Yup, and what's wrong with some level of social control?
It generally shouldn't be based on coercion, because people disagree about what measure of control is appropriate. It should only engage in violence (which a suit is, or at least, if its goal is imprisonment) if the offending behavior does serious harm to society (debatable in this case) and other avenues have been explored first.
Wild boar and other game caught in some Bavarian forests still has to be checked for radition, because it rained when the Chernobyl cloud passed over them. 20 years later people in Bavaria still feel the effects of an incident that occured more than 1000 km away.
The radioactive polution of the ocean surrounding the Fukushima plant is quite scary, indeed.
I'm not a big fan of subsidies per se, but in this case they helped kickstart an economy and we're now reaping the benefits. BTW, they are about to sunset (e.g. this year is the last you can get funding for home solar installations), but after Fukushima some are talking about extending them.
Probably because you're buying power from France and buying(and burning) more natural gas from Russia, increasing your CO2 emissions and marginally increasing the amount of pollution in your air.
No, we don't. Germany produces 35% more electricity than it consumes, it is a electricity exporter in Europe. 25% of our energy mix is nuclear. It follows that we don't nuclear to satisfy our electricity needs.
Additionally, if we were to import electricity from abroad right now, then prices at the electricity exchange in Leipzig would have gone up. They haven't.
By the way, I pay 20 cents/kWh and I'm with a utility that uses renewables exclusively. I don't know where the source in Wikipedia got their numbers from.
You need a file descriptor to access any kind of file. Except on the shell, where you can use them directly as input or output. The principle that everything is a file is a big reason why shell programming is as powerful as it is. (I'm not saying it's pleasant. But it does get the job done in many instances.)
I recommend renewable energies with proper storage and transmission systems and a parallel conservation effort. The money wasted on building new nuclear plants is much better spent there. Natural gas is not a base load provider (a loaded term pushed by the nuclear industry, but I digress), but might provide some power during peak usage.
Maybe in your country. You're not French, are you? I am fortunate to live in Germany which pushed renewable energy and energy concervation technologies early and even arrived at a consensus to phase out nuclear power by 2020.
Last year the current government decided to end that consensus and hand the nuclear operators a big cash gift. I assume that these politicians saw the reality you are talking about. After Fukushima, the same politicians did an about-face. Is it because they appraise the facts differently now? No, it's because they realized that political contributions by energy companies are worth nothing if the voters will punish you at the polls. Which is what happened a month ago in two of our states.
11 of Germany's 17 nukes are currently offline, yet there are no blackouts. What's more, the prices at the regional electricity exchange in Leipzig have not gone up. The inescapeable conclusion is that our electricity market is completely saturated, thus we don't need the nukes. And no, we don't import electricity from abroad, even with the nukes offline we still produce more electricity than we consume.
Up-to-date designs don't matter shit if operators decide to skip regular maintenance and fake the protocols.
The same is true of a hydro-electric power plant, or a geothermal plant.
While other technologies have the potential for much destruction, none of them are able to render large areas permanently inhabitable for a few decades or centuries in a matter of hours or days. The Japanese will be able to rebuild the damage caused by the earthquake and tsunami in a few years. Except in a 20-mile radius around Fukushima.
Saying "they are obsolete" has nothing to do with whether they are safe; the issue is proper maintenance. If "proper maintenance" gets too expensive, well, then the plant will get shut down. The important thing is to make sure proper maintenance is DONE.
You seem to assume that designs considered safe today will stay so for eternity. Yet nuclear apologists claim all the time that our nuclear plants are only unsafe because they use a 30-year old design and that newer designs are far superior and in fact safe. You can't have it both ways.
In Germany, the plants build before 1980 are not able to withstand a plane crash (the newer ones supposedly are). These plants are properly maintained (I hope), but they are certified unsafe.
I know of a few German scandals as well, but I'm too lazy to google references in German.
If you think that nuclear operators are somehow model corporate citizens that don't try to save costs and unload risks/losses to the public whenever possible then you're deluding yourself. Remember, no private company will insure a nuclear plant construction effort. The state has to pick up the tap when (not if) something goes wrong.
The plant appeared to run perfectly until the tsunami hit. I'm sorry, but what kind of damage assessment could have been done within that hour, considering the chaos in Japan at that time.
I'm not saying that the quake did damage the plant, I'm doubting that we can say one way or the other right now. E.g. the quake could have resulted in small, localized damage -- undetected at the time -- that cascaded when the tsunami hit.
what Fukushima showed is that you can build a reactor that withstands a quake ten times the size it is rated to withstand, shut down gracefully (as graceful as a SCRAM can be) and still maintain enough power to engage its emergency cooling
And you know this how? For all we know, the quake itself caused damage to the reactor, and the tsunami just added to that.
... anti-nuclear nuts have left us all pretty damn screwed.
Um, no.
1. Up-to-date designs don't matter shit if operators decide to skip regular maintenance and fake the protocols. 2. Plants that are designed with the state of the art in mind today WILL become obsolete in 10, 50, 100 years at which point greedy operators will push to continue their operation and corrupt politicians will gladly oblige.
It's nuclear nuts who keep insisting on pushing a technology that is not needed, incredibly complex to operate, and has catastrophic results when (not if) something goes wrong.
It means that they are broadcasting to the whole world -- which is the whole point of Twitter since "following" is non-symmetric and Twitter user streams are (usually) public. That behavior is not really appropriate on Facebook, since you can't broadcast to the world unless it has "friended" you back and Facebook user walls are (usually) private. All you achieve is spamming your friends.
Yes, but then why even mention the technical term text-file? Why not conceptionally describe what's going on, so that anybody can understand it?
Cookies are pieces of data that are stored on your computer, usually for preferences such as login information. They can also be used to track your browsing patterns.
Followup with a link to a broader discussion of the pros and cons of cookies. On the technical end, someone else mentioned a adblock-like approach for sites from which cookies should be blocked by default. This should be integrated into every modern browser, at least through a plugin that is advertised properly.
The definition of a computer file, from wiktionary: "An aggregation of data on a storage device, identified by a name." That definition was what I was taught when I studied CS in the 80's too, it goes back to the 60's.
That definition clashes with the Unix philosophy of "Everything is a file" which allows us to abstract from different peripheral devices and treat them all uniformly.
Is/dev/disk0 a file? I'd say no, because it is the storage device, not just the data on it. (E.g. you can use it to query the SMART status of the storage device which I would not count as the data stored on it.)
Is/dev/kmem a file? It's data, but it's not on storage, but in volatile memory.
Most files below/proc are not even data at all, but state. (I.e. their informational value depends on the time they are queried.)
Also, a database file is usually not a text-file, because it contains data that is not human-readable.
The term groupthink was introduced (by Janis, IIRC) to describe the phenomenon that groups sometimes settle on a more polarized consensus than one would expect after querying each individual before they went into the group. That effect doesn't necessarily happen, but it has been observed in many instances. The Wikipedia page lists a few canonical examples.
I think your "definition" of it is itself derogative, but I agree that groupthink is not very prevalent here. For one, it requires that the group is highly coherent. And while the Slashdot community may be very homogenous in some aspects, it diverges wildly in others. (For instance, one would expect that all members of a political cabinet share a set of core beliefs -- after all, they got elected on the same ticket and had to have engaged in party politics for a long time to rise to the top. The same can hardly be said for the bunch that dwells here.) It also requires a somewhat skewed power dynamic in the group which is also not present on Slashdot.
If modern designs are so safe, why is no private company willing to insure a new construction effort?
One of the supposedly safe designs that is often mentioned on Slashdot are peddle-bed reactors. Well, recently we had a scare in Germany, where some of those peddles went missing. (They weren't actually missing, just misaccounted for if memory serves right.) Anyway, during the reporting on that incident, the public learned that a substantial amount of these peddles had cracked -- calling into question the fundamental safety of this design.
When Chernobyl blew up our politicians and nuclear operators said that we shouldn't worry because (a) we weren't effected by the fallout and (b) our safety measures are so much superior to the (godless, communist) russians that such an accident would never happen. Both statements have subsequently been proven wrong. People in Bavaria still have to check wild game for radiation before they can eat it, 20 years after Chernobyl and more than a 1000 km away. And the best safety measures are worth nothing if the operator decides to fake them or if the engineers are working on false assumptions, such as a maximum possible wave height of a tsunami that did not take into account the historical record in Japan. (Apparently, the true record was not known at the time the design criteria of many nukes in Japan were formalized.)
It shouldn't surprise you that people outright reject any claim of safety of nuclear plants, given that previous claims of that nature have turned out to be wrong and the incalculable risks that nuclear energy poses. This doesn't even touch on the unsolved problems of nuclear waste and the relationship between civilian and military use of nuclear energy.
And by the way: 11 of Germany's 17 nukes are currently offline. Still, there are no blackouts whatsoever. That's not surprising given that Germany produces 35% more electricity than it consumes. What's more, the prices for electricity at the Leipzig exchange have not gone up. That suggests that the market for electricity is completely saturated in the region. Apparently, we don't need nuclear energy in Germany at all, contrary to what the operators and politicians told us just a year ago. The recent events in Germany have made it obvious that nuclear plants are nothing but cash-printing machines for big energy companies. But while they are making hay, crucial investments in alternative energy are delayed. It's the same old game for nuclear companies: Profits are privatized while costs are socialized.
You're right, they would have to pay a PI. Or they could put a tracking device on you. Or they could ask the cell phone company for the exact same data that is on the phone. If the government or someone with with sufficient resources wants to track you - they're probably gonna be able to track you.
That may be true, but it isn't a good reason to give law enforcement yet another option of tracking you.
Also, I think one reason for the outrage is that it gives other attackers an easy way to track your (past) movements that wasn't available before to them (non-law-enforcement people like, say, a disgruntled spouse or relative). The police can get your location data from the mobile carriers, but the average person can't. Now, they don't have to, because all they need is to steal your phone for a few moments.
Technically, the reactor survived the earthquake but was damaged beyond repair by the tsunami.
That's what has been alleged, but I have not seen conclusive evidence for this version of events. It is true that the cooling system ultimately failed because the tsunami washed away the emergency diesel generators. However, we've also learned of a 20 cm long crack in one of the containment vessels (in reactor 2, IIRC) as the suspected source of much of the released radioactivity and so far nobody has said that this damage was caused by the tsunami and not the earthquake. (Another possible culprit is the hydrogen explosion.)
In short, it is my belief that we do not yet have a detailed account of what incident caused what damage. And as long as we don't, saying that the reactor survived the earthquake is disingenuous and nothing but the propaganda of nuclear energy apologists.
I don't have the actual numbers, but it's safe to say that the tsunami dwarfs the earth quake and the nuclear incident in deaths and property damage.
People focus on the nuclear incident though, because the mitigation strategies against the quake and the tsunami mostly worked. "Only" 25000 people died compared to the 200000+ who died in the 2006 Indian Ocean tsunami. On the other hand, we have no mitigation strategy against the the nuclear incident (other than keeping it cool at all costs to prevent a meltdown and in the process dumping tons of highly radioactive water into the biosphere) and it has complicated the other rescue efforts. It uses resources that normally would go to the search and rescue and later to the reconstruction effort.
In what way is Libya a republic? By name it's a "state of the masses" (which to me sounds a lot like "dictatorship of the proletariat") and in reality it's a family-run, like the mafia (or North Korea).
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, and what's wrong with some level of social control?
It generally shouldn't be based on coercion, because people disagree about what measure of control is appropriate. It should only engage in violence (which a suit is, or at least, if its goal is imprisonment) if the offending behavior does serious harm to society (debatable in this case) and other avenues have been explored first.
Girls rate other girls by tits?
Mod parent up.
Wild boar and other game caught in some Bavarian forests still has to be checked for radition, because it rained when the Chernobyl cloud passed over them. 20 years later people in Bavaria still feel the effects of an incident that occured more than 1000 km away.
The radioactive polution of the ocean surrounding the Fukushima plant is quite scary, indeed.
A source for the 35% figure from RWE, 2007: http://rwecom.online-report.eu/factbook/en/marketdata/electricity/grid/germanyimportandexportofelectricity.html
I'm not a big fan of subsidies per se, but in this case they helped kickstart an economy and we're now reaping the benefits. BTW, they are about to sunset (e.g. this year is the last you can get funding for home solar installations), but after Fukushima some are talking about extending them.
Probably because you're buying power from France and buying(and burning) more natural gas from Russia, increasing your CO2 emissions and marginally increasing the amount of pollution in your air.
No, we don't. Germany produces 35% more electricity than it consumes, it is a electricity exporter in Europe. 25% of our energy mix is nuclear. It follows that we don't nuclear to satisfy our electricity needs.
Additionally, if we were to import electricity from abroad right now, then prices at the electricity exchange in Leipzig would have gone up. They haven't.
By the way, I pay 20 cents/kWh and I'm with a utility that uses renewables exclusively. I don't know where the source in Wikipedia got their numbers from.
The installer for pkg-files does not run any code without user interaction.
You need a file descriptor to access any kind of file. Except on the shell, where you can use them directly as input or output. The principle that everything is a file is a big reason why shell programming is as powerful as it is. (I'm not saying it's pleasant. But it does get the job done in many instances.)
I recommend renewable energies with proper storage and transmission systems and a parallel conservation effort. The money wasted on building new nuclear plants is much better spent there. Natural gas is not a base load provider (a loaded term pushed by the nuclear industry, but I digress), but might provide some power during peak usage.
Maybe in your country. You're not French, are you? I am fortunate to live in Germany which pushed renewable energy and energy concervation technologies early and even arrived at a consensus to phase out nuclear power by 2020.
Last year the current government decided to end that consensus and hand the nuclear operators a big cash gift. I assume that these politicians saw the reality you are talking about. After Fukushima, the same politicians did an about-face. Is it because they appraise the facts differently now? No, it's because they realized that political contributions by energy companies are worth nothing if the voters will punish you at the polls. Which is what happened a month ago in two of our states.
11 of Germany's 17 nukes are currently offline, yet there are no blackouts. What's more, the prices at the regional electricity exchange in Leipzig have not gone up. The inescapeable conclusion is that our electricity market is completely saturated, thus we don't need the nukes. And no, we don't import electricity from abroad, even with the nukes offline we still produce more electricity than we consume.
That's a false choice between fossil and nuclear fuels. We don't need either.
Up-to-date designs don't matter shit if operators decide to skip regular maintenance and fake the protocols.
The same is true of a hydro-electric power plant, or a geothermal plant.
While other technologies have the potential for much destruction, none of them are able to render large areas permanently inhabitable for a few decades or centuries in a matter of hours or days. The Japanese will be able to rebuild the damage caused by the earthquake and tsunami in a few years. Except in a 20-mile radius around Fukushima.
Saying "they are obsolete" has nothing to do with whether they are safe; the issue is proper maintenance. If "proper maintenance" gets too expensive, well, then the plant will get shut down. The important thing is to make sure proper maintenance is DONE.
You seem to assume that designs considered safe today will stay so for eternity. Yet nuclear apologists claim all the time that our nuclear plants are only unsafe because they use a 30-year old design and that newer designs are far superior and in fact safe. You can't have it both ways.
In Germany, the plants build before 1980 are not able to withstand a plane crash (the newer ones supposedly are). These plants are properly maintained (I hope), but they are certified unsafe.
Chernobyl blew up because the night shift did not follow the testing protocol designed by the day shift. Wikipedia has a timeline.
Then there was a scandal in Japan concerning Fukushima: http://archives.cnn.com/2002/BUSINESS/asia/09/02/japan.tepco/index.html
I know of a few German scandals as well, but I'm too lazy to google references in German.
If you think that nuclear operators are somehow model corporate citizens that don't try to save costs and unload risks/losses to the public whenever possible then you're deluding yourself. Remember, no private company will insure a nuclear plant construction effort. The state has to pick up the tap when (not if) something goes wrong.
The plant appeared to run perfectly until the tsunami hit. I'm sorry, but what kind of damage assessment could have been done within that hour, considering the chaos in Japan at that time.
I'm not saying that the quake did damage the plant, I'm doubting that we can say one way or the other right now. E.g. the quake could have resulted in small, localized damage -- undetected at the time -- that cascaded when the tsunami hit.
what Fukushima showed is that you can build a reactor that withstands a quake ten times the size it is rated to withstand, shut down gracefully (as graceful as a SCRAM can be) and still maintain enough power to engage its emergency cooling
And you know this how? For all we know, the quake itself caused damage to the reactor, and the tsunami just added to that.
Never mind the 80-90000 permantly displaced people who used to live in what is now the Fukushima Exclusion Zone.
Ups.
... anti-nuclear nuts have left us all pretty damn screwed.
Um, no.
1. Up-to-date designs don't matter shit if operators decide to skip regular maintenance and fake the protocols.
2. Plants that are designed with the state of the art in mind today WILL become obsolete in 10, 50, 100 years at which point greedy operators will push to continue their operation and corrupt politicians will gladly oblige.
It's nuclear nuts who keep insisting on pushing a technology that is not needed, incredibly complex to operate, and has catastrophic results when (not if) something goes wrong.
It means that they are broadcasting to the whole world -- which is the whole point of Twitter since "following" is non-symmetric and Twitter user streams are (usually) public. That behavior is not really appropriate on Facebook, since you can't broadcast to the world unless it has "friended" you back and Facebook user walls are (usually) private. All you achieve is spamming your friends.
Yes, but then why even mention the technical term text-file? Why not conceptionally describe what's going on, so that anybody can understand it?
Cookies are pieces of data that are stored on your computer, usually for preferences such as login information. They can also be used to track your browsing patterns.
Followup with a link to a broader discussion of the pros and cons of cookies. On the technical end, someone else mentioned a adblock-like approach for sites from which cookies should be blocked by default. This should be integrated into every modern browser, at least through a plugin that is advertised properly.
The definition of a computer file, from wiktionary: "An aggregation of data on a storage device, identified by a name."
That definition was what I was taught when I studied CS in the 80's too, it goes back to the 60's.
That definition clashes with the Unix philosophy of "Everything is a file" which allows us to abstract from different peripheral devices and treat them all uniformly.
Is /dev/disk0 a file? I'd say no, because it is the storage device, not just the data on it. (E.g. you can use it to query the SMART status of the storage device which I would not count as the data stored on it.)
Is /dev/kmem a file? It's data, but it's not on storage, but in volatile memory.
Most files below /proc are not even data at all, but state. (I.e. their informational value depends on the time they are queried.)
Also, a database file is usually not a text-file, because it contains data that is not human-readable.
The term groupthink was introduced (by Janis, IIRC) to describe the phenomenon that groups sometimes settle on a more polarized consensus than one would expect after querying each individual before they went into the group. That effect doesn't necessarily happen, but it has been observed in many instances. The Wikipedia page lists a few canonical examples.
I think your "definition" of it is itself derogative, but I agree that groupthink is not very prevalent here. For one, it requires that the group is highly coherent. And while the Slashdot community may be very homogenous in some aspects, it diverges wildly in others. (For instance, one would expect that all members of a political cabinet share a set of core beliefs -- after all, they got elected on the same ticket and had to have engaged in party politics for a long time to rise to the top. The same can hardly be said for the bunch that dwells here.) It also requires a somewhat skewed power dynamic in the group which is also not present on Slashdot.
If modern designs are so safe, why is no private company willing to insure a new construction effort?
One of the supposedly safe designs that is often mentioned on Slashdot are peddle-bed reactors. Well, recently we had a scare in Germany, where some of those peddles went missing. (They weren't actually missing, just misaccounted for if memory serves right.) Anyway, during the reporting on that incident, the public learned that a substantial amount of these peddles had cracked -- calling into question the fundamental safety of this design.
When Chernobyl blew up our politicians and nuclear operators said that we shouldn't worry because (a) we weren't effected by the fallout and (b) our safety measures are so much superior to the (godless, communist) russians that such an accident would never happen. Both statements have subsequently been proven wrong. People in Bavaria still have to check wild game for radiation before they can eat it, 20 years after Chernobyl and more than a 1000 km away. And the best safety measures are worth nothing if the operator decides to fake them or if the engineers are working on false assumptions, such as a maximum possible wave height of a tsunami that did not take into account the historical record in Japan. (Apparently, the true record was not known at the time the design criteria of many nukes in Japan were formalized.)
It shouldn't surprise you that people outright reject any claim of safety of nuclear plants, given that previous claims of that nature have turned out to be wrong and the incalculable risks that nuclear energy poses. This doesn't even touch on the unsolved problems of nuclear waste and the relationship between civilian and military use of nuclear energy.
And by the way: 11 of Germany's 17 nukes are currently offline. Still, there are no blackouts whatsoever. That's not surprising given that Germany produces 35% more electricity than it consumes. What's more, the prices for electricity at the Leipzig exchange have not gone up. That suggests that the market for electricity is completely saturated in the region. Apparently, we don't need nuclear energy in Germany at all, contrary to what the operators and politicians told us just a year ago. The recent events in Germany have made it obvious that nuclear plants are nothing but cash-printing machines for big energy companies. But while they are making hay, crucial investments in alternative energy are delayed. It's the same old game for nuclear companies: Profits are privatized while costs are socialized.
You're right, they would have to pay a PI. Or they could put a tracking device on you. Or they could ask the cell phone company for the exact same data that is on the phone. If the government or someone with with sufficient resources wants to track you - they're probably gonna be able to track you.
That may be true, but it isn't a good reason to give law enforcement yet another option of tracking you.
Also, I think one reason for the outrage is that it gives other attackers an easy way to track your (past) movements that wasn't available before to them (non-law-enforcement people like, say, a disgruntled spouse or relative). The police can get your location data from the mobile carriers, but the average person can't. Now, they don't have to, because all they need is to steal your phone for a few moments.
Technically, the reactor survived the earthquake but was damaged beyond repair by the tsunami.
That's what has been alleged, but I have not seen conclusive evidence for this version of events. It is true that the cooling system ultimately failed because the tsunami washed away the emergency diesel generators. However, we've also learned of a 20 cm long crack in one of the containment vessels (in reactor 2, IIRC) as the suspected source of much of the released radioactivity and so far nobody has said that this damage was caused by the tsunami and not the earthquake. (Another possible culprit is the hydrogen explosion.)
In short, it is my belief that we do not yet have a detailed account of what incident caused what damage. And as long as we don't, saying that the reactor survived the earthquake is disingenuous and nothing but the propaganda of nuclear energy apologists.
I don't have the actual numbers, but it's safe to say that the tsunami dwarfs the earth quake and the nuclear incident in deaths and property damage.
People focus on the nuclear incident though, because the mitigation strategies against the quake and the tsunami mostly worked. "Only" 25000 people died compared to the 200000+ who died in the 2006 Indian Ocean tsunami. On the other hand, we have no mitigation strategy against the the nuclear incident (other than keeping it cool at all costs to prevent a meltdown and in the process dumping tons of highly radioactive water into the biosphere) and it has complicated the other rescue efforts. It uses resources that normally would go to the search and rescue and later to the reconstruction effort.
In what way is Libya a republic? By name it's a "state of the masses" (which to me sounds a lot like "dictatorship of the proletariat") and in reality it's a family-run, like the mafia (or North Korea).