Who could have known that CUA dictates that a red X means Accept. But now that we have been enlightened, it is hard to deny the brilliance? I imagine that shortly red Xs will be popping up everywhere.
Yes. We all love Microsoft. And we have always been at war with EastAsia.
The rationale for Yucca Mountain is that the water table there is WAY down. So that even if the storage containers are somehow breached, waste is not going to end up contaminating streams and/or aquifers before it is cleaned up. On top of which, the drainage, such as it is, from Yucca Mountain is via dry stream beds into unpopulated arid basins. You could probably assemble the entire population that could be affected by a worst-case breach in a small town high school auditorium.
We're told that the amount of waste to be stored is pretty small. Yucca Mountain is reasonably tall (6700 feet ASL, 1300 feet above surrounding terrain) and quite long. Wikipedia has a picture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Hopefully, it's unlikely they would ever "Fill it up".
Without disagreeing about the need for Yucca Mountain or the equivalent, I think the situation is more complex. My understanding is that even with a permanent long term storage facility, some amount of waste will probably always be stored on site. That's because after refueling, it's probably safer to allow the fuel to cool down both physically and radiologically before transporting it. That would seem to make sense. Why transport Iodine-131 -- half life 8 days -- hundreds or thousands of km if the stuff will simply go away in a few months? After all, transportation accidents are probably far more likely than breeches of a well designed temporary or permanent storage facility.
What's the optimum strategy? I have no idea. That is beyond my pay grade.
And besides which, what evidence is there that being on psychoactive drugs is a detriment to IT productivity? If one hopes to become one with modern programming tools and environments I should think a bit of booze, grass, or smack would probably be more of a help than a hinderance.
In fairness, many decades ago a few months after "they" got tired of retrieving aircraft and passengers from Cuba and installed metal detectors, the guy in front of me in a boarding line at Denver was found to be carrying a pair of handcuffs. He declined to explain why and was hustled off by two large security people. I guess that counts as catching a threat... maybe.
"Sometimes flying is the only practical way to go"
That's correct, although back before I decided that the whole horror show with airport security, seats that are too closely spaced for an average height male, and a complete inability to stick to published schedules really wasn't much fun I encountered more than one situation where crossing the US by air took just about as long as driving. The only positive thing I can say about flying today vs flying half a century ago is the airport food has improved immeasurably.
Not too long ago my wife's employers ended up taking FOUR DAYS to fly from Taos, NM to Burlington, VT.... and it would have taken longer if they hadn't opted to fly from NM to Manchester, NH, rent a car, and drive the last 200km... and that wasn't even in Winter. Now that I think about if, my last flight -- about 12 years ago -- took three days because the plane the airline insisted I take left Burlington too late to make it's connection at JFK... two days in a row. But at least I got to spend the time at home, not counting each and every acoustic panel in some airport's ceiling.
And have the uplifting experience of dealing with US border Patrol clown show instead of the airport security clown show. The Canadian are border folks polite, competent, and quick. The US frequently are anything but.
"The innovations of today just feel like trinkets..."
Yes and no. Cell phones and to some extent GPS really are changing the way people interact and live. But I agree that much modern "innovation" is pointless when it isn't actively annoying. And some of it seems to act as a stupidity amplifier -- something the world does not remotely need. But I expect when todays young adults look back at the world from the perspective of old age you will see transformative innovations. Just not necessarily the ones we might identify today.
BTW, I'd say that the three biggest innovations during the nearly 80 years I've been around are medicines that actually work, crops that yield many more calories from each acre farmed, and an great dimunation in cultural isolation over vast swaths of the planet.
Not to denigrate Jenner -- who deserves loads of credit. But innoculation with cowpox or a mild form of smallpox was commonly practiced in the American colonies in the 1770s. In point of fact after an early period where the practice of innoculation was forbidden by George Washington, recruits to the Continental army were deliberately infected with a mild strain of smallpox upon enlistment. http://www.mountvernon.org/dig...
"Right. Because no one ever inadvertently left their car in neutral to let it roll away until it struck something. But if they had... sue the manufacturer!"
Most automatic transmission vehicles built in the last two decades won't let you remove the keys if the vehicle isn't in Park. And if you try to leave the car with the keys in the ignition, they will beep at you.
Building a car that can start and run into things with no driver in the vehicle is not remotely defensible. Of course they are going to get sued.... and they are going to lose.
Can autonomous cars drive better than humans? One hopes so. It's hardly a high barrier. However, I suspect we're going to find that if a human mows down a crowd of schoolkids, the driver is at fault. But if an autonomous vehicle even musses one schoolkid's hair, it's the vendor/programmers fault. Rather a disincentive to building autonomous vehicles don't you think?
> Maybe if I could travel an interstate with no interaction, that might qualify.
That's pretty easy if you don't mind a few glitches like occasionally ending up headed down the wrong road with no easy way to get turned around. Weather, accidents, construction will also be a problem. I think the big issue is going to be reliability not capability. Vendors surely won't be able to get away with the kind of crap we are used to in commercial software. Not unless they fancy spending a lot of time in court dealing with lawsuits from those they harm. License agreements are unlikely to hold up as an excuse.
Problem is that it only happens on a few days a year when the sun is high in the sky, the days are long, and the wind is also blowing. Moreover, the reason that the price of electricity goes to zero (or below) is that no one really wants it at any price. In short, generation capacity is overbuilt. Why is it overbuilt? Because subsidies for renewable energy in Germany are poorly structured and do not go to zero when the wholesale price for electricity goes to zero. Who pays for the subsidies? Why the ratepayers of course.
Is there a lesson here for the US and other countries? You bet there is. But it isn't that renewable energy is dirt cheap. It's that one better be careful how one structures renewable energy subsidies (if any) because if one does not, one's electric bill is going to to include a surcharge to pay the Warren Buffetts, Koch brothers, T Boone Pickens et.al. for generating electricity that no want needs or wants.
"Modern distros remind me of firing up a full-blown JVM for a simple text editor"
Come on man. This is slashdot. A car analogy is mandatory here. e.g. Using a Ferrari to take your trash to the landfill.
(BTW, I just upgraded my eight year old Linux system to a more modern system in order to run a "modern" web browser. Aren't all these new features great? Actually, No. Mostly they are at best different ways to do something that worked fine the old way. At worst, they are outright annoying. On top of which I seem to have acquired dozens of new bugs that I'll have to track down and exterminate one by one. What ever happened to "If it ain't broke, don't fix it?")
Yes and no. Your math looks OK. However, I think a lighter than air craft with solar power might work out as a cargo carrier and possibly even as passenger vehicle. The Graf Zeppelin did a round the world trip sometime back around 1930. It took them something like a week and a half. They didn't use a lot of power and I'd expect that a modern design might be a bit faster. I think the zeppelins maxed out around 100kph (60mph in American).
I can't see them replacing jets at current fuel prices, but who knows what kerosene will cost in four or five decades.
"and I don't care that the owner knows what papers I read."
Which of course, they do anyway since they do one end of the encryption/decryption. And in any case, the site owner, their ISP, your ISP, everyone in between, the NSA, the Chinese, white hat hackers, evil hackers, and everyone else who cares knows "what paper you read" albeit not necessarily what specific content you are interested in. The IP routing information isn't (more or less can't be?) encrypted. So the fact that you sent packets to/ received packets from, for example, 172.217.3.4 is knowable whether or not the packet contents are encrypted.
End to end encryption might indeed be part of a secure internet. But we don't currently have the slightest idea how to secure internet communication. And yes, now that you ask, that IS something of a problem. Universal HTTPS seems more of a modest usability problem than a solution to any real problem. Security theatre like the TSA horror show at airports? (Whaddyamean I can't take this jug of maple syrup that I bought at the airport store onto the plane?)
You've got a good point, but rendering paper maps directly actually doesn't work as badly as one might think. Try this site www.topozone.com. Normally, I'd call it up to verify, but for complex reasons I'm stuck on my no-Javascript support but very fast browser for a few hours.
> There is no way (that I am aware of) to rotate the map so the gridlines run E-W and N-S so when you print out a close up view
If that's REALLY important to you, you can download a jpeg file through the Google Maps API or capture a screen shot. Once you have an image file, you can rotate, crop, and print with Image Magick or any of a dozen similar programs.
An American football field is pretty close to the size of a typical soccer (as we Americans call "football") field. Roughly 109mx48m. Typically we don't use the full 109m length when soccer is played on the same field because running into the permanently mounted football goal posts by accident hurts.
There's an interesting economic issue with desalinization. It's kind of expensive. So you take a region that gets a reasonable amount of rain/snow fall a lot of the time, natural precipitation -- being a cheaper water source -- will be the preferred source. Except during droughts. When users will turn to the desalinization plant. (Boy are we glad we built that. We are very clever, no?) But water from the largely unused desalinization facility is going to be much more expensive than was projected because maintenance and debt service costs are continuous, but revenue is only generated during droughts. And the costs can only be serviced when there is revenue.
It's cute. I have to give it that. And no argument that desalinization should be a well matched load for intermittent power sources. (So is pumping water around the countryside -- which is done a lot in areas like the Western US.) However, I expect that this scheme will encounter a zillion problems if anyone tries to actually implement it. Everything from wind blown salt spray which is corrosive and also coats the solar cells with salt to breaking up in strong storms. Remaining upright isn't all that useful if it is upright under 25 fathoms of water.
I'd think that a solar installation installed on something solid -- like ground for example -- would be cheaper to build and cheaper to maintain.
I assume the pills are Potassium Iodide. per Wikipedia when Potassium Iodide is exposed to air, it very slowly oxidizes to Potassium Carbonate and Iodine. (It turns yellowish). Iodine is sort of nasty stuff. It eats holes in things. So, yeah, I guess it's a real date... sort of...
However, If I were engulfed in a cloud of I-131 two days after the box expires, I think I'd chance the "expired" pill.
Nonsense! By 2025 or so, your Bluetooth headphones will likely deliver flawless audio..... If you can find any source device that still delivers such a by then ancient and outmoded technology.
More like a corporate obsession with overly complex solutions to problems... and non-problems. The Red Queen races on.
For those -- probably not numerous -- situations where digital audio is needed, wouldn't it make for sense to put an ADC in the using device?
This "solution" would seem to require DACs (and amplifiers? (and therefore batteries)) in headphones and completely baffle a lot of non-geek users who would have to deal with three incompatible connectors -- 3.5mm audio, usb-C, usb-C with sidepins. And, of course, USB to usb-C adapter cables will turn up for folks who want to use older devices to drive usb-C devices. But they won't have audio on sidepins because regular USB doesn't support that -- yet. And software problems routing audio to the analog and digital hardware in the source device will probably make things worse.
Slashdot Mirror
Absolutely. We do all love Microsoft.
Who could have known that CUA dictates that a red X means Accept. But now that we have been enlightened, it is hard to deny the brilliance? I imagine that shortly red Xs will be popping up everywhere.
Yes. We all love Microsoft. And we have always been at war with EastAsia.
The rationale for Yucca Mountain is that the water table there is WAY down. So that even if the storage containers are somehow breached, waste is not going to end up contaminating streams and/or aquifers before it is cleaned up. On top of which, the drainage, such as it is, from Yucca Mountain is via dry stream beds into unpopulated arid basins. You could probably assemble the entire population that could be affected by a worst-case breach in a small town high school auditorium.
We're told that the amount of waste to be stored is pretty small. Yucca Mountain is reasonably tall (6700 feet ASL, 1300 feet above surrounding terrain) and quite long. Wikipedia has a picture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Hopefully, it's unlikely they would ever "Fill it up".
Without disagreeing about the need for Yucca Mountain or the equivalent, I think the situation is more complex. My understanding is that even with a permanent long term storage facility, some amount of waste will probably always be stored on site. That's because after refueling, it's probably safer to allow the fuel to cool down both physically and radiologically before transporting it. That would seem to make sense. Why transport Iodine-131 -- half life 8 days -- hundreds or thousands of km if the stuff will simply go away in a few months? After all, transportation accidents are probably far more likely than breeches of a well designed temporary or permanent storage facility.
What's the optimum strategy? I have no idea. That is beyond my pay grade.
And besides which, what evidence is there that being on psychoactive drugs is a detriment to IT productivity? If one hopes to become one with modern programming tools and environments I should think a bit of booze, grass, or smack would probably be more of a help than a hinderance.
"They have caught NO THREATS yet."
In fairness, many decades ago a few months after "they" got tired of retrieving aircraft and passengers from Cuba and installed metal detectors, the guy in front of me in a boarding line at Denver was found to be carrying a pair of handcuffs. He declined to explain why and was hustled off by two large security people. I guess that counts as catching a threat ... maybe.
"Sometimes flying is the only practical way to go"
That's correct, although back before I decided that the whole horror show with airport security, seats that are too closely spaced for an average height male, and a complete inability to stick to published schedules really wasn't much fun I encountered more than one situation where crossing the US by air took just about as long as driving. The only positive thing I can say about flying today vs flying half a century ago is the airport food has improved immeasurably.
Not too long ago my wife's employers ended up taking FOUR DAYS to fly from Taos, NM to Burlington, VT. ... and it would have taken longer if they hadn't opted to fly from NM to Manchester, NH, rent a car, and drive the last 200km ... and that wasn't even in Winter. Now that I think about if, my last flight -- about 12 years ago -- took three days because the plane the airline insisted I take left Burlington too late to make it's connection at JFK ... two days in a row. But at least I got to spend the time at home, not counting each and every acoustic panel in some airport's ceiling.
"I would have to cut through Canada."
And have the uplifting experience of dealing with US border Patrol clown show instead of the airport security clown show. The Canadian are border folks polite, competent, and quick. The US frequently are anything but.
"The innovations of today just feel like trinkets..."
Yes and no. Cell phones and to some extent GPS really are changing the way people interact and live. But I agree that much modern "innovation" is pointless when it isn't actively annoying. And some of it seems to act as a stupidity amplifier -- something the world does not remotely need. But I expect when todays young adults look back at the world from the perspective of old age you will see transformative innovations. Just not necessarily the ones we might identify today.
BTW, I'd say that the three biggest innovations during the nearly 80 years I've been around are medicines that actually work, crops that yield many more calories from each acre farmed, and an great dimunation in cultural isolation over vast swaths of the planet.
Not to denigrate Jenner -- who deserves loads of credit. But innoculation with cowpox or a mild form of smallpox was commonly practiced in the American colonies in the 1770s. In point of fact after an early period where the practice of innoculation was forbidden by George Washington, recruits to the Continental army were deliberately infected with a mild strain of smallpox upon enlistment. http://www.mountvernon.org/dig...
"Right. Because no one ever inadvertently left their car in neutral to let it roll away until it struck something. But if they had... sue the manufacturer!"
Most automatic transmission vehicles built in the last two decades won't let you remove the keys if the vehicle isn't in Park. And if you try to leave the car with the keys in the ignition, they will beep at you.
Building a car that can start and run into things with no driver in the vehicle is not remotely defensible. Of course they are going to get sued. ... and they are going to lose.
Can autonomous cars drive better than humans? One hopes so. It's hardly a high barrier. However, I suspect we're going to find that if a human mows down a crowd of schoolkids, the driver is at fault. But if an autonomous vehicle even musses one schoolkid's hair, it's the vendor/programmers fault. Rather a disincentive to building autonomous vehicles don't you think?
> Maybe if I could travel an interstate with no interaction, that might qualify.
That's pretty easy if you don't mind a few glitches like occasionally ending up headed down the wrong road with no easy way to get turned around. Weather, accidents, construction will also be a problem. I think the big issue is going to be reliability not capability. Vendors surely won't be able to get away with the kind of crap we are used to in commercial software. Not unless they fancy spending a lot of time in court dealing with lawsuits from those they harm. License agreements are unlikely to hold up as an excuse.
Problem is that it only happens on a few days a year when the sun is high in the sky, the days are long, and the wind is also blowing. Moreover, the reason that the price of electricity goes to zero (or below) is that no one really wants it at any price. In short, generation capacity is overbuilt. Why is it overbuilt? Because subsidies for renewable energy in Germany are poorly structured and do not go to zero when the wholesale price for electricity goes to zero. Who pays for the subsidies? Why the ratepayers of course.
Is there a lesson here for the US and other countries? You bet there is. But it isn't that renewable energy is dirt cheap. It's that one better be careful how one structures renewable energy subsidies (if any) because if one does not, one's electric bill is going to to include a surcharge to pay the Warren Buffetts, Koch brothers, T Boone Pickens et.al. for generating electricity that no want needs or wants.
"Modern distros remind me of firing up a full-blown JVM for a simple text editor"
Come on man. This is slashdot. A car analogy is mandatory here. e.g. Using a Ferrari to take your trash to the landfill.
(BTW, I just upgraded my eight year old Linux system to a more modern system in order to run a "modern" web browser. Aren't all these new features great? Actually, No. Mostly they are at best different ways to do something that worked fine the old way. At worst, they are outright annoying. On top of which I seem to have acquired dozens of new bugs that I'll have to track down and exterminate one by one. What ever happened to "If it ain't broke, don't fix it?")
Yes and no. Your math looks OK. However, I think a lighter than air craft with solar power might work out as a cargo carrier and possibly even as passenger vehicle. The Graf Zeppelin did a round the world trip sometime back around 1930. It took them something like a week and a half. They didn't use a lot of power and I'd expect that a modern design might be a bit faster. I think the zeppelins maxed out around 100kph (60mph in American).
I can't see them replacing jets at current fuel prices, but who knows what kerosene will cost in four or five decades.
Hmmmm. And only five centuries after Magellan circled the world powered only by wind.
Making progress by leaps and bounds.
"and I don't care that the owner knows what papers I read."
Which of course, they do anyway since they do one end of the encryption/decryption. And in any case, the site owner, their ISP, your ISP, everyone in between, the NSA, the Chinese, white hat hackers, evil hackers, and everyone else who cares knows "what paper you read" albeit not necessarily what specific content you are interested in. The IP routing information isn't (more or less can't be?) encrypted. So the fact that you sent packets to/ received packets from, for example, 172.217.3.4 is knowable whether or not the packet contents are encrypted.
End to end encryption might indeed be part of a secure internet. But we don't currently have the slightest idea how to secure internet communication. And yes, now that you ask, that IS something of a problem. Universal HTTPS seems more of a modest usability problem than a solution to any real problem. Security theatre like the TSA horror show at airports? (Whaddyamean I can't take this jug of maple syrup that I bought at the airport store onto the plane?)
You've got a good point, but rendering paper maps directly actually doesn't work as badly as one might think. Try this site www.topozone.com. Normally, I'd call it up to verify, but for complex reasons I'm stuck on my no-Javascript support but very fast browser for a few hours.
> There is no way (that I am aware of) to rotate the map so the gridlines run E-W and N-S so when you print out a close up view
If that's REALLY important to you, you can download a jpeg file through the Google Maps API or capture a screen shot. Once you have an image file, you can rotate, crop, and print with Image Magick or any of a dozen similar programs.
An American football field is pretty close to the size of a typical soccer (as we Americans call "football") field. Roughly 109mx48m. Typically we don't use the full 109m length when soccer is played on the same field because running into the permanently mounted football goal posts by accident hurts.
There's an interesting economic issue with desalinization. It's kind of expensive. So you take a region that gets a reasonable amount of rain/snow fall a lot of the time, natural precipitation -- being a cheaper water source -- will be the preferred source. Except during droughts. When users will turn to the desalinization plant. (Boy are we glad we built that. We are very clever, no?) But water from the largely unused desalinization facility is going to be much more expensive than was projected because maintenance and debt service costs are continuous, but revenue is only generated during droughts. And the costs can only be serviced when there is revenue.
It's cute. I have to give it that. And no argument that desalinization should be a well matched load for intermittent power sources. (So is pumping water around the countryside -- which is done a lot in areas like the Western US.) However, I expect that this scheme will encounter a zillion problems if anyone tries to actually implement it. Everything from wind blown salt spray which is corrosive and also coats the solar cells with salt to breaking up in strong storms. Remaining upright isn't all that useful if it is upright under 25 fathoms of water.
I'd think that a solar installation installed on something solid -- like ground for example -- would be cheaper to build and cheaper to maintain.
Maybe I'm wrong. Hope so.
I assume the pills are Potassium Iodide. per Wikipedia when Potassium Iodide is exposed to air, it very slowly oxidizes to Potassium Carbonate and Iodine. (It turns yellowish). Iodine is sort of nasty stuff. It eats holes in things. So, yeah, I guess it's a real date ... sort of ...
However, If I were engulfed in a cloud of I-131 two days after the box expires, I think I'd chance the "expired" pill.
Nonsense! By 2025 or so, your Bluetooth headphones will likely deliver flawless audio. .... If you can find any source device that still delivers such a by then ancient and outmoded technology.
More like a corporate obsession with overly complex solutions to problems ... and non-problems. The Red Queen races on.
For those -- probably not numerous -- situations where digital audio is needed, wouldn't it make for sense to put an ADC in the using device?
This "solution" would seem to require DACs (and amplifiers? (and therefore batteries)) in headphones and completely baffle a lot of non-geek users who would have to deal with three incompatible connectors -- 3.5mm audio, usb-C, usb-C with sidepins. And, of course, USB to usb-C adapter cables will turn up for folks who want to use older devices to drive usb-C devices. But they won't have audio on sidepins because regular USB doesn't support that -- yet. And software problems routing audio to the analog and digital hardware in the source device will probably make things worse.