It's literally the transition phase from 3 dimensional models (vector-based curves, points, and polygons) to final pixel-based raster images.
Rendering transforms the wireframe models into images.
3D graphics always involve a renderer of some kind. There are different classes of rendering. The kind that video games use are optimized for speed and interactivity, they are still rasterizing the 3D models into images, but the images are dumped to the video buffer and disposed of, with each new frame, at 30 frames per second.
This article discusses renderers that are not concerned with speed or interactivity. The finished frames are retained and polished with compositing and photo editing software, including photoshop. In this case, the renderer is permitted to crunch numbers on a frame for minutes, hours or days, rather than 30 disposable frames per second.
Nucleotides are the fundamental component of a DNA molecule.
Nuclides are the differentiated nucleuses of the common atomic elements, some of which are regarded as isotopes, of which some isotopes are radioactive
But let's get creative about the realities of hazardous radioactive waste storage. It's not an impossible problem to solve, when you think about it pragmatically. It's difficult, expensive, requires material resources, expertise and dedication, but it's not impossible.
The typical and most reliable procedure for managing radioactive waste is vitrification: creating a purified mixture of molten glass and then introducing an evenly distributed non-critical ratio of hot waste material into the glass, and allowing it to harden into a solid glass object. The radioactive glass object is then carted off to a repository, for permanent storage, in accordance with the half life of the waste, which might be centuries or more. Vitrification is a safe way to prevent accidental criticality, so that all the waste stays cool and is easier to shield.
Generally underground storage sites are the most desirable locations for the final resting place of vitrified waste. This provides a simple barrier to the penetrating radiation that the waste may emit.
Security is essential to the storage of radioactive waste, since unaccounted waste means there's some nasty stuff floating around. This adds effort to maintaining a site.
Ventilation is necessary, since ionizing radiation produces an accumulation of fee oxygen and hydrogen by catalyzing moisture in the air. This means offgassing equipment is needed to ventilate the natural accumulation to prevent explosion hazards. This adds complexity to storage.
Degradation of construction is a long term pest, in that the site must be constructed of high quality, durable architectual members, equipped to last centuries, and not collapse within decades. This adds expertise and expense requirements.
Site selection should be a no brainer though. Consider that Ukraine can make some decent income off the tragedy of Chernobyl, given that they have an unusable sector of their territory relegated to the reactor sarcophagus. Yeah, the sarcophagus is impossible to manage above ground, but what about digging underneath it and excavating a massive permanent waste repository, and charging money for depositing waste there? Nobody wants anything to do with Chernobyl. It's a ghost town. Seems like a chance to employ the site as a massive underground waste repository.
Same goes for Fukushima. Take a geological survey of the site, design durable, earthquake-proof architecture for an underground repository, and charge money to dumpwaste there.
After construction completes, your budget mostly comes from staffing qualified nuclear engineers and security personnel. Little else is necessary. A nuclear reactor and research lab can provide power to the site and provide an intellectual basis to attract new staff. Doesn't this sound like a sustainable plan?
In America there has been this massive battle over Yuka Mountain. It's politically hazardous to store waste underneath otherwise uncontaminated land. The protest generally stems from the not-in-my-backyard philosophy. There are tons of superfund sites, that are doomed to contamination for decades because of simple bureacratic laziness. Most of them are pretty close to cities. I think America could probably find sites, but they usually get locked up in legal messiness that blows any deal. I think there are probably places that could accept waste, and there's no rational reason to care, but people fight it anyway, because everyone seems to enjoy irrational litigation as political sport as a sort of clerical version of new-deal make-work contruction projects. But I digress.
There are reasonable ways to confront the challenges of radioactive waste storage. Obstinate people use this objection as an example of an insurmountable challenge simply because they're stubborn.
There are superior solutions to vitrification. Synroc [1] is technically far superior as it puts the long lived isotopes into mineral phases in which they are stable, as opposed to metastable glass.
Once stablised as synroc it is simply a matter of storing the waste. Storing above ground (i.e. in a shed) seems to me to be a better solution than pursuing geologic disposal, given the waste is now stable, and can be easily monitored.
Good point! Water table contamination is yet another hazard.
Fukushima is situated on the coast line, and already leaks into the ocean, but Chernobyl is near the Pripyat river, and is a tributary to the Dnieper River, which empties into the Black Sea. The Pripyat is contaminated within the exclusion zone, but it would be bad news to disturb and agitate any contamination, and make things worse.
Given that it's already a bad situation, and that natural leeching is already taking place by doing nothing, any engineering project would have to approach the site carefully so that leeching is not accelerated.
Yucca mountain is located in the southwest desert, so that mitigates water seepage, but Yucca mountain isn't a disaster site (yet), so that technical challenge can be tackled before it arises.
My gut reaction is that this highjacking was "opportunistic" and "state sponsored". The "actors" knew there wouldn't be any consequences.
It would be nice to "send a message" by banning an AS number. The hassles involved in revoking that ban and/or obtaining a new AS number would make it unlikely that such opportunistic bad behavior would recur very often.
Yeah, I was kinda hoping people would touch on those questions here. I haven't managed to read the actual paper, but it's just 5 pages longs so I doubt it speaks much about these questions. But a piece discussing these particulars would be awesome.
Alright, so here are some of the most common applications, although I'm not sure about the chemistry behind them...
Rhenium: High performance super alloys, particularly when mixed with tungsten, mostly useful in turbine jet engines and heat exchangers. Also used as a catalyst in petroleum cracking when distilling crude oil. Isotopes are used as radiation sources.
Rhodium: A non-reactive metal with characteristic shine, mostly used as beads in automotive catalytic converters. Also used for jewelry and decorative purposes. Also as an good electrical conductor included in alloys for niche wiring applications and as a fiberglass additive.
Lanthanum: Commonly used as gas lamp mantles, but many other uses include acting as a cathode ray source, neutron and gamma ray detector, glass additive, alloy additive, all rare earths in the lanthanide series are useful as catalysts for petroleum cracking when distilling crude oil, and finally potential use in hydrogen fuel cells to sequester hydrogen.
Europium: Flourescent lamps, red phosphors in cathode ray tubes, anti-counterfeiting agent due to unique flourescent properties.
Dysprosium: Mostly magnetic applications. Can be used as a neodymium substitute with unique magnetic properties for niche applications, such as improving conductivity is solenoids for high performance electric motors, and in magnetic media such as hard disk platters.
Thulium: Very rare and expensive, but useful as a safe low-intensity x-ray source, also used in solid state lasers, and due to rarity as an anti-counterfeiting substance with unique flourescant properties.
Ytterbium: Miniscule vitrified sampled are bombarded by lasers as the time keeping component in high quality atomic clocks. Radioactive isotopes can be bombarded with neutrons to produce gamma rays.
Yttrium: Red phosphors in CRT monitors, emits white light from LEDs, semicondoctor doping agent, and lots more.
Strontium: Mostly mixed into glass to shield against x-ray emissions from cathode ray tubes.
Thallium: Mixed with glass to provide special properties, regarding hardness, optical effects and infrared effects. Also used as semiconductor doping agent.
Magnesium: Mostly used as a component of alloys, mixed with other metals to fabricate durable lightweight parts. Comparable to aluminum.
Manganese: An important metallurgical component in steel production, both when refining raw iron ore, and as a component of high quality steel alloys.
I guess it's a pretty wide mix, since many of the elements come from all across the board, on the periodic table. Recurring themes are alloys, glass additives, semiconductors, and chemical catalysts.
How come Rhenium is in the list of metals without substitutes, but also given as an example of a metal that was successfully substituted by General Electric? Is it just that it serves a different purpose in smartphones that nothing else can be adequately used for?
Wikipedia's article seems to point to the idea that recently, super alloy applications are placing high demand on a supply chain that was not prepared for such a change in market trends.
I think rhenium diboride seems to be a useful substitute for tungsten carbide in places where tungsten carbide is useful for its hardness. Apparently rhenium is used heavily in the production of tungsten alloys, so there's an association, in that industrial pipelines involving tungsten tend to have a lot of rhenium on hand too.
Meanwhile the super alloys which involve high use of rhenium are nickel-rhenium alloys. Apparently GE has produced a series of super alloys named Rene alloys, and the compositions vary among each memeber of the series, some don't involve rhenium. Given that they seem to be proprietary products with military applications (mostly high temperature rocket engine nozzles) details are somewhat scarce.
Maybe the demand directly relates to how many rockets are being launched, and how many fighter jets are serviced for replacement parts or lost in crashes?
I am uncertain that it would "destroy the global economy." That sounds like hyperbole. Convince me.
It would be any unhappy event, assuredly, but if "the global economy" wasn't destroyed by the Iraq debacle, I'm pretty sure that a similar conflict in Korea would carry comparable consequences.
All the same, I do not advocate any sort of war. Not out of squeamishness, but mostly because even the victors are handed empty promises by war. War isn't as productive as people would like to romanticize.
Your request to have them explicitly define what they are designating as metadata is wise. They may have a completely distorted concept of metadata that represents a drastic departure from any sane definition.
But the definitions you've put forth are completely off target, with respect to the layman's ordinary, rational concept of metadata. Conceptually, metadata forms a map of relationships between actual examples of data, in the sense that the wires between the lightbulbs are the metadata, while the lightbulbs are the data. Your hypothesis is that someone might propose that only the light emitted from the bulb is the data, and that all other phenomena beyond that are the metadata, so, if you take a picture of the lightbulb while it's switched on, and mark the time, the timestamped photo is the metadata, only because it recorded measurements of the intensity of the photons emanating from the bulb, and did not capture and retain the actual photons themselves (all else, aside from the photons being fair game). No one in their right mind would ever build such an absurd mental model.
The reality is that anyone proposing concepts like the ones you mention, is simply lying through their teeth. Thus, why would you want anyone like that to speak a single word?
If that's their version of the truth, and they seriously believe that's a representation of honesty, it's not worth listening to them.
If they know it's a lie and try to sell the lie anyway, it's not worth listening to them.
If they know what the reality is, but lie and provide the rational definition of metadata, regardless of how inaccurately it aligns with the truth, it's not worth listening to them.
The only thing you'd gain from hearing them speak to their belief of how metadata is defined, would be if you compare what they say to the actually evidence that proves the reality, and assess how warped they are, and how much they lied.
I don't believe the layman has an "ordinary, rational concept of metadata".
The NSA's library metaphor was well-chosen: loose enough to possibly explain but complex enough to mislead. It derailed the conversation.
But I see no utility in the light bulb metaphor you present, except possibly to mislead as most metaphors can do. I would never use it in this context.
The point is to eliminate the metaphors. "Just the facts, ma'am." as Dragnet's Sgt. Friday (didn't exactly) always says.
"why would you want anyone like that to speak a single word?"
To find the truth. If not, to reveal those who lie under oath. To eliminate the metaphors and replace them with facts.
In a generation or two, those positions will be staffed by completely different people, as the "THEY" of today retire.
When the "THEY" of tomorrow are handed the keys to this vast panopticon that they didn't have to build themselves, how will "THEY" behave. No one can be sure.
Consider the men that inherited the ash heap of Europe after WWI. What did those men do?
I don't think parent was equating current times with post-WWI era Europe in the least. He was simply saying that people who inherited a challenging/dangerous geo-political landscape went on to create an unimaginably worse geo-political landscape.
The current challenge is global terrorism, but the swing towards authoritarianism by Western governments may end up being FAR worse than the threat of terrorism.
Then what he was saying is immensely broad and basically useless as guidance for today. "Bad thing happened at some point in history" is worthless, as a sentence.
And we're not swinging towards authoritarianism. That's absolutely a lie. Want to know the irony in you saying that? That you can say that, and not fear your door being knocked down and you being questioned. You don't know authoritarianism if you think the US is headed that way. Authoritarianism is not being able to criticize the government. Authoritarianism is the inability to change the government. Authoritarianism is a very loaded word, and your misuse of it only clouds the real problems the US government has, of which there are undeniably many.
People like you who go chicken-little constantly by bandying about words like "authoritarianism" create huge political blockage, which causes government standstills like what we're seeing in congress today. Lawmakers are afraid to do anything, because every time they try, it ends with some lawmaker or another being portrayed as eating children under a bridge somewhere, and his/her constituents buy it enough to oust him/her, despite just trying to make this country a better place.
Well, just because I can say what I want today, doesn't mean the same will be true tomorrow. We're already past the point that people are beginning to self-censor out of fear of the surveillance state. We already have indefinite detentions, torture, secret laws with secret interpretations, and state-sanctioned kidnappings.
Looking across the pond at England, they went from filtering the internet to block child porn, to filtering the internet to block extremists in less than one year. You have UK law enforcement harassing and intimidating legitimate journalism about the out of control surveillance state.
Maybe none of that is alarming to you, and maybe you don't think any of those things are along the road that leads to an authoritarian state, but I and many others feel differently. Either way, just because my perception of events is different that yours doesn't make my perception a lie.
> We already have indefinite detentions, torture, secret laws with secret interpretations, and state-sanctioned kidnappings.
And have had them for many many years. Nothing new. We committed a genocide against a people in the 1900s, and enslaved another people in the 1800s, both of which I think are much worse things to do to people than where we are now. If you chart the kinds of freedoms people living in the US have throughout the US's existence, would you really try to say the average person is less free today? Obviously we're not done working on being better at that, and absolutely we slip, but I'm so sick and tired of this attitude that we're moving into a totalitarian state, when we only in the last 100ish years LEFT what amounted to one.
And a small point of order but obviously no, my perception isn't any more valid than yours, but there is an objective perception, and if your perception is not aligned with that objective flagpost, then yes, your perception is a lie.
If you know anything about neurology or psychology, you'll know that there is no "objective perception". There is science, but that's about repeatability, and the complexity of geopolitics makes situations difficult to reproduce in exactitude. We make assessment based on different sets of experiences and knowledge, and our perception is influenced by our past and present.
No two people have the same life experience.
The very rawest form of perceptual subjectivity can be demonstrated by the interference of vision and sound caused by the McGurk effect. Search youtube for an example.
Your argument is invalid. That there are features of "authoritarianism" currently missing doesn't in any way show that we're not "swinging towards authoritarianism", any more than not seeing redwoods outside your car windows means you're not driving towards California.
Being in a place where "authoritarianism" is one bad actor away is not a good place to be. If you feel that we 1) are not in that such a place, and 2) are not likely to be any time soon, then feel free to make that case.
Which bad actor would it take to put us into an authoritarian state? The president? No, congress would impeach him. Congressional leaders? No, the supreme court would overrule them. The chief justice? No, congress would constitutionalize a law if it's important enough. Checks and balances still exist.
I don't see any position of power that could act in such a way so as to gain unilateral control of the US government.
I'm not confident that we are in such a position, but I think we're closer than I am comfortable with. Imagine J. Edgar Hoover heading the NSA, "under" a weak president.
I don't think the NSA is an inherently powerful organization.
If they actually were doing all the awful things people keep saying they could do, e.g. congressional blackmail, the person doing those things would be shut down in a heartbeat. Do you honestly think the head of ANY government organization couldn't be dealt with if they went legitimately rogue?
There's plenty of evidence to suggest that, in the sense of things we would be more likely to see if it were the case than if it weren't. Many things from the Snowden docs; parallel construction; statements of congresspeople and courts that they were unaware or misinformed; Clapper flat out lying to Congress and not facing any charges... Nevertheless, I actually don't think it is the case that we are currently in that position; I am just nowhere near as confident of that as I would prefer to be.
I wouldn't have considered many actions over the course of years by a well positioned bad actor "one step", but if you would then I grant you that wording - I may have been thinking you meant smaller "steps" than you did. I would be tremendously surprised if we were a single action away (though "single precipitating action", less surprised).
I really don't see how you can assert that the things I listed aren't more likely in an environment where those holding power in secret are extending and exercising that power, than in an environment where they are not, which is what it means to be evidence.
It's literally the transition phase from 3 dimensional models (vector-based curves, points, and polygons) to final pixel-based raster images.
Rendering transforms the wireframe models into images.
3D graphics always involve a renderer of some kind. There are different classes of rendering. The kind that video games use are optimized for speed and interactivity, they are still rasterizing the 3D models into images, but the images are dumped to the video buffer and disposed of, with each new frame, at 30 frames per second.
This article discusses renderers that are not concerned with speed or interactivity. The finished frames are retained and polished with compositing and photo editing software, including photoshop. In this case, the renderer is permitted to crunch numbers on a frame for minutes, hours or days, rather than 30 disposable frames per second.