Re:The story is only 26 years old, a new record
on
Natural Nuclear Reactors
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I recall a short story in - I think - a SciFi anthology published a few years after the Scientific American article, which related that a similar concentration of uranium ore had been found very near the surface, but where conditions had not been sufficient to sustain even a slow chain reaction. Until, that is, the ore was uncovered, and then either through natural rainfall or because of water pumped through the site as part of its exploitation, enough of the fast neutrons were moderated down to slower energies that the the deposit as a whole crossed the criticality threshold, and... Fwoom.
--
When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth - a book of recollections of the days of the mainframes, by one who was there.
The article talks of a radar system based on the reflected waves from mobile phones.
Um, it's based on reflections of the transmissions from the fixed base stations, not the mobile devices. That's probably still a lot of processing, admittedly.
I'll admit to being just a little sceptical about how detailed a picture they'll be able to get, but if all you want is a motion sensor for a sensitive area, or a general idea of how much activity there is that shouldn't be so big a problem.
Sorry to burst you bubble, but the walmart PC is actually used to control dangerous machinery, and often the task it does is signal analysis. That is the exact thing DRM is targetting.
With respect, if such a commodity PC is performing safety-critical functions (as opposed to merely maintaining optimal performance) and there are no low-level failsafes to prevent it wrecking the place if it goes wrong, then the situation is already one of criminal negligence even without DRM functionality within the PC.
Sorry, but I just don't believe that is the case, any more than I believe that the manufacturer of the mill would dare compromise safety-critical 'lowlevel embedded stuff' with unneccessary and potentially dangerous functionality, even if it were technically feasable to include it. Aside from any considerations of ethics and responsibility, the damage to the firm's reputation and future (non-US) sales would be pretty spectacular.
<b>There is no reason to believe that after the bill becomes law and the recommendations of the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group... become law and regulation, that non-DRM processors (or DACs, or several other classes of electronic component) will be available in the US.</b>
Calm down.
Even if the CBDTA and BPDG recommendations are enacted into legislation in their current form - and I personally give the elected representatives in Congress and the White House credit for having enough collective common sense to recognise the folly of mandating DRM functionality into, for example, the papermill refiner described by freuddot - this will "merely" create a conflict with legislation covering such things as fitness of a product for its designated function, general safety in public places and industrial premises, plus any product certification requirements that have legal force, and so on. Of course CBDTPA et al don't admit to such exceptions - for pity's sake, they're written to the specifications of a group of people whose inflated sense of their own importance and significance matches that of anyone else on the planet, IT geeks included.
If such legislative conflicts are created, then the law mandating DRM will be challenged in the courts. And my personal opinion is that the US court system, for all its flaws, would have little difficulty in deciding that where there is a conflict between safety and the interests of copyright owners, safety should be given priority.
Running around screaming hysterically about a scenario so improbable that it constitutes wishful thinking detracts from the effort of ensuring that widespread availability of digital information processing mechanisms does not result in loss of balance between the public interest and that of copyright owners. If you want to make a useful contribution (even on/.;) then put some thought into how such a balance can be achieved. Obviously, safety-critical mechanisms must be exempt from a requirement to include DRM functionality. Arguably, mechanisms manufactured for the purpose of reproducing or creating copyrighted content should include such functionality. In such a situation, what provisions are required to ensure that the mechanisms are not abused to undermine fair use doctrine, or to maintain or create a monopoly on content distribution? How to ensure that the use of DRM technology does not effectively usurp the legislative and legal processes in the field of copyright enforcement and protection - in particular, should there be a legal obligation that DRM mechanisms already in use must be modifiable to conform to future legislative changes or legal decisions? Should there be an obligation on content distributors who use DRM technology to maintain an archive of the material in an 'unlocked' form so that it can be made available to the public domain when copyright expires? Between the extremes of safety-critical mechanisms and entertainment boxes, how should the general-purpose computer be treated - for example, should there be different rules for a PC that is sold for use in a private home and one that is installed in a business environment? And so on.
Of course, if you find this sort of question 'hard', by all means carry on claiming that the sky is falling.
Regardless of what legislation the Representative for Disneyland and the Senator for Tin Pan Ally are instructed to introduce by their sponsors, manufacturers of truely mission-critical systems will not dare to use components with DRM capabilities in their products, for one simple reason:
LEGAL LIABILITY
I wouldn't be surprised, also, if some of the mission-critical applications that the author claims may be affected are covered by explicit legal requirements for certification which will proscribe the mischievous addition of functionality which is both unrequired for the operation of the devices in question and which by its presence will undermine their reliability and safety.
By all means sound the warning bells when some of these bought toyboys introduce particularly inept legislation, and use excessive scope in their proposals to argue that they and their corporate sponsors are too stupid and self-interested to be permitted to decide on these matters, but don't pretend that just because one interest group has its head pushed so far up its posterior that it resembles a klein bottle it will be allowed to get its own way even if the result is that aircraft may start dropping out of the skies. All that does is to play into the hands of the content-distributors' efforts to portray their opponents as turning hysterical now that someone is finally doing something about their thievery.
I wonder how much better could we be if coders knew basic math...
<rant>Oh, the majority of coders know basic math, all right, or at least the most important concepts that are needed to hold down a job in today's IT business. They know that time equals money, and that taking the time to get the thing done right in the first place costs too much. They know (or they think they know) that it isn't necessary to worry overmuch about program size and speed any longer, because they can always depend on the hardware engineers rescuing them with the next set of more powerful products. They know that they get a greater return on effort spent on making pretty presentation slides of all the wonderful new features that are to be put into the next release and then transcribing the slides into the product's gui than on analyzing whther the new features are being provided in a consistent and unconfusing way, or even if they are needed in the first place.</rant>
It's not that trading raw power against development costs is unreasonable where that choice exists - far from it - but rather that hand-waving away questions of efficiency on the assumption that God (or Moore's Law[1]) will provide is a sure recipe for the sort of bloated and near-unmaintainable messes that are so common today. A Mbyte here, a Mbyte there, an assumption that the compiler will find and optimize the invariant components of loops... if you're not careful these all start adding up to measurable numbers "why is this so s l o w . ..")
[1]And, of course, one can always paraphrase Parkinson's Law for IT: programs and data expand to fill the processor power and storage available.
Ever since I first read it mentioned in passing - "it's a Bulova Dali" - in one of Larry Niven's stories set in Known Space, I've wanted to have a Daliesque flexible and functional watch woven into the cloth of a shirt cuff. Now, as the technology is gradually approaching the point where this might be feasable for the first time, we get... Disco Trousers?
Oh dear.
-- Bulova(r) is a registered trade mark of Bulova Corporation. Dali ought to be a registered trade mark, given his eye for the commercial main chance.
Any chance of crossover shows with other reality shows? - SirSlud
There was a Survivor variant screened in the UK a short while ago (or so I understand from reports in the media) under the title "I'm a celebrity - get me outa here". Has potential, I'd say.
do give us an example sometime of nobel prizes being awarded to dumb people.
Ask again after the Peace prize is announced Thursday...
I'm not so sure about that, but some recent selections seem to have been awarded by dumb people.
(One wants to encourage the positive, of course, but if you're going to fete old enemies who've shaken hands and decided to tolerate each other, at least wait a decent period of time to confirm that the outbreak of sweet reason will persist.)
The number of developers that are actually contributing seems much like the commercial closed-source projects I've worked on....
This is one of the few/.comments moderated up to +5 Insightful that fully deserves the ranking, imho. I'd add just one observation from my own experience of over 25 years programming for my living: if you've got a project of any sort of complexity, then for it to deliver a usable result on schedule then there needs to be just one person whose decisions on tricky questions are final and accepted by the rest of the project. (S)he may operate as a benevolent dictator, or be imposed from outside and be initially resented until it's clear that the decisions are, on the whole, pushing the project in the right direction, or even be someone who holds no formal directive role but whose 'suggestions' are never ignored - but some sort of deadlock-breaker is essential.
The language seems to allow the recording industry to deduct the top expenses that they incur for
setting up and maintaining the royalty payment regime.
<sarcasm>Something that it has not had up to now, presumably.</sarcasm>
OK, so it's only controllable by DoCoMo, and it's set up to control only 'household appliances', but with the remotely controlled camera all it needs is a few hardware mods to make a real mean robot sentry.... Didn't expect the 3G killer app to come in quite this form, though.
<troll>Come to think of it, in some parts of the US, a gun does come into the catagory of household appliances.<ducks and runs/></troll>
I seem to remember that the low-graphics option came after 9/11
No, it's been there from the beginning, AFAIK. The beeb could do a bit better about presenting eg SW frequency information in a form suitable for low-bandwidth connections, but they're pretty good about keeping the low-graphics news pages themselves going and as current as the high-graphics ones.
Make sure that it is the type that can receive shortwave frequencies and you will never be without a BBC broadcast.
Much as I continue to respect BBC World Service's news coverage, their spending on shortwave is being scaled back, especially in places where ready availability of Internet access or rebroadcasters over local FM or cable can be used to justify saving money. I seem to remember hearing that North America is one of the areas affected by this.
I'm not sure I'd regard Ananova as a major news site - my guess is that it is much less referenced from outside the UK than (say) BBC or CNN. It's default story display seems somewhat downmarket and UK-centric.
Now, could the same team please arrange for end to end mobile phone performances of John Cage's 4'33" alongside the main program at the next concert I go to?
(Quite seriously, I'm impressed by this, even if it isn't "great" art.)
The problem was not a leaking fuel tank. The Boeing press release linked in the/. story (it's only a few hundred words, for pity's sake) says clearly that the problem was that the pressurant (that is, the thing that pushes the fuel out of the tank to the motor) didn't get to the tank, because of a blockage in a valve.
But all kudos to the engineers from Boeing and NASA who worked out what the problem was - quite possibly from fairly subtle clues in the telemetry information or some very careful trial and error experiments - and how to get around it and coax the satellite up to its intended orbit.
The XBox is being used as an experiment in locking-down PCs.
Perhaps, but I think that's more a serendipitous side-effect than anything that was consciously planned - though doubtless it was intended to be hard enough to crack the box that most potential customers wouldn't bother and would just buy or rent the games and utilities of interest. Given his 'druthers, I suspect that Bill G would much prefer to keep the PC platform general-purpose rather than building in kit that allows Hollywood and Tim Pan Ally a veto over what can be done in future with his brainchild. However, he wouldn't be where he is today without a shrewd idea of what battles are winnable at any particular time.
In the last 5-10 years, there's been a constant push to develop more and newer technology to sell to willing customers (in the highly developed parts of the planet). This was in blind disregard of then common sense that enough is enough, if you don't need more features you're not going to buy it.
Although you might be prepared to buy something with fairly similar features if it represents a big enough incremental improvement: I'm thinking of the size and weight of mobile phones here - my 2-yr old mobile is OK for a coat or vest, but some of this years' are light enough to pop in a shirt pocket without sacrifice of usability.
But a lot of it is down to the need of the vendors to keep pushing product into markets that are already approaching saturation (like Western Europe: especially among young people just about everyone who is ever likely to get a mobile already has one). So, more bells and whistles, more attempts to push bandwidth-gobbling apps to justify investment in costly network infrastructure, and so on.
And I still haven't seen the "killer app" for 2G or 3G mobiles, the thing that would make me shell out for more than a low end model. Yes, something that was permanently online so I didn't need to wait 30 seconds or more to get a circuit-switched link before I could get the time of the next bus or train, if the network had wide enough coverage. Some service tying in to GPRS that could take the phone number of the cosy little restaurant where my date is (hopefully) still waiting and give me a little map of the way through the maze of twisty little lanes between us... but that sort of thing needs a lot of backend information readily available before the apps can start getting rolled out.
Of course, the need for food, shelter, education and freedom rises far above the need for communication and internet facilities. Also 3 million people a year are dying of aids, and so on and so forth... Life is not about more bandwidth (really!)
Amen. How about promoting the idea of a "lucky folks fund" - encourage people to donate a few percent of the cost of upgrading your PC/ Phone/ whatever to some organisation that is trying to help people less privileged than we are to pull themselves up.
Well, finding ways to justify the networks' investment in 3G mobile licences, perhaps?
Demonstrating that you're still up there in the leading group of equipment manufacturers, certainly. Nokia have produced some very speculative pieces of equipment to try things out (eg last year's 5510, full alphabetic keyboard for text messaging plus a digital music player) then later integrated some of the useful results in later more mainstream models.
I'm not particularly disagreeing with Hamsterboy's comments - I get to try out quite a range of the new phones where I work and haven't yet seen a reason yet to upgrade from the 6210, but some of the newer kit is very nice even for basic voice + messaging. I still haven't yet seen a true "killer app" for 2G or 3G classes of devices: getting your stock quotes on the train can be done easily enough with text messaging, and these days, the red color can be assumed. But with enough on-demand bandwidth, maybe the suppliers can grow a market for a device that provides visual proof of the archtypical irritating Mobile phone user's message "Hello honey, I'm on the train".
-- The question of whether the egg or the chicken came first depends on which of the two gets to write the history.
Slashdot Mirror
--
When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth - a book of recollections of the days of the mainframes, by one who was there.
I'll admit to being just a little sceptical about how detailed a picture they'll be able to get, but if all you want is a motion sensor for a sensitive area, or a general idea of how much activity there is that shouldn't be so big a problem.
Sorry, but I just don't believe that is the case, any more than I believe that the manufacturer of the mill would dare compromise safety-critical 'lowlevel embedded stuff' with unneccessary and potentially dangerous functionality, even if it were technically feasable to include it. Aside from any considerations of ethics and responsibility, the damage to the firm's reputation and future (non-US) sales would be pretty spectacular.
Even if the CBDTA and BPDG recommendations are enacted into legislation in their current form - and I personally give the elected representatives in Congress and the White House credit for having enough collective common sense to recognise the folly of mandating DRM functionality into, for example, the papermill refiner described by freuddot - this will "merely" create a conflict with legislation covering such things as fitness of a product for its designated function, general safety in public places and industrial premises, plus any product certification requirements that have legal force, and so on. Of course CBDTPA et al don't admit to such exceptions - for pity's sake, they're written to the specifications of a group of people whose inflated sense of their own importance and significance matches that of anyone else on the planet, IT geeks included.
If such legislative conflicts are created, then the law mandating DRM will be challenged in the courts. And my personal opinion is that the US court system, for all its flaws, would have little difficulty in deciding that where there is a conflict between safety and the interests of copyright owners, safety should be given priority.
Running around screaming hysterically about a scenario so improbable that it constitutes wishful thinking detracts from the effort of ensuring that widespread availability of digital information processing mechanisms does not result in loss of balance between the public interest and that of copyright owners. If you want to make a useful contribution (even on /. ;) then put some thought into how such a balance can be achieved. Obviously, safety-critical mechanisms must be exempt from a requirement to include DRM functionality. Arguably, mechanisms manufactured for the purpose of reproducing or creating copyrighted content should include such functionality. In such a situation, what provisions are required to ensure that the mechanisms are not abused to undermine fair use doctrine, or to maintain or create a monopoly on content distribution? How to ensure that the use of DRM technology does not effectively usurp the legislative and legal processes in the field of copyright enforcement and protection - in particular, should there be a legal obligation that DRM mechanisms already in use must be modifiable to conform to future legislative changes or legal decisions? Should there be an obligation on content distributors who use DRM technology to maintain an archive of the material in an 'unlocked' form so that it can be made available to the public domain when copyright expires? Between the extremes of safety-critical mechanisms and entertainment boxes, how should the general-purpose computer be treated - for example, should there be different rules for a PC that is sold for use in a private home and one that is installed in a business environment? And so on.
Of course, if you find this sort of question 'hard', by all means carry on claiming that the sky is falling.
LEGAL LIABILITY
I wouldn't be surprised, also, if some of the mission-critical applications that the author claims may be affected are covered by explicit legal requirements for certification which will proscribe the mischievous addition of functionality which is both unrequired for the operation of the devices in question and which by its presence will undermine their reliability and safety.
By all means sound the warning bells when some of these bought toyboys introduce particularly inept legislation, and use excessive scope in their proposals to argue that they and their corporate sponsors are too stupid and self-interested to be permitted to decide on these matters, but don't pretend that just because one interest group has its head pushed so far up its posterior that it resembles a klein bottle it will be allowed to get its own way even if the result is that aircraft may start dropping out of the skies. All that does is to play into the hands of the content-distributors' efforts to portray their opponents as turning hysterical now that someone is finally doing something about their thievery.
It's not that trading raw power against development costs is unreasonable where that choice exists - far from it - but rather that hand-waving away questions of efficiency on the assumption that God (or Moore's Law[1]) will provide is a sure recipe for the sort of bloated and near-unmaintainable messes that are so common today. A Mbyte here, a Mbyte there, an assumption that the compiler will find and optimize the invariant components of loops... if you're not careful these all start adding up to measurable numbers "why is this so s l o w . . .")
[1]And, of course, one can always paraphrase Parkinson's Law for IT: programs and data expand to fill the processor power and storage available.
Oh dear.
--
Bulova(r) is a registered trade mark of Bulova Corporation. Dali ought to be a registered trade mark, given his eye for the commercial main chance.
(One wants to encourage the positive, of course, but if you're going to fete old enemies who've shaken hands and decided to tolerate each other, at least wait a decent period of time to confirm that the outbreak of sweet reason will persist.)
<troll>Come to think of it, in some parts of the US, a gun does come into the catagory of household appliances.<ducks and runs/></troll>
I'm not sure I'd regard Ananova as a major news site - my guess is that it is much less referenced from outside the UK than (say) BBC or CNN. It's default story display seems somewhat downmarket and UK-centric.
Now, could the same team please arrange for end to end mobile phone performances of John Cage's 4'33" alongside the main program at the next concert I go to?
(Quite seriously, I'm impressed by this, even if it isn't "great" art.)
Oops.
"...didn't get to the tank..."
motor, of course, mea culpa.
--
See how dangerous righteous indignation is?
But all kudos to the engineers from Boeing and NASA who worked out what the problem was - quite possibly from fairly subtle clues in the telemetry information or some very careful trial and error experiments - and how to get around it and coax the satellite up to its intended orbit.
...your primary business. If, indeed, it is your primary business any longer, or even has been in the past.
But a lot of it is down to the need of the vendors to keep pushing product into markets that are already approaching saturation (like Western Europe: especially among young people just about everyone who is ever likely to get a mobile already has one). So, more bells and whistles, more attempts to push bandwidth-gobbling apps to justify investment in costly network infrastructure, and so on.
And I still haven't seen the "killer app" for 2G or 3G mobiles, the thing that would make me shell out for more than a low end model. Yes, something that was permanently online so I didn't need to wait 30 seconds or more to get a circuit-switched link before I could get the time of the next bus or train, if the network had wide enough coverage. Some service tying in to GPRS that could take the phone number of the cosy little restaurant where my date is (hopefully) still waiting and give me a little map of the way through the maze of twisty little lanes between us... but that sort of thing needs a lot of backend information readily available before the apps can start getting rolled out.
Amen. How about promoting the idea of a "lucky folks fund" - encourage people to donate a few percent of the cost of upgrading your PC/ Phone/ whatever to some organisation that is trying to help people less privileged than we are to pull themselves up.Demonstrating that you're still up there in the leading group of equipment manufacturers, certainly. Nokia have produced some very speculative pieces of equipment to try things out (eg last year's 5510, full alphabetic keyboard for text messaging plus a digital music player) then later integrated some of the useful results in later more mainstream models.
I'm not particularly disagreeing with Hamsterboy's comments - I get to try out quite a range of the new phones where I work and haven't yet seen a reason yet to upgrade from the 6210, but some of the newer kit is very nice even for basic voice + messaging. I still haven't yet seen a true "killer app" for 2G or 3G classes of devices: getting your stock quotes on the train can be done easily enough with text messaging, and these days, the red color can be assumed. But with enough on-demand bandwidth, maybe the suppliers can grow a market for a device that provides visual proof of the archtypical irritating Mobile phone user's message "Hello honey, I'm on the train".
--
The question of whether the egg or the chicken came first depends on which of the two gets to write the history.