Gregory Benford discussed the "warning future generations" issue a good number of years ago. Even gave a GoH speech on it at the 1999 Worldcon (Melbourne).
Power reactors transfer heat to some transfer medium, then to water, and the steam through a turbine. If you don't have enough heat in the reactor to create a usable amount of pressure, you don't generate power.
Past a certain point, your radioactives won't keep enough of a reaction going to keep the temperature past the 'usable' point. Adding more (of the same level) radioactives would mean you could heat more water to that same "not quite useful for turbine power" point.
Which means, if you want to continue creating electrical power from such materials, you have to go to some other method of extracting. Or you have to find uses other than electrical power generation.
You've had the luck of the draw, friend. You may not have been on a bus with a screaming lunatic, but I have (in Portland, OR, with its good transit system, yet).
On the other hand, I haven't had the misfortune to get robbed or assaulted on public transit.
I fear I must disagree with a couple of your selections.
I found it so difficult to get through Dune (boring!) that I never developed any need to even look at the sequels.
Similarly, I think The Wheel of Time requires a longer attention span. Still, as a coming-of-age story, it still has its attractions. And think of it... when you're done with them, you can use them as blocks to help balance the motor-home!
>If I complete a loan/job/cell phone application and... provide other false information, I could face legal consequences for providing such false information.
You're quite right. In each of those cases, the other party can suffer damage - usually financial - because of your false information. However, for the loan and cell phone application, I would not be so sure that providing false information - and still living up to the financial obligations - is illegal or objectionable, so long as you are not assuming the identity of some other actual person. (Feel free to prove me wrong. I'm always happy to learn.)
If Myspace charged a fee for their service, then they, too, could suffer damage because of the false information.
But instead, your 'real' identity is a non sequitur. Their use of your personal information is not a part of their service to you. Their use of your eyeballs is, but your eyeballs aren't labeled.
On the other hand, they are a private company running a public forum. The laws are greyer for that, than for such things as cell phone applications.... Freedom of anonymous speech, and all that. As you point out, "screen names", for starters.
Without having read TFA, I imagined they were simply using the compressed air to power a generator... sort of like putting a pinwheel in front of the nozzle from a balloon. Which wouldn't have been so much more efficient, really.
It's more interesting than that, though. They're using the compressed air as the input to (natural gas)-powered turbines, saving on the energy that would have been used to run the compressors.
I'm still not sure where the energy savings comes in, though. The article says "uses fuel more efficiently"... but then why not treat the fuel that way ALL the time? Because you don't have the "excess" compressed air? But you're using power (the night-time wind generation) to create that excess.
The only case I can see where this actually buys you anything is if your wind generation at night is also in excess of your needs at night. I'll grant you "generation minimums" (below which the cost of restarting the gas/coal/whatever generators becomes an issue), which might help the wind power be "an excess".
Put a few obviously silly items on the list and the ones you really want probably look a bit more plausible.
The dangerous thing is, the uninformed have a different standard for "obviously silly". Do you really want to know how many congresscritters fall into that category, for any given subject?
That's not to say they're uninformed on every subject. But they've got a lot of subjects to cover. And there's enough congresscritters out there to ensure that every subject will have at least a few who understand it just well enough to propose silly laws about it.
I assume that with such certainty at you're expressing, you have proof to share with us?
Above, there are example anecdotes of people whose accounts have been dormant for months, only to find that the accounts had been hacked sometime in the interrim. A keylogger would have had no relevant input; a trojan would not have had any locally stored password to scrape.
I really am interested in what studies you've made (or read) pointing to wireless-N as the culprit.
I'm also interested in how you can possibly be so assured that Blizzard servers have never been compromised. You're on slashdot, so I assume you've got an independent source to verify Blizzard....
You say "build them in deserts" as the place with the least value (to you).
You only think they're deserts now. If you take 100% of the sunlight off a patch of ground, you leave 0% for plants. Plants do important things like hold ground together, feed animals, feed people.... So what you're trading for that solar power generation (or that highway, or those houses, same difference) is whatever ecology previously existed there.
It is issues like these (among others) that this study is supposed to report on. It's be a shame if we paved over our deserts with solar plants, then discovered we needed those deserts for something else.
This seems to me to be the classic Prisoner's Dilemma situation...
- if everyone cooperates (drives "sensibly" for any definition of sensible), traffic behaves smoothly. - the individual who cooperates (leaving sufficient braking room) gets preyed upon by the individual who shoves his car into the "car and a half" sized gap the reasonable driver used. - the driving environment becomes much more dangerous as individuals react to opportunistic behavior by reducing braking distance.
The reason the discs were sent out was not as a gift. It was sent as cross-promotional material -- something that both the sender and the receiver desires. It does not matter WHY someone sends me something unsolicited. It only matters that they did so. Once they did that, I'm free to do with it as I like.... And the court agreed.
Otherwise, I could mail you a ribbon, with instructions that you had to wrap it around a bundle of $20 bills and mail it back, and you'd be obliged to do so, according to terms thrust upon you without your acceptance.
The reason the discs weren't marked with instructions for their return is because they were on disposable media. Again, irrelevant to the argument at hand. They were unsolicited. No contract of any sort existed. If there HAD been instructions for their return, they would have been irrelevant.
There needs to be some way to send something to someone without sending it to the world. I don't care what that technique is, just tell me what it is. Copyright laws. Use them. If you're not happy with that, then you're not happy with the Doctrine of First Sale. And if you're not happy with that,... well... my heart bleeds for you.
It's always struck me as funny that record companies get pissed about free music being available online, when they happily send music stores multiple free copies of nearly every new CD that comes out. I've often wondered how many tens of thousands of free copies of each major release get sent out. (I understand the logic -- quid pro quo and all that -- but it's still a strange practice.) Give me the softball questions, will you...
It's easy. The CDs they send out for free are promotion material.... which they deduct from the money they would pay the artist. The labels aren't out any money, the artist is. Guess who wrote the contract, who decides how to promote an album?
Depends on the virus, I'd guess. But yeah, there are actual ransomware trojans out there. One of the earlier posters gave a link. On the other hand, you might well have been hit by the trojan after the payment system was closed (IE someone put a trace on the paypal account and 'joe doesn't live here any more').
NewYorkCountryLawyer reads Slashdot, and is involved in RIAA copyright litigation, as well as running a fairly informative site on the subject.. I'd say the odds were pretty good.
Tell that to the police who show up at the scenes of accidents caused by drunk drivers.
Non-violent acts of legal drug use, violent acts of arrest and imprisonment. The only thing you're missing are the consequences of that drug use: impaired cognition, behavior dangerous to other parties, societal costs of repairing the damage thus caused.
Legalizing drug use? As a simple blanket statement, you might want to put some more thought into it. Look at how good we are at actually rehabilitating folks, vs simply throwing them in the oubliette (prisons) and forgetting about them until their time is served. Extrapolate from there, how well we'd do once drugs were in even more common usage.
Guess who pays, for the prisons, and for the rehab.
The Hatch Act is not as wide a blanket prohibition as it used to be. The Hatch Act reference URL given does not list NASA specifically as an agency On The List.
The closest I could see was...
Senior Executive Service (career positions described at 5 U.S.C. ? 3132(a)(4))
Is that the particular inhibition you were thinking of?
Were you subject to it under the older, wider coverage? Or is NASA simply hidden in plain sight somewhere in that list?
Recently watched "Monster House", and extras on the disk. This animated film used motion-capture animation, instead of drawn or computer generated animation.
I think this deserves special mention, in that the actors of this "animated film" are probably treated more in line with "live films" than simply as voice talent.
On the other hand, I feel compelled to try to apply your comments to live films. For instance, how were the CGI folks who worked on the Matrix movies compensated?
And for that matter, how does their job profile compare to that of actors? (How much time do actors typically have to spend auditioning, or 'advertising themselves'? And how much advertising will they generate for the film simply by being there?)
I've seen (sub) games where the challenge WAS clicking (on a particular thing). I'm thinking of a macintosh word/math/puzzle game from the mid '90s, whose name I forget... had something to do with the journey of the number '3' from some file, and getting lost in the system...
That particular puzzle was that the maguffin would run from the cursor when the mouse was up, but was just fine when you had the mouse down...
But this is entirely irrelevant to everything but the troll above... To which I say, "you don't want me, you want my big brother! He's got much more content than me, and he'll be passing by this thread any comment now!"
> And what happens when the difference between two candidates is only 0.05% after the votes are counted, and the loser demands a recount? Suddenly that difference between 99.9% and 99.99% accuracy matters very much.
And therein lies another problem with our voting procedures: Current voting laws assume "precisely 50%+1" of the vote wins. And everyone goes along with it, because "it is obvious that more people want Candidate X than Candidate Y".
The reality is that we've been using precision - and the courts when precision fails - as a coin toss. I think we'd have a lot less acrimony if we simply HAD a coin toss if the difference in votes was less than an easily identifiable percentage of the vote. Or a re-vote.
It's not like either candidate has "a mandate from the voters...". 50% of the people, more or less, are going to be disappointed either way.
But if you committed suicide, would the bullies be guilty of murder? Is that the standard we want to set, legally?
If so, where do you draw that line? If Joe is caught two timing on Susan and Susan ODs on sleeping pills and alcohol? How about if Handsome Hal simply won't go out with Plain Jane?
On the other end of the scale, how about if your Pointy Haired Boss keeps telling you "this has to be done by Friday, you worthless sack of pus", and you work yourself to death (Karoshi)?
Similarly, non-physical spousal abuse?
At what point do you assign personal responsibility for one's actions... on both sides of the abuse?
"We have acknowledged that we manage peer-to-peer traffic in a limited manner to minimize network congestion," Comcast's statement continued. "While we believe our current network management approach was a reasonable choice, we are now working with a variety of companies including BitTorrent [to] move to a protocol-agnostic network management technique."
They're not limiting it because of illegal content. They're limiting it because you're actually using (completely) the bandwidth you contracted for.
> You don't hear about domestic terrorism because there isn't any.
Two words: Oklahoma City
>Now, take a young Iraqi kid who has lost his entire family to American military "collateral damage," or who's seen his sister raped and murdered because we can't even offer basic security after we destroyed their country, and show him a target that's in his neighborhood. That's an easy sell, and one that works in any cultural situation.... and points out foibles of human psychology, too: The police are Iraqi, not Americans. The people who raped his sister are Iraqi. (Well, the vast majority of the time, at least.) If she survived that, the murderers might well be her relatives due to cultural reasons. And you're quite right that it's an easy sell. Fortunately, it's not a sure sell; Iraqis are just as capable of reasoning as we are.
> US politicians don't pay attention to what their constituents want if it happens to conflict with their own.
Slashdot Mirror
Gregory Benford discussed the "warning future generations" issue a good number of years ago. Even gave a GoH speech on it at the 1999 Worldcon (Melbourne).
Might look up Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia.
Primarily because of efficiency.
Power reactors transfer heat to some transfer medium, then to water, and the steam through a turbine. If you don't have enough heat in the reactor to create a usable amount of pressure, you don't generate power.
Past a certain point, your radioactives won't keep enough of a reaction going to keep the temperature past the 'usable' point. Adding more (of the same level) radioactives would mean you could heat more water to that same "not quite useful for turbine power" point.
Which means, if you want to continue creating electrical power from such materials, you have to go to some other method of extracting. Or you have to find uses other than electrical power generation.
Such as... "it's a hot tub AND a night light!"
You've had the luck of the draw, friend. You may not have been on a bus with a screaming lunatic, but I have (in Portland, OR, with its good transit system, yet).
On the other hand, I haven't had the misfortune to get robbed or assaulted on public transit.
I fear I must disagree with a couple of your selections.
I found it so difficult to get through Dune (boring!) that I never developed any need to even look at the sequels.
Similarly, I think The Wheel of Time requires a longer attention span. Still, as a coming-of-age story, it still has its attractions. And think of it... when you're done with them, you can use them as blocks to help balance the motor-home!
>If I complete a loan/job/cell phone application and ... provide other false information, I could face legal consequences for providing such false information.
You're quite right. In each of those cases, the other party can suffer damage - usually financial - because of your false information. However, for the loan and cell phone application, I would not be so sure that providing false information - and still living up to the financial obligations - is illegal or objectionable, so long as you are not assuming the identity of some other actual person. (Feel free to prove me wrong. I'm always happy to learn.)
If Myspace charged a fee for their service, then they, too, could suffer damage because of the false information.
But instead, your 'real' identity is a non sequitur. Their use of your personal information is not a part of their service to you. Their use of your eyeballs is, but your eyeballs aren't labeled.
On the other hand, they are a private company running a public forum. The laws are greyer for that, than for such things as cell phone applications.... Freedom of anonymous speech, and all that. As you point out, "screen names", for starters.
Given that they contain mercury, how you doing at getting all those compact fluorescents recycled as they go bad?
How much energy (gas, etc) does it take to do that recycling? (Primarily, taking them to BE recycled...)
Without having read TFA, I imagined they were simply using the compressed air to power a generator... sort of like putting a pinwheel in front of the nozzle from a balloon. Which wouldn't have been so much more efficient, really.
It's more interesting than that, though. They're using the compressed air as the input to (natural gas)-powered turbines, saving on the energy that would have been used to run the compressors.
I'm still not sure where the energy savings comes in, though. The article says "uses fuel more efficiently"... but then why not treat the fuel that way ALL the time? Because you don't have the "excess" compressed air? But you're using power (the night-time wind generation) to create that excess.
The only case I can see where this actually buys you anything is if your wind generation at night is also in excess of your needs at night. I'll grant you "generation minimums" (below which the cost of restarting the gas/coal/whatever generators becomes an issue), which might help the wind power be "an excess".
Put a few obviously silly items on the list and the ones you really want probably look a bit more plausible.
The dangerous thing is, the uninformed have a different standard for "obviously silly". Do you really want to know how many congresscritters fall into that category, for any given subject?
That's not to say they're uninformed on every subject. But they've got a lot of subjects to cover. And there's enough congresscritters out there to ensure that every subject will have at least a few who understand it just well enough to propose silly laws about it.
I assume that with such certainty at you're expressing, you have proof to share with us?
Above, there are example anecdotes of people whose accounts have been dormant for months, only to find that the accounts had been hacked sometime in the interrim. A keylogger would have had no relevant input; a trojan would not have had any locally stored password to scrape.
I really am interested in what studies you've made (or read) pointing to wireless-N as the culprit.
I'm also interested in how you can possibly be so assured that Blizzard servers have never been compromised. You're on slashdot, so I assume you've got an independent source to verify Blizzard....
You say "build them in deserts" as the place with the least value (to you).
You only think they're deserts now. If you take 100% of the sunlight off a patch of ground, you leave 0% for plants. Plants do important things like hold ground together, feed animals, feed people.... So what you're trading for that solar power generation (or that highway, or those houses, same difference) is whatever ecology previously existed there.
It is issues like these (among others) that this study is supposed to report on. It's be a shame if we paved over our deserts with solar plants, then discovered we needed those deserts for something else.
This seems to me to be the classic Prisoner's Dilemma situation...
- if everyone cooperates (drives "sensibly" for any definition of sensible), traffic behaves smoothly.
- the individual who cooperates (leaving sufficient braking room) gets preyed upon by the individual who shoves his car into the "car and a half" sized gap the reasonable driver used.
- the driving environment becomes much more dangerous as individuals react to opportunistic behavior by reducing braking distance.
Otherwise, I could mail you a ribbon, with instructions that you had to wrap it around a bundle of $20 bills and mail it back, and you'd be obliged to do so, according to terms thrust upon you without your acceptance. The reason the discs weren't marked with instructions for their return is because they were on disposable media. Again, irrelevant to the argument at hand. They were unsolicited. No contract of any sort existed. If there HAD been instructions for their return, they would have been irrelevant. There needs to be some way to send something to someone without sending it to the world. I don't care what that technique is, just tell me what it is. Copyright laws. Use them. If you're not happy with that, then you're not happy with the Doctrine of First Sale. And if you're not happy with that,
It's easy. The CDs they send out for free are promotion material.
Depends on the virus, I'd guess. But yeah, there are actual ransomware trojans out there. One of the earlier posters gave a link. On the other hand, you might well have been hit by the trojan after the payment system was closed (IE someone put a trace on the paypal account and 'joe doesn't live here any more').
NewYorkCountryLawyer reads Slashdot, and is involved in RIAA copyright litigation, as well as running a fairly informative site on the subject.. I'd say the odds were pretty good.
Tell that to the police who show up at the scenes of accidents caused by drunk drivers.
Non-violent acts of legal drug use, violent acts of arrest and imprisonment.
The only thing you're missing are the consequences of that drug use: impaired cognition, behavior dangerous to other parties, societal costs of repairing the damage thus caused.
Legalizing drug use? As a simple blanket statement, you might want to put some more thought into it. Look at how good we are at actually rehabilitating folks, vs simply throwing them in the oubliette (prisons) and forgetting about them until their time is served. Extrapolate from there, how well we'd do once drugs were in even more common usage.
Guess who pays, for the prisons, and for the rehab.
The Hatch Act is not as wide a blanket prohibition as it used to be. The Hatch Act reference URL given does not list NASA specifically as an agency On The List.
The closest I could see was...
Senior Executive Service (career positions described at 5 U.S.C. ? 3132(a)(4))
Is that the particular inhibition you were thinking of?
Were you subject to it under the older, wider coverage? Or is NASA simply hidden in plain sight somewhere in that list?
So move out of Area 51. Problem solved!
Recently watched "Monster House", and extras on the disk. This animated film used motion-capture animation, instead of drawn or computer generated animation.
I think this deserves special mention, in that the actors of this "animated film" are probably treated more in line with "live films" than simply as voice talent.
On the other hand, I feel compelled to try to apply your comments to live films. For instance, how were the CGI folks who worked on the Matrix movies compensated?
And for that matter, how does their job profile compare to that of actors? (How much time do actors typically have to spend auditioning, or 'advertising themselves'? And how much advertising will they generate for the film simply by being there?)
I've seen (sub) games where the challenge WAS clicking (on a particular thing). I'm thinking of a macintosh word/math/puzzle game from the mid '90s, whose name I forget... had something to do with the journey of the number '3' from some file, and getting lost in the system...
That particular puzzle was that the maguffin would run from the cursor when the mouse was up, but was just fine when you had the mouse down...
But this is entirely irrelevant to everything but the troll above... To which I say,
"you don't want me, you want my big brother! He's got much more content than me, and he'll be passing by this thread any comment now!"
> And what happens when the difference between two candidates is only 0.05% after the votes are counted, and the loser demands a recount? Suddenly that difference between 99.9% and 99.99% accuracy matters very much.
And therein lies another problem with our voting procedures: Current voting laws assume "precisely 50%+1" of the vote wins. And everyone goes along with it, because "it is obvious that more people want Candidate X than Candidate Y".
The reality is that we've been using precision - and the courts when precision fails - as a coin toss. I think we'd have a lot less acrimony if we simply HAD a coin toss if the difference in votes was less than an easily identifiable percentage of the vote. Or a re-vote.
It's not like either candidate has "a mandate from the voters...". 50% of the people, more or less, are going to be disappointed either way.
But if you committed suicide, would the bullies be guilty of murder? Is that the standard we want to set, legally?
... on both sides of the abuse?
If so, where do you draw that line? If Joe is caught two timing on Susan and Susan ODs on sleeping pills and alcohol? How about if Handsome Hal simply won't go out with Plain Jane?
On the other end of the scale, how about if your Pointy Haired Boss keeps telling you "this has to be done by Friday, you worthless sack of pus", and you work yourself to death (Karoshi)?
Similarly, non-physical spousal abuse?
At what point do you assign personal responsibility for one's actions
"We have acknowledged that we manage peer-to-peer traffic in a limited manner to minimize network congestion," Comcast's statement continued. "While we believe our current network management approach was a reasonable choice, we are now working with a variety of companies including BitTorrent [to] move to a protocol-agnostic network management technique."
They're not limiting it because of illegal content. They're limiting it because you're actually using (completely) the bandwidth you contracted for.
>YOU should be reading the article and see that this is NOT every 10 days
I'm sure you're right.
> You don't hear about domestic terrorism because there isn't any.
... and points out foibles of human psychology, too: The police are Iraqi, not Americans. The people who raped his sister are Iraqi. (Well, the vast majority of the time, at least.) If she survived that, the murderers might well be her relatives due to cultural reasons. And you're quite right that it's an easy sell. Fortunately, it's not a sure sell; Iraqis are just as capable of reasoning as we are.
Two words: Oklahoma City
>Now, take a young Iraqi kid who has lost his entire family to American military "collateral damage," or who's seen his sister raped and murdered because we can't even offer basic security after we destroyed their country, and show him a target that's in his neighborhood. That's an easy sell, and one that works in any cultural situation.
> US politicians don't pay attention to what their constituents want if it happens to conflict with their own.
And yet, George Bush was re-elected. Go figure.