite my opposition to the mess the nuclear industry has left on earth, this is a very elegant design that is totally appropriate for what it is tasked for, space.
To give you an idea of how big that is (and recalculating for a specific battery type), using Nickel Hydrogen batteries (also like the ISS) which are 75 Wh/kg, you'd need 179,200kg = 394,240lb = 197 tons of batteries.
Because you repeat it makes it so? Having children is a biological imperative offspring must be produced for evolution to occur so it's a command from biological processes so deep there is not even a chance for a species to disobey it. A 'command' is a demand, just like the captain of a military vessel doesn't 'suggest' that they fire the weapons.
But lets move on to your other points that I didn't have time to address earlier...
and atheism is disbelief, not philosophy.
You can't present any evidence that [insert deity here] doesn't exist so atheism is a philosophy just the same as any other religion. You're as Fundamental a Dawkinist as *any* fundamentalist a religion produces, get over it.
There is nothing in atheism that "commands" anything
You 'Dawkinists' are so flummoxed that the rest of the world can't understand what seems to be perfectly rational to you that you think you can save the world from the suffering brought upon us all by nasty evil religion and their belief systems by replacing it with your own flawed belief systems. You are conducting an atheistic 'j i had' to rid the world of all the fidels, that's what atheism commands.
Evil is a function of humanity, no matter what someone believes.
Funny that this should come up now. Next week I have a meeting with a Civil Liberties Council to start advising the Lawyers there about using encryption for email and client data on their computer systems. I've been involved for other matters but I've notice that the lawyers I've seen don't actually use any form of encryption for their clients data or communication.
Surely some of them know about it but I think the general problem is while the term IANAL is thrown around the term IANAT (I Am Not A Technologist) isn't and frankly it's the people here in this thread that are the appropriate people to start sharing that education that encryption is no more sinister than an envelope. It remains to be seen how effective I am in that regard as there are many techno-legal issues arising to cover and I'm told (by my legal friends who invite me) that they have no idea of the consequences of.
I plan to use this thread to help me draw up some things to talk about next week. I'd encourage anyone here to see if the are some Civil Liberties Councils in your city/state you can get involved with as they need our help as much as, inevitably, we need theirs. The Information Technology profession is maturing and surely we need to have quality laws that reflect IT's place in society so if encryption isn't popular now perhaps it's because we have been remiss in performing our duties.
maybe store headerless file information at the end of the filesystem that looks innocuous. Then give the user information on how much they can fill up before they destroy that data. I'm not a filesystem guy so I don't know how well that would work, just throwing out a suggestion. His requirements are definitely hard to meet.
Why not just have a encrypted volume in a partition marked swap. Just because it's marked as swap doesn't mean it *is* swap and hey if someone wants to go poking around in an old swap partition the encrypted data would look about right.
So what will be the energy source you will use for moving this asteroid around?
I'd probably use femto machines to convert the matter of the asteroid directly into energy or perhaps a flock of wild geese in space suits with string attached to their little legs as they flag their rocket equipped wings madly.
In all seriousness, I don't know. I think the problem in front of us atm is actually getting into space. Hopefully in 1000 years or so we may have actually done that and by the time we need to do this we would actually have the technology to have tested it out on another celestial body first.
I read an article about capturing an asteroid into Earth's orbit and using it to slowly adjust the Earth's orbit so that it stays in the habitable zone of the sun.
OTH, another dog is a lab/border collie mix who takes longer to learn something
It was probably the lab part of the mix. I had a border collie, she was really easy to train and didn't seem like a slow learner. She would know exactly which windows to bark under if it was too cold outside and she wanted to sleep in the laundry or if she wanted to play and I was still sleeping or hung-over in my room. She also picked one spot on the yard to crap on and left the rest of the yard clean. Picked up every command easily, sat before crossing the road, then learned it really meant to look out for cars.
She was a really low maintenance dog, pretty quiet and didn't disturb anyone, had a good demeanor with children and she could run so fast. Conditioning her with a single type of whistle meant she would always come running for a good greeting and I can only remember her be in trouble once when she was a puppy. Long lived too, I got her when I was 16 and she dies when I was 30. I never thought the breed was ranked as the smartest dog but I have a lot of good memories of an animal that was a great companion. I think humans lives would be a lot less without animals as pets.
The big question is whether dogs are smarter than cats!!!
Slashdot Mirror
to the Bat laser, we're going in to BATL with BABL!
You forgot
Nuclear disarmament: No one can afford internet downtime from emp anymore.
I know thats why it was originally invented, but I don't think the modern internet is emp resistant.
I remember the newsgroups were the main thing for me, I wasted alot of time on them. Now I waste a lot of time on /.
Thanks, I was being lazy.
As much as I want to hope, as much as I want to be optimistic and as much as I want to believe, reality kicks me in the face when I consider where humanity is right now. It's like being on a big fast comfortable train looking out the window and seeing that, a few miles ahead, the bridge we are about to cross has collapsed in the middle. You try and tell people "hey the bridge ahead has collapsed - we gotta stop this train", but instead people look at you as if you have committed some massive social fo-par, because the train is comfortable and why would they want to stop.
In itself, technology is a gift that is completely neutral, it can either free or enslave. Unfortunately the current status quo is using that gift to pressure every living system on the face of this small planet, and that includes the human race. The bottom line for all of this is the economic models (that demand the pace of technological development) address natural resources as a subset of the economy, where in fact the reverse is true.
Consider the reality of systemic human activity, in the short or long term it is not sustainable. Now consider this mind numbingly simple fact: Unsustainable systems cannot be sustained.
Our technology has never been designed to be sustainable. When you realise that you realise that technology and progress, which is often demonised as the cause of all our ills, has always been misapplied to consume resources as if they are infinite, therefore, it has always been going backwards. How is that "exponential technological growth" possible with limited resources and *without* sustainability goals?
I'm not saying it's impossible to change, actually, I think change will provide the greatest of technological challenges over the next few decades. But that would be *real* progress and it will be the masses against the vested interest groups who frame such changes as 'not realistic'. If you consider it critically and honestly the only thing that is 'not realistic' is the high energy/mass consumption configuration of our society. Until we change powers controlling the application human ingenuity and direction of technological development I suspect we are heading for a tailspin no amount of technological prowess will pull us out of.
Evidently you have missed the point of the Montreal protocol, which is the subject of this discussion. To clue you in it's to ban CFC's, maybe all the scientist's and contributors were all collectively deluded and they should have listened to you saying "Nothing to see here move along" back in the '90's.
And then what, you'll numb me with your ignorance? I don't think I have the time. I'd suggest you read a statement I prepared earlier that applies to people such as yourself.
Despite the Montreal Act, CFC114, which is also a greenhouse gas 20,000 times more potent than C02, is leaking from Paducah Uranium Enrichment facilities into the atmosphere through hundreds of kilometres of cooling pipes. The average is 1 million pounds (thats 453,592.27 kilograms) PER YEAR since the bans began. That is 8 618 255.03 kilograms (8 Megatons) of CFC114 *since* they were banned. That's the equivalent of 172,365,100,000 kilograms of carbon dioxide from the enrichment process alone and does not include the 1 Gigawatt of coal fired power used to run Paducah.
One thing that is not immediately obvious from the destruction this compound causes to the ozone layer is the eventual effect on Phytoplankton which creates more breathable oxygen than the Amazon. The assertion is examined in these links production of oxygen in the oceans is at least equal to the production on land if not a bit more
and Field studies indicate a dramatic decrease in photosynthetic oxygen production can be measured after exposure to solar radiation
and Environmental effects of ozone depletion: 1998 Assessment. Sure it's 10 years old, but that's an extra 10 million pounds of CFC114 resultant from enrichment operating, I don't imaging it's got any better.
Going after nitrous oxide emissions is the proverbial trying to plug a hole in a dam with your fingers while it is bursting elsewhere. CFC 114 is still used for enrichment today, and the Nuclear industry is the number one industrial emitter of CFC's in the United States. We can expect up to 1 million pounds of CFC114 to leak into the atmosphere per year whilst enrichment continues.
Why is this modded funny? coal fired nuclear is the safest power generation method since ever, the radiation decays overnight and is perfectly safe to use in all of our homes.
Today
Yes, Dutch Wood Rock!
Except they did and they still wouldn't talk (then ps2 vs xbox), I had a copy of the game (star wars battlefront) for each platform and they would not f*!k^%g talk to each other on my local network. v.annoying and v.lame!
I also had the game on a pc and was about to experiment to see if the pc could host the game and the xbox and playstation join in. I even asked at the games store and they said 'they use a different network protocol', I just sighed and left.
Makes you wonder if open sourced games would have the same restrictions if hosted on the consoles.
Rule 34?
There are many forums to conduct the business of shaping democracy. This is their *business*, ask them, show an interest in being part of the democratic process that shapes laws. I'm sure the attitude will change.
So have you actually taken the time to formulate an effective question in you mind so you don't waste their time when you ask it. You don't have to be intimidated, everyone is busy.
It appears you are making excuses so you can maintain your apathy. If you don't want to do something then it's a little selfish to undermine the will of those who are prepared to make an effort.
The courts are not the most effective forum to address these issues. Even the ACLU link above has a Technology and privacy section, start there and if it is not comprehensive enough, join the aclu and expand the scope of the discussion using you expert witness qualifications.
As professionals we can either accept the responsibility that comes with our profession or we can accept the ignorant calls that are made on our behalf. Personally I believe that only by shaping the way technology laws are implemented can the I.T profession garner the respect that it should rightfully carry.
That is irrelevant because the target audience is layers and politicians. They have to be educated or, at the very least, ambitious to be able to perform their work. They don't need all of the details, just the executive summary of the consequences and recommendations of how they should act to achieve the appropriate outcome.
You are not talking to the masses here, you are talking to a select group of people who are professionals, intelligent and used to considering things. We are talking about people who are actually interested in the risks posed to society by ill-founded decisions made law.
Exactly, if you want to understand why watch this documentary.
There is a saying, There is no such thing as a bad student only a bad teacher. If the legal system is ignorant about how 'technical crime' should be addressed it's because we, as technology professionals, have failed to lobby for the appropriate changes to be made to law to handle these cases properly.
Why? The framework for all of these things already exist in the legal system. All this world changing technology has been unleashed over the last decade or two and Information Technology is maturing as a profession. It's a bit unrealistic to expect the legal system to make quality decisions about how the law should be adapted to handle those changes while the people responsible for delivering the technology do not get involved in educating those who can codify the law to behave reasonably.
It ridicules us to point the finger and say 'look at how ignorant they are' when in reality we should be more self critical and understand that this is the treatment we should expect if we are too apathetic to influence the legal system appropriately.
I've been following the research at Glenn for a while and I think that the Stirling engine design and linear alternator design pictured here (the metal bottle shaped assembly is one Stirling engine/alternator) are already used for Terrestrial solar arrays, i.e this design is *already* implemented as a solar array it's just been implemented in a horizontally opposed configuration (perhaps 180 degrees out of phase electrically as well?) for a nuclear heat source. The engines probably get their efficiency from the extreme heat differential of space, i.e the colder it is the more efficient the generator becomes as it can throw away more heat. So before someone asks, that's why it wouldn't work so well in your garage. The terrestrial solar units are probably a lot hotter on the hot side to produce the same heat differential.
Got to admire the engineering involved here, because the working gas in the Stirling engine (no doubt it's Helium) is effectively the secondary cooling loop for the reactor. The waste heat from the tertiary cooling loop (the convector) used for the power piston side of the Stirling is sure to be free of radioactive isotopes and a nice heat source for the spacecraft or base. If the coolant was to become contaminated then the whole system would stop working.
I'm a bit surprised though, I would have thought a device, not a nuclear "reactor" in the sense of a critical mass, using the decay heat of an isotope like plutonium (or even something hotter) as a heat source *within* the stirling engine i.e the displacer piston inside the Stirling engine is actually machined out of pu-239, would have been a simpler, more robust design. I thought that's what they were trying to achieve at Glenn, who knows maybe it was too hard to machine the isotope for use inside the Stirling engine or the Convector was a useful heat source for the spacecraft or base.
Of course, who'd of thought *anyone* could patent rubbing a magnet along a wire to produce an electric current (arrrghhh!), I mean "linear alternator" come on - are you serious - this has actually been patented!!
If it can be launched reliably is should be a fantastic source of power for spacecraft and bases producing heat for instruments and electricity for Ion engines. 40Kw is not unreasonable either, I know of 100Kw research reactors roughly the size of a car engine and despite my opposition to the mess the nuclear industry has left on earth, this is a very elegant design that is totally appropriate for what it is tasked for, space.
Oh, so that's how much a metric ass-load of batteries weigh.
Because you repeat it makes it so? Having children is a biological imperative offspring must be produced for evolution to occur so it's a command from biological processes so deep there is not even a chance for a species to disobey it. A 'command' is a demand, just like the captain of a military vessel doesn't 'suggest' that they fire the weapons.
But lets move on to your other points that I didn't have time to address earlier...
You can't present any evidence that [insert deity here] doesn't exist so atheism is a philosophy just the same as any other religion. You're as Fundamental a Dawkinist as *any* fundamentalist a religion produces, get over it.
You 'Dawkinists' are so flummoxed that the rest of the world can't understand what seems to be perfectly rational to you that you think you can save the world from the suffering brought upon us all by nasty evil religion and their belief systems by replacing it with your own flawed belief systems. You are conducting an atheistic 'j i had' to rid the world of all the fidels, that's what atheism commands.
Evil is a function of humanity, no matter what someone believes.
I thought science was testing the Theory of Evolution. It's the most rational explanation but it should still be approached with pragmatism.
ummm, having children?
Funny that this should come up now. Next week I have a meeting with a Civil Liberties Council to start advising the Lawyers there about using encryption for email and client data on their computer systems. I've been involved for other matters but I've notice that the lawyers I've seen don't actually use any form of encryption for their clients data or communication.
Surely some of them know about it but I think the general problem is while the term IANAL is thrown around the term IANAT (I Am Not A Technologist) isn't and frankly it's the people here in this thread that are the appropriate people to start sharing that education that encryption is no more sinister than an envelope. It remains to be seen how effective I am in that regard as there are many techno-legal issues arising to cover and I'm told (by my legal friends who invite me) that they have no idea of the consequences of.
I plan to use this thread to help me draw up some things to talk about next week. I'd encourage anyone here to see if the are some Civil Liberties Councils in your city/state you can get involved with as they need our help as much as, inevitably, we need theirs. The Information Technology profession is maturing and surely we need to have quality laws that reflect IT's place in society so if encryption isn't popular now perhaps it's because we have been remiss in performing our duties.
Encrypted volumes is standard practice in some places I've worked.
Why not just have a encrypted volume in a partition marked swap. Just because it's marked as swap doesn't mean it *is* swap and hey if someone wants to go poking around in an old swap partition the encrypted data would look about right.
I'd probably use femto machines to convert the matter of the asteroid directly into energy or perhaps a flock of wild geese in space suits with string attached to their little legs as they flag their rocket equipped wings madly.
In all seriousness, I don't know. I think the problem in front of us atm is actually getting into space. Hopefully in 1000 years or so we may have actually done that and by the time we need to do this we would actually have the technology to have tested it out on another celestial body first.
I read an article about capturing an asteroid into Earth's orbit and using it to slowly adjust the Earth's orbit so that it stays in the habitable zone of the sun.
It was probably the lab part of the mix. I had a border collie, she was really easy to train and didn't seem like a slow learner. She would know exactly which windows to bark under if it was too cold outside and she wanted to sleep in the laundry or if she wanted to play and I was still sleeping or hung-over in my room. She also picked one spot on the yard to crap on and left the rest of the yard clean. Picked up every command easily, sat before crossing the road, then learned it really meant to look out for cars.
She was a really low maintenance dog, pretty quiet and didn't disturb anyone, had a good demeanor with children and she could run so fast. Conditioning her with a single type of whistle meant she would always come running for a good greeting and I can only remember her be in trouble once when she was a puppy. Long lived too, I got her when I was 16 and she dies when I was 30. I never thought the breed was ranked as the smartest dog but I have a lot of good memories of an animal that was a great companion. I think humans lives would be a lot less without animals as pets.
The big question is whether dogs are smarter than cats!!!