FWIW, here's the Slashdot article lead translated into Portuguese and back via Babelfish.
"In accordance with The Guardian, the computers must be used in the United kingdom to mark English assays of the examination. ' Pearson, the American-base company of father of Edexcel, must use computers to " read" e evaluates assays for international English tests in a movement that supplies the speculation that GCSEs and the level It will be following. Pearson demands this will be more accurate of what the marking human being. ' Can the subtis computers now understand all nuances of the language, or are the peoples who go to have that to learn pleasant a special form of the English to pass examinations?"
Are they really trying to tell us that computers understand language well enough to grade tests? No damn wonder that nothing much in modern society seems to work quite right. The inmates truly do seem to be running this place.
FWIW, as of this morning, the W3C Validator [http://validator.w3.org] reports
www.google.com ------------ 39 Errors, 2 warning(s) www.microsoft.com -------- 300 Errors, 31 warning(s) www.apple.com -------------- 6 Errors, 1 warning(s) www.bing.com -------------- 12 Errors http://validator.w3.org/ ------ Sorry! This document can not be checked www.slashdot.org ---------- 64 Errors, 2 warning(s)
And don't those web page designers who are "dancing for joy" deserve a bit of credit for this shambles? I'd like to believe that they won't immediately start using features that work in chrome, but not IE because "all the user has to do is download a plugin." But if past experience is any guide, that is exactly what many of them will do.
Drat -- forgot to click "Plain Old text". Let's try again.
You equate "space exploration" with "manned space exploration". That's not very insightful. Human beings are a really, really, lousy information detection and collection device. Supporting them in space is very difficult and costs a fortune. Any sensible engineer would instantly reject a robot design for space exploration that resembled a human being. And people are unlikely to be able to explore Venus, Jupiter, etc for many decades -- maybe not ever.
So here's a thought. Instead of exploring space with humans and the oceans with robots, how about we explore the oceans using people and space using robots? The oceans are poorly known, have more area than the moon and Mars combined, and represent at least as great a technical challenge as space exploration. The costs of exploring and exploiting the oceans -- maybe even colonizing them would probably be comparable to space exploration. And there are plenty of opportunities to create a bunch of martyrs if you think that killing folks engaged in unnecessary, but stirring, activities is somehow a requirement for progress. But the cost increments in ocean exploration are much smaller. A billion bucks worth of ocean research will actually buy you something other than a pile of paper and a few press releases.
BTW, IMHO if anyone seriously thinks that an additional three billion a year is all our space program needs to make it well, they are fantasizing (again). -- You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
You equate "space exploration" with "manned space exploration". That's not very insightful. Human beings are a really, really, lousy information detection and collection device. Supporting them in space is very difficult and costs a fortune. Any sensible engineer would instantly reject a robot design for space exploration that resembled a human being. And people are unlikely to be able to explore Venus, Jupiter, etc for many decades -- maybe not ever.
So here's a thought. Instead of exploring space with humans and the oceans with robots, how about we explore the oceans using people and space using robots? The oceans are poorly known, have more area than the moon and Mars combined, and represent at least as great a technical challenge as space exploration. The costs of exploring and exploiting the oceans -- maybe even colonizing them would probably be comparable to space exploration. And there are plenty of opportunities to create a bunch of martyrs if you think that killing folks engaged in unnecessary, but stirring, activities is somehow a requirement for progress. But the cost increments in ocean exploration are much smaller. A billion bucks worth of ocean research will actually buy you something other than a pile of paper and a few press releases.
BTW, IMHO if anyone seriously thinks that an additional three billion a year is all our space program needs to make it well, they are fantasizing (again).
***you don't stop flying just because airplanes can crash.***
I expect that you would stop flying if any sociopathic teenager in Belgrade or Sendai could crash your plane from his bedroom with fifteen keystrokes. Would it be rude to point out that cyber security is a disaster area and the situation seems to be deteriorating, not improving?
***Each SAGE housed an A/N FSQ-7 computer, which had around 60,000 vacuum tubes. IBM constructed the hardware, and each computer occupied a huge amount of space.***
The sites had two computers, not one. The switched between them once a day so they could check all the vacuum tubes on the off line computer -- of which I'm pretty sure there were only about 6000. Mostly they were 6SN7 dual triodes so there were actually about 12000 switches in each computer. Memory was 68K by 32 bits wide, and software was continually swapped in from drums in the background. Instruction cycle time was 6 microseconds. The specs weren't vastly different from a 1980s IBM PC with 256K of memory.
The software was written in assembler and was speced to accept digitized radar from 16 sites, support 40 or 80 (can't remember which) consoles, track up to 300 aircraft simultaneously, control dozens of manned interceptors plus unmanned Bomarc interceptors, communicate with four or five adjacent sites digitally, and some number of manual sites via teletype, and some other things. And it actually did most of that. (I think it maxed out a little below 200 simultaneous tracks). Try THAT on a 8088
In general, the software -- which cost a fortune -- worked. Not perfectly, but better than Windows and Office.
And, yes, SAGE needed a lot of air conditioning. The lights in parts of Santa Monica used to dim momentarily when the air conditioning at the RAND System Reseach labs development facility started up.
*** It was a two story building***
It was a four story building. And the computers were on the second floor only. Another floor held something like 40 (80?)desk sized consoles -- each with a fairly large display, a light gun (closest thing today would be a mouse), and a button panel. Other floors held offices, Telco equipment, etc. The consoles were used to monitor target tracking, control interceptors, etc. There were also a half dozen or so regional command centers -- also with AN/FSQ7s that were configured a bit differently.
Note to self. We are said have meaningful competition in digital communications that provides all sorts of benefits. Organize expedition. Try to find it/them. Surely there must be some way to profit from discovery of something that rare.
How? We can worry about how to profit once we capture one or more competes (or whatever the hell the singular of competition is) and persuade it/them to breed in captivity.
***Well its not trivial. This is not a remote exploit, its local.***
True -- as formulated and presented. But what would you like to bet that there are roughly 200 clever but warped people out there working on ways to exploit the defect remotely? 150 for the publicity or because they are curious. And 50 for profit. What do you reckon that one or more will succeed? Even money maybe? (... Let's see... we log in via anonymous ftp, then we do x and y and z and -- viola -- now we are root and running telnet...)
Of course, Windows seems to get a bunch of patches every month for stuff of probably comparable severity, so this is probably not a reason to switch. Does make me wonder if computers with sensitive data ought to be networked quite as freely as we are doing today.
***Also while in Dayton, check out the Wright Brother's Bicycle Shop!***
There were about six Wright bicycle shops over the years. The final one where they built their aircraft prototypes was moved to Greenfield Village near Detroit sometime in the 1930s.
Please do not assume that because you can write cursive script, anyone can. Tain't so. Many people find the mechanical skills involved to be difficult or impossible (look up Dysgraphia). That includes many people who have no trouble mastering touch typing or using a computer pointing device.
I myself certainly can write cursive script. But in order to write it legibly, I have to work harder than I do to print -- so anything that has to be read by others gets printed or typed.
The only group of people I can think of who routinely use cursive script nowadays are doctors. Their handwriting is notoriously marginally decryptable by the rest of humanity.
***The power draw @ 0.10/kWh is not worth worrying about, despite what the green hippies tell you.***
0.10kWh (which probably isn't what you had in mind) would appear to be 100 watts -- which works out to $87.60 a year if you are lucky enough to get your electricity at 10 cents a kW Hour. In a lot of cases, that's more money than you paid for the gadget it's powering.
There is surely some amount of power drain that really is too small to worry about, but it's not clear that ANY device that plugs into a power line actually draws that little. Even a device that consumes only 1 watt (about average for a wall-wart connected to a device that is off I'm told) consumes about 8.8kwH per year.
Them green hippies ain't always wrong.... Now the orange ones...
***The whole Walmart thing could have been fixed with simple marketing. in the first world they could have simply had it marketed to K-12 with something like "my first laptop" or something.***
Indeed, they could have. I think there might be modest market for a cheap fairly indestructable device with more capability than AlphaSmart. And it certainly doesn't have to run Windows in K-4 and for Special Ed. If the teachers can't figure out Windows... and for the most part they can't... what hope does a seven year old with limited mental abilities have?
***What you see in a web browser is not HTML, it is a *rendering* of HTML.***
Exactly. It's called HyperText Markup Language, not HyperText Layout Language. What You See is not necessarily what Someone else will get. That is by intent to deal with widely varying display capabilities. Using HTML for layout definition is sort of like modifying a sports car for use as a plow. It can probably be done, but it will be a lot of work and will probably never be be a very good plow.
***Don't expect to be getting your own IPv6 address any time soon. Most likely, they're going to roll it out for managing all those devices first, and you'll still be assigned an IPv4 address for your Internet connectivity.***
You're probably right. Too bad in a way. I expect that there will be entertainment galore starting shortly after early adopters turn off their NAT routing. Maybe it's just me, but I sort of think that a large part of Internet security such as it is probably depends on the limitations of IPv4 and NAT. With IPv6, my computer, phone, TV setup box, refrigerator, printer will all be fully visible and accessible to any corporation, government, nutcase, religious fanatic, scam artist, and sociopathic teenager anywhere in the world? What could possibly go wrong?
***You try, getting three different clients working against a database from the same vendor working properly. They all crave different versions of dotnet, java or whatnot and any new version of the client software demands countless hours of testing just about every possible combination of apps.***
Thanks, no. Been there. Done That. You're right. It is a nightmare.
But I'm curious why you think, as you apparently do, that switching to "the cloud" is going to be better. From where I sit, "the cloud" looks like a huge glob of poison gas. More standards than anyone can keep track of. But no one complies with them anyway. No discipline. Very little common sense. I suspect where the cloud is headed is a worse shambles than the current desktop plus latency and bandwidth problems. And security... what security? Do people seriously think that "Never run as root" is going to prevent the ongoing security disaster?
Fortunately, I am retired and no longer have to make a living fighting with computers. I have a lot of sympathy for those who are not as lucky. Fasten those seatbelts folks, the next couple of decades are going to be one bumpy ride.
You're right that you probably don't want ringer voltage applied to your NIC. But a simple removable passive plastic or wooden block that blocks pin 1&2 or 7&8 in the RJ45 socket but still allows an RJ11 to plug in will fix that. My guess is that crafting a block from a soda bottle using a razor blade would take about 15 minutes. That 15 minutes Includes figuring out where you left the razor blades last time you used them and a first attempt that has some sort of problem.
***The browsers you named have even smaller market share than Firefox...***
True, but they are part of the pack that is nibbling away at the mindset of incompetent web site designers who think that the fact that their abomination worked once for about five minutes in IE means it is correct and the rest of the world is out of step. Sooner or later I'm going to lose it and go after some clown who suggests that I need to upgrade to a "modern web browser" on a site that fails W3C validation with hundreds of layout errors in its HTML.
I'm using konqueror to view Slashdot BTW. Firefox works fine, but it is klunky. IE is even klunkier. It's not awful. I can use it if I have to. I'd just prefer not to.
***I despise windows but I just need a system that works with the option of using advanced features if I choose to not defeaturing or blocking features. I can get that from Microsoft.***
Don't do a lot of on-line forums, do we? Most are a LOT worse than this.
Heck, Slashdot works almost as well as the Compuserve Forums did in 1990. A lot of us back then thought that the future was about improvement. Boy, were we in for a shock.
It won't be marketed to users or developers? It'll be marketed to OEMs on the basis of price? We're talking largely about computers that cost a few hundred dollars. Shaving $10 USD off the OS price has a meaningful impact on the selling price or on someone's margins. (This will not be good for Microsoft BTW).
Thank you. It's nice to know that I'm not the only person who finds scribd to be a truly awful machination. The concept and intent may be meritorious. The implementation sucks. Unreadably small type face that requires horizontal scrolling once you figure out how to get the text big enough to read. Lousy screen layout. Unlabeled icons that do stuff that nobody could possibly understand... yech.
***Given the temperature a few feet under ground is still fairly cool even in summer the returning water ought to be relatively cold.***
Well, yeah. But isn't that because dirt is a lousy heat conductor? What's going to happen when you start trying to exchange a gazillion BTU per hour generated by your server farm into it? I'm not sure that you are wrong, but I think you might be. The ground just might not behave like an infinitely large heat sink/source?
Slashdot Mirror
FWIW, here's the Slashdot article lead translated into Portuguese and back via Babelfish.
"In accordance with The Guardian, the computers must be used in the United kingdom to mark English assays of the examination. ' Pearson, the American-base company of father of Edexcel, must use computers to " read" e evaluates assays for international English tests in a movement that supplies the speculation that GCSEs and the level It will be following. Pearson demands this will be more accurate of what the marking human being. ' Can the subtis computers now understand all nuances of the language, or are the peoples who go to have that to learn pleasant a special form of the English to pass examinations?"
Are they really trying to tell us that computers understand language well enough to grade tests? No damn wonder that nothing much in modern society seems to work quite right. The inmates truly do seem to be running this place.
There are standards for HTML? Who knew?
FWIW, as of this morning, the W3C Validator [http://validator.w3.org] reports
www.google.com ------------ 39 Errors, 2 warning(s)
www.microsoft.com -------- 300 Errors, 31 warning(s)
www.apple.com -------------- 6 Errors, 1 warning(s)
www.bing.com -------------- 12 Errors
http://validator.w3.org/ ------ Sorry! This document can not be checked
www.slashdot.org ---------- 64 Errors, 2 warning(s)
And don't those web page designers who are "dancing for joy" deserve a bit of credit for this shambles? I'd like to believe that they won't immediately start using features that work in chrome, but not IE because "all the user has to do is download a plugin." But if past experience is any guide, that is exactly what many of them will do.
Drat -- forgot to click "Plain Old text". Let's try again.
You equate "space exploration" with "manned space exploration". That's not very insightful. Human beings are a really, really, lousy information detection and collection device. Supporting them in space is very difficult and costs a fortune. Any sensible engineer would instantly reject a robot design for space exploration that resembled a human being. And people are unlikely to be able to explore Venus, Jupiter, etc for many decades -- maybe not ever.
So here's a thought. Instead of exploring space with humans and the oceans with robots, how about we explore the oceans using people and space using robots? The oceans are poorly known, have more area than the moon and Mars combined, and represent at least as great a technical challenge as space exploration. The costs of exploring and exploiting the oceans -- maybe even colonizing them would probably be comparable to space exploration. And there are plenty of opportunities to create a bunch of martyrs if you think that killing folks engaged in unnecessary, but stirring, activities is somehow a requirement for progress. But the cost increments in ocean exploration are much smaller. A billion bucks worth of ocean research will actually buy you something other than a pile of paper and a few press releases.
BTW, IMHO if anyone seriously thinks that an additional three billion a year is all our space program needs to make it well, they are fantasizing (again).
--
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
You equate "space exploration" with "manned space exploration". That's not very insightful. Human beings are a really, really, lousy information detection and collection device. Supporting them in space is very difficult and costs a fortune. Any sensible engineer would instantly reject a robot design for space exploration that resembled a human being. And people are unlikely to be able to explore Venus, Jupiter, etc for many decades -- maybe not ever. So here's a thought. Instead of exploring space with humans and the oceans with robots, how about we explore the oceans using people and space using robots? The oceans are poorly known, have more area than the moon and Mars combined, and represent at least as great a technical challenge as space exploration. The costs of exploring and exploiting the oceans -- maybe even colonizing them would probably be comparable to space exploration. And there are plenty of opportunities to create a bunch of martyrs if you think that killing folks engaged in unnecessary, but stirring, activities is somehow a requirement for progress. But the cost increments in ocean exploration are much smaller. A billion bucks worth of ocean research will actually buy you something other than a pile of paper and a few press releases. BTW, IMHO if anyone seriously thinks that an additional three billion a year is all our space program needs to make it well, they are fantasizing (again).
***you don't stop flying just because airplanes can crash.***
I expect that you would stop flying if any sociopathic teenager in Belgrade or Sendai could crash your plane from his bedroom with fifteen keystrokes. Would it be rude to point out that cyber security is a disaster area and the situation seems to be deteriorating, not improving?
***Each SAGE housed an A/N FSQ-7 computer, which had around 60,000 vacuum tubes. IBM constructed the hardware, and each computer occupied a huge amount of space.***
The sites had two computers, not one. The switched between them once a day so they could check all the vacuum tubes on the off line computer -- of which I'm pretty sure there were only about 6000. Mostly they were 6SN7 dual triodes so there were actually about 12000 switches in each computer. Memory was 68K by 32 bits wide, and software was continually swapped in from drums in the background. Instruction cycle time was 6 microseconds. The specs weren't vastly different from a 1980s IBM PC with 256K of memory.
The software was written in assembler and was speced to accept digitized radar from 16 sites, support 40 or 80 (can't remember which) consoles, track up to 300 aircraft simultaneously, control dozens of manned interceptors plus unmanned Bomarc interceptors, communicate with four or five adjacent sites digitally, and some number of manual sites via teletype, and some other things. And it actually did most of that. (I think it maxed out a little below 200 simultaneous tracks). Try THAT on a 8088
In general, the software -- which cost a fortune -- worked. Not perfectly, but better than Windows and Office.
And, yes, SAGE needed a lot of air conditioning. The lights in parts of Santa Monica used to dim momentarily when the air conditioning at the RAND System Reseach labs development facility started up.
*** It was a two story building***
It was a four story building. And the computers were on the second floor only. Another floor held something like 40 (80?)desk sized consoles -- each with a fairly large display, a light gun (closest thing today would be a mouse), and a button panel. Other floors held offices, Telco equipment, etc. The consoles were used to monitor target tracking, control interceptors, etc. There were also a half dozen or so regional command centers -- also with AN/FSQ7s that were configured a bit differently.
***That same competition exists under IPv4.***
Note to self. We are said have meaningful competition in digital communications that provides all sorts of benefits. Organize expedition. Try to find it/them. Surely there must be some way to profit from discovery of something that rare.
How? We can worry about how to profit once we capture one or more competes (or whatever the hell the singular of competition is) and persuade it/them to breed in captivity.
***Well its not trivial. This is not a remote exploit, its local.***
True -- as formulated and presented. But what would you like to bet that there are roughly 200 clever but warped people out there working on ways to exploit the defect remotely? 150 for the publicity or because they are curious. And 50 for profit. What do you reckon that one or more will succeed? Even money maybe? (... Let's see ... we log in via anonymous ftp, then we do x and y and z and -- viola -- now we are root and running telnet ...)
Of course, Windows seems to get a bunch of patches every month for stuff of probably comparable severity, so this is probably not a reason to switch. Does make me wonder if computers with sensitive data ought to be networked quite as freely as we are doing today.
***Also while in Dayton, check out the Wright Brother's Bicycle Shop!***
There were about six Wright bicycle shops over the years. The final one where they built their aircraft prototypes was moved to Greenfield Village near Detroit sometime in the 1930s.
They are facts for a lot of us.
Please do not assume that because you can write cursive script, anyone can. Tain't so. Many people find the mechanical skills involved to be difficult or impossible (look up Dysgraphia). That includes many people who have no trouble mastering touch typing or using a computer pointing device.
I myself certainly can write cursive script. But in order to write it legibly, I have to work harder than I do to print -- so anything that has to be read by others gets printed or typed.
The only group of people I can think of who routinely use cursive script nowadays are doctors. Their handwriting is notoriously marginally decryptable by the rest of humanity.
***The power draw @ 0.10/kWh is not worth worrying about, despite what the green hippies tell you.***
0.10kWh (which probably isn't what you had in mind) would appear to be 100 watts -- which works out to $87.60 a year if you are lucky enough to get your electricity at 10 cents a kW Hour. In a lot of cases, that's more money than you paid for the gadget it's powering.
There is surely some amount of power drain that really is too small to worry about, but it's not clear that ANY device that plugs into a power line actually draws that little. Even a device that consumes only 1 watt (about average for a wall-wart connected to a device that is off I'm told) consumes about 8.8kwH per year.
Them green hippies ain't always wrong. ... Now the orange ones ...
***The whole Walmart thing could have been fixed with simple marketing. in the first world they could have simply had it marketed to K-12 with something like "my first laptop" or something.***
Indeed, they could have. I think there might be modest market for a cheap fairly indestructable device with more capability than AlphaSmart. And it certainly doesn't have to run Windows in K-4 and for Special Ed. If the teachers can't figure out Windows ... and for the most part they can't ... what hope does a seven year old with limited mental abilities have?
Exactly. It's called HyperText Markup Language, not HyperText Layout Language. What You See is not necessarily what Someone else will get. That is by intent to deal with widely varying display capabilities. Using HTML for layout definition is sort of like modifying a sports car for use as a plow. It can probably be done, but it will be a lot of work and will probably never be be a very good plow.
***Of course, fossils are three dimensional***
Sometimes. Often remains of critters that do not have hard parts are smooshed flat and are preserved as a film.
***Don't expect to be getting your own IPv6 address any time soon. Most likely, they're going to roll it out for managing all those devices first, and you'll still be assigned an IPv4 address for your Internet connectivity.***
You're probably right. Too bad in a way. I expect that there will be entertainment galore starting shortly after early adopters turn off their NAT routing. Maybe it's just me, but I sort of think that a large part of Internet security such as it is probably depends on the limitations of IPv4 and NAT. With IPv6, my computer, phone, TV setup box, refrigerator, printer will all be fully visible and accessible to any corporation, government, nutcase, religious fanatic, scam artist, and sociopathic teenager anywhere in the world? What could possibly go wrong?
***You try, getting three different clients working against a database from the same vendor working properly. They all crave different versions of dotnet, java or whatnot and any new version of the client software demands countless hours of testing just about every possible combination of apps.***
Thanks, no. Been there. Done That. You're right. It is a nightmare.
But I'm curious why you think, as you apparently do, that switching to "the cloud" is going to be better. From where I sit, "the cloud" looks like a huge glob of poison gas. More standards than anyone can keep track of. But no one complies with them anyway. No discipline. Very little common sense. I suspect where the cloud is headed is a worse shambles than the current desktop plus latency and bandwidth problems. And security ... what security? Do people seriously think that "Never run as root" is going to prevent the ongoing security disaster?
Fortunately, I am retired and no longer have to make a living fighting with computers. I have a lot of sympathy for those who are not as lucky. Fasten those seatbelts folks, the next couple of decades are going to be one bumpy ride.
You're right that you probably don't want ringer voltage applied to your NIC. But a simple removable passive plastic or wooden block that blocks pin 1&2 or 7&8 in the RJ45 socket but still allows an RJ11 to plug in will fix that. My guess is that crafting a block from a soda bottle using a razor blade would take about 15 minutes. That 15 minutes Includes figuring out where you left the razor blades last time you used them and a first attempt that has some sort of problem.
***It was AOL who bought Time-Warner:***
Yep, that's the way I remember it. Thanks for posting that. I was beginning to think that I had somehow found my way into a parallel universe.
***The browsers you named have even smaller market share than Firefox...***
True, but they are part of the pack that is nibbling away at the mindset of incompetent web site designers who think that the fact that their abomination worked once for about five minutes in IE means it is correct and the rest of the world is out of step. Sooner or later I'm going to lose it and go after some clown who suggests that I need to upgrade to a "modern web browser" on a site that fails W3C validation with hundreds of layout errors in its HTML.
I'm using konqueror to view Slashdot BTW. Firefox works fine, but it is klunky. IE is even klunkier. It's not awful. I can use it if I have to. I'd just prefer not to.
***I despise windows but I just need a system that works with the option of using advanced features if I choose to not defeaturing or blocking features. I can get that from Microsoft.***
Really? What's it called?
Don't do a lot of on-line forums, do we? Most are a LOT worse than this.
Heck, Slashdot works almost as well as the Compuserve Forums did in 1990. A lot of us back then thought that the future was about improvement. Boy, were we in for a shock.
It won't be marketed to users or developers? It'll be marketed to OEMs on the basis of price? We're talking largely about computers that cost a few hundred dollars. Shaving $10 USD off the OS price has a meaningful impact on the selling price or on someone's margins. (This will not be good for Microsoft BTW).
***That's not what my mom told me a "clean room" meant.***
Maybe. Or maybe you never really understood what she was trying to tell you. Who's to know?
Thank you. It's nice to know that I'm not the only person who finds scribd to be a truly awful machination. The concept and intent may be meritorious. The implementation sucks. Unreadably small type face that requires horizontal scrolling once you figure out how to get the text big enough to read. Lousy screen layout. Unlabeled icons that do stuff that nobody could possibly understand ... yech.
***Given the temperature a few feet under ground is still fairly cool even in summer the returning water ought to be relatively cold.***
Well, yeah. But isn't that because dirt is a lousy heat conductor? What's going to happen when you start trying to exchange a gazillion BTU per hour generated by your server farm into it? I'm not sure that you are wrong, but I think you might be. The ground just might not behave like an infinitely large heat sink/source?