Germany still was a net exporter in 2011. You expect that will no longer be true in 2012, but right now, that's just a prediction.
Also, look at the chart: Germany only started to be a consistent exporter in 2003, so there's obviously a need to panic: Can you still remember the big blackouts of the 80s and 90s?</sarcasm>
So what? There are many good reasons to switch to renewable energy sources long term. However, as long as fossil fuels, and nuclear power are economically viable, there's no incentive for the private sector to make the necessary investments in infrastructure (power grid and storage facilities).
Of course we could go on doing business as usaual for some more decades or trying the band-aid approach by switching to nuclear - a technology with inherent design flaws (thorium readtors might help with that, and fusion reactors might be viable someday), but really, is it really a goo idea to bury your head in the sand and only start moving once the shit has hit the fan?
Not playing by the rules and forcing necessary change can be a good thing.
That is more to do with a lot of europe using radiators for heating I think.
That might be true for France, where elecricity is cheap (assuming you meant electric heating when saying radiator), but not so for Germany. Also, houses in Germany are pretty well insulated in general (which, to a certain degree, is required by law, but many home owners do it of their own free will to keep energy costs down).
There is a direction: we are alive and they are not.
Big deal: I'm alive, while my grandparents are not. In fact, as I'm European I'm probably partly Neanderthal, so the analogy actually works...
Unless they were wiped out by a freak event, it means we're genetically "better".
It does not. For example, not having to synthesize vitamin C might have been slightly advantageous in the past, but all those sailors having died from scurvy would probably disagree...
It seems to me that JIT compilers have the promise of being able to optimize things based on what's actually going on rather than what might theoretically be going on.
Keep in mind that dynamic recompilation does not come for free - the actual compilation aside (which must be reasonably fast, ie a just-in-time compiler probably won't optimize as heavily as an ahead-of-time compiler), you also need to add introspection hooks to determine hot code paths and insert guards to check if preconditions still hold.
In most cases, runtime optimization can't compete with profile-guided link-time optimization, which gets you many of the benefits of the former without any runtime overhead whatsoever.
We couldn't live in a universe with both matter and antimatte.
Yes, we could: due to inflation, there could be pockets of matter/antimatter which won't ever causally interact again. I dont know enough about Lambda-CDM to know if this is consistent with the cosmological standard model, but it's at least theoretically possible...
This 'Energy Turnaround in Germany' was only a panic reaction to Fukushima insofar as the governing parties were concerned: The 'Anti-Atomkraft'-movement has been going strong here for decades and actually was prtly responsible for a now mainstream political party. When the Greens party was part of the federal government, the 'Atomkonsens' of 2000-06-14 and the 'Atomgesetz' from 2001-12-14 would have resulted in turning off the last nuclear power plant by ~202 as well. The current government just retracted the law to accomodate their clientele and it took Fukushima to change their stance again.
Germany exports more energy than it imports. You could pull the plug on all of the old nuclear plants (and for various reasons - like incorrectly installed anchor bolts in Biblis - there were times when most actually were off-line) without affecting German infrastructure. Even the newer ones are probably only necessary during peak periods and for safety reasons, and it might well be possible to create the necessary infrastructure to allow smaller, de-centralized plants to replace the base load capacity of the nuclear plants.
As an aside, I don't really understand people arguing against moving away from nuclear fission for energy production: Using a technology which
- produces toxic wastes we have no way to safely handle - can't be shut down in case of emergencies
just does not seems very reasonable to me. Considering the date, just think about what might have happened if terrorists had targeted nuclear plants instead of 'just' office space (no disrespect intended).
What model or data is there that shows that having the temperature of the planet increase a few degrees, overall, would be a bad thing for our species or any other?
Will increasing CO2 increase the temperature of the earth? This is not certain, because of the complex interactions of the climate. One example: raise the temperature, and you get more water vapor. More water vapor yields more clouds, which have a *massive* cooling effect. In short: it is entirely possible that CO2 has a negligible effect on the temperature.
Where did you read about that *massive* cooling effect? The last time I looked into global warming (three years ago), the strength of the negative feedback due to increased clound covering was still subject to quite a lot of debate, but it was suspected to be far less than the warming attributed to humans.
Also keep in mind that water itself is a greenhouse gas (it's the most important component of the natural greenhouse effect), so there's also a povitive feedback component involved as well: a higher atmospheric temperature means we'll get a higher concentration of water vapor in the atmosphere before condensation happens (curse you, Clausius and Clapeyron!)
Set the temperature question aside for a moment: is a higher CO2 level a bad thing? CO2's primary effect on the planet is "plant food". Commercial greenhouses deliberately increase CO2 in order to increase their crop yields. If we could magically reduce CO2 to 19th century levels, we would see crop yields fall substantially.
Too bad the CO2 won't stay in the lower atmosphere where plants can get at it, and then there's the problem of Liebig's barrel: an increase in CO2 means shit if you're lacking for some other resource...
Back to temperature. If the earth's temperature does rise, is this a bad thing? Historically, warmer periods have been times of prosperity. Most of the earth is in the temperate zone, and warmer temperatures improve the climate, lengthen growing seasons, etc. Imagine frozen Siberia as the bread basket of Asia. It is not clear that a warmer earth is bad.
Well, as long as you don't live in the Mediterranean area, I guess... But in Germany (that's where I'm living), the number of heavy rain (which causes nasty floodings...) has increased during the last century with, global warming as the main suspect; but at least I don't have to worry about hurricanes or rising sea levels - take that, Holland;)
Finally, how do we measure the temperature of the earth? There are many temperature stations scattered about, but the majority of them do not comply with the guidelines set up to ensure accurate measurement. Many are at airports (lots of tarmac), others - especially in very cold climates - are placed conveniently near buildings. These and other siting issues make the temperature measurements inaccurate. Satellite measurements have their own difficulties. The more you read about these issues, the clearer it becomes that we do not currently have reliable temperature measurements.
That's where statistics comes in; the problem with the seamingly contradictory satellite data has also been solved some years ago, btw...
So: on the basis of inaccurate temperature data and ineffective models, what should we do? Should we commit trillions of dollars to drastic policies based on questionable science? Or should we, maybe, invest in a decent network of weather stations, invest in climate science, and *understand* what is going on?
Excuse me, but I have no idea what you are talking about here. Could you clarify to which policies costing trillions of dollars you refer, and why you think them useless? Global warming is a widely accepted fact, the debate has shifted to the question of who to blame; personally, I belive it's us pesky humans, but that's beside the point as we'll have to deal with the consequences anyway (according to the Milankovitch theory, the next ice age won't be triggered for quite a few thousand of years); and switching away from oil is recommendable for quite a few other r
Technically they can't do that at the moment because there are 13 or so separate fundamental constants of nature.
You're right. But normally, you just set the one's to 1 which are relevant to your calculations - which often include the speed of light and the reduced Planck's constant (seeing a length given in 1/GeV is a bit strange at first;)). Good candidates are the Boltzman constant (if you do thermodynamics), the Gravitaional constant and the elementary charge.
Although, I suppose that won't stop some of them writing c = PI = 1, 1 = any identity (irregular matrix, tensor or otherwise), leaving off vector squiggles when there are 2 possibilities (you're supposed to know which one), and letting the reader keep track of this nonsense.
I heard rumors of setting 2PI=1, but have yet to see that done...
Just imagine what would happen if they finally unify all the forces and connect those now independent constants of nature after the CERN experiment... and the guy who did it had some ridiculous last name or came up with some ludicrous unit (continuing the tradition of strings, beauty quarks, p-branes, etc).
Yeah, a lot of physical naming schemes seem to come straight from Terry Pratchett novels...
Actually, it would take a guy in the spacecraft a minimum of 4.3 years to arrive at Alpha Centauri. In Earth's reference frame it might take thousands of years. I'm saying that you're using the times in the wrong frames of reference.
Not true. When travelling at the speed of light, time won't pass at all (in the frame of the moving object) - which also implies that there wouldn't be any time to hit the stop button.
Problems with acceleration/deceleration aside, there's no limit to how small the inherent time interval can be made...
The C standard requires that NULL be an expression that resolved to either a null void pointer or an integer expression that resolves to 0.
No, it doesn't. The C99 standard reads:
7.17 3 [...] NULL which expands to an implementation-defined null pointer constant; [...]
In my book, a pointer constant is not an integer expression. GCC agrees.
The C++ standard (which the article is about) requires that NULL be an integer expression that resolves to 0. Because of the stronger typing in C++, NULL cannot be a void pointer.
The problem with NULL is it resolves to 0, an int expression. If you overload a function to take an int or a pointer, and use NULL, it will incorrectly choice the int form.
Thats not true. The C macro NULL normally expands to ((void *)0). If you use this as an int expression, C compilers will warn. I'd consider the behaviour you described a bug.
But there's another thing we DO know: the global supply of oil is limited. Therefore, the responsible thing to do is save as much of it as we can, regardless of whether burning it is responsible for the climate change or not.
I'd rather save the supplies we have for use in the chemical industry instead of wasting them as a cheap, but possibly hazardous energy source.
And just to be clear on this: We currently do not understand how the climate works; I wouldn't call messing with things we don't understand just for convenience or not 'paying extra' a smart thing to do...
There is nothing magic about what C or C++ does when it utilizes shared memory for dynamically linked libraries. Your assertion that Java or C# cannot do this strikes me as incorrect, although I'm not sure if any VMs actually make use of such a thing or not. Googl says IBM has been doing something like this at least since 2004. Sun's VM supports class data sharing since version 1.5: http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/guide/vm/class-data-sharing.html
*If* that's not Java and is C, it's not ANSI C. ANSI C requires/* comment */ -style commenting, not// and you're supposed to declare the variable before putting it in the for loop Not true for C99 any longer - it's 2007, times have changed;)
Slashdot Mirror
Germany still was a net exporter in 2011. You expect that will no longer be true in 2012, but right now, that's just a prediction.
Also, look at the chart: Germany only started to be a consistent exporter in 2003, so there's obviously a need to panic: Can you still remember the big blackouts of the 80s and 90s?</sarcasm>
Yes, but it has a half-life of 25,000 years so I think we can relax about that for a few hundred years.
U235 has a half-life of 7,038 × 10^8 years - perhaps you're mixing it up with Pu239?
How long ago was the U-235 on Earth created?
That question is irrelevant: A 4 billion year old Uranium atom is as stable (ie has the same probability to decay) as a newly created one.
In a 1000 years, we'll only lose 1/10000 per-cent of U235 to natural decay, so there's no need to hurry on that account.
All U-235 on Earth is going to decay eventually so either we use it before it decays or we will never be able to use it anymore.
Considering the half-life of U235, U238 and Th232, running out of fuel because of natural decay is a non-issue.
Germany is NOT a net exporter.
Citation needed. According to all statistics I know, Germany is a net exporter of electricity (see eg data from 2010 on Wikipedia).
So what? There are many good reasons to switch to renewable energy sources long term. However, as long as fossil fuels, and nuclear power are economically viable, there's no incentive for the private sector to make the necessary investments in infrastructure (power grid and storage facilities).
Of course we could go on doing business as usaual for some more decades or trying the band-aid approach by switching to nuclear - a technology with inherent design flaws (thorium readtors might help with that, and fusion reactors might be viable someday), but really, is it really a goo idea to bury your head in the sand and only start moving once the shit has hit the fan?
Not playing by the rules and forcing necessary change can be a good thing.
That is more to do with a lot of europe using radiators for heating I think.
That might be true for France, where elecricity is cheap (assuming you meant electric heating when saying radiator), but not so for Germany. Also, houses in Germany are pretty well insulated in general (which, to a certain degree, is required by law, but many home owners do it of their own free will to keep energy costs down).
There is a direction: we are alive and they are not.
Big deal: I'm alive, while my grandparents are not. In fact, as I'm European I'm probably partly Neanderthal, so the analogy actually works...
Unless they were wiped out by a freak event, it means we're genetically "better".
It does not. For example, not having to synthesize vitamin C might have been slightly advantageous in the past, but all those sailors having died from scurvy would probably disagree...
Keep in mind that dynamic recompilation does not come for free - the actual compilation aside (which must be reasonably fast, ie a just-in-time compiler probably won't optimize as heavily as an ahead-of-time compiler), you also need to add introspection hooks to determine hot code paths and insert guards to check if preconditions still hold.
In most cases, runtime optimization can't compete with profile-guided link-time optimization, which gets you many of the benefits of the former without any runtime overhead whatsoever.
We couldn't live in a universe with both matter and antimatte.
Yes, we could: due to inflation, there could be pockets of matter/antimatter which won't ever causally interact again. I dont know enough about Lambda-CDM to know if this is consistent with the cosmological standard model, but it's at least theoretically possible...
Just to clean up some misconceptions:
This 'Energy Turnaround in Germany' was only a panic reaction to Fukushima insofar as the governing parties were concerned: The 'Anti-Atomkraft'-movement has been going strong here for decades and actually was prtly responsible for a now mainstream political party. When the Greens party was part of the federal government, the 'Atomkonsens' of 2000-06-14 and the 'Atomgesetz' from 2001-12-14 would have resulted in turning off the last nuclear power plant by ~202 as well. The current government just retracted the law to accomodate their clientele and it took Fukushima to change their stance again.
Germany exports more energy than it imports. You could pull the plug on all of the old nuclear plants (and for various reasons - like incorrectly installed anchor bolts in Biblis - there were times when most actually were off-line) without affecting German infrastructure. Even the newer ones are probably only necessary during peak periods and for safety reasons, and it might well be possible to create the necessary infrastructure to allow smaller, de-centralized plants to replace the base load capacity of the nuclear plants.
As an aside, I don't really understand people arguing against moving away from nuclear fission for energy production: Using a technology which
- produces toxic wastes we have no way to safely handle
- can't be shut down in case of emergencies
just does not seems very reasonable to me. Considering the date, just think about what might have happened if terrorists had targeted nuclear plants instead of 'just' office space (no disrespect intended).
What model or data is there that shows that having the temperature of the planet increase a few degrees, overall, would be a bad thing for our species or any other?
look here for a basic idea
Will increasing CO2 increase the temperature of the earth? This is not certain, because of the complex interactions of the climate. One example: raise the temperature, and you get more water vapor. More water vapor yields more clouds, which have a *massive* cooling effect. In short: it is entirely possible that CO2 has a negligible effect on the temperature.
Where did you read about that *massive* cooling effect? The last time I looked into global warming (three years ago), the strength of the negative feedback due to increased clound covering was still subject to quite a lot of debate, but it was suspected to be far less than the warming attributed to humans.
Also keep in mind that water itself is a greenhouse gas (it's the most important component of the natural greenhouse effect), so there's also a povitive feedback component involved as well: a higher atmospheric temperature means we'll get a higher concentration of water vapor in the atmosphere before condensation happens (curse you, Clausius and Clapeyron!)
Set the temperature question aside for a moment: is a higher CO2 level a bad thing? CO2's primary effect on the planet is "plant food". Commercial greenhouses deliberately increase CO2 in order to increase their crop yields. If we could magically reduce CO2 to 19th century levels, we would see crop yields fall substantially.
Too bad the CO2 won't stay in the lower atmosphere where plants can get at it, and then there's the problem of Liebig's barrel: an increase in CO2 means shit if you're lacking for some other resource...
Back to temperature. If the earth's temperature does rise, is this a bad thing? Historically, warmer periods have been times of prosperity. Most of the earth is in the temperate zone, and warmer temperatures improve the climate, lengthen growing seasons, etc. Imagine frozen Siberia as the bread basket of Asia. It is not clear that a warmer earth is bad.
Well, as long as you don't live in the Mediterranean area, I guess... But in Germany (that's where I'm living), the number of heavy rain (which causes nasty floodings...) has increased during the last century with, global warming as the main suspect; but at least I don't have to worry about hurricanes or rising sea levels - take that, Holland ;)
Finally, how do we measure the temperature of the earth? There are many temperature stations scattered about, but the majority of them do not comply with the guidelines set up to ensure accurate measurement. Many are at airports (lots of tarmac), others - especially in very cold climates - are placed conveniently near buildings. These and other siting issues make the temperature measurements inaccurate. Satellite measurements have their own difficulties. The more you read about these issues, the clearer it becomes that we do not currently have reliable temperature measurements.
That's where statistics comes in; the problem with the seamingly contradictory satellite data has also been solved some years ago, btw...
So: on the basis of inaccurate temperature data and ineffective models, what should we do? Should we commit trillions of dollars to drastic policies based on questionable science? Or should we, maybe, invest in a decent network of weather stations, invest in climate science, and *understand* what is going on?
Excuse me, but I have no idea what you are talking about here. Could you clarify to which policies costing trillions of dollars you refer, and why you think them useless? Global warming is a widely accepted fact, the debate has shifted to the question of who to blame; personally, I belive it's us pesky humans, but that's beside the point as we'll have to deal with the consequences anyway (according to the Milankovitch theory, the next ice age won't be triggered for quite a few thousand of years); and switching away from oil is recommendable for quite a few other r
Technically they can't do that at the moment because there are 13 or so separate fundamental constants of nature.
You're right. But normally, you just set the one's to 1 which are relevant to your calculations - which often include the speed of light and the reduced Planck's constant (seeing a length given in 1/GeV is a bit strange at first ;)). Good candidates are the Boltzman constant (if you do thermodynamics), the Gravitaional constant and the elementary charge.
Although, I suppose that won't stop some of them writing c = PI = 1, 1 = any identity (irregular matrix, tensor or otherwise), leaving off vector squiggles when there are 2 possibilities (you're supposed to know which one), and letting the reader keep track of this nonsense.
I heard rumors of setting 2PI=1, but have yet to see that done...
Just imagine what would happen if they finally unify all the forces and connect those now independent constants of nature after the CERN experiment... and the guy who did it had some ridiculous last name or came up with some ludicrous unit (continuing the tradition of strings, beauty quarks, p-branes, etc).
Yeah, a lot of physical naming schemes seem to come straight from Terry Pratchett novels...
No, *real* scientists use natural units and measure temperature in eV - like everything else ;)
Actually, it would take a guy in the spacecraft a minimum of 4.3 years to arrive at Alpha Centauri. In Earth's reference frame it might take thousands of years. I'm saying that you're using the times in the wrong frames of reference.
Not true. When travelling at the speed of light, time won't pass at all (in the frame of the moving object) - which also implies that there wouldn't be any time to hit the stop button.
Problems with acceleration/deceleration aside, there's no limit to how small the inherent time interval can be made...
The C standard requires that NULL be an expression that resolved to either a null void pointer or an integer expression that resolves to 0.
No, it doesn't. The C99 standard reads:
7.17 3 [...] NULL which expands to an implementation-defined null pointer constant; [...]
In my book, a pointer constant is not an integer expression. GCC agrees.
The C++ standard (which the article is about) requires that NULL be an integer expression that resolves to 0. Because of the stronger typing in C++, NULL cannot be a void pointer.
And that's imo a bug with the C++ standard.
The problem with NULL is it resolves to 0, an int expression. If you overload a function to take an int or a pointer, and use NULL, it will incorrectly choice the int form.
Thats not true. The C macro NULL normally expands to ((void *)0). If you use this as an int expression, C compilers will warn. I'd consider the behaviour you described a bug.
But there's another thing we DO know: the global supply of oil is limited. Therefore, the responsible thing to do is save as much of it as we can, regardless of whether burning it is responsible for the climate change or not.
I'd rather save the supplies we have for use in the chemical industry instead of wasting them as a cheap, but possibly hazardous energy source.
And just to be clear on this: We currently do not understand how the climate works; I wouldn't call messing with things we don't understand just for convenience or not 'paying extra' a smart thing to do...
Use -std=c99 instead - this will switch to ANSI C99 (aka ISO 9899) mode
(which isn't fully implemented yet...)