Programming as a skill in itself is totally separate from most of those .
But to be a good programmer you don't just have to be able to write good code- you have to be able to write good code which does useful things and unless you have a decent understanding of a few of the above you're going to be missing a number of very useful and powerful tools.
I'll get around to writing a decent response to your post some time tomorrow evening - too busy today though there are 2 minor points I'd like to clarify first-
Why do you lump the nuclear weapons industry in with the nuclear energy industry? Even if 100% of our power came from elsewhere the military would still want nuclear weapons and they'd build their own facilities to get weapons grade material one way or another. I'm in favor of plants which are not build specifically to produce weapons grade material but nukes won't go away even if the plants do.
second- You seem to assign an extremely high negative weighting to anything even slightly radioactive. Radioactive hazardous waste is nasty but so is any kind of hazardous industrial waste and I'll take a swimming pool full of radioactive poison over hundreds of swimming pools full of normal regular poison.
Pretty much anything which is radioactive for 500,000 years is about as radioactive as concrete. In practice a few years after waste comes out of the reactor it's radiation output has dropped to a tiny tiny fraction of what it was when it first came out. A couple of hundred years later anything that's left is mainly dangerous due to it's chemical properties.
I'll fill in the math when I write the full response.
You can handle a small lump of plutonium safely without need for a radiation suit though you might want some kind of gloves. You wouldn't want to eat it but heavy industry already produces thousands of times the volume of really really nasty hazardous waste with no half life which will do just as much damage if it gets into the water table.
if it's brutal enough I might not be against this one:D Some Microsoft programmer grabs a small chunk of GPLed code and well... But it probably doesn't mean that since that would be the most dangerous to companies which create large monolithic expensive projects.
the best algorithms are *already* kept secret. Or as secret as they can be given that there's hordes of people with talents with debuggers.
a distressing number of software patents completely fail to contain any source code or even decent pseudocode.
I can imagine rare situations where a patent on software might be justified but as it stands there's no requirement that source code be provided. Instead they patent the general idea and use vague flowcharts instead of explicit code.
It's possible to innovate your way around a novel break design. It's impossible to innovate your way around a box in a spreadsheet reading "slows car down"
plus there's a load of other stuff about how patents work well for centralised industries dominated by large companies(the legal teams can keep up with all recent patents) but utterly terrible for a decentralised industry where trying to make useful things becomes like playing Russian roulette since no one person can keep up with all the recent patents and shouldn't try.
The energy density is absolutely terrible but it's a potential source for cooler poorer countries. You don't have to make it a bit tower. Build it up the side of a mountain and you can get the required height. The wind speeds near the chimney are a problem though. You couldn't grow crops there without the risk of your staff being sucked up and into the turbines.
Also scale. it has to be really really big to be useful but the materials are cheap..
The water isn't used to clean the panels. He's talking about solar thermal where you build a big ring of mirrors and focus the light on a huge tank of molten salt. It provides a fairly steady steam of power but you're still boiling water to run the turbines. Hence they take a lot of water to run.
Unfortunately that's not such a straightforward calculation given than a coal mine can be a massive open strip mine covering many square kilometers or a smallish hole in the ground surrounded by a few kilotons of coal sludge. Especially since not all coal goes to power plants and it's hard to figure out how much of a particular mines output goes to a particular plant.
As for the mine tailings etc, how does your preferred power source deal with the waste products from production or running?
Does the (insert power source here) industry have any plans for dealing with industrial waste generated in building,production or running? eg waste solvents, byproducts, tailings from mining the minerals needed etc.
before we begin what is you preferred alternative? just so we can compare it realistically to nuclear.
After all sure 250 million tons of slightly radioactive sand you've extracted uranium from (unless you've mined your uranium with in in situ leeching or something like they do in america) is something you have to deal with but equally so is the billions of tonnes of slightly radioactive sand left over after mining the metal ores needed for the billions of solar panels, millions of wind turbines,hundreds of thousands of thermal boreholes or whatever other scheme you have in mind.
All you've established is that nuclear is not perfect. Nobody ever said it was. Merely that it is the best option available. You have in no way established that any of the alternatives are safer,less polluting,cheaper or more practical.
So. Name your favorite so we can move forward making an intelligent comparison.
And that's exactly what the real native true blooded americans should have done when your ancestors waltzed on in pretending they had some kind of a right to be there.
This situation is unresolved and this technology will do nothing to resolve it.
Nuclear reactors which burn nuclear waste as fuel will do nothing to resolve the problem of dealing with nuclear waste? That's an interesting conclusion.
Are you prepared to critically evaluate the Nuclear Industry based on actual information and reason in comparison to other sources of power rather than in a vacuum?
The gross conversion efficiencies (taking into account that the solar dishes or troughs occupy only a fraction of the total area of the power plant) are determined by net generating capacity over the solar energy that falls on the total area of the solar plant. The 500-megawatt (MW) SCE/SES plant would extract about 2.75% of the radiation (1 kW/m; see Solar power for a discussion) that falls on its 4,500 acres (18.2 km).
For the 50 MW AndaSol Power Plant that is being built in Spain (total area of 1,300×1,500 m = 1.95 km) gross conversion efficiency comes out at 2.6%
Only to refer back to TFA they found the opposite. so apparently the teens really were able to get up and get themselves to school an hour later without supervision when most parents have already gone to work.
Also, it would be unrealistic to compare my teens 30 years ago with teens today. They have many more diversions and temptations regarding entertainment (though the basic one hasn't changed at all).
Old fogies have been saying this about young people since there were old folks and young people.
The elderly always decide that this generations entertainment is so much more.... different from the good old entertainment in the olden days and obviously it's going to damage them.
of course 20 minutes later they'll be off fucking that punk down the street cause now you've made it forbidden and forbidden things are the most appealing and they'll quickly find out how many fun things there are involved besides marriage.
And what now if we put into the balance the Iraq war and eventually climate change?
That seems a bit unrelated to solar vs nuclear.
Many, most people seem not to look for "the truth"
Very true. I wince whenever I hear the words "clean coal".
The las vegas example may have a reasonable explanation- They also have an extremely high demand in the evenings when solar isn't available. If their one and only peak was due to AC at midday solar would match up pretty well but since they need a lot of power in the evenings they need another generator to provide that power. Now I much prefer a nuclear plant to a coal or gas plant for that purpose and since running the nuclear plant at 100% or 10% cost pretty much the same they might as well provide power during the day as well.
At which point if there's a perfectly good plant already producing power why build more unless you can beat them on price?
I did a few back of the envelope calcs and from what I can find it would require about 369,000 tons of salt to keep a 1gw solar thermal plant running for 4 hours. I don't want to just assume a multiple of 3 to keep it running for 12 hours but hell, call it something like a million tons of salt as a 1 time investment. Quite reasonable really.
The bigger downside I can think of is the drop in power generation during the winter, exactly when people need their homes heated. Also climate change is probably going to lead to more unpredictable weather and when you're building a plant "unpredictable" is bad.
I remember a couple of years ago trying to get some of those working in windows and it complained about glaux. There's some "glaux replacement code" but I couldn't get that working either.
So any any idea if the tutorials will ever be updated to work out of the box so that newbies can avoid worrying about dependencies until they have a handle on the material?
It massively detracts from the value of the tutorials to newbies when the tutorial code simply doesn't work which is a pity because they're good tutorials otherwise.
Slashdot Mirror
and you're assuming than anything more than a tiny minority care enough or are bright enough to have ever thought about it in terms of "ethics".
Programming as a skill in itself is totally separate from most of those .
But to be a good programmer you don't just have to be able to write good code- you have to be able to write good code which does useful things and unless you have a decent understanding of a few of the above you're going to be missing a number of very useful and powerful tools.
correction:
Nobody who understands the difference has fought against funding for research into cures using adult stem cells.
There's a massive ignorant crowd of fundies who still consider anything and everything to do with stem cells to be bad.
I'll get around to writing a decent response to your post some time tomorrow evening - too busy today though there are 2 minor points I'd like to clarify first-
Why do you lump the nuclear weapons industry in with the nuclear energy industry?
Even if 100% of our power came from elsewhere the military would still want nuclear weapons and they'd build their own facilities to get weapons grade material one way or another.
I'm in favor of plants which are not build specifically to produce weapons grade material but nukes won't go away even if the plants do.
second-
You seem to assign an extremely high negative weighting to anything even slightly radioactive.
Radioactive hazardous waste is nasty but so is any kind of hazardous industrial waste and I'll take a swimming pool full of radioactive poison over hundreds of swimming pools full of normal regular poison.
Pretty much anything which is radioactive for 500,000 years is about as radioactive as concrete.
In practice a few years after waste comes out of the reactor it's radiation output has dropped to a tiny tiny fraction of what it was when it first came out.
A couple of hundred years later anything that's left is mainly dangerous due to it's chemical properties.
I'll fill in the math when I write the full response.
You can handle a small lump of plutonium safely without need for a radiation suit though you might want some kind of gloves.
You wouldn't want to eat it but heavy industry already produces thousands of times the volume of really really nasty hazardous waste with no half life which will do just as much damage if it gets into the water table.
if it's brutal enough I might not be against this one :D
Some Microsoft programmer grabs a small chunk of GPLed code and well...
But it probably doesn't mean that since that would be the most dangerous to companies which create large monolithic expensive projects.
no no.
all your content should of course be DRM'd.
No need for receipts then.
(who wants to bet someone actually proposed this at some point)
I dunno.
The US owns a really massive portion of the webs criminals.
the best algorithms are *already* kept secret.
Or as secret as they can be given that there's hordes of people with talents with debuggers.
a distressing number of software patents completely fail to contain any source code or even decent pseudocode.
I can imagine rare situations where a patent on software might be justified but as it stands there's no requirement that source code be provided.
Instead they patent the general idea and use vague flowcharts instead of explicit code.
It's possible to innovate your way around a novel break design.
It's impossible to innovate your way around a box in a spreadsheet reading "slows car down"
plus there's a load of other stuff about how patents work well for centralised industries dominated by large companies(the legal teams can keep up with all recent patents) but utterly terrible for a decentralised industry where trying to make useful things becomes like playing Russian roulette since no one person can keep up with all the recent patents and shouldn't try.
"And once a man is in your home, anything you do to him is nice and legal."
"Is that so? . . . Oh Flanders, won't you join me in my kitchen? Heh, heh, heh, heh, heh, heh, heh, heh . . . "
"Uh, it doesn't work if you invite him."
"Hi-dily hey!"
"Go home."
"Too-dily do!"
The energy density is absolutely terrible but it's a potential source for cooler poorer countries.
You don't have to make it a bit tower.
Build it up the side of a mountain and you can get the required height.
The wind speeds near the chimney are a problem though.
You couldn't grow crops there without the risk of your staff being sucked up and into the turbines.
Also scale.
it has to be really really big to be useful but the materials are cheap..
The water isn't used to clean the panels.
He's talking about solar thermal where you build a big ring of mirrors and focus the light on a huge tank of molten salt.
It provides a fairly steady steam of power but you're still boiling water to run the turbines.
Hence they take a lot of water to run.
Unfortunately that's not such a straightforward calculation given than a coal mine can be a massive open strip mine covering many square kilometers or a smallish hole in the ground surrounded by a few kilotons of coal sludge.
Especially since not all coal goes to power plants and it's hard to figure out how much of a particular mines output goes to a particular plant.
So honestly I don't know.
plutonium-239 is, and Uranium-238
We call these fuel.
As for the mine tailings etc, how does your preferred power source deal with the waste products from production or running?
Does the (insert power source here) industry have any plans for dealing with industrial waste generated in building ,production or running? eg waste solvents, byproducts, tailings from mining the minerals needed etc.
before we begin what is you preferred alternative?
just so we can compare it realistically to nuclear.
After all sure 250 million tons of slightly radioactive sand you've extracted uranium from (unless you've mined your uranium with in in situ leeching or something like they do in america) is something you have to deal with but equally so is the billions of tonnes of slightly radioactive sand left over after mining the metal ores needed for the billions of solar panels, millions of wind turbines ,hundreds of thousands of thermal boreholes or whatever other scheme you have in mind.
All you've established is that nuclear is not perfect.
Nobody ever said it was.
Merely that it is the best option available.
You have in no way established that any of the alternatives are safer,less polluting,cheaper or more practical.
So.
Name your favorite so we can move forward making an intelligent comparison.
And that's exactly what the real native true blooded americans should have done when your ancestors waltzed on in pretending they had some kind of a right to be there.
This situation is unresolved and this technology will do nothing to resolve it.
Nuclear reactors which burn nuclear waste as fuel will do nothing to resolve the problem of dealing with nuclear waste?
That's an interesting conclusion.
Are you prepared to critically evaluate the Nuclear Industry based on actual information and reason in comparison to other sources of power rather than in a vacuum?
The gross conversion efficiencies (taking into account that the solar dishes or troughs occupy only a fraction of the total area of the power plant) are determined by net generating capacity over the solar energy that falls on the total area of the solar plant. The 500-megawatt (MW) SCE/SES plant would extract about 2.75% of the radiation (1 kW/m; see Solar power for a discussion) that falls on its 4,500 acres (18.2 km).
For the 50 MW AndaSol Power Plant that is being built in Spain (total area of 1,300×1,500 m = 1.95 km) gross conversion efficiency comes out at 2.6%
http://www.worldofsolarthermal.com/vbnews.php?do=viewarticle&artid=12&title=conversion-rates
citation provided.
Ya this seems pretty damned sad though the great grandparents strip-gaming thing sounds absolutely awesome for parties.
Every time you get fragged you have to take an item of clothing off.
For best effect a game with a moderate kill rate would be best and with a few seconds respawn time so you have time to get the clothing off.
combine with some kind of drinking game and you'd be on to a winner- model it on alcoholic chess
http://miscellanea.wellingtongrey.net/2008/01/06/alcoholic-chess/
where say every time you get 2 kills in a row you have to take a drink.
Only to refer back to TFA they found the opposite.
so apparently the teens really were able to get up and get themselves to school an hour later without supervision when most parents have already gone to work.
Also, it would be unrealistic to compare my teens 30 years ago with teens today. They have many more diversions and temptations regarding entertainment (though the basic one hasn't changed at all).
Old fogies have been saying this about young people since there were old folks and young people.
The elderly always decide that this generations entertainment is so much more.... different from the good old entertainment in the olden days and obviously it's going to damage them.
of course 20 minutes later they'll be off fucking that punk down the street cause now you've made it forbidden and forbidden things are the most appealing and they'll quickly find out how many fun things there are involved besides marriage.
as far as I know the margins on selling infections aren't that fantastic.
I depends on who you're infecting though.
A tutorial which simply doesn't work is still a broken tutorial.
And what now if we put into the balance the Iraq war and eventually climate change?
That seems a bit unrelated to solar vs nuclear.
Many, most people seem not to look for "the truth"
Very true.
I wince whenever I hear the words "clean coal".
The las vegas example may have a reasonable explanation-
They also have an extremely high demand in the evenings when solar isn't available.
If their one and only peak was due to AC at midday solar would match up pretty well but since they need a lot of power in the evenings they need another generator to provide that power.
Now I much prefer a nuclear plant to a coal or gas plant for that purpose and since running the nuclear plant at 100% or 10% cost pretty much the same they might as well provide power during the day as well.
At which point if there's a perfectly good plant already producing power why build more unless you can beat them on price?
I did a few back of the envelope calcs and from what I can find it would require about 369,000 tons of salt to keep a 1gw solar thermal plant running for 4 hours.
I don't want to just assume a multiple of 3 to keep it running for 12 hours but hell, call it something like a million tons of salt as a 1 time investment.
Quite reasonable really.
The bigger downside I can think of is the drop in power generation during the winter, exactly when people need their homes heated.
Also climate change is probably going to lead to more unpredictable weather and when you're building a plant "unpredictable" is bad.
gah.
sorry about that, had 2 windows open and got the 1 mixed up.
Mod offtopic.
I remember a couple of years ago trying to get some of those working in windows and it complained about glaux.
There's some "glaux replacement code" but I couldn't get that working either.
So any any idea if the tutorials will ever be updated to work out of the box so that newbies can avoid worrying about dependencies until they have a handle on the material?
It massively detracts from the value of the tutorials to newbies when the tutorial code simply doesn't work which is a pity because they're good tutorials otherwise.