Yes of course. I don't agree with you, so I'm listening to a lobby.
Actually, I did the research myself. I never read anything that said "France's electricity prices are among the lowest in Europe!" I was simply curious about the nuclear industry in the country where I live, looked up some numbers, and came to a conclusion.
Your figures don't disagree with me. I said "some of the lowest", not "the lowest". Yes, other countries have lower prices, but nuclear power is still competitive.
How about saying, "I saw one crash yesterday, and the day before, and the day before! Ok, it was XP running on a somewhat-decent Compaq portable, but still!" I don't know about other people on this site, but my complaints about the instability of Windows comes from direct experience with the most modern home version available.
The problem is this. Some people, like yourself, have no problems with Windows, and it works great. Some people, like my girlfriend, have Windows installations that crash all the time. So yes, Windows can be perfectly stable, if you're lucky. (I should also point out that shutting the machine down at night shouldn't count; decent computers have sleep modes and never have to be rebooted just to make them stop using electricity.)
With Linux or OS X or whatever, you don't have this kind of inconsistency. Basically everybody who uses them, ignoring people who run experimental kernels or unsupported drivers, never has them crash, even when the computers are up for months at a time. You don't have to be lucky or do anything special. Yes, Windows is better, but it still has a long way to go. When my girlfriend's PC stops crashing a couple of times a week (running XP) then I'll reconsider.
Thanks for the interesting story. NIBMY certainly isn't dead, or even dying. But it is possible to overcome. It's fruitless to say things like, "We can't build any more nuclear power plants, because of NIMBY." You don't know until you tried! If you refuse to try, then the clueless self-defeating NIMBYites have won.
And why do "Friends of the Earth" groups seem to deliberately misunderstand the purposes of things so often? Are they just colossally stupid, or incredibly untrusting? It seems like this is the kind of thing they would want, if they actually understood what it was for. That's the kind of BS that gives environmentalism such a bad name.
Pollution is what waste is called when it gets released into the environment. If it stays in its storage facility, it's not pollution. That's just my definition, but the dictionary and contemporary use of the word agrees with me.
At the other extreme, arguing that if we embraced nuclear power then we would be living in paradise is also well, I mean, hello?, look at France. They have totally bought into nuclear power and they still can't come up with a good pop song or a decent car.
On the other hand, France gets 90% of its electricity from non-polluting sources, exports tons of electricity to its neighbors, and has some of the lowest electricity prices in Europe. It may not be "paradise", but it proves that nuclear energy can work and work well.
Graphite was used as a moderator (i.e. it slows down neutrons), not as coolant. Graphite participated in the accident by being unbelievably flammable, since it is basically pure carbon, and burning like crazy once the shit hit the fan. Most of the radioactive release was due to the fire from the graphite, which burned for ten days.
What's insane is not comparing Chernobyl with a reactor cooled by ocean water. What's insane is comparing Chernobyl with any non-RBMK design. The RBMK is unsafe by design, unlike basically every other civilian reactor. It's impossible for a Chernobyl-type accident to happen in other reactor types, and apparently (I haven't verified this, I just heard it) the remaining RBMK reactors have been upgraded to avoid the problems as well.
That excuse doesn't fly with me. I can send multimegabyte e-mails around the world for zero marginal cost, which have the exact same infrastructure problems, minus the wireless part. The wireless part also can't be that expensive, since I can buy communications for around a dollar an hour in bulk. Put together cheap e-mail and cheap wireless and you get... incredibly expensive text messaging.
NIMBYism is overrated. I live within 20 miles of two nuclear power plants. It doesn't bug me, and I've never run into anybody who complained about them or worried about them. Just the other day, somebody told me about an event they were participating in, and I asked where it was. I didn't know the town, so they said "it's near the nuclear plant", casual, just like that. Nuclear policy in this country is much more sane than in certain other places, and people are much more rational about it. That gives me hope that the rampant NIMBYism with regards to nuclear power in the US can be changed.
If you want to test your gag reflex, go to a computer with QuickTime and visit the clips page. It looks like it'll incredibly unrealistic, as well as a really bad movie. One to avoid, unless your love of big special-effects spectacles can override everything else.
/.'ers are pretty proud of their 'slashdot effect', but in my opinion the only thing that differentiates the/. meltdown from any other meltdown is that/.'ers have worked hard to get the description of the event into a modern, contemporary online vernacular.
Well, there is another difference. Namely, that the slashdot effect strikes without warning, often on unprepared sites. I have no doubt that it's easy to design something from the ground up to get much more traffic than a slashdotting will give. Indeed, slashdot posts links to Apple, NYT, etc. etc. all the time without any noticeable impact on their operations. But when slashdot posts a link to some dinky server colo'd at a rural ISP running on a single T1 line, which happens quite a lot, then bad stuff happens.
Of course slashdot has plenty of clueless people. Just find the latest movie announcement and look for somebody screaming about how linking to the trailer is such a bad idea... a trailer at Apple.com, hosted by Akamai.
This is slightly OT, but everybody's talking about how little bandwidth these messages actually take up.
My question is, why do SMS's cost so damned much? For a max of 160 bytes of data, the phone companies charge an unbelievable amount! It's something like a tenth of a second worth of voice traffic, but they're not priced accordingly. Is there a technical reason for this or, (more likely) are the phone companies just money-grubbing rat bastards?
Maybe they would have been made, maybe they wouldn't. But the fact is that they were made for material gain. The Wright brothers patented their invention and got rich off of it. So did the creators of everything else I listed that occurred in modern times. Maybe those things would have been made anyway, if we were in a perfect patentless utopia, but we aren't. The original poster didn't say that invention would happen even without intellectual property rights; he said that nothing important was ever created for money, in this reality. That is completely false.
I don't have the assumption that you claim, and never gave any indication that I did have it. Question your assumptions about the points of views of other people.
I'm a Mac owner. I've owned nothing but Apple computers, first an Apple IIGS then a series of Macs. I love them, and I think Apple is great. But that doesn't prevent me from facing reality.
The fact is, it doesn't matter if "only" your user account is compromised, and root remains secure. What can a trojan possibly do to your computer that you don't want it to do? It can delete files, spy on you, and proxy spam or other malicious network connections. It can do all of this with "only" your user account. You don't have to be root to proxy anything. You don't have to be root to run a keylogger or run a heuristic that greps for credit card numbers. You don't have to be root to trash all of the files in your home directory, which should be the only ones you care about. Who cares if the trojan can't trash the stuff in/System? You can get that off of a CD in half an hour. It's the documents, pictures, movies, and music that you have that are difficult to replace, and owning your user account is enough for a virus to destroy them.
The unix permissions model is great on multiuser systems, but on a home desktop it really just doesn't help that much. It's nice, but it fails to protect that which I care most about.
I honestly don't care about the other things he said. I only care about this one sentence:
None of the great innovations, discoveries, or achievements in human history were made for material gain.
That sentence is total idiocy and makes me doubt the sanity and basic connection to reality of the original poster. All of the things I listed were made for material gain. The rest of his post is of no consequence to my point, and that's why I didn't mention them. The quoted sentence is not affected by its context.
No, that's not it at all. They're saying is that if you visit a properly-constructed web page, that page can cause your computer to execute arbitrary code without any further intervention on your part. You just go to the URL, and a few seconds later you've been owned.
My university had a collection of pretty powerful Alphas that served as shell servers, e-mail servers, etc. I thought it would be cool to run SETI on them. However, they were too smart, and had very strict process limits. A process that used more than two minutes of CPU was axed, and was supposed to be run using some bizarre batch processing system. With the batch system, you could run a long-running job for up to twelve hours.
I got to thinking, and tinkering with the system. Oddly, if you had your batch job be a shell script, when your time was up and your job got killed, the program would get killed but the shell script had time to do a little work afterwards. So I coded a little shell script like this:
seti-at-home submit self to batch queue
And bang, I had a self-resubmitting batch job! That machine just tore through units, too. Then about a day later I got an e-mail from the admin. He was very kind, didn't get angry or anything, just said "Please stop." I briefly argued with him, but I respected his reasonableness and did as he requested.
Sure, SETI is limited, but it's also very cheap. They piggyback on the Aricebo telescope while it's doing other observations, and basically don't really get in people's way. The whole reason for the SETI@Home project is because they didn't have enough funding to get "real" computer time.
Compare this to the proposals being floated to search for earth-like planets around other stars: pairs of big space-based telescopes linked using unbelievably sophisticated equipment, doing interferometry, and costing at least hundreds of millions of dollars. It's a completely different problem.
This is a good idea, which I forgot about when I made my other post. I don't know what difficulties might be involved in making an image in this situation, but it's probably going to be easier than building a telescope that's 500 million km in diameter.
Let's assume there are some aliens out there who want to solve the Kennedy assassination for us next year. At that time, the light will be 42 years out. Assume they want to observe visual light with a resolution of half a meter, which should be enough for a skilled analyst to decide whether the guy on the grassy knoll is carrying a rifle or just a camera.
Unless I flubbed up the calculations somewhere, which is possible, you'd need a telescope with a diameter of 480 million kilometers. Or you'd need two gigantic telescopes 480 million km apart, kept within nanometers of their required position, in order to do interferometry. We don't even have any idea of how to begin to think about designing such a beast. It is theoretically possible, but not within any reasonable realm of practicality for a long, long time.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes of course. I don't agree with you, so I'm listening to a lobby.
Actually, I did the research myself. I never read anything that said "France's electricity prices are among the lowest in Europe!" I was simply curious about the nuclear industry in the country where I live, looked up some numbers, and came to a conclusion.
Your figures don't disagree with me. I said "some of the lowest", not "the lowest". Yes, other countries have lower prices, but nuclear power is still competitive.
How about saying, "I saw one crash yesterday, and the day before, and the day before! Ok, it was XP running on a somewhat-decent Compaq portable, but still!" I don't know about other people on this site, but my complaints about the instability of Windows comes from direct experience with the most modern home version available.
The problem is this. Some people, like yourself, have no problems with Windows, and it works great. Some people, like my girlfriend, have Windows installations that crash all the time. So yes, Windows can be perfectly stable, if you're lucky. (I should also point out that shutting the machine down at night shouldn't count; decent computers have sleep modes and never have to be rebooted just to make them stop using electricity.)
With Linux or OS X or whatever, you don't have this kind of inconsistency. Basically everybody who uses them, ignoring people who run experimental kernels or unsupported drivers, never has them crash, even when the computers are up for months at a time. You don't have to be lucky or do anything special. Yes, Windows is better, but it still has a long way to go. When my girlfriend's PC stops crashing a couple of times a week (running XP) then I'll reconsider.
Thanks for the interesting story. NIBMY certainly isn't dead, or even dying. But it is possible to overcome. It's fruitless to say things like, "We can't build any more nuclear power plants, because of NIMBY." You don't know until you tried! If you refuse to try, then the clueless self-defeating NIMBYites have won.
And why do "Friends of the Earth" groups seem to deliberately misunderstand the purposes of things so often? Are they just colossally stupid, or incredibly untrusting? It seems like this is the kind of thing they would want, if they actually understood what it was for. That's the kind of BS that gives environmentalism such a bad name.
Pollution is what waste is called when it gets released into the environment. If it stays in its storage facility, it's not pollution. That's just my definition, but the dictionary and contemporary use of the word agrees with me.
At the other extreme, arguing that if we embraced nuclear power then we would be living in paradise is also well, I mean, hello?, look at France. They have totally bought into nuclear power and they still can't come up with a good pop song or a decent car.
On the other hand, France gets 90% of its electricity from non-polluting sources, exports tons of electricity to its neighbors, and has some of the lowest electricity prices in Europe. It may not be "paradise", but it proves that nuclear energy can work and work well.
Am I the only one who, upon seeing that headline, instantly thought that God was telling me that I should take some cocaine? Talk about ambiguity.
No. You should not be prevented from participating in society merely because you're "suspicious".
Graphite was used as a moderator (i.e. it slows down neutrons), not as coolant. Graphite participated in the accident by being unbelievably flammable, since it is basically pure carbon, and burning like crazy once the shit hit the fan. Most of the radioactive release was due to the fire from the graphite, which burned for ten days.
What's insane is not comparing Chernobyl with a reactor cooled by ocean water. What's insane is comparing Chernobyl with any non-RBMK design. The RBMK is unsafe by design, unlike basically every other civilian reactor. It's impossible for a Chernobyl-type accident to happen in other reactor types, and apparently (I haven't verified this, I just heard it) the remaining RBMK reactors have been upgraded to avoid the problems as well.
That excuse doesn't fly with me. I can send multimegabyte e-mails around the world for zero marginal cost, which have the exact same infrastructure problems, minus the wireless part. The wireless part also can't be that expensive, since I can buy communications for around a dollar an hour in bulk. Put together cheap e-mail and cheap wireless and you get... incredibly expensive text messaging.
NIMBYism is overrated. I live within 20 miles of two nuclear power plants. It doesn't bug me, and I've never run into anybody who complained about them or worried about them. Just the other day, somebody told me about an event they were participating in, and I asked where it was. I didn't know the town, so they said "it's near the nuclear plant", casual, just like that. Nuclear policy in this country is much more sane than in certain other places, and people are much more rational about it. That gives me hope that the rampant NIMBYism with regards to nuclear power in the US can be changed.
If you want to test your gag reflex, go to a computer with QuickTime and visit the clips page. It looks like it'll incredibly unrealistic, as well as a really bad movie. One to avoid, unless your love of big special-effects spectacles can override everything else.
/.'ers are pretty proud of their 'slashdot effect', but in my opinion the only thing that differentiates the /. meltdown from any other meltdown is that /.'ers have worked hard to get the description of the event into a modern, contemporary online vernacular.
Well, there is another difference. Namely, that the slashdot effect strikes without warning, often on unprepared sites. I have no doubt that it's easy to design something from the ground up to get much more traffic than a slashdotting will give. Indeed, slashdot posts links to Apple, NYT, etc. etc. all the time without any noticeable impact on their operations. But when slashdot posts a link to some dinky server colo'd at a rural ISP running on a single T1 line, which happens quite a lot, then bad stuff happens.
Of course slashdot has plenty of clueless people. Just find the latest movie announcement and look for somebody screaming about how linking to the trailer is such a bad idea... a trailer at Apple.com, hosted by Akamai.
This is slightly OT, but everybody's talking about how little bandwidth these messages actually take up.
My question is, why do SMS's cost so damned much? For a max of 160 bytes of data, the phone companies charge an unbelievable amount! It's something like a tenth of a second worth of voice traffic, but they're not priced accordingly. Is there a technical reason for this or, (more likely) are the phone companies just money-grubbing rat bastards?
Maybe they would have been made, maybe they wouldn't. But the fact is that they were made for material gain. The Wright brothers patented their invention and got rich off of it. So did the creators of everything else I listed that occurred in modern times. Maybe those things would have been made anyway, if we were in a perfect patentless utopia, but we aren't. The original poster didn't say that invention would happen even without intellectual property rights; he said that nothing important was ever created for money, in this reality. That is completely false.
I don't have the assumption that you claim, and never gave any indication that I did have it. Question your assumptions about the points of views of other people.
Funny, how these assumptions happen.
/System? You can get that off of a CD in half an hour. It's the documents, pictures, movies, and music that you have that are difficult to replace, and owning your user account is enough for a virus to destroy them.
I'm a Mac owner. I've owned nothing but Apple computers, first an Apple IIGS then a series of Macs. I love them, and I think Apple is great. But that doesn't prevent me from facing reality.
The fact is, it doesn't matter if "only" your user account is compromised, and root remains secure. What can a trojan possibly do to your computer that you don't want it to do? It can delete files, spy on you, and proxy spam or other malicious network connections. It can do all of this with "only" your user account. You don't have to be root to proxy anything. You don't have to be root to run a keylogger or run a heuristic that greps for credit card numbers. You don't have to be root to trash all of the files in your home directory, which should be the only ones you care about. Who cares if the trojan can't trash the stuff in
The unix permissions model is great on multiuser systems, but on a home desktop it really just doesn't help that much. It's nice, but it fails to protect that which I care most about.
None of the great innovations, discoveries, or achievements in human history were made for material gain.
It all depends on what you consider "great", but here are some examples:
The airplane.
The telegraph.
The radio.
The transistor.
The integrated circuit.
Metal working.
Domesticated animals.
Agriculture.
Steam power.
I think that's enough.
No, that's not it at all. They're saying is that if you visit a properly-constructed web page, that page can cause your computer to execute arbitrary code without any further intervention on your part. You just go to the URL, and a few seconds later you've been owned.
They never had occasion to use this, though.
I know it's not the original Enterprise, but there was that movie where they did pretty much exactly as you described.
My university had a collection of pretty powerful Alphas that served as shell servers, e-mail servers, etc. I thought it would be cool to run SETI on them. However, they were too smart, and had very strict process limits. A process that used more than two minutes of CPU was axed, and was supposed to be run using some bizarre batch processing system. With the batch system, you could run a long-running job for up to twelve hours.
I got to thinking, and tinkering with the system. Oddly, if you had your batch job be a shell script, when your time was up and your job got killed, the program would get killed but the shell script had time to do a little work afterwards. So I coded a little shell script like this:
seti-at-home
submit self to batch queue
And bang, I had a self-resubmitting batch job! That machine just tore through units, too. Then about a day later I got an e-mail from the admin. He was very kind, didn't get angry or anything, just said "Please stop." I briefly argued with him, but I respected his reasonableness and did as he requested.
Sure, SETI is limited, but it's also very cheap. They piggyback on the Aricebo telescope while it's doing other observations, and basically don't really get in people's way. The whole reason for the SETI@Home project is because they didn't have enough funding to get "real" computer time.
Compare this to the proposals being floated to search for earth-like planets around other stars: pairs of big space-based telescopes linked using unbelievably sophisticated equipment, doing interferometry, and costing at least hundreds of millions of dollars. It's a completely different problem.
This is a good idea, which I forgot about when I made my other post. I don't know what difficulties might be involved in making an image in this situation, but it's probably going to be easier than building a telescope that's 500 million km in diameter.
Let's assume there are some aliens out there who want to solve the Kennedy assassination for us next year. At that time, the light will be 42 years out. Assume they want to observe visual light with a resolution of half a meter, which should be enough for a skilled analyst to decide whether the guy on the grassy knoll is carrying a rifle or just a camera.
Unless I flubbed up the calculations somewhere, which is possible, you'd need a telescope with a diameter of 480 million kilometers. Or you'd need two gigantic telescopes 480 million km apart, kept within nanometers of their required position, in order to do interferometry. We don't even have any idea of how to begin to think about designing such a beast. It is theoretically possible, but not within any reasonable realm of practicality for a long, long time.
If it's any comfort, the concept of "now" over those distances is meaningless in the context of General Relativity.