Not only that, but what really makes the difference is the ability to measure the contribution from each source separately. If you had to make a comparison with the total natural background level then in this instance (measured from the far side of the Pacific) the excess would be tiny, whereas if you look specifically for Iodine-131 (for example) then natural levels are so low that anything you add stands out clearly.
It's great that we can measure with such accuracy, but the figures are unfortunately very easy to misrepresent. When told that something is ten times higher than the natural background level you want to be very clear as to precisely what has been counted as part of the background.
The question is whether it exceeds efficiency of other solar-to-electricity production.
It doesn't need to be better, or even as good. Being able to store the energy and generate baseload electricity is a huge advantage, and the inability of most solar power systems to do this is the main reason why they don't easily scale beyond a small fraction of total capacity.
That's not what 'rational' means: you can be rational without being altruistic or wanting to maximise the common good.
Only if said rational agent is too stupid to notice that they are part of a society. Altruistic behaviour/is/ rational behaviour, and the sooner you work that out, the sooner people will stop screwing you over or avoiding you.
Atruistic behaviour is most certainly rational if you value the common good. There is also the concept of enlightened self-interest (although that is not technically altruism). This does not mean that non-altruistic behaviour is irrational.
You're making the mistake of assuming that if someone reaches a different conclusion from you then it is because of their defective ability to reason, as opposed to having different values or working from different evidence. That person in turn is likely to dismiss your reasoning as intellectual arrogance and we will get nowhere. If you understand why they reached their conclusion then you have a far better chance of convincing them to change it.
While it may be a correct mathematical statement reflecting the spread of infection, it is not a "rational" approach to immunization. If everyone followed that, then none of the children would be immunized. If 50% of the population followed that then the diseases would still be a problem. And so forth.
That's not what 'rational' means: you can be rational without being altruistic or wanting to maximise the common good.
I don't disagree with the rest of your analysis, but you won't win this if you have fundamentally misunderstood what the objections are.
At the end of the day the parent that doesn't vaccinate has made a bad choice for their child and their child suffers because of it.
Not necessarily. If vaccination rates are low then it is probably in everyone's self-interest to be vaccinated. If rates are high then the risk of infection should go down, in which case the risk of vaccination (which is unlikely to be zero) may become greater at some point on the curve.
You can argue that this is a selfish choice, and that the risk of vaccination has been greatly exaggerated by some commentators, but let's not try to pretend that there is only one rational outcome here.
They found IE9 to be the best choice to defend against attacks aimed at IE9. Other browsers where found to be severely lacking in in defending against attacks aimed at IE9.
Not only that, but they ran all of the tests on Windows. That is hardly the platform that you would choose if you were trying to block malware, so given a free choice of platform IE would be at a severe disadvantage because it is tied to Windows[1]. The test nullifies that disadvantage by making all of the browsers play on Microsoft's home ground. I don't see how they could possibly claim that this was an unbiased test.
[1] unless you count IE5 on Mac OS, which is unlikely to win any prizes in this contest.
The article says the charge was "storing a computer virus without a legitimate reason". In this case, the suspect "told the MPD that he did it to punish people who use file-sharing software"; do you consider that "a legitimate reason"?
I can think of at least two organisations that might.
Poser - any Scotsman should know the whole island is Britain and it's hard to be independent of your own island. Perhaps you are confused as to the southeastern part of Britain? They're called the "English".
Poster - any American should know the whole majority of the continent is USA and it's hard to be independent of your own majority of a continent. Perhaps you are confused as to the existence of this mythical independent Republic of Texas? And the Confederacy, that never happened either, because it is completely un-possible to have two separate, independent, sovereign countries in the same land mass. In fact that bullshit about the sovereign nation called the Vatican being right there in the same landmass as that other sovereign nation called Italy, well you DO know that's just a lie right?
A more appropriate analogy would be for Canada to become independent of North America, which would be a major civil engineering project.
Great Britain is an island that includes most of England, Wales and Scotland
The British Isles is a group of islands that includes Great Britain and Ireland (northern and southern)
The United Kingdom is a sovereign state that includes England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland
uranium can create much more energy than coal: fission of one kg of U235 creates 83.14 TJ. The ratio of U235 in natural uranium is 0.72% so for every kg of natural uranium mined we have 598GJ available with 100% efficiency.
You're assuming that reactor fuel is 100% U235. The actual figure is more likely to be between 3 and 5%, with most of the remainder being U238. That means you need between 20 and 33 times less natural uranium than your calculation suggests.
Then UK winter sounds like a prime candidate for solar power generation since skies tend to be clear.
I wish that were so, but we're too far north. That means the days are too short and the angle of incidence too shallow. In my experience, the energy generated in December is about a tenth of what you get in June.
Read the last sentence of CCTF/09-27. They would rather undefine TAI altogether.
That may be how it has been presented, but I think this is misleading: for practical purposes what they are actually proposing is to abolish UTC, then rename TAI to become the new UTC (plus or minus a constant).
All I'm saying is that if they are inventing a new system then they should give it a new name -- and if they are reinventing an existing system then it would be better if they reused the existing name, which is TAI. Is that really too much to ask?
The CCTF advises the BIPM. This note to the ITU-R was to point out that the BIPM is not tasked with nor funded for the distribution of a time scale. The BIPM produces TAI after the fact, and TAI is not available for use as part of an operational system.
From a bureaucrat's perspective perhaps. From an engineering perspective TAI can be trivially derived from GPS time, and almost as easily from UTC. It is quite absurd to say that it is 'not available for use'.
Besides, even if one were to accept the premise that TAI is somehow a second-class citizen amongst time systems, it would surely be simpler, less disruptive, and less confusing to promote it to first-class citizenship -- instead of fundamentally redefining the characteristics of UTC so that it becomes TAI in all but name.
No, we don't have this option. See CCTF/09-27 which was submitted to ITU-R SG7A in 2007-09 and which said
That's not their call. TAI a well known and well-defined time scale. Unless and until we become subject to the Digital Millennium Timekeeping Act or some similar insanity, we have the option to use it however we please.
Seriously this has been an issue for along time - GPS time does not include leap seconds and I am tired of having to write software that let's user adjust for the variable amount of leap seconds - nobody really cares if the earths rotation is synchronized with " UTC"
Those who doesn't care about synchronisation already have the option to use TAI. They should use that instead of redefining UTC.
One of the sad things about our approach to nuclear safety is that we do shoddy work at each level because we thing the other levels will save us.
That is not "sad". That is good engineering. If you have $X dollars to spend on safety, it is almost always better to build multiple shoddy levels than one really good level. Three layers that are 90% reliable are ten times better than one layer that is 99% reliable, and probably cheaper.
I agree, but I think it is worth adding that if you take that approach then you need to make quite certain that there are no common-mode failures that will defeat all of your protective measures at the same time.
That was the problem in Japan: one event was able to take out locally-generated power (because the reactors scrammed), grid power and backup generators, leaving only a very limited amount of battery power. This is one of the reasons why modern reactor designs tend to emphasise passive safety, so that it matters less if multiple systems fail.
What obstacles is Mozilla is placing in the way of a group of people who want to provide LTS versions of Firefox? We've even discussed the possibility of opening up our automated testing infrastructure to such a (hypothetical, at this point) group.
Yes, you might not get to call your LTS of Firefox "Firefox". But it won't be Firefox, it'll be your personal LTS build.
I agree that it's not an insurmountable obstacle for one package, or even (as in this case) a small suite of them. However, imagine that every open source developer started behaving in the same way. Imagine that every package name in Debian and Ubuntu had to be different from the upstream name. Not only that, they would probably end up being different from the name used by Fedora, which would be different from the ones used by SuSE and so on.
Even for this one small suite of packages it has caused a fair amount of confusion for end users, and quite a bit of bad publicity for both yourselves and Debian over what was perceived by many observers to be a very petty dispute. (I'm not saying it was, but I can see why it looked that way.)
Ultimately it's your trademark, of course, and you have the right to do what you want with it, but I think you are setting a bad example by engaging in behaviour that would be highly damaging if others were to follow suit.
If you don't care about any of this stuff, by all means, pick a version of IE and get your security updates for 10 years. Microsoft has the resources and the will to do that kind of thing. Mozilla doesn't.
This isn't about providing security updates for ten years. It is about a cycle so quick that it won't even see out a minor Ubuntu release, let alone Ubuntu LTS or Debian.
I can see there is a problem that if you have a rapid release cycle then try to support every version for a long period. Understandably, you do not want to find yourselves providing support for many different versions in parallel. The solution to that is to have two release cycles: one that gives the latest features, and one that gives some measure of stability.
At the very least, if Mozilla is unable or unwilling to provide security updates for a reasonable length of time then you should avoid placing obstacles in the way of others who want to take on that role (as was done to Debian when they were required to rebrand Firefox as Iceweasel).
I'm always surprised at how energetic the pro-nuke zealots are on/.
That's probably because of the amount of misinformation coming from many of the anti-nuclear zealots.
The fact is nuclear energy has some nasty-ass waste AND IT SUCKS.
Fair comment as far as it goes. The pro-nuclear argument is that despite this, the alternatives are worse.
Yes I know there are other designs that don't make the 4.5-billion-year stuff.
The '4.5-billion-year stuff' was made before the earth formed, not by us, and in any case is only mildly radioactive.
That folks say renewables will "never" work is also irritating.
Who seriously say that though?
I don't think I've ever seen anyone argue against renewables forming part of the mix. Hydroelectric power is great for load balancing, and in the right circumstances wind, solar and geothermal power can all work well. The point at issue whether a 100% renewable solution could work, and while it would be wrong to say 'never', I think it is fair to say that with current technology the sums don't add up.
By this I don't necessarily mean that it is physically impossible. It's a matter of cost versus benefit: even if you only look at the environmental and/or safety impact then nuclear wins most of the time.
More importantly, whatever happened to innovation?
I agree with you about R&D, and if someone were to come up with a 100% replacement for nuclear power and fossil fuels that was genuinely safer and less environmentally damaging then I suspect that most of the 'pro-nuclear zealots' you refer to would vanish overnight. Pro-nuclear sentiment is very rarely grounded in any form of ideology, other than (as was once famously noted) being 'pro-arithmetic'.
I'm new to HTML, so I'd like to ask an honest question, even if it's a little off-topic: if you're writing your pages in straight HTML, how do you separate your style from your content? If, for example, I wanted to add a menu to the left-hand side of all my pages, the only way I know to do it now is to to re-edit every single one of those 100,000+ pages.
I think you will find that most of the people who maintain a site of any size with a text editor are not writing straight HTML. Personally I use a combination of XSLT and CSS, which allows almost complete separation of style from content.
The length of the term is one of the problems, but at a practical level I would be more concerned about:
- Patents that were not obvious when they were invented because they depend on infrastructure that didn't exist them (eg. ubiquitous Internet access, smartphones, fast processors, cheap storage etc.) so would have been useless, but are obvious and useful now.
- Patents to solve a problem that the holder of the patent created, in order to protect a particular file format, protocol or suchlike. Microsoft's patent on long file handling in VFAT would be an example of this.
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Not only that, but what really makes the difference is the ability to measure the contribution from each source separately. If you had to make a comparison with the total natural background level then in this instance (measured from the far side of the Pacific) the excess would be tiny, whereas if you look specifically for Iodine-131 (for example) then natural levels are so low that anything you add stands out clearly.
It's great that we can measure with such accuracy, but the figures are unfortunately very easy to misrepresent. When told that something is ten times higher than the natural background level you want to be very clear as to precisely what has been counted as part of the background.
Whether it's free Wi-Fi or paid Wi-Fi, read those Terms of Service. I'm sure this activity was disclosed in theire [...]
Even if that lets them off the hook so far as the user is concerned, the website owner is not a party to those terms of service.
The question is whether it exceeds efficiency of other solar-to-electricity production.
It doesn't need to be better, or even as good. Being able to store the energy and generate baseload electricity is a huge advantage, and the inability of most solar power systems to do this is the main reason why they don't easily scale beyond a small fraction of total capacity.
That's not what 'rational' means: you can be rational without being altruistic or wanting to maximise the common good.
Only if said rational agent is too stupid to notice that they are part of a society. Altruistic behaviour /is/ rational behaviour, and the sooner you work that out, the sooner people will stop screwing you over or avoiding you.
Atruistic behaviour is most certainly rational if you value the common good. There is also the concept of enlightened self-interest (although that is not technically altruism). This does not mean that non-altruistic behaviour is irrational.
You're making the mistake of assuming that if someone reaches a different conclusion from you then it is because of their defective ability to reason, as opposed to having different values or working from different evidence. That person in turn is likely to dismiss your reasoning as intellectual arrogance and we will get nowhere. If you understand why they reached their conclusion then you have a far better chance of convincing them to change it.
While it may be a correct mathematical statement reflecting the spread of infection, it is not a "rational" approach to immunization. If everyone followed that, then none of the children would be immunized. If 50% of the population followed that then the diseases would still be a problem. And so forth.
That's not what 'rational' means: you can be rational without being altruistic or wanting to maximise the common good.
I don't disagree with the rest of your analysis, but you won't win this if you have fundamentally misunderstood what the objections are.
At the end of the day the parent that doesn't vaccinate has made a bad choice for their child and their child suffers because of it.
Not necessarily. If vaccination rates are low then it is probably in everyone's self-interest to be vaccinated. If rates are high then the risk of infection should go down, in which case the risk of vaccination (which is unlikely to be zero) may become greater at some point on the curve.
You can argue that this is a selfish choice, and that the risk of vaccination has been greatly exaggerated by some commentators, but let's not try to pretend that there is only one rational outcome here.
It wasn't a jurist; it was the Judge. However, your skepticism still seems relevant...
A judge is a jurist (but not a juror, which is probably the word you were thinking of).
They found IE9 to be the best choice to defend against attacks aimed at IE9. Other browsers where found to be severely lacking in in defending against attacks aimed at IE9.
Not only that, but they ran all of the tests on Windows. That is hardly the platform that you would choose if you were trying to block malware, so given a free choice of platform IE would be at a severe disadvantage because it is tied to Windows[1]. The test nullifies that disadvantage by making all of the browsers play on Microsoft's home ground. I don't see how they could possibly claim that this was an unbiased test.
[1] unless you count IE5 on Mac OS, which is unlikely to win any prizes in this contest.
The article says the charge was "storing a computer virus without a legitimate reason". In this case, the suspect "told the MPD that he did it to punish people who use file-sharing software"; do you consider that "a legitimate reason"?
I can think of at least two organisations that might.
Poser - any Scotsman should know the whole island is Britain and it's hard to be independent of your own island. Perhaps you are confused as to the southeastern part of Britain? They're called the "English".
Poster - any American should know the whole majority of the continent is USA and it's hard to be independent of your own majority of a continent. Perhaps you are confused as to the existence of this mythical independent Republic of Texas? And the Confederacy, that never happened either, because it is completely un-possible to have two separate, independent, sovereign countries in the same land mass. In fact that bullshit about the sovereign nation called the Vatican being right there in the same landmass as that other sovereign nation called Italy, well you DO know that's just a lie right?
A more appropriate analogy would be for Canada to become independent of North America, which would be a major civil engineering project.
Great Britain is an island that includes most of England, Wales and Scotland
The British Isles is a group of islands that includes Great Britain and Ireland (northern and southern)
The United Kingdom is a sovereign state that includes England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland
uranium can create much more energy than coal: fission of one kg of U235 creates 83.14 TJ. The ratio of U235 in natural uranium is 0.72% so for every kg of natural uranium mined we have 598GJ available with 100% efficiency.
You're assuming that reactor fuel is 100% U235. The actual figure is more likely to be between 3 and 5%, with most of the remainder being U238. That means you need between 20 and 33 times less natural uranium than your calculation suggests.
The *only* issue is inventing a way to store power for the nights.
While that is certainly a problem, it is not as big a problem as storing power for the winter.
Then UK winter sounds like a prime candidate for solar power generation since skies tend to be clear.
I wish that were so, but we're too far north. That means the days are too short and the angle of incidence too shallow. In my experience, the energy generated in December is about a tenth of what you get in June.
Read the last sentence of CCTF/09-27. They would rather undefine TAI altogether.
That may be how it has been presented, but I think this is misleading: for practical purposes what they are actually proposing is to abolish UTC, then rename TAI to become the new UTC (plus or minus a constant).
All I'm saying is that if they are inventing a new system then they should give it a new name -- and if they are reinventing an existing system then it would be better if they reused the existing name, which is TAI. Is that really too much to ask?
The CCTF advises the BIPM. This note to the ITU-R was to point out that the BIPM is not tasked with nor funded for the distribution of a time scale. The BIPM produces TAI after the fact, and TAI is not available for use as part of an operational system.
From a bureaucrat's perspective perhaps. From an engineering perspective TAI can be trivially derived from GPS time, and almost as easily from UTC. It is quite absurd to say that it is 'not available for use'.
Besides, even if one were to accept the premise that TAI is somehow a second-class citizen amongst time systems, it would surely be simpler, less disruptive, and less confusing to promote it to first-class citizenship -- instead of fundamentally redefining the characteristics of UTC so that it becomes TAI in all but name.
No, we don't have this option. See CCTF/09-27 which was submitted to ITU-R SG7A in 2007-09 and which said
That's not their call. TAI a well known and well-defined time scale. Unless and until we become subject to the Digital Millennium Timekeeping Act or some similar insanity, we have the option to use it however we please.
Seriously this has been an issue for along time - GPS time does not include leap seconds and I am tired of having to write software that let's user adjust for the variable amount of leap seconds - nobody really cares if the earths rotation is synchronized with " UTC"
Those who doesn't care about synchronisation already have the option to use TAI. They should use that instead of redefining UTC.
The reactors were scrammed manually.
According to the IAEA they scrammed automatically (see http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/meetings/PDFplus/2011/cn200/documentation/cn200_Final-Fukushima-Mission_Report.pdf), but it makes no difference: even if someone has to press a button, if the operating procedures say to press that button in the event of an earthquake then you need to take that into account when performing the risk analysis.
One of the sad things about our approach to nuclear safety is that we do shoddy work at each level because we thing the other levels will save us.
That is not "sad". That is good engineering. If you have $X dollars to spend on safety, it is almost always better to build multiple shoddy levels than one really good level. Three layers that are 90% reliable are ten times better than one layer that is 99% reliable, and probably cheaper.
I agree, but I think it is worth adding that if you take that approach then you need to make quite certain that there are no common-mode failures that will defeat all of your protective measures at the same time.
That was the problem in Japan: one event was able to take out locally-generated power (because the reactors scrammed), grid power and backup generators, leaving only a very limited amount of battery power. This is one of the reasons why modern reactor designs tend to emphasise passive safety, so that it matters less if multiple systems fail.
What obstacles is Mozilla is placing in the way of a group of people who want to provide LTS versions of Firefox? We've even discussed the possibility of opening up our automated testing infrastructure to such a (hypothetical, at this point) group.
Yes, you might not get to call your LTS of Firefox "Firefox". But it won't be Firefox, it'll be your personal LTS build.
I agree that it's not an insurmountable obstacle for one package, or even (as in this case) a small suite of them. However, imagine that every open source developer started behaving in the same way. Imagine that every package name in Debian and Ubuntu had to be different from the upstream name. Not only that, they would probably end up being different from the name used by Fedora, which would be different from the ones used by SuSE and so on.
Even for this one small suite of packages it has caused a fair amount of confusion for end users, and quite a bit of bad publicity for both yourselves and Debian over what was perceived by many observers to be a very petty dispute. (I'm not saying it was, but I can see why it looked that way.)
Ultimately it's your trademark, of course, and you have the right to do what you want with it, but I think you are setting a bad example by engaging in behaviour that would be highly damaging if others were to follow suit.
If you don't care about any of this stuff, by all means, pick a version of IE and get your security updates for 10 years. Microsoft has the resources and the will to do that kind of thing. Mozilla doesn't.
This isn't about providing security updates for ten years. It is about a cycle so quick that it won't even see out a minor Ubuntu release, let alone Ubuntu LTS or Debian.
I can see there is a problem that if you have a rapid release cycle then try to support every version for a long period. Understandably, you do not want to find yourselves providing support for many different versions in parallel. The solution to that is to have two release cycles: one that gives the latest features, and one that gives some measure of stability.
At the very least, if Mozilla is unable or unwilling to provide security updates for a reasonable length of time then you should avoid placing obstacles in the way of others who want to take on that role (as was done to Debian when they were required to rebrand Firefox as Iceweasel).
Wind power has some serious drawbacks, but the fact that it might stop you from extracting oil is not one of them.
Mod parent up.
I'm always surprised at how energetic the pro-nuke zealots are on /.
That's probably because of the amount of misinformation coming from many of the anti-nuclear zealots.
The fact is nuclear energy has some nasty-ass waste AND IT SUCKS.
Fair comment as far as it goes. The pro-nuclear argument is that despite this, the alternatives are worse.
Yes I know there are other designs that don't make the 4.5-billion-year stuff.
The '4.5-billion-year stuff' was made before the earth formed, not by us, and in any case is only mildly radioactive.
That folks say renewables will "never" work is also irritating.
Who seriously say that though?
I don't think I've ever seen anyone argue against renewables forming part of the mix. Hydroelectric power is great for load balancing, and in the right circumstances wind, solar and geothermal power can all work well. The point at issue whether a 100% renewable solution could work, and while it would be wrong to say 'never', I think it is fair to say that with current technology the sums don't add up.
By this I don't necessarily mean that it is physically impossible. It's a matter of cost versus benefit: even if you only look at the environmental and/or safety impact then nuclear wins most of the time.
More importantly, whatever happened to innovation?
I agree with you about R&D, and if someone were to come up with a 100% replacement for nuclear power and fossil fuels that was genuinely safer and less environmentally damaging then I suspect that most of the 'pro-nuclear zealots' you refer to would vanish overnight. Pro-nuclear sentiment is very rarely grounded in any form of ideology, other than (as was once famously noted) being 'pro-arithmetic'.
I'm new to HTML, so I'd like to ask an honest question, even if it's a little off-topic: if you're writing your pages in straight HTML, how do you separate your style from your content? If, for example, I wanted to add a menu to the left-hand side of all my pages, the only way I know to do it now is to to re-edit every single one of those 100,000+ pages.
I think you will find that most of the people who maintain a site of any size with a text editor are not writing straight HTML. Personally I use a combination of XSLT and CSS, which allows almost complete separation of style from content.
The length of the term is one of the problems, but at a practical level I would be more concerned about:
- Patents that were not obvious when they were invented because they depend on infrastructure that didn't exist them (eg. ubiquitous Internet access, smartphones, fast processors, cheap storage etc.) so would have been useless, but are obvious and useful now.
- Patents to solve a problem that the holder of the patent created, in order to protect a particular file format, protocol or suchlike. Microsoft's patent on long file handling in VFAT would be an example of this.