When reading the title i was expecting non religious people to be miffed by the intrusion of religious fanfiction in their stuff. Well, it was the other way around. But i know next to nothing to seperheroes and the public interested in them.
Isn't all sort of advert a good advert ? Coudln't they sell the comic surfing over a wave of comical christfags whining ? For the fun of it ?
I mostly agree with you. I learned on a commodore 64.
But i have to commend the ones learning on a Timex Sinclair or a raspberry pi. The C64 had tons of (mostly pirated) games. You did a lot of gaming, a little bit of hacking to cheat and a little bit of programming. But they were mainly gaming machines and that is what the kids enjoy.
A raspberry pi on another hand... Nice toy for nerds like yours truly but how many kids are going to play games on it ?
Besides most people need formal training. A cool gaming computer will put many feet on the ladder but for most they won't be enough. It worked for you because you were very resourceful.
Unfortunately, they won't. I have been told it has something to do with being kids. Until they do wise up, you can put them in large concentration camps. Or let them join a profession where judgment is superfluous. Like the police.
Another solution is not to give kids unsupervised internet access. My computer did not have internet when i was a kid, and it still wasn't in my room.
Whether this plan will come into effect remains to be seen.
But if they displace coal generated electricity by gas plants, i won't be impressed. Especially if they choose faster plants over combined cycle (they pollute less than a combination of classical gas + wind turbines but i do not expect the greens to accept that easily). They will still emit much more greenhouse gases per capita than the French.
If i was a betting person i would put money on gas greenwashed by subsidized wind and solar.
The Germans (And to a lesser extent the Spaniards) are struggling to manage the variability of their renewable electricity. Are they planning to modernize their grid so central European countries do not have to carry their power from on side of Germany or another ?
Seen from afar, i also find the power of public opinion in what are essentially technical matters frightening. Can the administration act as a counterweight to the politicians ?
Both Ariane 62 and Ariane 64 are optimized to launch commercial payload in Low Earth Orbit. A bit light for the moon; That is if ArianeGroup succeed to build them as planned. Ariane 5 is still the launcher that sends the most commercial payloads for the moments (do not forget it can launch 2 satellites in one go). But its days are numbered.
Besides, ArianeGroup builds rockets. Arianespace commercializes them along other rockets like VEGA or the Russian Soyouz Fregat. The ESA is the European Space agency and is some sort of NASA with a lower budget. As a previous poster explained, it is not a body of the EU and has non-EU members in it like Switzerland and Canada; Canada has some kind of special status while not being a full member.
Three different entities.
And such plans shouldn't be taken too seriously. It is probably an attempt at getting the European states to finance launches. They are often not adopted beyond preliminary studies. The problem of the Europeans is the lack of ambitions of their political caste and a pork mentality even worse than in the USA.
Because you cannot always displace the energy into the grid, precisely. In Europe at least they have massive peaks of overproduction of wind power they have to get rid of by selling it at negative prices. Totally not dispatchable. And the reversible hydroelectric plants ability to store electricity is overwhelmed. In the bargain, it is often the nuke plants that reduce their output so it is totally useless.
And in the U.S. the different electricity grids are not even well connected.
Hence a demand for electricity storage. In huge quantities. And for cheap.
In theory, i am pro public transportation. This is probably a good measure.
But, a common transportation cannot be better than the people riding in it. And you would have to pay me well to make me use the public transport in Paris again. Or go to Paris tout court. I do not blame the RATP. It is just there are too many smelly, rude and uneducated people in them. When i was living in Brussels, i avoided public transport because of that. A girlfriend of mine bought a car because being groped there made her allergic to common transportation. Even if driving there is uncomfortable she wouldn't have any of it. Not with "those people".
It can be a turn off. If you want to make public transit appealing, you have to educate the public. People matter. You can build very good systems but if you do not have the right people in them it will not work.
I second those who said two wheels rock. I never biked in Paris but biking can be very efficient and a pleasant workout. But it is difficult without the right infrastructure and mindset. People are often deterred by the traffic and bike theft. Society as a whole would gain a lot by taking bicycles more seriously.
You are on a website open to comments. That is probably a magnifying glass where the nutty people, whatever their "side" is, are overrepresented.
Besides, badass female characters in video games aren't new. We had them before Lara Croft or even Carla from Monkey Island. Polemics surrounding SWJs are. I wonder what will happen when In The Valley Of Gods will be released. Especially with the kind of reputation Sean Vanaman gave to Campo Santo.
I have not bothered with my local greens but where i came form (Some tiny country in Yurop) the greens were in love with natural gas. Funny. It probably has to do with combined cycle plants fast enough to be paired with intermittent energy sources that cannot be dispatched. Like the wind turbines they are fond of.
It is not very far from what i have done. I do not want my phone to collect data on where i go so i do my shopping and most of my biking without it. So in affect i have zero phone under such circumstances.
And as other posters said, this is no news. My Samsung phone has lots of crud i cannot uninstall. I never had a facebook account but the SSD space wasted is annoying. One gig for microsoft stuff i will never use.
I may buy a flip phone when the need to replace it arises. Or maybe stop using a mobile phone for personal uses altogether.
Under their rules, Sokal's hoax should have been punished.
The reactions of these academics (The ones who try to punish the people who did the hoax) is clumsy because it highlights their own intellectual mediocrity and eventually the poor value of their entire field if this procedure ends up being approved by the profession. They should thank Boghossian for exposing reviewers as frauds and claim they would not have been caught by such a hoax.
But they aren't even smart enough for this. They will pass for people trying to protect a scam at the expense of dumb college "students".
Social studies already have a very poor reputation.
Russian BN600 and BN800 do work already.Breeders would be a neat solution if nuclear energy was used more widely. But since the sector stagnates, there is no shortage of fuel to be spent in the classical way so not enough incentives to build such devices.
One of the well known by-products of reprocessing is plutonium, which has civilian uses. Right now, as i write this comment, a space probe is preparing to observe a very distant Kuiper Belt object nicknamed Ultima Thule. That probe uses electricity that comes from a Radioisotope Thermal Generator that is fuelled by plutonium. More news after the 1st of December 2019.:)
Molten salt reactors are a very interesting concept (You can do molten salt reactors with uranium too). But there are several technical hurdles to overcome. They are not necessarily nuclear. Some have to do with sustaining higher pressures and solving metallurgy challenges.
Nothing that seems scientifically undoable but huge investments would be required and private companies are simply not going to invest the billions needed. And industrialists will focus their efforts on the technologies that already exist.
I hear left and right about diverse experiments financed by the public but we are way short of the mark.
I still have one. 32 bits celeron working OK with a small Linux distro. I use it as a calculator for lab related stuff. Back in the day, a Linux compatible portable computer sold for cheap without the Microsoft tax was big news.
It is not cheap. It is actually extremely expensive save a few exceptional cases. That is why it is heavily subsidised by different mechanisms. It isn't cleaner in the case of France because it rarely substitutes fossil fuel consumption. It is often the nuclear plants which are slowed down which has zero to negative environmental impact. (A little bit more Xenon pollution in the reactor is all what you achieve).
And besides it generates electricity when you do not need it, without meaningful means of storing it and you sometimes must get rid of it selling it at negative prices to avoid to damage your electricity network.
The day we invent revolutionary means of storing electricity at low cost, that may change. But we are nowhere near that.
Now that i am at it: Solar works best as thermal solar: to heat water. Because heat is stored more easily than electricity and if you have an excess heat, you will not pollute a global infrastructure with it. Just mix it with cold water when you take your shower. You can even use it as heating. THAT is a case where renewables do indeed reduce fossil fuel consumption. But Halas it isn't cheap everywhere.
But it is widely used in some countries and it has a measurable impact in oil consumption. Because heating and heating water is a non trivial item in energy consumption.
Instead of closing nuclear plants you could use their steam as cogen to heat buildings or power to some degree some industrial installations. It isn't cheap either because you have to dig trenches and regulate the stuff but there is a nuclear heating in some parts of Moscow. Roughly half of the heat of a thermal plant is lost. It could be used elsewhere to consume less primary energy. And heating is often generated by fossil fuels.
A lot of potential is lost by not isolating correctly housing....
Much better ways to spend money than to subsidise wind and photovoltaic.
Because of the parent poster had just explained to you: "The cost of legal and bureaucratic issues related to nukes, due to irrational hysteria, has gone up."
Was it that hard to understand !?
Besides, when it come to manage large industrial infrastructures, the Brits can easily become a bit.. weird. Let's say they love to listen to their accountants and they resist to whatever their engineers suggest. So they tend to suffer more from delays, cost overruns, bad supervision and "cost saving" experimental dead ends and sometimes part of the work must be done several times until some manager accepts to do things the "normal" way.
It is by no means a problem specific to nuclear plants.
About Finland, i do not know much. But legal norms around nukes have been strengthened sharply. In the bargain, the more or less deregulated electricity market is not in favour of big power plants. Whether they are nuclear or not. And nukes are more efficient when they are big.
That said, there is research towards putting smaller and more easy to sell nuclear plants. More compatible with Europeans economical beliefs. But from a pure engineering point of view, they are less economical.
Which means i have heard of this declaration elsewhere and in other contexts. In short, nobody in the energy sector takes it seriously. France in not Germany and their administration is a more efficient counterweight in face of the public opinion. And nobody there wants to end up like Germany in regard to energy.
They know they are close to their optimum with roughly 80% nuke and 20% hydroelectric. One part of the hydroelectric power being in fact nuke electricity pumped in reversible hydro plants. The Cour Des Comptes, their equivalent of the general accounting office is screaming when they see the economics of subsidies towards wind and solar, especially wind.
So, all those public schedules are probably unrealisable bullshit to win the votes of the uneducated. And Macron probably knows explaining that, if that ever happens, will be the problem of someone else.
When i talk with researchers in the non-scam energy sector, i often have the impression they wait for the hippy generation to croak so more rational policies can be enacted.
"If we have billions of people with a high-bandwidth link to an AI extension of themselves, it would actually make everyone hyper-smart."
I am afraid most of us would become immensely powerfully idiotic. Most humans are probably born as smart as your good scientist or good writer. Like most people are born with a body with the potential to be an athlete.
It is just most people have not desire for excellence. They are not educated that way. Our problem is not that much a lack of brain processing power. We already have intelligence magnifying tools. Take writing for example. Wonderful things have indeed been written and that is not over. But most people won't bother with books and plenty of magazines with stories about celebrities are sold. Internet is used to watch porn and hurl insults to each other, etc...
Tools and system are fine and all. But you need the right people to do nice things with them. We are not there yet.
No. And i would call my lawyer to see if i can negotiate some sort of compensation for being fired although i doubt i would get any. I probably would get another similarly paid job afterwards but after a long negotiation period. I would have to live and eventually finish that mortgage on savings between jobs.
I am sorry but there are tons of people who read and write crud all the time. Published crud will be cheaper that is all.
I recall the interview of some guy form a French recording company. He was explaining that he was making dance album with one guy paid to make quickly rhythms and mixed parts of nonsensical sentences uttered by a female singer paid a flat fee.
He added "Our approach may sound cynical but this is how we make money we use later to produce real music made by real artists".
Except i do not expect Amazon to use the generated money to finance great writing.
Slashdot Mirror
When reading the title i was expecting non religious people to be miffed by the intrusion of religious fanfiction in their stuff. Well, it was the other way around. But i know next to nothing to seperheroes and the public interested in them.
Isn't all sort of advert a good advert ? Coudln't they sell the comic surfing over a wave of comical christfags whining ? For the fun of it ?
I mostly agree with you. I learned on a commodore 64.
But i have to commend the ones learning on a Timex Sinclair or a raspberry pi. The C64 had tons of (mostly pirated) games. You did a lot of gaming, a little bit of hacking to cheat and a little bit of programming. But they were mainly gaming machines and that is what the kids enjoy.
A raspberry pi on another hand... Nice toy for nerds like yours truly but how many kids are going to play games on it ?
Besides most people need formal training. A cool gaming computer will put many feet on the ladder but for most they won't be enough. It worked for you because you were very resourceful.
Kids need to wise up
Unfortunately, they won't. I have been told it has something to do with being kids. Until they do wise up, you can put them in large concentration camps. Or let them join a profession where judgment is superfluous. Like the police.
Another solution is not to give kids unsupervised internet access. My computer did not have internet when i was a kid, and it still wasn't in my room.
It has worked quite well for the French.
Whether this plan will come into effect remains to be seen.
But if they displace coal generated electricity by gas plants, i won't be impressed. Especially if they choose faster plants over combined cycle (they pollute less than a combination of classical gas + wind turbines but i do not expect the greens to accept that easily). They will still emit much more greenhouse gases per capita than the French.
If i was a betting person i would put money on gas greenwashed by subsidized wind and solar.
The Germans (And to a lesser extent the Spaniards) are struggling to manage the variability of their renewable electricity. Are they planning to modernize their grid so central European countries do not have to carry their power from on side of Germany or another ?
Seen from afar, i also find the power of public opinion in what are essentially technical matters frightening. Can the administration act as a counterweight to the politicians ?
He or she probably modded you down "-1 overrated" because there is no "- 1 batshit insane" option.
Both Ariane 62 and Ariane 64 are optimized to launch commercial payload in Low Earth Orbit. A bit light for the moon; That is if ArianeGroup succeed to build them as planned. Ariane 5 is still the launcher that sends the most commercial payloads for the moments (do not forget it can launch 2 satellites in one go). But its days are numbered.
Besides, ArianeGroup builds rockets. Arianespace commercializes them along other rockets like VEGA or the Russian Soyouz Fregat. The ESA is the European Space agency and is some sort of NASA with a lower budget. As a previous poster explained, it is not a body of the EU and has non-EU members in it like Switzerland and Canada; Canada has some kind of special status while not being a full member.
Three different entities.
And such plans shouldn't be taken too seriously. It is probably an attempt at getting the European states to finance launches. They are often not adopted beyond preliminary studies. The problem of the Europeans is the lack of ambitions of their political caste and a pork mentality even worse than in the USA.
Because you cannot always displace the energy into the grid, precisely. In Europe at least they have massive peaks of overproduction of wind power they have to get rid of by selling it at negative prices. Totally not dispatchable. And the reversible hydroelectric plants ability to store electricity is overwhelmed. In the bargain, it is often the nuke plants that reduce their output so it is totally useless.
And in the U.S. the different electricity grids are not even well connected.
Hence a demand for electricity storage. In huge quantities. And for cheap.
Unfortunately, it is not going to happen soon.
In theory, i am pro public transportation. This is probably a good measure.
But, a common transportation cannot be better than the people riding in it. And you would have to pay me well to make me use the public transport in Paris again. Or go to Paris tout court. I do not blame the RATP. It is just there are too many smelly, rude and uneducated people in them. When i was living in Brussels, i avoided public transport because of that. A girlfriend of mine bought a car because being groped there made her allergic to common transportation. Even if driving there is uncomfortable she wouldn't have any of it. Not with "those people".
It can be a turn off. If you want to make public transit appealing, you have to educate the public. People matter. You can build very good systems but if you do not have the right people in them it will not work.
I second those who said two wheels rock. I never biked in Paris but biking can be very efficient and a pleasant workout. But it is difficult without the right infrastructure and mindset. People are often deterred by the traffic and bike theft. Society as a whole would gain a lot by taking bicycles more seriously.
You are on a website open to comments. That is probably a magnifying glass where the nutty people, whatever their "side" is, are overrepresented.
Besides, badass female characters in video games aren't new. We had them before Lara Croft or even Carla from Monkey Island. Polemics surrounding SWJs are. I wonder what will happen when In The Valley Of Gods will be released. Especially with the kind of reputation Sean Vanaman gave to Campo Santo.
Why not a non smartphone. ? :)
I have not bothered with my local greens but where i came form (Some tiny country in Yurop) the greens were in love with natural gas. Funny. It probably has to do with combined cycle plants fast enough to be paired with intermittent energy sources that cannot be dispatched. Like the wind turbines they are fond of.
It is not very far from what i have done. I do not want my phone to collect data on where i go so i do my shopping and most of my biking without it. So in affect i have zero phone under such circumstances.
And as other posters said, this is no news. My Samsung phone has lots of crud i cannot uninstall. I never had a facebook account but the SSD space wasted is annoying. One gig for microsoft stuff i will never use.
I may buy a flip phone when the need to replace it arises. Or maybe stop using a mobile phone for personal uses altogether.
Under their rules, Sokal's hoax should have been punished.
The reactions of these academics (The ones who try to punish the people who did the hoax) is clumsy because it highlights their own intellectual mediocrity and eventually the poor value of their entire field if this procedure ends up being approved by the profession. They should thank Boghossian for exposing reviewers as frauds and claim they would not have been caught by such a hoax.
But they aren't even smart enough for this. They will pass for people trying to protect a scam at the expense of dumb college "students".
Social studies already have a very poor reputation.
For a quick overview of what can be done with reprocessing you can google " breeder reactors"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Russian BN600 and BN800 do work already.Breeders would be a neat solution if nuclear energy was used more widely. But since the sector stagnates, there is no shortage of fuel to be spent in the classical way so not enough incentives to build such devices.
One of the well known by-products of reprocessing is plutonium, which has civilian uses. Right now, as i write this comment, a space probe is preparing to observe a very distant Kuiper Belt object nicknamed Ultima Thule. That probe uses electricity that comes from a Radioisotope Thermal Generator that is fuelled by plutonium. More news after the 1st of December 2019. :)
Not before long i am afraid.
Molten salt reactors are a very interesting concept (You can do molten salt reactors with uranium too). But there are several technical hurdles to overcome. They are not necessarily nuclear. Some have to do with sustaining higher pressures and solving metallurgy challenges.
Nothing that seems scientifically undoable but huge investments would be required and private companies are simply not going to invest the billions needed. And industrialists will focus their efforts on the technologies that already exist.
I hear left and right about diverse experiments financed by the public but we are way short of the mark.
His netbook move was not vain.
I still have one. 32 bits celeron working OK with a small Linux distro. I use it as a calculator for lab related stuff. Back in the day, a Linux compatible portable computer sold for cheap without the Microsoft tax was big news.
It is not cheap. It is actually extremely expensive save a few exceptional cases. That is why it is heavily subsidised by different mechanisms. It isn't cleaner in the case of France because it rarely substitutes fossil fuel consumption. It is often the nuclear plants which are slowed down which has zero to negative environmental impact. (A little bit more Xenon pollution in the reactor is all what you achieve).
And besides it generates electricity when you do not need it, without meaningful means of storing it and you sometimes must get rid of it selling it at negative prices to avoid to damage your electricity network.
The day we invent revolutionary means of storing electricity at low cost, that may change. But we are nowhere near that.
Now that i am at it: Solar works best as thermal solar: to heat water. Because heat is stored more easily than electricity and if you have an excess heat, you will not pollute a global infrastructure with it. Just mix it with cold water when you take your shower. You can even use it as heating. THAT is a case where renewables do indeed reduce fossil fuel consumption. But Halas it isn't cheap everywhere.
But it is widely used in some countries and it has a measurable impact in oil consumption. Because heating and heating water is a non trivial item in energy consumption.
Instead of closing nuclear plants you could use their steam as cogen to heat buildings or power to some degree some industrial installations. It isn't cheap either because you have to dig trenches and regulate the stuff but there is a nuclear heating in some parts of Moscow. Roughly half of the heat of a thermal plant is lost. It could be used elsewhere to consume less primary energy. And heating is often generated by fossil fuels.
A lot of potential is lost by not isolating correctly housing....
Much better ways to spend money than to subsidise wind and photovoltaic.
Because of the parent poster had just explained to you: "The cost of legal and bureaucratic issues related to nukes, due to irrational hysteria, has gone up."
Was it that hard to understand !?
Besides, when it come to manage large industrial infrastructures, the Brits can easily become a bit.. weird. Let's say they love to listen to their accountants and they resist to whatever their engineers suggest. So they tend to suffer more from delays, cost overruns, bad supervision and "cost saving" experimental dead ends and sometimes part of the work must be done several times until some manager accepts to do things the "normal" way.
It is by no means a problem specific to nuclear plants.
About Finland, i do not know much. But legal norms around nukes have been strengthened sharply. In the bargain, the more or less deregulated electricity market is not in favour of big power plants. Whether they are nuclear or not. And nukes are more efficient when they are big.
That said, there is research towards putting smaller and more easy to sell nuclear plants. More compatible with Europeans economical beliefs. But from a pure engineering point of view, they are less economical.
I too speak both French and bullshit.
Which means i have heard of this declaration elsewhere and in other contexts. In short, nobody in the energy sector takes it seriously. France in not Germany and their administration is a more efficient counterweight in face of the public opinion. And nobody there wants to end up like Germany in regard to energy.
They know they are close to their optimum with roughly 80% nuke and 20% hydroelectric. One part of the hydroelectric power being in fact nuke electricity pumped in reversible hydro plants. The Cour Des Comptes, their equivalent of the general accounting office is screaming when they see the economics of subsidies towards wind and solar, especially wind.
So, all those public schedules are probably unrealisable bullshit to win the votes of the uneducated. And Macron probably knows explaining that, if that ever happens, will be the problem of someone else.
When i talk with researchers in the non-scam energy sector, i often have the impression they wait for the hippy generation to croak so more rational policies can be enacted.
"If we have billions of people with a high-bandwidth link to an AI extension of themselves, it would actually make everyone hyper-smart."
I am afraid most of us would become immensely powerfully idiotic. Most humans are probably born as smart as your good scientist or good writer. Like most people are born with a body with the potential to be an athlete.
It is just most people have not desire for excellence. They are not educated that way. Our problem is not that much a lack of brain processing power. We already have intelligence magnifying tools. Take writing for example. Wonderful things have indeed been written and that is not over. But most people won't bother with books and plenty of magazines with stories about celebrities are sold. Internet is used to watch porn and hurl insults to each other, etc...
Tools and system are fine and all. But you need the right people to do nice things with them. We are not there yet.
I do not have access to TFA but form the summary i understand they would be used as tracking devices. Not to replace or improve over biometrics then.
"Would you let your employer microchip you?"
No. And i would call my lawyer to see if i can negotiate some sort of compensation for being fired although i doubt i would get any. I probably would get another similarly paid job afterwards but after a long negotiation period. I would have to live and eventually finish that mortgage on savings between jobs.
I am sorry but there are tons of people who read and write crud all the time. Published crud will be cheaper that is all.
I recall the interview of some guy form a French recording company. He was explaining that he was making dance album with one guy paid to make quickly rhythms and mixed parts of nonsensical sentences uttered by a female singer paid a flat fee.
He added "Our approach may sound cynical but this is how we make money we use later to produce real music made by real artists".
Except i do not expect Amazon to use the generated money to finance great writing.
So, the mechanically written books for the masses imagined in Orwell's 1984 may become a reality ? If i recall well it was called "pornosex".
Well, you can already automate generation of postmodern essays so why not ?
On of the many: http://www.elsewhere.org/journ...