I'm wondering though, what's your position on the issue of nuclear waste? I'd like to hear about it from someone such as yourself, who obviously thinks nuclear power is, on balance, a good technology. I've only ever heard about it from those who'd rather boil their kettle via pedal-power than countenance nuclear power, and I wonder if their view is all that balanced.
To the extent nuclear waste is still energetic enough to be dangerous, it's possible that we'll find it useful at some point. It should probably be buried someplace where it's out of the way, and likely to remain so, but where we can get it back someday if we need it. I don't think it should be buried in subduction zones or launched into the sun or anything like that.
People think of uranium as some kind of magical, inexhaustible power source, but it's really more like just another "fossil fuel." We don't have an infinite supply. Hopefully fusion power will become available at some point and render the whole question moot.
Fine, whatever. But if you want to climb onto your high horse and preach about the amount of radioactive material released, why pick on a few isolated unintentional nuclear accidents? Why not cite the thousands of nuclear weapons tests that were deliberately conducted during the Cold War? Any one of those tests probably released more radioactivity into the air than Fukushima, and we know for a fact that people have died as a result. But did they ever kill 13,000 people a year?
(Admittedly, that's probably some kind of nuclear-industry astroturf site, but I'll still stand by the point that we would never tolerate the environmental harm caused by coal-fired plants if it were as obvious as a Fukushima or Chernobyl.)
(Shrug) Several things have to go wrong before a nuclear plant can kill anyone. We can criticize their decision to build Diablo Canyon in a seismic zone, but the fact is, if the plant is capable of shutting itself down immediately when an earthquake occurs, it's not going to do anything but cost Californians a lot of money they don't have.
I'm guessing you're trolling, but you could argue that a lack of electric power resulting from forced adoption of inadequate/inappropriate energy sources can result in unnecessary deaths.
I wonder how many elderly and infirm people in India died of heatstroke or food poisoning over the last week, when the power went off? In this case it didn't happen because they insisted on using solar and wind power in places where it couldn't meet demand, but it's not inconceivable that such misguided regulations will indeed get people killed.
And like I said elsewhere, nobody will notice or care, because nothing is glowing green and setting off Geiger counters on the nightly news.
The impact of those emissions has a lot more to do with where they end up, how long they last, and how they are absorbed by humans, plants, and animals, than with the total amount of material being emitted.
Or are you saying that more people will actually die because of Fukushima than because of coal-fired emissions, radioactive and otherwise? I don't think that case can possibly be made.
The meltdowns at TMI, Chernobyl, and Fukashima have made nuclear power release more radioactive material than coal over this period.
Oh, horse shit.
TMI released essentially no radioactive material at all. No deaths have been attributed to it.
Chernobyl was possibly the worst stereotypical example of batshit-crazy Soviet-era negligence I've ever heard of. Someone who attempts to hold the modern nuclear power industry to the standards of Chernobyl is not doing so in an effort to enlighten, educate, or warn, but rather, to deceive. Lay off the vodka, and you won't have a Chernobyl. It's as simple as that.
The Fukushima disaster resulted from similar incompetence. A 40-year-old nuclear plant was allowed to operate long past its scheduled 25-year design life, in a seismically active zone that was known to be prone to tsunamis, under the control of a corrupt power company with demonstrably inadequate oversight. Despite all that, it almost managed to survive an 8.9 earthquake. No one could possibly have been surprised when it didn't. The lesson of Fukushima is that events like Fukushima are 100% avoidable if existing laws and practices are followed.
Meanwhile, people are dying right now from coal-fired plant emissions, all over the industrialized world. It just doesn't look scary enough on CNN for people like you to notice.
Geeks can make serious money at suburban malls these days. Apple pays me to stand around in front of their store, and Abercrombie and Fitch pays me to stay away from theirs.
calling it "Trash-80" is exactly what that hack deserved; it was significantly behind what most hobbiests at the time would have cobbled together on the same parts budget
I agree that the Model I was nobody's idea of an awesome hardware design, but for $595, could anyone else have done better, at either a hobbyist or professional/corporate level? That was what really got my attention. Even as an 8-year-old, I knew $595 wasn't that much money for a real computer.
The Apple II was about $1500. Sure, it was a better machine, but in those days the difference between $600 and $1500 was a much bigger deal than it is now. A lot of people got their start in computing on the Trash-80... many of whom would have spent the next few years on the sidelines if the Apple II had been the only alternative.
(Shrug) He could make 'butchered' movies that bring in a billion dollars and give audiences enjoyment for generations, or he could treat the books like religious documents and make $25,692.00. In the latter case, there would be no Hobbit movie at all, faithful or otherwise.
AFAIK Jackson's version is canon now. He put more sweat and blood into the work than Tolkien ever did.
Some of you geeks act like the MPAA sent jackbooted goons to your house to confiscate your books.
The best way to do that is to give the government the power to outright kick the board and CEO out and replace them with a government determined management team for a set period of time.
That will just sink the whole company. You might as well set their building on fire.
Heavy, even crippling fines are a better answer. Not the "$200,000 and don't admit wrongdoing," BS that Sony got away with. If that rootkit had cost them, say, $1 billion, you can bet they wouldn't try it again, and neither would anyone else including Ubisoft.
We can disagree about how important the feature is, but it's useful enough that the fact that they don't do it suggests that they can't.
That means some technical decisions were made at Bing, somewhere along the way, that are going to become more problematic as users become more inclined to treating the Web like a real-time resource. Even a slight bias that favors more recent results would be helpful.
In any case, my original point had nothing to do with the advantages of Google versus Bing, but rather, the importance of search versus social. And that point stands. One is a utility, the other is a toy.
A good example of when sort-by-date is useful happened to me this morning, in fact. Instead of the usual results I was expecting from a Google search, I kept getting strange error messages to the effect that my usage pattern resembled "automated queries." The problem was that I was logged into a foreign VPN service that is also popular with spammers, but that didn't occur to me at first.
So I went to Bing to see if I could find out WTF was wrong with Google. I tried the search string "google automated query error" and was rewarded with a pile of completely worthless crap from the 2007-2009 timeframe. On Google, I would have cut through the obsolete results by selecting "Past 24 hours" or "Past week" from the tools menu. On Bing, I spent a good 5 minutes poking around trying to find something similar. My jaw dropped lower and lower in amazement that such a basic feature didn't seem to be present.
So, yeah. Bing bears the same resemblance to a real search engine that one of these bears to a Galaxy S3. They are literally wasting their own time along with everybody else's.
If it helps, substitute "Bing or Google" for "Google."
I'm not evangelizing Google, I'm pointing out that without good search engines, we'd be catapulted halfway back to the Stone Age, at least on a log scale.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is actually a really bad thing.
What is?
I'm wondering though, what's your position on the issue of nuclear waste? I'd like to hear about it from someone such as yourself, who obviously thinks nuclear power is, on balance, a good technology. I've only ever heard about it from those who'd rather boil their kettle via pedal-power than countenance nuclear power, and I wonder if their view is all that balanced.
To the extent nuclear waste is still energetic enough to be dangerous, it's possible that we'll find it useful at some point. It should probably be buried someplace where it's out of the way, and likely to remain so, but where we can get it back someday if we need it. I don't think it should be buried in subduction zones or launched into the sun or anything like that.
People think of uranium as some kind of magical, inexhaustible power source, but it's really more like just another "fossil fuel." We don't have an infinite supply. Hopefully fusion power will become available at some point and render the whole question moot.
Fine, whatever. But if you want to climb onto your high horse and preach about the amount of radioactive material released, why pick on a few isolated unintentional nuclear accidents? Why not cite the thousands of nuclear weapons tests that were deliberately conducted during the Cold War? Any one of those tests probably released more radioactivity into the air than Fukushima, and we know for a fact that people have died as a result. But did they ever kill 13,000 people a year?
(Admittedly, that's probably some kind of nuclear-industry astroturf site, but I'll still stand by the point that we would never tolerate the environmental harm caused by coal-fired plants if it were as obvious as a Fukushima or Chernobyl.)
(Shrug) Several things have to go wrong before a nuclear plant can kill anyone. We can criticize their decision to build Diablo Canyon in a seismic zone, but the fact is, if the plant is capable of shutting itself down immediately when an earthquake occurs, it's not going to do anything but cost Californians a lot of money they don't have.
I'm guessing you're trolling, but you could argue that a lack of electric power resulting from forced adoption of inadequate/inappropriate energy sources can result in unnecessary deaths.
I wonder how many elderly and infirm people in India died of heatstroke or food poisoning over the last week, when the power went off? In this case it didn't happen because they insisted on using solar and wind power in places where it couldn't meet demand, but it's not inconceivable that such misguided regulations will indeed get people killed.
And like I said elsewhere, nobody will notice or care, because nothing is glowing green and setting off Geiger counters on the nightly news.
While better-enforced regulations can help, you'd be a fool to think that we're never going to have more nuclear accidents.
Agreed. Nothing made by man or God is perfect. Life is hard, wear a helmet.
My point is that in both cases, laws were broken and best practices were grossly disregarded.
The simple facts are that 99.9% of nuclear power plants have never harmed anyone, and that 0.0% of coal plants can make that claim.
We shouldn't blame technology for its misuse. We can and must do better at preventing the misuse in the first place. It's not as if we don't know how.
The impact of those emissions has a lot more to do with where they end up, how long they last, and how they are absorbed by humans, plants, and animals, than with the total amount of material being emitted.
Or are you saying that more people will actually die because of Fukushima than because of coal-fired emissions, radioactive and otherwise? I don't think that case can possibly be made.
And of course, where the radioactive emissions actually end up isn't of any relevance at all, I suppose.
The meltdowns at TMI, Chernobyl, and Fukashima have made nuclear power release more radioactive material than coal over this period.
Oh, horse shit.
TMI released essentially no radioactive material at all. No deaths have been attributed to it.
Chernobyl was possibly the worst stereotypical example of batshit-crazy Soviet-era negligence I've ever heard of. Someone who attempts to hold the modern nuclear power industry to the standards of Chernobyl is not doing so in an effort to enlighten, educate, or warn, but rather, to deceive. Lay off the vodka, and you won't have a Chernobyl. It's as simple as that.
The Fukushima disaster resulted from similar incompetence. A 40-year-old nuclear plant was allowed to operate long past its scheduled 25-year design life, in a seismically active zone that was known to be prone to tsunamis, under the control of a corrupt power company with demonstrably inadequate oversight. Despite all that, it almost managed to survive an 8.9 earthquake. No one could possibly have been surprised when it didn't. The lesson of Fukushima is that events like Fukushima are 100% avoidable if existing laws and practices are followed.
Meanwhile, people are dying right now from coal-fired plant emissions, all over the industrialized world. It just doesn't look scary enough on CNN for people like you to notice.
They have already fumbled once - the mechanism for rotating the observer failed.
That's not a fumble. That's a ten-year-old spacecraft, long past its primary mission, with a temporary problem that they were able to work around.
Geeks can make serious money at suburban malls these days. Apple pays me to stand around in front of their store, and Abercrombie and Fitch pays me to stay away from theirs.
That "(?)" in the date makes all the difference in the world.
calling it "Trash-80" is exactly what that hack deserved; it was significantly behind what most hobbiests at the time would have cobbled together on the same parts budget
I agree that the Model I was nobody's idea of an awesome hardware design, but for $595, could anyone else have done better, at either a hobbyist or professional/corporate level? That was what really got my attention. Even as an 8-year-old, I knew $595 wasn't that much money for a real computer.
The Apple II was about $1500. Sure, it was a better machine, but in those days the difference between $600 and $1500 was a much bigger deal than it is now. A lot of people got their start in computing on the Trash-80... many of whom would have spent the next few years on the sidelines if the Apple II had been the only alternative.
I do, as a defensive measure
Funny, the people who build land mines say the same thing.
I call Poe's Law
(Shrug) He could make 'butchered' movies that bring in a billion dollars and give audiences enjoyment for generations, or he could treat the books like religious documents and make $25,692.00. In the latter case, there would be no Hobbit movie at all, faithful or otherwise.
AFAIK Jackson's version is canon now. He put more sweat and blood into the work than Tolkien ever did.
Some of you geeks act like the MPAA sent jackbooted goons to your house to confiscate your books.
I call Poe's Law
The best way to do that is to give the government the power to outright kick the board and CEO out and replace them with a government determined management team for a set period of time.
That will just sink the whole company. You might as well set their building on fire.
Heavy, even crippling fines are a better answer. Not the "$200,000 and don't admit wrongdoing," BS that Sony got away with. If that rootkit had cost them, say, $1 billion, you can bet they wouldn't try it again, and neither would anyone else including Ubisoft.
Thus demonstrating, yet again, that it doesn't pay to be the only sane guy in the asylum.
We can disagree about how important the feature is, but it's useful enough that the fact that they don't do it suggests that they can't.
That means some technical decisions were made at Bing, somewhere along the way, that are going to become more problematic as users become more inclined to treating the Web like a real-time resource. Even a slight bias that favors more recent results would be helpful.
In any case, my original point had nothing to do with the advantages of Google versus Bing, but rather, the importance of search versus social. And that point stands. One is a utility, the other is a toy.
A good example of when sort-by-date is useful happened to me this morning, in fact. Instead of the usual results I was expecting from a Google search, I kept getting strange error messages to the effect that my usage pattern resembled "automated queries." The problem was that I was logged into a foreign VPN service that is also popular with spammers, but that didn't occur to me at first.
So I went to Bing to see if I could find out WTF was wrong with Google. I tried the search string "google automated query error" and was rewarded with a pile of completely worthless crap from the 2007-2009 timeframe. On Google, I would have cut through the obsolete results by selecting "Past 24 hours" or "Past week" from the tools menu. On Bing, I spent a good 5 minutes poking around trying to find something similar. My jaw dropped lower and lower in amazement that such a basic feature didn't seem to be present.
So, yeah. Bing bears the same resemblance to a real search engine that one of these bears to a Galaxy S3. They are literally wasting their own time along with everybody else's.
ROFL. Call me when Bing supports advanced, leading-edge features like, oh, "sort by date."
If it helps, substitute "Bing or Google" for "Google."
I'm not evangelizing Google, I'm pointing out that without good search engines, we'd be catapulted halfway back to the Stone Age, at least on a log scale.
If facebook.com were to vanish from the DNS tomorrow, my girlfriend would be mildly annoyed for about 10 minutes.
If google.com were to vanish tomorrow, it would be a national emergency second only to an accidental nuclear attack.
Google is a de facto public utility. Facebook is a toy.
A Concorde's taxi to the end of a runway used as much fuel as a 737's flight from London to Amsterdam.
If that much energy were released over that short a timespan, the airplane wouldn't be there anymore, and neither would the runway.
This must be that "Journalist physics" I keep hearing about, similar in methodology to "Cop math."