What rats, and what rain? You think they left some steel stuff, wires, pipes or control equipment laying around unattended outdoors, or even somewhere at the site at all? You think someone, somewhere installs ANYTHING in a half-finished building? Or that there is ANY financial sense in installing a nearly functional reactor and then letting it rot for 19 years?
The reality is that they halted the construction before the concrete work was done, because it just doesn't make any sense to cancel construction after any significant part of the reactor is installed. It's better to complete it and have some return on investment, even if it's going to be lower than planned.
Parent is not insightful, it is troll and not even cohesive.
In Europe this problem has obviously been solved. It's only a problem in the US where 'environmentalists' keep shouting "nuclear waste" and blocking all attempts at solving the issue long after presented with several good propositions. The problem with nuclear waste is the 'environmentalists' and not the waste itself.
250,000 years is very short on the geological scale, and putting uranium in old salt mines and other geologically stable sites deep underground has no significant problems, except some people think that the infinitesimally small chance of a giant earthquake that causes all this waste to somehow find its way into groundwater and kill our distant ancestors that know nothing about radioactivity (yeah right) is much less likely that their empty heads being hit with a meteor.
Nuclear is the one power source that allow corporations to retain control of power generation.
The "decentralized generation" argument of wind and solar is rather weak. 1. Best sites are in sparsely populated areas or offshore. You are not going to build a wind turbine or a solar farm there by yourself. Offshore wind farms, large solar farms in the desert, hydroelectric, tidal and geothermal power plants are going to be owned by corporations as well. 2. The perspective of being energetically independent is a pipe dream. The required storage technology is not available (store your entire energy consumption for at least 10 months to cover for large seasonal variations, and ideally for 2 years or more to cover for worse years). If you are connected to the grid to avoid those problems, then having solar panels on the roof or a small wind turbine in the back yard is equivalent to owning a share in a power generating company. 3. Power is a 100% pure commodity. This makes impossible most kinds of abusive corporate behavior. There is no fundamental difference between owning power generating capacity and not, except economical ones. The economical ones will diminish if this becomes common, since the cost of power during sunny/windy days will drop, while the cost on callm / cloudy days will rise.
The problem is that personal data is not personally identifiable information! The converse is true but this is not.
"Personal data" is anything that gives a clue about your identity. Personally identifiable information is a piece or set of data that identifies you uniquely, with negligible possibility of error or ambiguity. The difference is vast. Your name is personal data but it is not personally identifiable information, because there might be hundreds of people called John Smith. Personal bank account number is usually PII, because there is only one such account belonging to only one person.
Personally I'm waiting for them to add better integration of PPAs into Synaptic. For example, when I need a bleeding edge version of Banshee, or some application not in Debian like Handbrake, I pick its PPA from a list, enter the password and it magically appears in Synaptic. After this I'm asked which programs from this PPA I want to install (again a list for PPAs that have several). Since it allows only PPAs and not some arbitrary repositories, it could be protected against malware to some extent. This would change software installation on Ubuntu from good to groundbreaking.
That's ass backwards. We need *more* PPAs with the latest versions. What's missing is an easy way to pick them from a checklist while automatically fetching GPG keys. This way you have something like an open app store, and it solves the problem of not having recent enough versions in the repository - you need a bleeding edge version, you check the relevant PPA and the latest bells and whistles magically appear in the package manager.
Wind turbines are great and all, except for the fact they need tons of copper, aluminum, fiberglass and other resources
All other kinds of plants do as well, but that's not the point.
A server farm has high availability requirements, and cannot be powered solely by a single intermittent energy source like a wind farm, because when there's no wind your clients canish off the net. That's as stupid as making a solar powered respirator (or other life support device), where the patient dies when the Sun stops shining. The whole premise of the article is hilarious. They essentially invested in 2 separate things: a server farm and a wind farm, and now try to link them to create free "green" publicity.
There are some important differences between a 1500MW wind farm and a 1500MW nuclear plant. The nuke will actually put out 1500MW consistently regardless of weather conditions (with a good track record of security you can even get an uprate of a few percent), whereas the wind farm will sometimes give you 1000MW and sometimes zero (wind farms rarely achieve their theoretical power output). The nuclear plant will also probably last longer.
Indeed. I've never understood the western need to demonize dog meat consumption.
Apart from the fact that people are unlikely to eat species of animals they keep as pets, dog is unclean according to Jewish tradition. There are few unclean animals that are commonly used in Western cuisines (only pigs are really common).
I can see how this could be made to work. Have a 'better' photo for use on wikipedia.org, and point to an alternate free copy for use e.g. when other sites re-use wikipedia.
Upload a low-res versions under a permissive license instead. I don't really need a huge picture of an actor to know how he/she looks like, a small picture is sufficient. For photos of people a 200x200 thumbnail is really sufficient on a website, and is not usable in a newspaper or in other printed media. This way photographers can still sell their work while giving it away for free.
Nitpick: detonation is not something you can slow down. Detonation happens when the explosion shockwave travels faster than sound in the detonated material. Rocket fuel cannot detonate (otherwise it could not be used as rocket fuel). It can only burn out of control.
I agree with the description of your post as an "epic fail": Normal people do not give a shit about updates until beaten repeatedly over the head with a metal pole, or their computer explodes.
No X server wipes out being able to run most of the GUI software in the ecosystem.
I really doubt they will remove X. They may not use X.org, but not using the X11 protocol would make life much harder for them. Most probably they will have a trimmed down X server that works very close to the hardware like Wayland, with an API built on top of the X11 protocol but hiding its complexity.
You locked to google.
Even if they won't have X (which I think they will use), they will open source their display system, so it will be possible to write a perfect emulator that passed the display calls to X.
The best google could have done is done yet another standard Linux distro, with X in some form, so they can tap into the existing software ecosystem.
I have reason to believe this is what they've done. While for Android it makes little sense to support existing apps because they weren't designed for phones and most often just don't work very well with small screens and/or touchscreens, it makes a lot of sense for netbooks.
I think they might be looking into something like Wayland: a very trimmed down X server built on top of DRI2. I agree that replacing X11 is completely unrealistic, and there is no reason to do so: it works quite well and is portable. There is even an X server for Windows in the PuTTY distribution that can run remote X clients over SSH, and most apps work without a hitch.
I can see where it's going: - CAFC declares all software-only patents invalid - Microsoft releases ODF compatibility pack for all versions of Office as a critical update - SCO is officially dissolved - Apple declares it will implement Theora in HTML5 - Adobe open sources Flash Player - Kim Jong-il's residence blown up in a North Korean nuclear test mishap - Michael Jackson jumps out of the coffin and performs "Thriller" at his funeral to a shocked audience
7-Zip is only a program, the underlying compression algorithm is LZMA. It is not a standard (as far as I know no formal specification exists), but a public domain reference implementation is available. ZIP on the other hand is truly an open standard, since it is a part of e.g. OpenDocument.
Before somebody throws Wikipedia at me: the fact is that you have exactly zero chance of being prosecuted for using x264 in a computer program without paying a patent license fee in the EU.
EPO may issue software-only patents, but they are meaningless. They interpret the EPC differently from the member states, and essentially they think that "a computer program for X" is not patentable, but "using a computer program to do X" is. Member states think that both are equally unpatentable and will refuse to enforce a software-only patent. It's not that nobody tried to enforce them: they just cannot be enforced.
I can only speak with certainty for my country (Poland) and I'm 100% sure that all software-only patents are unenforceable here.
Microsoft's blessing was a must when they had 95% market share. Right now they have no more than 70% and it is steadily declining - by the time HTML5 is available, they might not matter any more. Moreover the majority of their market share is just uninformed. All it takes now is one really big "killer site" like Youtube not supporting IE, and their share will plummet into the low 20s.
Slashdot Mirror
19 years of rats and rain
What rats, and what rain? You think they left some steel stuff, wires, pipes or control equipment laying around unattended outdoors, or even somewhere at the site at all? You think someone, somewhere installs ANYTHING in a half-finished building? Or that there is ANY financial sense in installing a nearly functional reactor and then letting it rot for 19 years?
The reality is that they halted the construction before the concrete work was done, because it just doesn't make any sense to cancel construction after any significant part of the reactor is installed. It's better to complete it and have some return on investment, even if it's going to be lower than planned.
Parent is not insightful, it is troll and not even cohesive.
In Europe this problem has obviously been solved. It's only a problem in the US where 'environmentalists' keep shouting "nuclear waste" and blocking all attempts at solving the issue long after presented with several good propositions. The problem with nuclear waste is the 'environmentalists' and not the waste itself.
250,000 years is very short on the geological scale, and putting uranium in old salt mines and other geologically stable sites deep underground has no significant problems, except some people think that the infinitesimally small chance of a giant earthquake that causes all this waste to somehow find its way into groundwater and kill our distant ancestors that know nothing about radioactivity (yeah right) is much less likely that their empty heads being hit with a meteor.
Nuclear is the one power source that allow corporations to retain control of power generation.
The "decentralized generation" argument of wind and solar is rather weak.
1. Best sites are in sparsely populated areas or offshore. You are not going to build a wind turbine or a solar farm there by yourself. Offshore wind farms, large solar farms in the desert, hydroelectric, tidal and geothermal power plants are going to be owned by corporations as well.
2. The perspective of being energetically independent is a pipe dream. The required storage technology is not available (store your entire energy consumption for at least 10 months to cover for large seasonal variations, and ideally for 2 years or more to cover for worse years). If you are connected to the grid to avoid those problems, then having solar panels on the roof or a small wind turbine in the back yard is equivalent to owning a share in a power generating company.
3. Power is a 100% pure commodity. This makes impossible most kinds of abusive corporate behavior. There is no fundamental difference between owning power generating capacity and not, except economical ones. The economical ones will diminish if this becomes common, since the cost of power during sunny/windy days will drop, while the cost on callm / cloudy days will rise.
The problem is that personal data is not personally identifiable information! The converse is true but this is not.
"Personal data" is anything that gives a clue about your identity. Personally identifiable information is a piece or set of data that identifies you uniquely, with negligible possibility of error or ambiguity. The difference is vast. Your name is personal data but it is not personally identifiable information, because there might be hundreds of people called John Smith. Personal bank account number is usually PII, because there is only one such account belonging to only one person.
Personally I'm waiting for them to add better integration of PPAs into Synaptic. For example, when I need a bleeding edge version of Banshee, or some application not in Debian like Handbrake, I pick its PPA from a list, enter the password and it magically appears in Synaptic. After this I'm asked which programs from this PPA I want to install (again a list for PPAs that have several). Since it allows only PPAs and not some arbitrary repositories, it could be protected against malware to some extent. This would change software installation on Ubuntu from good to groundbreaking.
That's ass backwards. We need *more* PPAs with the latest versions. What's missing is an easy way to pick them from a checklist while automatically fetching GPG keys. This way you have something like an open app store, and it solves the problem of not having recent enough versions in the repository - you need a bleeding edge version, you check the relevant PPA and the latest bells and whistles magically appear in the package manager.
Wind turbines are great and all, except for the fact they need tons of copper, aluminum, fiberglass and other resources
All other kinds of plants do as well, but that's not the point.
A server farm has high availability requirements, and cannot be powered solely by a single intermittent energy source like a wind farm, because when there's no wind your clients canish off the net. That's as stupid as making a solar powered respirator (or other life support device), where the patient dies when the Sun stops shining. The whole premise of the article is hilarious. They essentially invested in 2 separate things: a server farm and a wind farm, and now try to link them to create free "green" publicity.
And when the wind stops your server farm melts. What could possibly go wrong?
There are some important differences between a 1500MW wind farm and a 1500MW nuclear plant. The nuke will actually put out 1500MW consistently regardless of weather conditions (with a good track record of security you can even get an uprate of a few percent), whereas the wind farm will sometimes give you 1000MW and sometimes zero (wind farms rarely achieve their theoretical power output). The nuclear plant will also probably last longer.
Indeed. I've never understood the western need to demonize dog meat consumption.
Apart from the fact that people are unlikely to eat species of animals they keep as pets, dog is unclean according to Jewish tradition. There are few unclean animals that are commonly used in Western cuisines (only pigs are really common).
Comon guys, someone make a utility that makes compiling and installing a kernel impossible to screw up.
Already exists.
make-kpkg --initrd --append-to-version=-custom kernel_image kernel_headers
dpkg -i linux-*
Not sure about RPM-based distros.
Wrong part of the Mafiaa, movies are the domain of MPAA...
As bonus points, "jeb" means "fuck" in Polish.
I can see how this could be made to work. Have a 'better' photo for use on wikipedia.org, and point to an alternate free copy for use e.g. when other sites re-use wikipedia.
Upload a low-res versions under a permissive license instead. I don't really need a huge picture of an actor to know how he/she looks like, a small picture is sufficient. For photos of people a 200x200 thumbnail is really sufficient on a website, and is not usable in a newspaper or in other printed media. This way photographers can still sell their work while giving it away for free.
detonating vast quantities of explosives slowly
Nitpick: detonation is not something you can slow down. Detonation happens when the explosion shockwave travels faster than sound in the detonated material. Rocket fuel cannot detonate (otherwise it could not be used as rocket fuel). It can only burn out of control.
And for Linux as well:
http://aufs.sourceforge.net/
Probably they could, but its interface caused me to chew my legs off.
Oh, um, how do I get updates on this thing?
I agree with the description of your post as an "epic fail": Normal people do not give a shit about updates until beaten repeatedly over the head with a metal pole, or their computer explodes.
No X server wipes out being able to run most of the GUI software in the ecosystem.
I really doubt they will remove X. They may not use X.org, but not using the X11 protocol would make life much harder for them. Most probably they will have a trimmed down X server that works very close to the hardware like Wayland, with an API built on top of the X11 protocol but hiding its complexity.
You locked to google.
Even if they won't have X (which I think they will use), they will open source their display system, so it will be possible to write a perfect emulator that passed the display calls to X.
The best google could have done is done yet another standard Linux distro, with X in some form, so they can tap into the existing software ecosystem.
I have reason to believe this is what they've done. While for Android it makes little sense to support existing apps because they weren't designed for phones and most often just don't work very well with small screens and/or touchscreens, it makes a lot of sense for netbooks.
I think they might be looking into something like Wayland: a very trimmed down X server built on top of DRI2. I agree that replacing X11 is completely unrealistic, and there is no reason to do so: it works quite well and is portable. There is even an X server for Windows in the PuTTY distribution that can run remote X clients over SSH, and most apps work without a hitch.
I can see where it's going:
- CAFC declares all software-only patents invalid
- Microsoft releases ODF compatibility pack for all versions of Office as a critical update
- SCO is officially dissolved
- Apple declares it will implement Theora in HTML5
- Adobe open sources Flash Player
- Kim Jong-il's residence blown up in a North Korean nuclear test mishap
- Michael Jackson jumps out of the coffin and performs "Thriller" at his funeral to a shocked audience
7-Zip is only a program, the underlying compression algorithm is LZMA. It is not a standard (as far as I know no formal specification exists), but a public domain reference implementation is available. ZIP on the other hand is truly an open standard, since it is a part of e.g. OpenDocument.
Before somebody throws Wikipedia at me: the fact is that you have exactly zero chance of being prosecuted for using x264 in a computer program without paying a patent license fee in the EU.
EPO may issue software-only patents, but they are meaningless. They interpret the EPC differently from the member states, and essentially they think that "a computer program for X" is not patentable, but "using a computer program to do X" is. Member states think that both are equally unpatentable and will refuse to enforce a software-only patent. It's not that nobody tried to enforce them: they just cannot be enforced.
I can only speak with certainty for my country (Poland) and I'm 100% sure that all software-only patents are unenforceable here.
Microsoft's blessing was a must when they had 95% market share. Right now they have no more than 70% and it is steadily declining - by the time HTML5 is available, they might not matter any more. Moreover the majority of their market share is just uninformed. All it takes now is one really big "killer site" like Youtube not supporting IE, and their share will plummet into the low 20s.