Ok, I just realised 7GB is the amount free you need to install the service pack, the minimum requirements for the actual Vista install (without SP1) exceeds my entire HD usage, and that includes several gigabytes of music... I mean, I realised it was bad, but what the fuck?
If you don't count the music files in my/home directory, Vista's minimum requirement exceeds my total usage, even with a plethora of applications ( Inkscape, Amarok, LyX,... ). Funny thing is, I have wine installed, so I actually have a fair share of the windows API included in this install. It seriously makes me wonder what Vista uses all its space for.
It would also be good if the format of the proofs would be such that it could easily be manipulated by similar algorithm's as those which you are investigating. I beleive that this can be readily implemented using linked lists, where each node consists of a pointer to the element it contains ( call it car ) and another pointer to the next node ( call it cdr ).
Or maybe, just maybe, Microsoft released an unfinished operating system, which was a spectacular failure, and now everybody is trying to avoid paying a huge chunk of cash because there is a good chance Microsoft will try to wipe the problems under the carpet and get something better out ASAP.
Step1: Implement ipv6 , that pretty much ends the issue with regards to who assigns ip addresses, because there will be enough for everbody, making it a moot point.
Step2: Register domain names under your country code. ICANN has more or less promised not to fuck around with countries TLDs, and quite frankly they wouldn't be that stupid. If you happen to be a major international company that MUST have a.com address, then the cost will probably be lower than your accounting errors anyway, and if the name is taken just sue them under trademark violations ( because you DID trademark your company, right ? )
The problem with non-latin characters is technical, not merely political, and moving to a UN organisation won't make the technical issues go away. You would have to come up with something which doesn't break existing implementations, but is simulataneously sufficient enough that you won't have to revamp it again in ten years time. When somebody comes up with a working implementation for this that won't break thinsg across the globe, and if ICANN rejects it on political reasons, then one could start discussing it.
Of course, it would help if the US government would just stay the fuck out of ICANN decisions..xxx was rejected on technical grounds, but it certainly didn't help ICANN or its credibility to have some asshats try to have it rejected on "moral" grounds and what not. Yea it gets a bit tiresome, but you can blame you know who...
5. The batteries are all different. Hard drives, RAM, etc. are interchangeable to some extent, why not batteries?
Li-Ion batteries have to be carefully charged or you get the nowinfameous exploding battery problem. It is dificult to ensure that this works correctly across several different devices, hence many manufacturers make sure their devices only work with their own batteries to avoid trouble. Another reason is that manufacturers try to squeze maximum amount of battery into minimum space, and this is easier if you can change the shape of teh battery as you see fit. There is also the good old usual "if we force customers to use our batteries we can charge them more for replacements" crap going on.
A small comfort is that if your laptop + battery is from the same vendor, then they get a bit of a harder time when something goes wrong. Imagine two supliers pointing the finger at one another when a lithium ion battery catches fire and toasts your rather pricy system.
You're an idiot. That plant was closed down already thanks to pressure from your government ( among other things ). Meanwhile the coal fiered powerplants your government operates emit more radioactive material into the air every year than Barsebäck did during its entire lifetime.
No, don't. Chernobyl was a type of Fast Breeder Nuclear reactor.
Wtf have you been smoking? Chernobyl was a graphite moderated, highly thermalised, water-cooled, low-burnup reactor. I.e, in every single way a reactor CAN differ from a fast breeder, chernobyl did. Let me sumarise it:
Coolant: Chernobyl - Water Fast Breeder - Molten metal
Fuel: Chernobyl - Natural uranium, unenriched Fast breeder - Plutonium/Uranium/Zirconium alloy or MOX, highly enriched
Moderator: Chernobyl: Graphite Fast breeder: None
Neutron Spectrum: Chernobyl: thermal Fast breeder: fast
Void coefficient: Chernobyl: large positive Fast breeder: highly negative or nil
Reactor pressure: Chernobyl: several atmosphere Fast breeder: neutral
Emergency circulation power: Chernobyl: Turbine inertia Fast breeder: Natural circulation
Containment: Chernobyl: Partial Fast Breeder: Complete containment structure
Core configuration: Chernobyl: Multiple pressure tubes Fast Breeder: Pool-type or loop-type with a single pressure vessel
Seriously, you couldn't have found a reactor with fewer things in common with fats breeders than Chernobyl if you tried.
Ok, somebody actually SHOULD write a worm which dumps child porn on people's computers. Make it a real citeable event and not just a theoretical possibility. Heck, make it encrypt the data as well.
Once again to be a little more clear - "WHAT IS THE NAME OF THE NUCLEAR PLANT THAT PRODUCES POWER AT THOSE COSTS?"
Mentioning numbers without a clear context is not enough.
Fine, ALL power plants operating in France have costs BELLOW 150% the number the GP quoted. That is still lower than on-shore windfarms. The reason you can't give numbers for individual plants is because the regulation, fuel fabrication, waste reprocessing and disposal, are all centralised, and thus those costs are averaged over very many plants. It is however perfectly possible to give average numbers for a large fleet of nuclear plants, and in many countries ( Such as France, Sweden, Finland, Japan... etc ) those averaged costs are considerably lower than the costs of wind-farms ( even before you take into consideration that you need to buffer them to maintain a stable production ).
Furthermore, if you are going to make these insane demands for proponents of nuclear power to document costs, then you have to do the same for alternatives. You can't say nuclear power is expensive, deny the numbers people give you because they won't give you the uncertainty of the 4th data point, and then use some pulled-out-of the arse number for wind-farm costs to argue nuclear is more expensive than renewables.
Essentially, your complaint is a straw man. It is a bit like complaining that the price of AMD's latest processor is missleading because it doesn't include the cost of traveling to the store, and then proceed to reject any estimate of what that travel price is on average, only to conclude Intel is cheaper, using the numbers they give you before including VAT. If you're going to compare prices you compare like for like, or you admit you have no clue what the price is and don't use it as an argument against nuclear power.
You're missing the point. Separating Pu-240 from Pu-239 is MUCH more tricky than just starting from scracth with natural uranium. If anybody was capable of separating the two (no plant capable of doing so has ever been constructed ) then they wouldn't bother with it, because separating U-235 from U-238 would be piss easy in comparison. This is partially because of the larger mass difference, partially because Plutonium is more radioactive and produces more heat, but also because U-235 is a superior isotope due to its low rate of spontaneous fission.
Now, even if we do assume somebody manages to get hold of weapons grade plutonium, that's far from enough to have a nuclear weapon. While a gun-triggered device is sufficient for uranium, even weapons grade plutonium has too large a spontaneous fission rate for that, and would require the use of an implosion type design. Now have a guess how easy it is to work out how to cut the explosives in order to focus a spherically expanding shockwave into an imploding one? Keep in mind you need to do this with an accuracy similar to that of the lenses in a pair of binoculars. You need to alloy the plutonium with the right amount of gallium to ensure it sticks in its delta phase, you need to take into account neutrons reflected from the surrounding material, you need to take into consideration any impurities left in the plutonium. The end result should be a shockwave powerful enough to compress a solid ball of metal about the size of a grapefruit into something the size of a golf-ball (yea, I know boosted weapons can have hollow pits, but that just makes things even harder. ).
Now, lets say you figure out how to do it. Well, doing it is a whole different game. You can forget any normal workshop tools, those are not designed to cut and polish plastic explosives. You need an enrichment plant capable of separating Pu-239 from Pu-240, all equipment operated remotely... no such plant has ever been constructed, and it would likely be considerably larger than a Uranium enrichment plant, given the increased difficulty of separating plutonium isotopes. Btw, gas centrifuges were developed for Uranium-hexaflouride , you would have to find a similar carrier gas for Plutonium , know of any good ones ?.
So lets say you build such a plant and all equipment, now, how do you keep its planning, contruction and operation secret? Seriously, only sovereign governments could possibly pull of a stunt like that, and if they wanted to it would be orders of magnitude easier to just start from scratch with U-235 enrichment. At the end of the day the question is not weather you could theoretically use a comercial reactor to create weapons grade plutonium, but rather if doing so would be any easier than just starting from scratch on a simpler method. It is not.
While storing it as an ultra-small magnetic dipole moment in a piece of rust on a rapidly spinning platter which will be irreversibly damaged from just a speck of dust sounds like a sane idea ?
We want freedom for the users to make their systems obey them, and allow them to study and modify it to suit their needs. That is rather different from lettin unauthorized peopel take their controll away. It's all about the user's freedom.
Think about it; if you were running scripts on the server, then you could look in files in other people's home directories, where their database username and password would be clearly visible. There is no* workaround, either the apache daemon has to have read access to every user's scripts, including the code used to undo any ad hoc obfuscation applied by users to passwords.
Rather than using built-in modules in the httpd daemon it can launch the interpreter for the respective scripts as the user in question? Maybe I am missing something here, but I would imagine this kinda thing has popped up before. It doesn't seem particularily impossible to write a daemon which will sandbox scripts to a single user, or failing that, forking to surrender privileges. Now I'll admit I'm no expert in the field, but given that it is perfectly doable I'll assume that the people who are have already optimised this to buggery.
When hot objects emit IR they emit it in a very wide range of frequencies, and thus the intensity at any individual frequency is not to high, but the total amount of energy deposited can be large enough to be dangerous. With an LED it is the exact opposite. The LED emits relatively little IR, but it pumps it all into a quite narrow range of frequencies. The consequence is that your detector can distinguish the LED light from background noise, even at relatively modest power levels. Is this enough to make the above experiment safe? Well, I'm not a doctor nor an optician, so I dunno what could be considered safe, but I would suspect that it can be easily done at intensities lower than what would be dangerous.
Nuclear reactor controll rods are typically mounted to an electro-magnet, meaning a power failure will cause them to drop into the core under their own weight, disabling the chain reaction within seconds. Modern plants have multiple ways to kill the power to the magnet, this could include computer controlled systems, manual switches, thermal sensors, or literarely cutting the power cable. Also, following the chernobyl accident the guide channels are normally designed to prevent the rods from getting stuck should a damaged reactor be disformed.
Troll: "nine,nine,nine,nine,nine,nine,nine,nine,nine,nine,nine..." Dilbert: "Are you sure that is random?" Troll: "That's the thing with random numbers, you can never be sure... nine,nine,nine,nine,nine..."
As for the story, someone has to provide access to the net.
Why? No, really, why? If the number of people using wifi this way gets large enough you effectively have a p2p network on the physical layer. The only place you need a traditional ISP is for connections outside the city, and this is where the fun part comes in. You then don't have to live in the ISP's coverage area. Any company with a large quantity of bandwidth (Google, IBM... ) could start acting like an ISP by hooking into the wireless network and renting you shells to ssh into. This is why you should expect AT&T and Verizon et al, to oppose this. It would absolutely destroy their monopoly. Then start to consider what happens when people start routing things through the 3G net, etc...
Really, we have just seen the start of this. The telcos will get pissed thou...
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, I just realised 7GB is the amount free you need to install the service pack, the minimum requirements for the actual Vista install (without SP1) exceeds my entire HD usage, and that includes several gigabytes of music... I mean, I realised it was bad, but what the fuck?
I'm running ubuntu-desktop and a fair share of applications with Qt dependancies:
/ /var/run /var/lock /dev /dev/shm /lib/modules/2.6.22-14-generic/volatile /home
/home directory, Vista's minimum requirement exceeds my total usage, even with a plethora of applications ( Inkscape, Amarok, LyX, ... ). Funny thing is, I have wine installed, so I actually have a fair share of the windows API included in this install. It seriously makes me wonder what Vista uses all its space for.
BlueParrot:~$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 9.2G 4.6G 4.2G 53%
varrun 316M 108K 316M 1%
varlock 316M 0 316M 0%
udev 316M 84K 316M 1%
devshm 316M 0 316M 0%
lrm 316M 34M 282M 11%
/dev/sda5 15G 4.9G 8.9G 36%
If you don't count the music files in my
...and so, Romeo and Juliet lived happily ever after.
Hey, if they can do it to H.C. Andersen and the Grimm Brothers, they can do it to Shakespeare...
It would also be good if the format of the proofs would be such that it could easily be manipulated by similar algorithm's as those which you are investigating. I beleive that this can be readily implemented using linked lists, where each node consists of a pointer to the element it contains ( call it car ) and another pointer to the next node ( call it cdr ).
Or maybe, just maybe, Microsoft released an unfinished operating system, which was a spectacular failure, and now everybody is trying to avoid paying a huge chunk of cash because there is a good chance Microsoft will try to wipe the problems under the carpet and get something better out ASAP.
Or in other words:
Vista is the new Millenium.
And the way things are going, that will soon be 100 billion dollars! .
Step1: Implement ipv6 , that pretty much ends the issue with regards to who assigns ip addresses, because there will be enough for everbody, making it a moot point.
.com address, then the cost will probably be lower than your accounting errors anyway, and if the name is taken just sue them under trademark violations ( because you DID trademark your company, right ? )
.xxx was rejected on technical grounds, but it certainly didn't help ICANN or its credibility to have some asshats try to have it rejected on "moral" grounds and what not. Yea it gets a bit tiresome, but you can blame you know who...
Step2: Register domain names under your country code. ICANN has more or less promised not to fuck around with countries TLDs, and quite frankly they wouldn't be that stupid. If you happen to be a major international company that MUST have a
The problem with non-latin characters is technical, not merely political, and moving to a UN organisation won't make the technical issues go away. You would have to come up with something which doesn't break existing implementations, but is simulataneously sufficient enough that you won't have to revamp it again in ten years time. When somebody comes up with a working implementation for this that won't break thinsg across the globe, and if ICANN rejects it on political reasons, then one could start discussing it.
Of course, it would help if the US government would just stay the fuck out of ICANN decisions.
Li-Ion batteries have to be carefully charged or you get the nowinfameous exploding battery problem. It is dificult to ensure that this works correctly across several different devices, hence many manufacturers make sure their devices only work with their own batteries to avoid trouble. Another reason is that manufacturers try to squeze maximum amount of battery into minimum space, and this is easier if you can change the shape of teh battery as you see fit. There is also the good old usual "if we force customers to use our batteries we can charge them more for replacements" crap going on.
A small comfort is that if your laptop + battery is from the same vendor, then they get a bit of a harder time when something goes wrong. Imagine two supliers pointing the finger at one another when a lithium ion battery catches fire and toasts your rather pricy system.
You're an idiot. That plant was closed down already thanks to pressure from your government ( among other things ). Meanwhile the coal fiered powerplants your government operates emit more radioactive material into the air every year than Barsebäck did during its entire lifetime.
Wtf have you been smoking? Chernobyl was a graphite moderated, highly thermalised, water-cooled, low-burnup reactor. I.e, in every single way a reactor CAN differ from a fast breeder, chernobyl did. Let me sumarise it:
Coolant:
Chernobyl - Water
Fast Breeder - Molten metal
Fuel:
Chernobyl - Natural uranium, unenriched
Fast breeder - Plutonium/Uranium/Zirconium alloy or MOX, highly enriched
Moderator:
Chernobyl: Graphite
Fast breeder: None
Neutron Spectrum:
Chernobyl: thermal
Fast breeder: fast
Void coefficient:
Chernobyl: large positive
Fast breeder: highly negative or nil
Reactor pressure:
Chernobyl: several atmosphere
Fast breeder: neutral
Emergency circulation power:
Chernobyl: Turbine inertia
Fast breeder: Natural circulation
Containment:
Chernobyl: Partial
Fast Breeder: Complete containment structure
Core configuration:
Chernobyl: Multiple pressure tubes
Fast Breeder: Pool-type or loop-type with a single pressure vessel
Seriously, you couldn't have found a reactor with fewer things in common with fats breeders than Chernobyl if you tried.
Care to tell me how to prevent him being of the "black pointy hair" type?
Ok, somebody actually SHOULD write a worm which dumps child porn on people's computers. Make it a real citeable event and not just a theoretical possibility. Heck, make it encrypt the data as well.
Fine, ALL power plants operating in France have costs BELLOW 150% the number the GP quoted. That is still lower than on-shore windfarms. The reason you can't give numbers for individual plants is because the regulation, fuel fabrication, waste reprocessing and disposal, are all centralised, and thus those costs are averaged over very many plants. It is however perfectly possible to give average numbers for a large fleet of nuclear plants, and in many countries ( Such as France, Sweden, Finland, Japan
Furthermore, if you are going to make these insane demands for proponents of nuclear power to document costs, then you have to do the same for alternatives. You can't say nuclear power is expensive, deny the numbers people give you because they won't give you the uncertainty of the 4th data point, and then use some pulled-out-of the arse number for wind-farm costs to argue nuclear is more expensive than renewables.
Essentially, your complaint is a straw man. It is a bit like complaining that the price of AMD's latest processor is missleading because it doesn't include the cost of traveling to the store, and then proceed to reject any estimate of what that travel price is on average, only to conclude Intel is cheaper, using the numbers they give you before including VAT. If you're going to compare prices you compare like for like, or you admit you have no clue what the price is and don't use it as an argument against nuclear power.
You're missing the point. Separating Pu-240 from Pu-239 is MUCH more tricky than just starting from scracth with natural uranium. If anybody was capable of separating the two (no plant capable of doing so has ever been constructed ) then they wouldn't bother with it, because separating U-235 from U-238 would be piss easy in comparison. This is partially because of the larger mass difference, partially because Plutonium is more radioactive and produces more heat, but also because U-235 is a superior isotope due to its low rate of spontaneous fission. Now, even if we do assume somebody manages to get hold of weapons grade plutonium, that's far from enough to have a nuclear weapon. While a gun-triggered device is sufficient for uranium, even weapons grade plutonium has too large a spontaneous fission rate for that, and would require the use of an implosion type design. Now have a guess how easy it is to work out how to cut the explosives in order to focus a spherically expanding shockwave into an imploding one? Keep in mind you need to do this with an accuracy similar to that of the lenses in a pair of binoculars. You need to alloy the plutonium with the right amount of gallium to ensure it sticks in its delta phase, you need to take into account neutrons reflected from the surrounding material, you need to take into consideration any impurities left in the plutonium. The end result should be a shockwave powerful enough to compress a solid ball of metal about the size of a grapefruit into something the size of a golf-ball (yea, I know boosted weapons can have hollow pits, but that just makes things even harder. ). Now, lets say you figure out how to do it. Well, doing it is a whole different game. You can forget any normal workshop tools, those are not designed to cut and polish plastic explosives. You need an enrichment plant capable of separating Pu-239 from Pu-240, all equipment operated remotely... no such plant has ever been constructed, and it would likely be considerably larger than a Uranium enrichment plant, given the increased difficulty of separating plutonium isotopes. Btw, gas centrifuges were developed for Uranium-hexaflouride , you would have to find a similar carrier gas for Plutonium , know of any good ones ?. So lets say you build such a plant and all equipment, now, how do you keep its planning, contruction and operation secret? Seriously, only sovereign governments could possibly pull of a stunt like that, and if they wanted to it would be orders of magnitude easier to just start from scratch with U-235 enrichment. At the end of the day the question is not weather you could theoretically use a comercial reactor to create weapons grade plutonium, but rather if doing so would be any easier than just starting from scratch on a simpler method. It is not.
Man, I had Secret Garden playing when I read that... the combined effect was quite awesome. Thanks...
While storing it as an ultra-small magnetic dipole moment in a piece of rust on a rapidly spinning platter which will be irreversibly damaged from just a speck of dust sounds like a sane idea ?
We want freedom for the users to make their systems obey them, and allow them to study and modify it to suit their needs. That is rather different from lettin unauthorized peopel take their controll away. It's all about the user's freedom.
Rather than using built-in modules in the httpd daemon it can launch the interpreter for the respective scripts as the user in question? Maybe I am missing something here, but I would imagine this kinda thing has popped up before. It doesn't seem particularily impossible to write a daemon which will sandbox scripts to a single user, or failing that, forking to surrender privileges. Now I'll admit I'm no expert in the field, but given that it is perfectly doable I'll assume that the people who are have already optimised this to buggery.
There, fixed it for you.
When hot objects emit IR they emit it in a very wide range of frequencies, and thus the intensity at any individual frequency is not to high, but the total amount of energy deposited can be large enough to be dangerous. With an LED it is the exact opposite. The LED emits relatively little IR, but it pumps it all into a quite narrow range of frequencies. The consequence is that your detector can distinguish the LED light from background noise, even at relatively modest power levels. Is this enough to make the above experiment safe? Well, I'm not a doctor nor an optician, so I dunno what could be considered safe, but I would suspect that it can be easily done at intensities lower than what would be dangerous.
How about these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Controlrods.jpg
Nuclear reactor controll rods are typically mounted to an electro-magnet, meaning a power failure will cause them to drop into the core under their own weight, disabling the chain reaction within seconds. Modern plants have multiple ways to kill the power to the magnet, this could include computer controlled systems, manual switches, thermal sensors, or literarely cutting the power cable. Also, following the chernobyl accident the guide channels are normally designed to prevent the rods from getting stuck should a damaged reactor be disformed.
Troll: "nine,nine,nine,nine,nine,nine,nine,nine,nine,nine,nine..."
Dilbert: "Are you sure that is random?"
Troll: "That's the thing with random numbers, you can never be sure... nine,nine,nine,nine,nine..."
I don't see any red flags...
Why? No, really, why? If the number of people using wifi this way gets large enough you effectively have a p2p network on the physical layer. The only place you need a traditional ISP is for connections outside the city, and this is where the fun part comes in. You then don't have to live in the ISP's coverage area. Any company with a large quantity of bandwidth (Google, IBM
Really, we have just seen the start of this. The telcos will get pissed thou...