As per Google's Usenet archives
[ http://groups.google.com/googlegroup...ounce_20.html], the
first discussion of the Y2K problem on the Usenet was on January 18
1985 [ http://groups.google.com/groups?thre...0%40reed.UUCP]. That
is a good 15 years before the problem manifested. Even then, it
turned out, we were scrambling for cover when the D-day was
approaching.
Although the Y2K scare turned out to be vastly overblown, we do have a
massive problem ahead of us ------ the Year 2038 problem. On Mon Jan
18 21:14:07 2038, the Unix seconds-since-epoch count will "roll-over".
After that, the time on the Unix systems will read as Fri Dec 13
14:45:52 1901.
IMHO, if we want to avoid the last minute panic that we witnessed
towards the end of the last millennium (while pursuing the Y2K
problem), we should begin the process of debating the viable solutions
to this problem NOW. It will take a long time for the consensus to be
built, and to come up with a solution that most (if not all) people
find acceptable. We also need considerable time to test out all
possible solutions in the real world, to decide if the solutions
really work as expected. We may also need to develop a suite of
recovery strategies should the problem manifest in some system on that
fateful Monday morning. All this takes time. So, as the late Todd
Beamer would have said: Let's roll.
Bhat
Nov 14 '05
248  10164 
Michael Wojcik <mw*****@newsguy.com> coughed up the following: [Snipped most of the newsgroups, as this troll thread was ridiculously
crossposted.]
In article <MP************************@news.indigo.ie>, Gerry Quinn
<ge****@DELETETHISindigo.ie> writes: "Gerry Quinn" <ge****@DELETETHISindigo.ie> wrote in message
In countries where little or no effort was put into preventing it,
no
significant problems occurred either.
There was a Feb 29 bug in 2000 that wasn't hyped at all, and little
enough went wrong that day either.
This is rather impressively arrogant even for you, Gerry.
I personally saw numerous major projects that identified and corrected
Y2K bugs (including Feb 29 2000 bugs, and other variants) in in-use
production code that would have caused major difficulty and expense
for its users, and I wasn't even involved in Micro Focus' Y2K
remediation
business.
Do you have any evidence for either of the claims above?
Truth is the Millenium Bug Disaster was a '60s science fiction
scenario,
The truth is that you're making unsubstantiated claims about a subject
you've demonstrated no actual knowledge of.
based on the assumption that all the operations that keep the
industrial
world turning are done by technicians blindly obeying the orders on
punched cards that some big old computer spits out.
No, the actual assessment of the problem - not the myth reported by
an ignorant news industry - was based on actual examination of actual
running code.
The real world is
considerably more fault tolerant.
The real world runs a great deal of very fragile code. I've seen
quite a bit of it running at customer sites, and again that's just
incidental to my actual job. I rarely look at customer code, but
the bits I do see are not, in fact, particularly tolerant of faults.
A great deal of effort went into fixing real bugs in real code before
the rollover. It was a problem and it was handled. Those who claim
there was no problem are just as misinformed as those who hyped it
beforehand.
Michael, you're right.
As evidenced by /this/ ng in particular, It seems that some people are
prone to over simplified explanations, and are quick to point fingers at
past melodramas as if to say "I knew better." Furthermore some people
seem to only have hind-sight.
The truly interesting thing about y2k is that it wasn't the case that it
was a fear among the masses and that the engineers knew better. It was
the other way around: the masses had little clue UNTIL the hype and the
engineers knew all along.
It was truly amazing that as little failed as it did. You can test each
of the following, fix it for y2k, and verify it independently:
nuclear sub software
NYSE software
FAA control tower software
McDonald's french fry calibration software
....but you /can not/ have the entire world do a dry-run and test all of
those things at *once*.
So much software relies on other software working. We were /right/ to
worry about a cascade effect.
--
Everythinginlifeisrealative.Apingpongballseemssmal luntilsomeoneramsitupy
ournose.
Dik T. Winter <Di********@cwi.nl> coughed up the following: In article <c9*********@news4.newsguy.com> mw*****@newsguy.com writes:
... > I personally saw numerous major projects that identified and
corrected > Y2K bugs (including Feb 29 2000 bugs, and other
variants) in in-use > production code that would have caused major
difficulty and expense > for its users, and I wasn't even involved
in Micro Focus' Y2K remediation > business.
Might have been. But the way it was hyped, management in many cases
have gone out of their way to ensure that no Y2K problems did exist.
Even when the technically knowledgable said that there would be *no*
major problem. And printing 1-1-2000 as 1-1-100, 1-1-1900 or
1-1-19100,
is *not* a major problem. I know of people that had to ensure that
part of the software was Y2K immune, *even when the software did not
care about the date at all*. Like compilers. "Is gcc Y2K immune?"
The problem was almost never the date itself. It was the possibility
that a chain of causality would ensue, with each domino knocking over an
ever bigger one. Wow, was that a bad metaphor.
ALL software engineers know of the disasters that can infrequently occur
when seemingly innocuous parts of a system fail. In my years I've seen
all kinds of improbable interconnected hoo-haa.
And it was therefore CRITICAL that compilers, the /makers/ of the
software, be fixed.
I was not one of the Y2K hissy fitters----at the time I was one of those
saying "bah, nothing'll happen". But I said so foolishly.
--
Everythinginlifeisrealative.Apingpongballseemssmal luntilsomeoneramsitupy
ournose.
AngleWyrm <no***************@hotmail.com> coughed up the following: "Dan Pop" <Da*****@cern.ch> wrote in message
news:c9**********@sunnews.cern.ch... In <90*************************@posting.google.com>
us****@sta.samsung.com
(Generic Usenet Account) writes:
Nope, this won't happen. By then, time_t will be a 64-bit type, as
it already is on some 64-bit platforms (e.g. all 64-bit Linux ports):
So, what's the next massive problem we have to worry about, now that
we
have just solved this one?
The entire planet's 3 thrillion barrels of oil is about 25% gone, and
at the current rate of 80 million/day, it will be completely gone
within the lifespans of some of the folks walking the earth today.
My solution is that I plan to be dead around 2040 or so.
When I was in middle school, mid to late 70's, they told us with
completely /authoritative tones/ that if the world were entirely hollow
and filled with oil that it would be used up before the year 2020.
eeeeeeeeee-Yuh.
--
Everythinginlifeisrealative.Apingpongballseemssmal luntilsomeoneramsitupy
ournose.
CBFalconer <cb********@yahoo.com> coughed up the following: Stephen Sprunk wrote: "Corey Murtagh" <em***@slingshot.no.uce> wrote in message
... snip ...
15 years after the oil runs out and we're all paying
US$20/gallon for vehicle grade alcohol :>
I assume that $20 is after inflation, which means it'll be on par
(in constant dollars) with what we pay for petrol or ethanol
today. Hardly a problem, though I'd expect us all to be running
on hydrogen by then; ethanol is a transition fuel.
And where does the power to extract that hydrogen come from?
Nuclear power plants.
In
case you hadn't noticed it does not tend to occur in free form in
nature. However, it can serve as an intermediary between real
renewable sources and portable machinery.
--
fix (vb.): 1. to paper over, obscure, hide from public view; 2.
to work around, in a way that produces unintended consequences
that are worse than the original problem. Usage: "Windows ME
fixes many of the shortcomings of Windows 98 SE". - Hutchison
--
Everythinginlifeisrealative.Apingpongballseemssmal luntilsomeoneramsitupy
ournose.
jpd <re**********@do.not.spam.it> coughed up the following: On 2004-05-28, Stephen Sprunk <st*****@sprunk.org> wrote: "Corey Murtagh" <em***@slingshot.no.uce> wrote in message
news:10**************@radsrv1.tranzpeer.net... AngleWyrm wrote:
My solution is that I plan to be dead around 2040 or so.
Hm I might not make that. Fun prospect!
15 years after the oil runs out and we're all paying US$20/gallon
for vehicle grade alcohol :>
I assume that $20 is after inflation, which means it'll be on par (in
constant dollars) with what we pay for petrol or ethanol today.
Hardly a problem, though I'd expect us all to be running on hydrogen
by then; ethanol is a transition fuel.
The fun thing of course is that alcohols are about the simplest things
to make, and dead cheap too. The only thing that make them so darn
expensive is the various governements wanting a piece of the action,
in
the interest of letting people have less fun for their dollar.
Fact is, oil is not as cheap as it seems, as it has rather high
cleanup
costs associated with it. Same with nuclear fuels, but oil doesn't
have
quite such spectacular faillure modes. Altough I have to admit that
fuel/air bombs are kinda neat. And oily birds make for nice television
and cause traffic jams with people driving to a different, clean
beach.
Same with our silicon based computing stuffs. They and the facilities
needed to produce them are not very environment friendly, and the
pittance some of us now have to pay as advance clean-up costs will not
be enough to fix the problems the obsoleted debris will create later
on.
Anyway. Whatever we do, we'll pay for it sooner or later. If
sufficiently late we'll just be cursed by our ancestors. Which would
you prefer?
I'm thinking they're gonna hate us for one thing for another. If not
for environmental reasons then perhaps social. Heck, we might as well
give'm something to cry about. Let's go melt them polar caps good.
Er......wait a while....
--
j p d (at) d s b (dot) t u d e l f t (dot) n l .
--
Everythinginlifeisrealative.Apingpongballseemssmal luntilsomeoneramsitupy
ournose.
Roger Willcocks <rk**@rops.org> coughed up the following: "Gordon Burditt" <go***********@burditt.org> wrote in message
news:c9********@library2.airnews.net...
My personal preference would be for a 256-bit number of picoseconds
since the creation of the universe. It gives better precision than
1 second. It won't run out during the life of this universe. The
only trouble is, we don't know accurately when that was.
Given we want to represent times in the past as well as the future,
it would be reasonable to fix 'now' (give or take) as midpoint in the
range, so why not arbitrarily pick
00:00:00.000 on the morning of January First 0001 as
1-followed-by-255-zeroes (256-bit unsigned value).
Without doing the math....Does that leave it possible to have years
/before/ the begining of time?
--
Everythinginlifeisrealative.Apingpongballseemssmal luntilsomeoneramsitupy
ournose.
<q@q.com> wrote in message news:40**************@q.com...
Stephen Sprunk wrote: Ethanol is mainly interesting because it has almost the same energy
density as petrol, has about the same price, runs in the same engines without
modification (though the fuel system needs anti-corrosion protection),
uses the same transport and fueling infrastructure, and can be produced
nearly anywhere in the world. While ethanol is far cleaner than petrol, it's
nowhere near as clean as hydrogen even if you consider waste generated
in producing the latter.
I am not sure hyow hydrogen would be ditributed,
either to the resellers (filling stations)
or regionally (to terminals).
Gasoline is distributed to terminals via pipelines.
MTBE is also distributed via pipelines. But MTBE
pollutes ground water.
Ethanol is shipped via trucks, no pipelines.
Any thoughts on hydrogen distribution?
Once oil is refined into gasoline (aka petrol), it is shipped to filling
stations nearly exclusively via rail and truck tankers, at least in the US.
Hydrogen would be distributed the same way. Natural Gas is the only fuel
commonly transported via pipeline to consumers, and that makes it attractive
in the near term, but CNG and LNG aren't long-term solutions for clean
energy.
Transporting large masses of H2 isn't nearly as safe as petrol, for obvious
reasons, but this is mostly offset because hydrogen can be produced anywhere
electricity is available, removing the need to ship it long distances around
the world or even around a state/province. In theory, every filling station
could produce their own, removing transport from the picture entirely, but I
doubt that's cost-effective.
S
--
Stephen Sprunk "Stupid people surround themselves with smart
CCIE #3723 people. Smart people surround themselves with
K5SSS smart people who disagree with them." --Aaron Sorkin
"Thomas G. Marshall" wrote: CBFalconer <cb********@yahoo.com> coughed up the following: Stephen Sprunk wrote: "Corey Murtagh" <em***@slingshot.no.uce> wrote in message
... snip ...
15 years after the oil runs out and we're all paying
US$20/gallon for vehicle grade alcohol :>
I assume that $20 is after inflation, which means it'll be on par
(in constant dollars) with what we pay for petrol or ethanol
today. Hardly a problem, though I'd expect us all to be running
on hydrogen by then; ethanol is a transition fuel.
And where does the power to extract that hydrogen come from?
Nuclear power plants.
Now you are really trying to pull my chain. Better known as a
silly way to boil water. If you could propose a way of nullifying
the waste products, that would be one thing. Hiding them under
the rug for future generations does not count. Take a look at the
chart of the nuclides, and the products of uranium fission,
sometime.
--
fix (vb.): 1. to paper over, obscure, hide from public view; 2.
to work around, in a way that produces unintended consequences
that are worse than the original problem. Usage: "Windows ME
fixes many of the shortcomings of Windows 98 SE". - Hutchison
"Stephen Sprunk" <st*****@sprunk.org> wrote in message
news:22******************************@news.teranew s.com... Transporting large masses of H2 isn't nearly as safe as petrol, for
obvious reasons
I'm sorry, but what are the reason Hydrogen is less safe than petrol or
natural gas?
--
Mabden
On Fri, 28 May 2004 22:10:12 GMT, in comp.lang.c , "Stephen Sprunk"
<st*****@sprunk.org> wrote: "Villy Kruse" <ve*@station02.ohout.pharmapartners.nl> wrote in message
news:slrncbdqbn.3m8.ve*@station02.ohout.pharmapar tners.nl... Besides, the problem is just a small
subset of a bigger issue, namely the maximum number that can be stored
in a given variable.
My favorite real world example is when the NASDAQ lost hundreds of thousands
of trades one day due to a fixed-length field in their protocol.
I have a similar example but with a less happy outcome. Turned out the
print format for the amounts was fixed-width, 8 spaces. No room for minus
signs on large trades.... oops.
On another instance, someone made a column too narrow on a spreadsheet, so
the first 2 digits got hidden. 255000000 looked like 5000000.... double
oops.
This is a large
part of why it still takes 7 to 14 days for a check to clear even if it's
from a bank across town -- they know better than to trust their programmers.
Nah, thats just so we can earn 7-14 days interest off you suckers. :-)
(actually, its one of life's little mysteries. If we didn't trust our
programmers, would banks really transact trillions of dollars of FX, equity
and derivatives trades per day, many for same-day-settlement or at best
T+1? Believe me, there is no way banks can check off all those trades in
<24 hours...)
--
Mark McIntyre
CLC FAQ <http://www.eskimo.com/~scs/C-faq/top.html>
CLC readme: <http://www.angelfire.com/ms3/bchambless0/welcome_to_clc.html>
----== Posted via Newsfeed.Com - Unlimited-Uncensored-Secure Usenet News==---- http://www.newsfeed.com The #1 Newsgroup Service in the World! >100,000 Newsgroups
---= 19 East/West-Coast Specialized Servers - Total Privacy via Encryption =---
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Stephen Sprunk wrote: <q@q.com> wrote in message news:40**************@q.com...
Stephen Sprunk wrote:
Ethanol is mainly interesting because it has almost the same energy
density
as petrol, has about the same price, runs in the same engines without
modification (though the fuel system needs anti-corrosion protection),
uses
the same transport and fueling infrastructure, and can be produced
nearly
anywhere in the world. While ethanol is far cleaner than petrol, it's
nowhere near as clean as hydrogen even if you consider waste generated
in
producing the latter.
I am not sure hyow hydrogen would be ditributed,
either to the resellers (filling stations)
or regionally (to terminals).
Gasoline is distributed to terminals via pipelines.
MTBE is also distributed via pipelines. But MTBE
pollutes ground water.
Ethanol is shipped via trucks, no pipelines.
Any thoughts on hydrogen distribution?
Once oil is refined into gasoline (aka petrol), it is shipped to filling
stations nearly exclusively via rail and truck tankers, at least in the US.
Gasoline, one of the main products refined from crude oil, accounts for
just about 16 percent of the energy consumed in the United States. The
primary use for gasoline is in automobiles and light trucks. Gasoline
also fuels boats, recreational vehicles, and various farm and other
equipment. While gasoline is produced year-round, extra volumes are made
in time for the summer driving season. Gasoline is delivered from oil
refineries mainly through pipelines to a massive distribution chain
serving 168,000 retail gasoline stations throughout the United States.1
There are three main grades of gasoline: regular, mid-grade, and
premium. Each grade has a different octane level. Price levels vary by
grade, but the price differential between grades is generally constant.
The cost to produce and deliver gasoline to consumers includes the cost
of crude oil to refiners, refinery processing costs, marketing and
distribution costs, and finally the retail station costs and taxes. The
prices paid by consumers at the pump reflect these costs, as well as the
profits (and sometimes losses) of refiners, marketers, distributors, and
retail station owners.
In 2002, the price of crude oil averaged $24.09 per barrel, and crude
oil accounted for about 43% of the cost of a gallon of regular grade
gasoline (Figure 1). In comparison, the average price for crude oil in
2001 was $22.95 per barrel, and it composed 38% of the cost of a gallon
of regular gasoline. The share of the retail price of regular grade
gasoline that crude oil costs represent varies somewhat over time and
among regions.
Federal, State, and local taxes are a large component of the retail
price of gasoline. Taxes (not including county and local taxes) account
for approximately 31 percent of the cost of a gallon of gasoline. Within
this national average, Federal excise taxes are 18.4 cents per gallon
and State excise taxes average about 20 cents per gallon.2Also, eleven
States levy additional State sales and other taxes, some of which are
applied to the Federal and State excise taxes. Additional local county
and city taxes can have a significant impact on the price of gasoline.
Refining costs and profits comprise about 13% of the retail price of
gasoline. This component varies from region to region due to the
different formulations required in different parts of the country.
Distribution, marketing and retail dealer costs and profits combined
make up 13% of the cost of a gallon of gasoline. From the refinery, most
gasoline is shipped first by pipeline to terminals near consuming areas,
then loaded into trucks for delivery to individual stations. Some retail
outlets are owned and operated by refiners, while others are independent
businesses that purchase gasoline for resale to the public. The price on
the pump reflects both the retailer's purchase cost for the product and
the other costs of operating the service station. It also reflects local
market conditions and factors, such as the desirability of the location
and the marketing strategy of the owner.
Hydrogen would be distributed the same way. Natural Gas is the only fuel
commonly transported via pipeline to consumers, and that makes it attractive
in the near term, but CNG and LNG aren't long-term solutions for clean
energy.
Transporting large masses of H2 isn't nearly as safe as petrol, for obvious
reasons, but this is mostly offset because hydrogen can be produced anywhere
electricity is available, removing the need to ship it long distances around
the world or even around a state/province. In theory, every filling station
could produce their own, removing transport from the picture entirely, but I
doubt that's cost-effective.
S
In article <40***************@yahoo.com>, cb********@yahoo.com says... "Thomas G. Marshall" wrote: CBFalconer <cb********@yahoo.com> coughed up the following: And where does the power to extract that hydrogen come from?
Nuclear power plants.
Now you are really trying to pull my chain. Better known as a
silly way to boil water. If you could propose a way of nullifying
the waste products, that would be one thing. Hiding them under
the rug for future generations does not count. Take a look at the
chart of the nuclides, and the products of uranium fission,
sometime.
Then do an assay of the amount of natural radionucleides that are hidden
'under the rug'. I've heard there's stuff called uranium with a half-
life of 4000 million years, just hidden in rocks in unmarked locations
all over the planet. If you have a granite fireplace, there's even some
in your house, oozing radioactive radon gas into the air you breathe.
- Gerry Quinn
In article <3D*****************@nwrdny03.gnilink.net>, tg****************@replacetextwithnumber.hotmail.c om says... jpd <re**********@do.not.spam.it> coughed up the following:
Anyway. Whatever we do, we'll pay for it sooner or later. If
sufficiently late we'll just be cursed by our ancestors. Which would
you prefer?
I'm thinking they're gonna hate us for one thing for another. If not
for environmental reasons then perhaps social. Heck, we might as well
give'm something to cry about. Let's go melt them polar caps good.
"Those bastards in the twenty-first century could have prevented the ice
age, but they insisted on reducing CO2 emissions..."
- Gerry Quinn
In article <c9*********@news4.newsguy.com>, mw*****@newsguy.com says...
[Snipped most of the newsgroups, as this troll thread was ridiculously
crossposted.]
In article <MP************************@news.indigo.ie>, Gerry Quinn <ge****@DELETETHISindigo.ie> writes: "Gerry Quinn" <ge****@DELETETHISindigo.ie> wrote in message
> In countries where little or no effort was put into preventing it, no
> significant problems occurred either.
There was a Feb 29 bug in 2000 that wasn't hyped at all, and little
enough went wrong that day either.
I personally saw numerous major projects that identified and corrected
Y2K bugs (including Feb 29 2000 bugs, and other variants) in in-use
production code that would have caused major difficulty and expense
for its users, and I wasn't even involved in Micro Focus' Y2K remediation
business.
Do you have any evidence for either of the claims above?
I remember it well. No hype. No disaster. A few incorrect bills, I
think.
Truth is the Millenium Bug Disaster was a '60s science fiction scenario,
The truth is that you're making unsubstantiated claims about a subject
you've demonstrated no actual knowledge of.
based on the assumption that all the operations that keep the industrial
world turning are done by technicians blindly obeying the orders on
punched cards that some big old computer spits out.
No, the actual assessment of the problem - not the myth reported by
an ignorant news industry - was based on actual examination of actual
running code.
Nobody's disputing that there were necessary millenium-related bug
fixes. What is clear is that it was ridiculously over-hyped (you admit
this yourself) and that much money was wasted (another poster gives
clear examples. [Of course some of the money spent was just an excuse
to re-advertise various products without the need to actually improve
them.]
The real world is
considerably more fault tolerant.
The real world runs a great deal of very fragile code. I've seen
quite a bit of it running at customer sites, and again that's just
incidental to my actual job. I rarely look at customer code, but
the bits I do see are not, in fact, particularly tolerant of faults.
That's precisely why faulty software tends not to cause disasters.
People are aware that it is often faulty. If in fact a lot of computers
had gone down at once, I doubt that the inconvenience would have been
greatly multiplied compared to the random software collapses that occur
daily around the world.
A great deal of effort went into fixing real bugs in real code before
the rollover. It was a problem and it was handled. Those who claim
there was no problem are just as misinformed as those who hyped it
beforehand.
Perhaps I did over-egg the cake a little. But face it, the hype was
monstrous.
- Gerry Quinn
In comp.programming Gerry Quinn <ge****@deletethisindigo.ie> wrote: In article <40***************@yahoo.com>, cb********@yahoo.com says... "Thomas G. Marshall" wrote: > CBFalconer <cb********@yahoo.com> coughed up the following:
>> And where does the power to extract that hydrogen come from?
>
> Nuclear power plants.
Now you are really trying to pull my chain. Better known as a
silly way to boil water. If you could propose a way of nullifying
the waste products, that would be one thing. Hiding them under
the rug for future generations does not count. Take a look at the
chart of the nuclides, and the products of uranium fission,
sometime.
Then do an assay of the amount of natural radionucleides that are hidden
'under the rug'. I've heard there's stuff called uranium with a half-
life of 4000 million years, just hidden in rocks in unmarked locations
all over the planet. If you have a granite fireplace, there's even some
in your house, oozing radioactive radon gas into the air you breathe.
Well, if I am not completely mistaken, there's quite a bit of a
difference in the _concentration_ the stuff has been hidden 'under
the rug' by nature (plus stuff like plutonium doesn't seem to be very
common there) and the one the waste products are going to be stashed
away in. Or did they come upt with a way to distribute that stuff
evenly over a volume of a small mountain range and nobody told me?
Regards, Jens
--
\ Jens Thoms Toerring ___ Je***********@physik.fu-berlin.de
\__________________________ http://www.toerring.de
On 2004-05-29, Mabden <ma****@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
I'm sorry, but what are the reason Hydrogen is less safe than petrol or
natural gas?
Apart from the nasty tendency of those awfully small molecules to
slip through almost everything else (the main effort in creating
storage solutions for it is in storing it in a form where it's bound to
something else), it's mostly fear factor I guess.
It's a pity, really. It has such a simple cycle and in itself is about
as `clean' as you could wish for. It's just that handling it is hard.
--
j p d (at) d s b (dot) t u d e l f t (dot) n l .
"Thomas G. Marshall" <tg****************@replacetextwithnumber.hotmail. com>
wrote in message news:UI*****************@nwrdny03.gnilink.net... Roger Willcocks <rk**@rops.org> coughed up the following:
"Gordon Burditt" <go***********@burditt.org> wrote in message
news:c9********@library2.airnews.net...
My personal preference would be for a 256-bit number of picoseconds
since the creation of the universe. It gives better precision than
1 second. It won't run out during the life of this universe. The
only trouble is, we don't know accurately when that was.
Given we want to represent times in the past as well as the future,
it would be reasonable to fix 'now' (give or take) as midpoint in the
range, so why not arbitrarily pick
00:00:00.000 on the morning of January First 0001 as
1-followed-by-255-zeroes (256-bit unsigned value).
Without doing the math....Does that leave it possible to have years
/before/ the begining of time?
I reckon so... 2^255 / (10^12 * 86400 * 365) = 1.8x10^57 years
or about 10^47 times the age of the universe.
To put it another way, the universe is apparently somewhere between 2^98 and
2^99 picoseconds old (10 - 20 thousand million years.)
--
Roger
In article <2h************@uni-berlin.de>, Je***********@physik.fu-
berlin.de says... Then do an assay of the amount of natural radionucleides that are hidden
'under the rug'. I've heard there's stuff called uranium with a half-
life of 4000 million years, just hidden in rocks in unmarked locations
all over the planet. If you have a granite fireplace, there's even some
in your house, oozing radioactive radon gas into the air you breathe.
Well, if I am not completely mistaken, there's quite a bit of a
difference in the _concentration_ the stuff has been hidden 'under
the rug' by nature (plus stuff like plutonium doesn't seem to be very
common there) and the one the waste products are going to be stashed
away in. Or did they come upt with a way to distribute that stuff
evenly over a volume of a small mountain range and nobody told me?
The irony is that that (dispersion) is precisely the sort of thing that
people object to! The result is that radioactive waste is held in
concentrated form and everyone is afraid of it. If it were diluted, the
environmentalists would protest that where there were once a thousand
tons of nuclear waste, there are now a million.
Note how frequently you see a casually implied estimate of the threat
from nuclear materials in terms of the mass of material multiplied by
the halflife.
And people complain about quite insignificant amounts of radionucleides
in seawater.
- Gerry Quinn
--
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Free software - Baxter Codeworks www.baxcode.com
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Stephen Sprunk" <st*****@sprunk.org> wrote in message
news:22******************************@news.teranew s.com...
Once oil is refined into gasoline (aka petrol), it is shipped to filling
stations nearly exclusively via rail and truck tankers, at least in the
US.
Nope. There's been more than one explosion of gasoline pipelines.
---------
RENTON, Wash. (AP) - The operator of a 400-mile fuel pipeline system that
was shut down after an explosion plans to complete necessary repairs and
restart the line late Tuesday.
The repair and restart plan has been approved by coordinators for both the
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the state Ecology Department,
Olympic Pipe Line Co. spokesman Michael Abendhoff said Monday night.
The pipeline moves 12 million gallons of gasoline, diesel and jet fuel every
day. The explosion and subsequent fire disrupted fuel deliveries throughout
the system. http://islandpacket.com/24hour/natio...-8654812c.html
Seattle - July 28, 1999 -The families of two 10-year-old boys killed in a
gasoline pipeline explosion last month filed suit Wednesday, seeking
punitive damages and to ban the pipeline operator from continuing to do
business in the State of Washington. http://www.voiceoftheinjured.com/a-wd-pipe.html
Pipeline Accident Report: Rupture of Piney Point Oil Pipeline and Release
of Fuel Oil Near Chalk Point, Maryland
Pipeline Rupture and Release of Fuel Oil in the Reedy River at Fork Shoals,
South Carolina June 26, 1996
Williams Pipeline Company, Gasoline Explosion and Fire, Roseville,
Minnesota, April 16, 1981. http://www.ntsb.gov/publictn/P_Acc.htm
In article <Hy********@cwi.nl>, "Dik T. Winter" <Di********@cwi.nl>
wrote: In article <ch*********************************@slb-newsm1.svr.pol.co.uk>
Christian Bau <ch***********@cbau.freeserve.co.uk> writes: > There is one company that proudly produces a very VERY expensive
> non-Y2100 compatible watch. It is a mechanical watch, and displays year,
> month, day and weekday correctly until March 1st 2100. At that time,
> some part has to be replaced, but the replacement is already included in
> the price when you buy it today.
What will it do in 2800 (or 2700, i disremember), when the Greek Orthodox
church and the Gregorian calendar will disagree?
I think they invested 1 dollar in a bank account at four percent
interest per year, and when the day comes they will buy either the Greek
Orthodox church or whoever else they need to buy :-)
In article <dk********************@bgtnsc04-news.ops.worldnet.att.net> hu*****@NOSPAM.att.net writes: Dik T. Winter wrote: In article <ch*********************************@slb-newsm1.svr.pol.co.uk> Christian Bau <ch***********@cbau.freeserve.co.uk> writes: > There is one company that proudly produces a very VERY expensive
> non-Y2100 compatible watch. It is a mechanical watch, and displays year,
> month, day and weekday correctly until March 1st 2100. At that time,
> some part has to be replaced, but the replacement is already included in
> the price when you buy it today.
What will it do in 2800 (or 2700, i disremember), when the Greek Orthodox
church and the Gregorian calendar will disagree?
The two calendars disagree right now. As far as I know, there
are branches of the Orthodox Church which never recognized
Pope Gregory's adjustments.
But there are also branches that recognised the adjustments, but diverge
in the year I mentioned.
--
dik t. winter, cwi, kruislaan 413, 1098 sj amsterdam, nederland, +31205924131
home: bovenover 215, 1025 jn amsterdam, nederland; http://www.cwi.nl/~dik/
In article <10***************@ente.ipberlin.com> jpd <re**********@do.not.spam.it> writes: On 2004-05-29, Mabden <ma****@sbcglobal.net> wrote: I'm sorry, but what are the reason Hydrogen is less safe than petrol or
natural gas?
Apart from the nasty tendency of those awfully small molecules to
slip through almost everything else (the main effort in creating
storage solutions for it is in storing it in a form where it's bound to
something else), it's mostly fear factor I guess.
Yup. In one recent news report on a fire in a hydrogen tank somewhere in
the Netherlands, the conclusion was that there was no safety hazard as no
toxic chemical stuff did emerge.
--
dik t. winter, cwi, kruislaan 413, 1098 sj amsterdam, nederland, +31205924131
home: bovenover 215, 1025 jn amsterdam, nederland; http://www.cwi.nl/~dik/
"Mabden" <ma****@sbcglobal.net> wrote: I'm sorry, but what are the reason Hydrogen is less safe than
petrol or natural gas?
I'm sorry, but what has this got to do in *any* of these
newsgroups.
Peter
--
Peter J. Acklam - pj******@online.no - http://home.online.no/~pjacklam
Dik T. Winter wrote: In article <dk********************@bgtnsc04-news.ops.worldnet.att.net> hu*****@NOSPAM.att.net writes: > Dik T. Winter wrote: > > In article <ch*********************************@slb-newsm1.svr.pol.co.uk> Christian Bau <ch***********@cbau.freeserve.co.uk> writes:
> > > There is one company that proudly produces a very VERY expensive
> > > non-Y2100 compatible watch. It is a mechanical watch, and displays year,
> > > month, day and weekday correctly until March 1st 2100. At that time,
> > > some part has to be replaced, but the replacement is already included in
> > > the price when you buy it today.
> >
> > What will it do in 2800 (or 2700, i disremember), when the Greek Orthodox
> > church and the Gregorian calendar will disagree?
>
> The two calendars disagree right now. As far as I know, there
> are branches of the Orthodox Church which never recognized
> Pope Gregory's adjustments.
But there are also branches that recognised the adjustments, but diverge
in the year I mentioned.
The probability approaches 0.99999999 ... ad infinitum
that both you and I will be dead by that time and
it will be up to our descendants to handle that problem :)
--
"It is impossible to make anything foolproof
because fools are so ingenious"
- A. Bloch
Gerry Quinn wrote: Je***********@physik.fu-berlin.de says... Then do an assay of the amount of natural radionucleides that are hidden
'under the rug'. I've heard there's stuff called uranium with a half-
life of 4000 million years, just hidden in rocks in unmarked locations
all over the planet. If you have a granite fireplace, there's even some
in your house, oozing radioactive radon gas into the air you breathe.
Well, if I am not completely mistaken, there's quite a bit of a
difference in the _concentration_ the stuff has been hidden 'under
the rug' by nature (plus stuff like plutonium doesn't seem to be very
common there) and the one the waste products are going to be stashed
away in. Or did they come upt with a way to distribute that stuff
evenly over a volume of a small mountain range and nobody told me?
The irony is that that (dispersion) is precisely the sort of thing that
people object to! The result is that radioactive waste is held in
concentrated form and everyone is afraid of it. If it were diluted, the
environmentalists would protest that where there were once a thousand
tons of nuclear waste, there are now a million.
Chernobyl did an admirable job of dispersing radioactive waste
over a fairly wide area. Places such as Love Canal demonstrate
the efficacy of burying and forgetting wastes in general. 20 or
30 years after the banning of leaded gasoline, many highways
border vegetation show the benefits of lead dispersion.
I think we must belong to the genus Homo Non Sapiens.
--
Chuck F (cb********@yahoo.com) (cb********@worldnet.att.net)
Available for consulting/temporary embedded and systems.
<http://cbfalconer.home.att.net> USE worldnet address!
Peter J. Acklam <pj******@online.no> coughed up the following: "Mabden" <ma****@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
I'm sorry, but what are the reason Hydrogen is less safe than
petrol or natural gas?
I'm sorry, but what has this got to do in *any* of these
newsgroups.
Peter
--
Peter J. Acklam - pj******@online.no - http://home.online.no/~pjacklam
I no longer worry about OT posts in ng's. I've discovered that often a
subject is raised because of the /audience/ known to exist in the ng,
not its particular subject.
That is supposedly against the charter of the big 8. So be it.
--
While using is ok, actually /writing/ free software is a disingenuous
activity. You can afford to write software for free only because of
someone else somewhere actually paying for it. Just say no.
Gerry Quinn <ge****@DELETETHISindigo.ie> coughed up the following: In article <3D*****************@nwrdny03.gnilink.net>,
tg****************@replacetextwithnumber.hotmail.c om says... jpd <re**********@do.not.spam.it> coughed up the following:
Anyway. Whatever we do, we'll pay for it sooner or later. If
sufficiently late we'll just be cursed by our ancestors. Which would
you prefer?
I'm thinking they're gonna hate us for one thing for another. If not
for environmental reasons then perhaps social. Heck, we might as
well give'm something to cry about. Let's go melt them polar caps
good.
"Those bastards in the twenty-first century could have prevented the
ice age, but they insisted on reducing CO2 emissions..."
In my life, the spirit of your point here has been echoed by me in a
very many circumstances and subject matters.
--
While using is ok, actually /writing/ free software is a disingenuous
activity. You can afford to write software for free only because of
someone else somewhere actually paying for it. Just say no.
>>>>> "AB" == Alan Balmer <al******@att.net> writes:
AB> The only reason it didn't happen was because we fixed it.
I was actually tasked with fixing one of these "y2k Bugs".
I had to rewrite a CGI script for the Air Force. The old one only
cared about the last 2 digits of the year I had to modify the
script to accept all 4 digits. (Presumably the air force can't infer
that a birthday marked 82 means 1982 and not 2082 (or 1882) and
has to be explicitly told.) Of course this broke the badly
designed reporting format that the marketing company used and that
had to be redone too.
Quite a bit of work so it could be labeled Y2K compliant and make
DoD happy when the original script was quite sufficient.
--
Dale Henderson
"Imaginary universes are so much more beautiful than this stupidly-
constructed 'real' one..." -- G. H. Hardy
The United States does NOT use reactor designs like the one
at Chernobyl. Also, Chernobyl did NOT have a containment
building.
Helsinki (AFP) May 24, 2002
Finland's parliament on Friday approved construction of a fifth nuclear
reactor, the first such plant to be authorized in Western Europe or
North America since the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.
CBFalconer wrote: Gerry Quinn wrote:
Je***********@physik.fu-berlin.de says...
Then do an assay of the amount of natural radionucleides that are hidden
'under the rug'. I've heard there's stuff called uranium with a half-
life of 4000 million years, just hidden in rocks in unmarked locations
all over the planet. If you have a granite fireplace, there's even some
in your house, oozing radioactive radon gas into the air you breathe.
Well, if I am not completely mistaken, there's quite a bit of a
difference in the _concentration_ the stuff has been hidden 'under
the rug' by nature (plus stuff like plutonium doesn't seem to be very
common there) and the one the waste products are going to be stashed
away in. Or did they come upt with a way to distribute that stuff
evenly over a volume of a small mountain range and nobody told me?
The irony is that that (dispersion) is precisely the sort of thing that
people object to! The result is that radioactive waste is held in
concentrated form and everyone is afraid of it. If it were diluted, the
environmentalists would protest that where there were once a thousand
tons of nuclear waste, there are now a million.
Chernobyl did an admirable job of dispersing radioactive waste
over a fairly wide area. Places such as Love Canal demonstrate
the efficacy of burying and forgetting wastes in general. 20 or
30 years after the banning of leaded gasoline, many highways
border vegetation show the benefits of lead dispersion.
I think we must belong to the genus Homo Non Sapiens.
On Fri, 28 May 2004 05:53:43 +0000, Keith Thompson wrote: "Stephen Sprunk" <st*****@sprunk.org> writes: "Gordon Burditt" <go***********@burditt.org> wrote in message
news:c9********@library2.airnews.net... > My personal preference would be for a 256-bit number of picoseconds since
> the creation of the universe. It gives better precision than 1 second.
> It won't run out during the life of this universe. The only trouble is,
> we don't know accurately when that was.
You assume a "when" exists; relativity says that's impossible.
Relativity aside, there's nothing preventing time_t from being a
floating-point number whose zero is at a particular epoch. Epsilon of the
chosen type determines the precision of your clock.
With a floating-point type, the precision of your clock is also
determined by how far you are from the epoch. I'd rather have a
consistent precision over the entire representable range than be able
to measure picoseconds close to the epoch, but have the precision drop
by a factor of two every now and then.
Of course, more advanced beings would presumably have learned to cope with
that phenomenon, and have learned to focus on the more important concepts
in the Universe, such as universal mortality and alienation.
Singing:
"Does anybody really know what time it is?
Does anybody really care?
If so, I can't imagine why.
We've all got time enough to die."
-- Chicago
Sorry. ;-)
--
yvoregnevna gjragl-guerr gjb-gubhfnaq guerr ng lnubb qbg pbz
To email me, rot13 and convert spelled-out numbers to numeric form.
"Makes hackers smile" makes hackers smile.
On Thu, 27 May 2004 20:42:14 +0000, Stephen Sprunk wrote: "Generic Usenet Account" <us****@sta.samsung.com> wrote in message
news:90*************************@posting.google.co m... Although the Y2K scare turned out to be vastly overblown, we do have a
massive problem ahead of us ------ the Year 2038 problem. On Mon Jan
18 21:14:07 2038, the Unix seconds-since-epoch count will "roll-over".
After that, the time on the Unix systems will read as Fri Dec 13
14:45:52 1901.
You mean systems which use a signed 32-bit int for time_t. Modern systems
use a 64-bit int for time_t, so the problem is moot (unless you're running
code in 2038 that hasn't been recompiled since the early 1990s).
Which, in the real world, is very possible. The IA-64 architecture and the
Sparc-64 architecture both have explicit provisions to run 32-bit machine
code compiled for earlier iterations of the family tree. I think all
commercially viable 64-bit architectures will need very similar provisions.
Plus, in a world where PDP-8s are still used in mission-critical
applications by big organizations (BART), 32-bit systems will be around
long after 2038.
IMHO, if we want to avoid the last minute panic that we witnessed
towards the end of the last millennium (while pursuing the Y2K
problem), we should begin the process of debating the viable solutions
to this problem NOW. It will take a long time for the consensus to be
built, and to come up with a solution that most (if not all) people
find acceptable.
There already is a solution, consensus for it, and implementations of it.
The sky is NOT falling.
We knew, in a very real way, how to fix Y2K back in the 1980s. Hell, we
knew in the 1970s, but we thought it would be too expensive to do things
right.
IOW, the panic will set in, and it will be averted in 2037 or thereabouts
by the same method Y2K was averted in 1999.
--
yvoregnevna gjragl-guerr gjb-gubhfnaq guerr ng lnubb qbg pbz
To email me, rot13 and convert spelled-out numbers to numeric form.
"Makes hackers smile" makes hackers smile.
CBFalconer <cb********@yahoo.com> writes:
[...] You (and he) are too young. Back in gas shortage times, when
prices worked their way above 50 cents a gallon, most pumps
couldn't handle that wildly excessive level. The operators set
them to charge half-price, and created a sign stating as much.
I don't remember that, but I do remember that when gasoline started to
reach $1/gallon, some stations started selling by the liter because
their pumps couldn't handle the extra digit. It was a temporary
workaround, though; they went back to gallons as soon as the pumps
were upgraded.
It occurs to me that they might have been able to fix the problem by
dropping the last digit rather than the first one. (US gas prices are
almost universally $X.XX9/gallon; that extra nine-tenths of a cent has
always annoyed me. I'd gladly pay an extra cent or two for a tank of
gas if they'd price the stuff in whole numbers of cents.)
--
Keith Thompson (The_Other_Keith) ks***@mib.org <http://www.ghoti.net/~kst>
San Diego Supercomputer Center <*> <http://users.sdsc.edu/~kst>
We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do this.
On 29 May 2004 13:19:43 GMT, in comp.lang.c , Je***********@physik.fu-berlin.de wrote: Well, if I am not completely mistaken, there's quite a bit of a
difference in the _concentration_ the stuff has been hidden 'under
the rug' by nature (plus stuff like plutonium doesn't seem to be very
common there) and the one the waste products are going to be stashed
away in.
There are some people who live in parts of the UK where the radon gas
density is high enough to cause concern. Its coming from some quite large
granite plutons that some inconsiderate immortal shoved up through all the
limestone.
Not much we can do about it, except note that people have lived there for
~500,000 years and there's nothing especially unusual about them apart from
the funny accents, strange dress sense and tendency to have one enormous
eye.
--
Mark McIntyre
CLC FAQ <http://www.eskimo.com/~scs/C-faq/top.html>
CLC readme: <http://www.angelfire.com/ms3/bchambless0/welcome_to_clc.html>
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On Sat, 29 May 2004 09:48:24 GMT, in comp.lang.c , "Mabden"
<ma****@sbcglobal.net> wrote: "Stephen Sprunk" <st*****@sprunk.org> wrote in message
news:22******************************@news.terane ws.com...
Transporting large masses of H2 isn't nearly as safe as petrol, for
obvious reasons
I'm sorry, but what are the reason Hydrogen is less safe than petrol or
natural gas?
Think "Hindenberg"
If you pour a gallon of petrol on the floor, you can tap dance in it. If
you pour a gallon of natural gas on the floor, it dribbles out through the
drains in gaseous state. Trust me, I've done both. Heck I've even done it
with a gallon of iso-propanol (they're all handy coolants. The trick with
the last was to open the lab windows before I fell over dead drunk, and
then died of asphyxiation).
If you pour a gallon of H on the floor, you can kiss your ass goodbye as it
passes your head on its way to kingdom come. There /is/ a reason that the
LH test rig at RAL was about a mile from the rest of the lab, behind 20ft
thick earth banks, and inside a concrete bunker with one disposable wall.
--
Mark McIntyre
CLC FAQ <http://www.eskimo.com/~scs/C-faq/top.html>
CLC readme: <http://www.angelfire.com/ms3/bchambless0/welcome_to_clc.html>
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On Sat, 29 May 2004 16:18:48 GMT, in comp.lang.c , "Dik T. Winter"
<Di********@cwi.nl> wrote: In article <10***************@ente.ipberlin.com> jpd <re**********@do.not.spam.it> writes: On 2004-05-29, Mabden <ma****@sbcglobal.net> wrote: I'm sorry, but what are the reason Hydrogen is less safe than petrol or
natural gas?
Apart from the nasty tendency of those awfully small molecules to
slip through almost everything else (the main effort in creating
storage solutions for it is in storing it in a form where it's bound to
something else), it's mostly fear factor I guess.
Yup. In one recent news report on a fire in a hydrogen tank somewhere in
the Netherlands, the conclusion was that there was no safety hazard as no
toxic chemical stuff did emerge.
Tank fires are fairly safe, as its the vapour that burns and in tanks, not
much can escape. Also tanks for storing Hydrogen tend to be filled with an
inert material to retard any heat.
Mind you I heard a great (but probably apocryphal) story about someone at
RAL who accidentally ignited the a coolant bath of the stuff, and was
running around with the top ablaze, searching for a suitable place to chuck
it before the heat convected in and boiled the rest. At that point, there
would have been one heck of an explosion.
--
Mark McIntyre
CLC FAQ <http://www.eskimo.com/~scs/C-faq/top.html>
CLC readme: <http://www.angelfire.com/ms3/bchambless0/welcome_to_clc.html>
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"Thomas G. Marshall" <tg****************@replacetextwithnumber.hotmail. com>
wrote in message news:33****************@nwrdny03.gnilink.net... Peter J. Acklam <pj******@online.no> coughed up the following:
"Mabden" <ma****@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
I'm sorry, but what are the reason Hydrogen is less safe than
petrol or natural gas?
I'm sorry, but what has this got to do in *any* of these
newsgroups.
Peter
I no longer worry about OT posts in ng's. I've discovered that often a
subject is raised because of the /audience/ known to exist in the ng,
not its particular subject.
That is supposedly against the charter of the big 8. So be it.
Perhaps you both missed the "[OT]" tag. What that means is that the post you
are about to read, or ignore - your choice, is Off Topic for this newsgroup.
It's a courtesy to explain to you that you would be wasting you time if you
thought this thread was related to the newsgroup. When you see [OT], you are
guaranteed to have a subject that does not relate to the proper purpose of
the newsgroup. Therefore, if you only want to read topics that ARE targeted
to your newsgroup, please, in the future, ignore posts with [OT] in the
subject, as you may find them to be not what you would expect in the
newsgroup.
--
Mabden
"Mark McIntyre" <ma**********@spamcop.net> wrote in message
news:t2********************************@4ax.com... On Sat, 29 May 2004 09:48:24 GMT, in comp.lang.c , "Mabden"
<ma****@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
"Stephen Sprunk" <st*****@sprunk.org> wrote in message
news:22******************************@news.terane ws.com...
Transporting large masses of H2 isn't nearly as safe as petrol, for
obvious reasons
I'm sorry, but what are the reason Hydrogen is less safe than petrol or
natural gas?
Think "Hindenberg"
The Hindenberg didn't burn because of the hydrogen. You can't see hydrogen
burn (perhaps a little bluish glow).
The Hindenburg burned the cloth coating which was treated with the same
stuff we now use in rocket fuel. It went up because of static discharge that
was supposed to be mitigated by using wire to attach the cloth panels (to
ground it), but because they used rope instead the charge was allowed to
build until a flammable condition occured. It was a case of compounded
errors.
Learn a little history (and chemistry) before posting urban legends.
--
Mabden
Mabden <ma****@sbcglobal.net> coughed up the following: "Thomas G. Marshall"
<tg****************@replacetextwithnumber.hotmail. com> wrote in
message news:33****************@nwrdny03.gnilink.net... Peter J. Acklam <pj******@online.no> coughed up the following:
"Mabden" <ma****@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
I'm sorry, but what are the reason Hydrogen is less safe than
petrol or natural gas?
I'm sorry, but what has this got to do in *any* of these
newsgroups.
Peter
I no longer worry about OT posts in ng's. I've discovered that
often a subject is raised because of the /audience/ known to exist
in the ng,
not its particular subject.
That is supposedly against the charter of the big 8. So be it.
Perhaps you both missed the "[OT]" tag. What that means is that the
post you are about to read, or ignore - your choice, is Off Topic for
this newsgroup. It's a courtesy to explain to you that you would be
wasting you time if you thought this thread was related to the
newsgroup. When you see [OT], you are guaranteed to have a subject
that does not relate to the proper purpose of the newsgroup.
Therefore, if you only want to read topics that ARE targeted to your
newsgroup, please, in the future, ignore posts with [OT] in the
subject, as you may find them to be not what you would expect in the
newsgroup.
Have you lost your mind? I was agreeing with that very premise, and in
fact was pointing out a reason for it: People often like to discuss
things because of the ng's audience, not because of the ng's subject
topic. It's how most folks view it these days I think.
And, no by the way, I've seen purists attack even posts that were
labeled as "OT" under the argument that OT doesn't excuse a post
deliberately in the wrong ng. I certainly don't feel that way.
You seemed to have missed what I was saying entirely.
--
Forgetthesong,I'lljustoptforthefrontallobotomy...
"Thomas G. Marshall" <tg****************@replacetextwithnumber.hotmail. com>
wrote in message news:aJ*****************@nwrdny03.gnilink.net...
[snip vile attacks] And, no by the way, I've seen purists attack even posts that were
labeled as "OT" under the argument that OT doesn't excuse a post
deliberately in the wrong ng.
OK, Topic Nazi! I get your point, you want the "purity" of the newsgroup to
supersede the rights of posters who go off on tangents! Don't kill the
messenger, but people will sometimes have "side conversations" that are not
particularly "on- topic". That is just life, and the way people are.
Are you going to change the world, Net-Cop?! NO, I don't think so!
Is it *YOUR* job to police this newsgroup? NO!
Do I need this bad attitude after a hard day? No!
So keep your stupid opinions and attitude to yourself, Dick (Tracy)!
--
Mabden
August Derleth <se*@sig.now> coughed up the following: On Thu, 27 May 2004 20:42:14 +0000, Stephen Sprunk wrote:
"Generic Usenet Account" <us****@sta.samsung.com> wrote in message
news:90*************************@posting.google.co m... Although the Y2K scare turned out to be vastly overblown, we do
have a massive problem ahead of us ------ the Year 2038 problem.
On Mon Jan 18 21:14:07 2038, the Unix seconds-since-epoch count
will "roll-over". After that, the time on the Unix systems will
read as Fri Dec 13 14:45:52 1901.
You mean systems which use a signed 32-bit int for time_t. Modern
systems use a 64-bit int for time_t, so the problem is moot (unless
you're running code in 2038 that hasn't been recompiled since the
early 1990s).
Which, in the real world, is very possible. The IA-64 architecture
and the Sparc-64 architecture both have explicit provisions to run
32-bit machine code compiled for earlier iterations of the family
tree. I think all commercially viable 64-bit architectures will need
very similar provisions.
Plus, in a world where PDP-8s are still used in mission-critical
applications by big organizations (BART), 32-bit systems will be
around long after 2038.
IMHO, if we want to avoid the last minute panic that we witnessed
towards the end of the last millennium (while pursuing the Y2K
problem), we should begin the process of debating the viable
solutions to this problem NOW. It will take a long time for the
consensus to be built, and to come up with a solution that most (if
not all) people
find acceptable.
There already is a solution, consensus for it, and implementations
of it. The sky is NOT falling.
We knew, in a very real way, how to fix Y2K back in the 1980s. Hell,
we knew in the 1970s, but we thought it would be too expensive to do
things right.
IOW, the panic will set in, and it will be averted in 2037 or
thereabouts by the same method Y2K was averted in 1999.
Yep, and then in 2039 the 20-20 hindsighters will say: "Y2038 was blown
way way out of proportion, nothing went wrong!!!!!"
--
yvoregnevna gjragl-guerr gjb-gubhfnaq guerr ng lnubb qbg pbz
To email me, rot13 and convert spelled-out numbers to numeric form.
"Makes hackers smile" makes hackers smile.
--
Forgetthesong,I'lljustoptforthefrontallobotomy...
Mabden <ma****@sbcglobal.net> coughed up the following: "Thomas G. Marshall"
<tg****************@replacetextwithnumber.hotmail. com> wrote in
message news:aJ*****************@nwrdny03.gnilink.net...
[snip vile attacks]
And, no by the way, I've seen purists attack even posts that were
labeled as "OT" under the argument that OT doesn't excuse a post
deliberately in the wrong ng.
OK, Topic Nazi! I get your point,
You conveniently snipped away the sentence
I certainly don't feel that way.
that came right after that. Now WHY IS THAT? Could it be that you LIKE
misrepresenting the truth? That's called lying, and you should know
better.
you want the "purity" of the
newsgroup to supersede the rights of posters who go off on tangents!
Don't kill the messenger, but people will sometimes have "side
conversations" that are not particularly "on- topic". That is just
life, and the way people are.
AND I AGREED WITH THAT. I even elaborated on why. I have no issue now,
nor ever, with people going off on a tangent in ANY newsgroup.
You Do realize that you're looking like a bigger and bigger idiot, don't
you? You must be pretty embarrassed by now.
Are you going to change the world, Net-Cop?! NO, I don't think so!
Is it *YOUR* job to police this newsgroup? NO!
Do I need this bad attitude after a hard day? No!
So keep your stupid opinions and attitude to yourself, Dick (Tracy)!
IT'S NOT MY OPINION. I SAID THAT I DIDN'T FEEL THAT WAY.
But YOU like to quote only CERTAIN sentences of what someone says.
Go ahead fool, show me where I was "a topic nazi". I was completely the
opposite!!!!!!!!
--
Forgetthesong,I'lljustoptforthefrontallobotomy...
"Thomas G. Marshall" <tg****************@replacetextwithnumber.hotmail. com>
wrote in message news:J%**************@nwrdny03.gnilink.net... IT'S NOT MY OPINION. I SAID THAT I DIDN'T FEEL THAT WAY.
Yeah, I know, I was just fucking with you. hehehe. Sorry.
--
Mabden
Mabden <ma****@sbcglobal.net> coughed up the following: "Thomas G. Marshall"
<tg****************@replacetextwithnumber.hotmail. com> wrote in
message news:J%**************@nwrdny03.gnilink.net... IT'S NOT MY OPINION. I SAID THAT I DIDN'T FEEL THAT WAY.
Yeah, I know, I was just fucking with you. hehehe. Sorry.
Not a bad technique: get caught making a huge mistake and then say you
did it on purpose.
On purpose or not, you /might/ care for what others here think of you.
You and I weren't arguing in a void...
--
While using is ok, actually /writing/ free software is a disingenuous
activity. You can afford to write software for free only because of
someone else somewhere actually paying for it. Just say no.
On Sun, 30 May 2004 01:13:17 GMT, in comp.lang.c , "Mabden"
<ma****@sbcglobal.net> wrote: "Mark McIntyre" <ma**********@spamcop.net> wrote in message
news:t2********************************@4ax.com.. . On Sat, 29 May 2004 09:48:24 GMT, in comp.lang.c , "Mabden"
<ma****@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>"Stephen Sprunk" <st*****@sprunk.org> wrote in message
>news:22******************************@news.terane ws.com...
>
>> Transporting large masses of H2 isn't nearly as safe as petrol, for
>obvious
>> reasons
>
>I'm sorry, but what are the reason Hydrogen is less safe than petrol or
>natural gas?
Think "Hindenberg"
The Hindenberg didn't burn because of the hydrogen. You can't see hydrogen
burn (perhaps a little bluish glow).
The Hindenburg burned the cloth coating which was treated with the same
stuff we now use in rocket fuel.
Yesh, I saw that BBC docudrama too. I believe its still case not proven.
And you really think that the presence of a zillion moles of h2 didn't
assist somewhat?
Enough in this OT thread already...
--
Mark McIntyre
CLC FAQ <http://www.eskimo.com/~scs/C-faq/top.html>
CLC readme: <http://www.angelfire.com/ms3/bchambless0/welcome_to_clc.html>
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On 2004-05-30, Mark McIntyre <ma**********@spamcop.net> wrote: On Sun, 30 May 2004 01:13:17 GMT, in comp.lang.c , "Mabden"
<ma****@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
The Hindenburg burned the cloth coating which was treated with the same
stuff we now use in rocket fuel.
Yesh, I saw that BBC docudrama too. I believe its still case not proven.
And you really think that the presence of a zillion moles of h2 didn't
assist somewhat?
Think about it a bit. There's lots of hydrogen that is _not_ mixed with
air, so it can't burn until it encounters oxygen somewhere. (If it'd
been pre-mixed 2:1 with oxygen it would've gone BOOM instantly, but it
didn't. Igniting soap-bubbles filled with that mixture is a class-room
display experiment around here, BTW.)
You can pretty much emulate what happens when you fill a plastic bag
with, say, natural gas and hold a flame to it. The plastic burns first,
then the gas, which slowly forms a nice ball of fire as it gets out of
the bag (or the bag burns away).
Eyewitness reports gleaned from the 'net tell us that it was first
the outer hull, and only after a while the hydrogen burn was visible.
Thinking about it a bit more, I'd say that the actual cause of the fire
(sabotage or ropes instead of wire) is less important. The outer coating
_was_ too flammable, regardless of also being too ignitable.
Which is pretty clear from the after-incident technical investigation.
Enough in this OT thread already...
Don't ask, then. :-)
--
j p d (at) d s b (dot) t u d e l f t (dot) n l .
*** rude topposting fixed ***
"q@q.com" wrote: CBFalconer wrote: Gerry Quinn wrote: Je***********@physik.fu-berlin.de says...
> Then do an assay of the amount of natural radionucleides that
> are hidden 'under the rug'. I've heard there's stuff called
> uranium with a half-life of 4000 million years, just hidden
> in rocks in unmarked locations all over the planet. If you
> have a granite fireplace, there's even some in your house,
> oozing radioactive radon gas into the air you breathe.
>
Well, if I am not completely mistaken, there's quite a bit of
a difference in the _concentration_ the stuff has been hidden
'under the rug' by nature (plus stuff like plutonium doesn't
seem to be very common there) and the one the waste products
are going to be stashedaway in. Or did they come upt with a
way to distribute that stuff evenly over a volume of a small
mountain range and nobody told me?
The irony is that that (dispersion) is precisely the sort of
thing that people object to! The result is that radioactive
waste is held in concentrated form and everyone is afraid of
it. If it were diluted, the environmentalists would protest
that where there were once a thousand tons of nuclear waste,
there are now a million.
Chernobyl did an admirable job of dispersing radioactive waste
over a fairly wide area. Places such as Love Canal demonstrate
the efficacy of burying and forgetting wastes in general. 20 or
30 years after the banning of leaded gasoline, many highways
border vegetation show the benefits of lead dispersion.
I think we must belong to the genus Homo Non Sapiens.
The United States does NOT use reactor designs like the one
at Chernobyl. Also, Chernobyl did NOT have a containment
building.
I didn't say it did. The point was that dispersal is no answer to
fission products, which depend on physics, not reactor
containment, moderators, etc.
Helsinki (AFP) May 24, 2002
Finland's parliament on Friday approved construction of a
fifth nuclear reactor, the first such plant to be authorized
in Western Europe or North America since the Chernobyl
disaster in 1986.
My condolences to the Finns.
--
A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet and in e-mail?
In article <t2********************************@4ax.com>, ma**********@spamcop.net says... I'm sorry, but what are the reason Hydrogen is less safe than petrol or
natural gas?
Think "Hindenberg"
If you pour a gallon of petrol on the floor, you can tap dance in it. If
you pour a gallon of natural gas on the floor, it dribbles out through the
drains in gaseous state. Trust me, I've done both. Heck I've even done it
with a gallon of iso-propanol (they're all handy coolants. The trick with
the last was to open the lab windows before I fell over dead drunk, and
then died of asphyxiation).
If you pour a gallon of H on the floor, you can kiss your ass goodbye as it
passes your head on its way to kingdom come. There /is/ a reason that the
LH test rig at RAL was about a mile from the rest of the lab, behind 20ft
thick earth banks, and inside a concrete bunker with one disposable wall.
Does liquid hydrogen ignite spontaneously in air? I wouldn't have
thought so. While I'm sure it evaporates faster than liquid nitrogen,
the cooling effect of a couple of inches of boiling hydrogen would
hardly be sufficient to stop you walking out. Not if you have shoes on
anyway! Of course there might be an alarming amount of fog...
The Hindenberg, in any case, was full of gaseous hydrogen, probably
safer than liquid, but anyway different. AFAIK, more than half of the
passengers survived, largely because a hydrogen fireball produces a
relatively small proportion of radiant heat.
- Gerry Quinn
CBFalconer wrote: *** rude topposting fixed ***
"q@q.com" wrote:
CBFalconer wrote:
Gerry Quinn wrote:
Je***********@physik.fu-berlin.de says...
>>Then do an assay of the amount of natural radionucleides that
>>are hidden 'under the rug'. I've heard there's stuff called
>>uranium with a half-life of 4000 million years, just hidden
>>in rocks in unmarked locations all over the planet. If you
>>have a granite fireplace, there's even some in your house,
>>oozing radioactive radon gas into the air you breathe.
>>
>>
>Well, if I am not completely mistaken, there's quite a bit of
>a difference in the _concentration_ the stuff has been hidden
>'under the rug' by nature (plus stuff like plutonium doesn't
>seem to be very common there) and the one the waste products
>are going to be stashedaway in. Or did they come upt with a
>way to distribute that stuff evenly over a volume of a small
>mountain range and nobody told me?
>
The irony is that that (dispersion) is precisely the sort of
thing that people object to! The result is that radioactive
waste is held in concentrated form and everyone is afraid of
it. If it were diluted, the environmentalists would protest
that where there were once a thousand tons of nuclear waste,
there are now a million.
Chernobyl did an admirable job of dispersing radioactive waste
over a fairly wide area. Places such as Love Canal demonstrate
the efficacy of burying and forgetting wastes in general. 20 or
30 years after the banning of leaded gasoline, many highways
border vegetation show the benefits of lead dispersion.
I think we must belong to the genus Homo Non Sapiens.
The United States does NOT use reactor designs like the one
at Chernobyl. Also, Chernobyl did NOT have a containment
building.
I didn't say it did. The point was that dispersal is no answer to
fission products, which depend on physics, not reactor
containment, moderators, etc.
Reprocessing "spent" fuel rods will eliminate that problem.
Anyway the real future in nuclear technology is fusion.
Helsinki (AFP) May 24, 2002
Finland's parliament on Friday approved construction of a
fifth nuclear reactor, the first such plant to be authorized
in Western Europe or North America since the Chernobyl
disaster in 1986.
My condolences to the Finns.
In comp.programming Gerry Quinn <ge****@deletethisindigo.ie> wrote: In article <2h************@uni-berlin.de>, Je***********@physik.fu-
berlin.de says... > Then do an assay of the amount of natural radionucleides that are hidden
> 'under the rug'. I've heard there's stuff called uranium with a half-
> life of 4000 million years, just hidden in rocks in unmarked locations
> all over the planet. If you have a granite fireplace, there's even some
> in your house, oozing radioactive radon gas into the air you breathe.
Well, if I am not completely mistaken, there's quite a bit of a
difference in the _concentration_ the stuff has been hidden 'under
the rug' by nature (plus stuff like plutonium doesn't seem to be very
common there) and the one the waste products are going to be stashed
away in. Or did they come upt with a way to distribute that stuff
evenly over a volume of a small mountain range and nobody told me?
The irony is that that (dispersion) is precisely the sort of thing that
people object to! The result is that radioactive waste is held in
concentrated form and everyone is afraid of it. If it were diluted, the
environmentalists would protest that where there were once a thousand
tons of nuclear waste, there are now a million.
Problem is that you can't properly dilute it down to a level similar
to the concentration in nature. Even if you could bring all the stiff
into a soluble form and a make a very fine powder out of it and then
drop it in the sea it would still take a long long time until it's
dispersed down to an acceptable level. While mixing comes free, thanks
to the second law of thermodynamics, it takes quite some time. But if
you have to speed it up you need lots of extra energy. If that would
be different please explain why e.g. in the Irish sea due to the
Sellafield/Windscale plant (or whatever they call the thing nowadays)
the concentrations are still that high.
Note how frequently you see a casually implied estimate of the threat
from nuclear materials in terms of the mass of material multiplied by
the halflife.
And people complain about quite insignificant amounts of radionucleides
in seawater.
What's "insignificant" is depends a lot on whom you ask. And it meant
something quite different in the fifties compared to what it means
now, even to the stout supporters of the use of nuclear power. It's
simply that nobody knows what levels are "insignificant" since no-one
really understands all the mechanisms by which added amounts of radio-
active materials can influence living organisms. Some people (and not
from the crackpot fringe) even claim that small amounts are healthy -
having such a range of opinions shows quite nicely that nobody really
knows).
Regards, Jens
--
\ Jens Thoms Toerring ___ Je***********@physik.fu-berlin.de
\__________________________ http://www.toerring.de
"Thomas G. Marshall" <tg****************@replacetextwithnumber.hotmail. com> wrote: I no longer worry about OT posts in ng's. I've discovered that
often a subject is raised because of the /audience/ known to
exist in the ng, not its particular subject.
That is supposedly against the charter of the big 8. So be it.
I'm not against off-topic posts because of a charter, but because
it lowers the signal to noise ratio of a newsgroup. I want to
read about UNIX. If I wanted to read about hydrogen power vs
petrol, I would subscribe to the appropriate newsgroups.
Peter
--
Peter J. Acklam - pj******@online.no - http://home.online.no/~pjacklam This thread has been closed and replies have been disabled. Please start a new discussion. |
