I'm not sure how this could be enforced - power outages often come along with another disaster (earthquake, hurricane, etc), so in many cases merchants may not be able to even travel to their store, or the store may be severely understaffed.
Same way you handle all disaster readiness scenarios... you check on them in advance and confirm compliance of the ability to do so BEFORE the disaster comes.
And how do you check that a store is staffed adequately BEFORE the disaster strikes? Do you require a certain number of employees to live within walking distance? Do you ensure that they live in houses that are outside of a flood zone (or meet some minimal resistance to seismic hazards?) What do you do when half the town is asked to evacuate? Do the cashiers get special ID cards that let them stay behind to help serve remaining residents and disaster workers?
Also, for big-box stores with lots of inventory, there's a security concern with having a lot of cash on-site when electric cash recyclers and other forms of securely storing money may not be working, and armored car service may not be running.
So you're seriously saying that its a problem because they make too much money... I would love to have those problems, though they really are easy to solve.
If you want to have that problem, try working the graveyard shift at a 7/11 in a bad part of town - you'll see what it's like to have too much money, and people who are desperate to have it.
What is your solution to having too much cash on hand? Even corner supermarkets have problems with too much cash. What do you tell the minimum wage workers who are federally mandated to work during a disaster "Dear employees, you'll have $50,000 of cash on hand, no way to get it to the bank, police will be unable to respond to a robbery, so you're pretty much on your own in a disaster. Good luck"
Not having 'big' box stores in the first place would be a good start.
Good luck convincing most of the USA that the convenience that they've become accustomed to is no longer good for them. That went over great in NYC when they tried to ban large sized drinks.
Not that I think any of these things should be mandated. If the power is out for any length of time the store will compensate. People are going to want to make money and sell things,
Do you really think Home Depot cares if 5 stores out of 2000 are closed for a week due to a hurricane? They'll sell plenty after the power comes back on, no need to spend a hundred thousand dollars on a backup generator to keep a store open when they don't even know if employees are going to come in.
believe it or not, this was actually possible without cash registers at all at one point in time. This is actually what I use as the start of my argument as to why calculators should be illegal.
Yeah, well people did a lot of things before modern technology, but that doesn't mean things were better back then.
but they couldn't get their cash register system up and were unable to make any sales (not even cash sales) until the registers came back up. It took most of a day to get the registers working.
This is bothersome... I would favor a law, that in order to be a licensed retailer: one of the things you must do is show that you are prepared to operate during an emergency where electricity or communication services are unavailable. To be allowed the privilege of providing publicly accessible space and offering goods for sale on a regular basis, you must do this.
I'm not sure how this could be enforced - power outages often come along with another disaster (earthquake, hurricane, etc), so in many cases merchants may not be able to even travel to their store, or the store may be severely understaffed.
Also, for big-box stores with lots of inventory, there's a security concern with having a lot of cash on-site when electric cash recyclers and other forms of securely storing money may not be working, and armored car service may not be running.
Are you suggesting that Bitcoin is as safe as the USD? One of those still works when the lights go out...
Don't count on your paper US dollars working when the lights go out. I was in an area with an extended power outage -- the grocery store down the street had emergency generators to keep the freezers and lights on... but they couldn't get their cash register system up and were unable to make any sales (not even cash sales) until the registers came back up. It took most of a day to get the registers working.
This is a very simple problem to solve. Just make the authentication cookie contain a hash of several lines of key data (MD5 or whatever is considered secure today). The key data should include your password, IP address, and the cookie expiration time. It could also include your browser ID string and other things that might be useful to keep consistent.
The only problem with the above as described is that it requires the server to save your plaintext password, but the same scheme would work with a hash of the password. The cookie could even be generated by the browser without interacting with the web site at all, except that it would need to know the IP address as seen by the web site (NAT makes that difficult to know).
If you leave out the IP address from the hash, then it is more convenient for computers that move frequently, but is obviously less secure.
If you use the IP address as part of the authentication, every time my employer (or ISP) NATs my traffic through a different IP address, I'll have to log on again.
This is particularly troublesome with cell phones, my phone might get a dozen different IP addresses a day as I transition from home to the cellular network to various hot spots on my commute to work and back again.
thepiratebay.se has a bunch of NON DRM books also. Plus a price you can't beat.
ThePirateBay is free if your integrity has no value.
Integrity? When I buy a book, I want to read it on all of my devices, not just the one that supports whatever DRM the book came with. If I have to run a program of dubious legality to strip the DRM from my book, I may as well just get it from a source that provides it in an unencumbered format in the first place.
I think the effect it would have on the public is to wonder why he is putting the country at risk by eschewing his expensive protective limo and is instead riding around in a glorified bicycle that provides no protection at all from gunfire or explosives, while being surrounded by a half dozen 8 MPG SUV's.
Or if you're suggesting that he should suspend the laws of physics to allow his current limo to be solar powered (even at night), then yeah, I think he should do that.
Well, solar the SUVs, as well!
Solar is a SUPPLEMENT, not a 100% powering source. The freakin' vehicle doesn't drive around for more than a few miles or for more than a short amount of time. Hell, that's perfect for solar and battery!
Really? What fraction of an escort SUV's power would be provided by a solar panel on the vehicle? Would it ever repay the energy that went into building the panel?
Beats the people that have to drive 50+ miles to and from work everyday in sticky highway traffic "going green".
Except that the commuter that has a 50 mile commute knows that his 50 mile commute will be 50 miles every day. He doesn't have to be prepared to make an unscheduled 150 mile trip from a public speaking event to Camp David because an airplane is flying toward the Whitehouse, and his life isn't in jeopardy every time he stops to refuel.
Of course, you needn't go Solar (or even electric) to be "green", there are lots of hybrids, plug-in hybrids, and high mileage diesels out there to choose from.
My point is to LEAD BY EXAMPLE.
And you know what, while I'm at it... You're saying that the guzzling SUVs and diesel Presidential limo serve a purpose for protection. If that's the case, everyone can say that their fuel-wasting vehicles serve a purpose of some kind for their protection and make up reasons why.
People already come up with all sorts of reasons to justify their choice of vehicle -- you just did it by bringing up a 50+ mile commute when most Americans have a 32 mile or less commute, well within the range of current electric vehicles.
Are you suggesting that some purposes can be justified but the ones of the citizens can't?
Yes, I'm suggesting that some use cases are better suited for electric vehicles than others. Like long-haul trucks. And commuters that have 100 mile daily commutes -- but that doesn't mean that I don't think the guy with a long commute shouldn't drive a fuel efficient vehicle.
If you're not saying that, then what in the hell is the problem with going ENERGY EFFICIENT to set an example?
Because pretending to be "green" is worse than actually being green? Spending $50,000 to put some solar panels on the roof of an SUV to supply 5% of its energy is just a hollow gesture. Fighting the strong oil lobby by increasing CAFE standards by just 1mph across 10M cars sold annually is a real gesture, not just window dressing.
I just don't get why people have to argue with me on this one. The point wasn't that I'm the begin-all, end-all of decisions. I'm saying that leaders lead and people follow. It's basic logic. I don't understand why mods and comments have to argue with me on this.
Because you're asking me to pay for some expensive "green theater" that accomplishes nothing in reality and is less "green" than the way it is now.
This is not a President who leads by example; he's one who leads by rhetoric and simple mind-capturing speaking methods.
If a solar vehicle were actually to be used by the P-rez, it's hard to say what effect it would have on the public, but my gut feeling is it would encourage heavy-pocketed individuals to try and 'catch up' to what the top dogs (gov't) are doing.
Trickle-down behavior ensues. Just a theory.
I think the effect it would have on the public is to wonder why he is putting the country at risk by eschewing his expensive protective limo and is instead riding around in a glorified bicycle that provides no protection at all from gunfire or explosives, while being surrounded by a half dozen 8 MPG SUV's.
Or if you're suggesting that he should suspend the laws of physics to allow his current limo to be solar powered (even at night), then yeah, I think he should do that.
I thought this was Slashdot - news for nerds and all that.
A simple back of the envelope calculation will tell you why the presidential limo (or any practical car) is not solar powered.
It *could* be battery powered, charged by a solar power station, but I'd rather not put yet another $100K - $200K of taxpayer money into the presidential limo (which already costs $300K) to add enough batteries to give that heavy car a reasonable range. Plus the presidential limo is not a good use-case for current electric power technology. It's not like the President uses it only to commute from the Whitehouse to the Capital building every day -- it's role includes the possibility of long-distance travel and every stop is a potential security risk.
era, (noun); a long period of time, often marked by distinctive characteristic events.
What did you think the word meant?
And yes, I would consider most US nuclear reactors to be at least borderline Soviet-era, though probably with better control and safety systems than soviet-built reactors. They're old, creaky reactors being operated long past their scheduled end of life, and bear only a passing resemblance to modern reactors.
Well, it just seemed like a weird way to say "20 or more years old" -- usually when people say "Soviet-era", they mean that it's associated with the Soviet Union. I.e. "Soviet era T-54 tanks" or "Soviet era nuclear missiles".
Referring to USA designed reactors as "Soviet era" just because they were designed when the Soviet Union still existed is a bit like saying "The Smithsonian Museum has the Ottoman Era Declaration of Independence on display".
4 days is apparently not enough. Have you heard of Fukushima? They didn't build it as a pile of wreckage to start with you know.
I don't know if you'd heard, but there was a major earthquake and a huge Tsunami that took away all of the redundant power systems. It wasn't a failure of the cooling system that caused the
A redundant cooling system doesn't do much good when you have no way to power it.
If you're suggesting that the power plant should have been built to survive the exact disaster that struck it, then you'll get no argument from me, but it's a lot easier to design something to protect against past (and known), disasters than to design it for an unknown disaster that will strike 40 years into the future.
I fully agree that overly powerful cars should be banned from the roads. Or at least tamed down to "normal" car levels through a "track switch" that can enable the full performance of the car for use at the track (like the Bugatti Veyron's "high speed mode" that can only be activated while stopped with a special key). They are a hazard on the roads - I don't think anyone owns a 350+ HP sports car to drive in a safe and legal manner all the time, and the car commercials (with their trained drivers on a closed course) make that point too.
Man...are you ever the buzzkill. I'm guessing we shouldn't be able to have corvettes or porsches, or be able to mod our cars in any fashion to go over 55mph to suit you?
Where's the fun in that? If you can't handle a performance car, don't get one...but why rain on the parade of those who can?
I'm not saying you shouldn't have fun, you should absolutely have fun on closed courses (work with your car club to shut down those fun mountain roads for your uninterupted enjoyment), just don't have your fun at the expense of innocent drivers that use the roads for transportation. And I say that as someone who lost a close friend who was T-boned by a 280Z traveling at high speed through a stop sign -- cops said the 280Z was driving so fast, that it's likely that my friend couldn't even see the car coming around the bend in the road when she entered the intersection.
This was on a curvy country road known to be fun to drive on.
I've actually been SAVED from a number of accidents by having a car with enough performance to get the fuck out of the way of some other idiots on the road that didn't know how to drive and usually, were trying to drive piece of shit cars like they WERE performance cars.
I hear that argument a lot: "I need this powerful car so I can get out of other people's way"... but I've been driving for over 30 years, and in all of that time, there was only once when I had to rely on my vehicle's performance to get out of the way of an accident. And that was when I was on my motorcycle at a stoplight and saw the car approaching from behind at a high rate of speed - I made a quick (and illegal) right turn on red - he squealed to a stop in the middle of the intersection.
Agreed, politics is by far the greatest impediment to deploying small scale nuclear reactors. I'd love to see small scale nuclear reactors deployed on a wide scale, it's the best green technology that we have. If you get down to it you/could/ fit one of those in a clean room. I was speaking more metaphorically than literally in this case.
I think you're on the wrong website - I flippantly ignored the point you were making and corrected something you said, and you didn't call me any names, and even agreed with something I said in a later post.
I think that Slashdot protocol requires that you make a derogatory comment about my mother, or at least attack my virility and/or sexual orientation..
TFA, which has the same headline, ends by mentioning that people point them at pilots in planes taking off or landing. So way to make a misleading headline, networkworld. Not getting the traffic you want?
From TFA:
Commercial grade green and red laser pointers emit energy far beyond what is safe, posing skin, eye and fire hazards.
So what is misleading by saying "Laser Pointers Produce Too Much Energy, Pose Risk For the Careless"? Do you think everyone understands the eye risk of the laser pointed they bought on eBay and understands that aiming it on people risks eye and even skin injury, and that even an errant reflection from a shiny surface has the same danger?
In other news, a report reports that automobiles produce too much energy and poses risks, including death, for the careless.
I fully agree that overly powerful cars should be banned from the roads. Or at least tamed down to "normal" car levels through a "track switch" that can enable the full performance of the car for use at the track (like the Bugatti Veyron's "high speed mode" that can only be activated while stopped with a special key). They are a hazard on the roads - I don't think anyone owns a 350+ HP sports car to drive in a safe and legal manner all the time, and the car commercials (with their trained drivers on a closed course) make that point too.
The difference between overpowered sports cars and overpowered lasers is that it's a lot easier to buy an overpowered laser without knowing that you have one.
Can you? This article was predicting they'd be on sale in less than five years, and was written over four years ago. They appear to be a little behind schedule. Their website (http://www.gen4energy.com/) still talks about everything as being still on the drawing board; no mention of actual deployment or any target dates or milestones.
There's a lot more than physics behind the inability of in newer (and safer) nuclear power plant designs being deployed.
There are other examples of small-scale reactor deployments - like the ones used in nuclear submarines (including the small NR-1), as well as the nuclear reactors used in spacecraft (not something you'd power a neighborhood with, but they are still reactors).
Correct me if I'm wrong, but is not Fukushima in fact a Soviet-era reactor, or nearly so? They could potentially perform massive refitting of the plant, but that's expensive, you're already complaining about the current energy prices
You are wrong. The reactors are Fukushima-I are all USA design BWR's (designed by General Electric, several were manufactured by GE). I'm not sure that "era" means what you think it does...Unless by "Soviet-era" you meant the period of time that the USSR existed? That would put most of the nuclear plants in the USA in the "Soviet-era".
To put it another way: There's already a 100% guaranteed fail-safe in place to keep the stored fuel safe for at least 4 days after a cooling system failure: the physical properties of water.
What secondary system can you build that can beat the reliability of physics? What do you gain by having a secondary cooling system (to offset the doubled installation and operational costs)?
Mistakes, bugs or rodent problems are understandable. But c'mon, we're talking about nuclear power here. I expect at least some redundancy and fail-safety. Unless we're talking about some soviet era facility, I guarantee you that you'll never hear about such a problem on any other nuclear power plant in the world. It's like they didn't learn anything from two years ago. And Tepco is one of the most well-funded companies in Japan. Lack of money and staff shouldn't be a problem. As a guy who lives in Japan I hate Tepco. Thanks to them my power bill is freaking expensive and yet they can't even do a decent job. What a disgrace to Japan.
How much redundancy do you need in a system that stays at safe levels for 4 days after a failure?
I can see having full double or triple redundancy for systems that will result in unsafe conditions in hours or minutes, but for 4 days?
Nature is very good at serving us humility in small bite size portions that can bring great things down. Events like this should remind us that we are mere stewards of the planet and that the rest of the ecosystem will happily take over the best laid plans we have if we let our guard down even a little.
Isn't that the lesson Jeff Goldblum was trying to teach us in Jurassic Park?
No matter how well you design something nature can and will find a way to get in, and it is arrogance in the extreme to assume otherwise. About the only way to avoid something like that is to have a clean room environment, and I'm quite certain that you can't fit a nuclear power plant inside a clean room.
They didn't say that the pools would risk releasing radiation after 4 days, they said:
Tepco said it would have taken several days for temperatures in the pools to have risen above the safe level of 65 degrees Celsius, or 149 degrees Fahrenheit.
The company said that temperatures in the fuel pools would have remained at safe levels for at least four days.
A rise above "safe" levels doesn't necessarily mean radiation release. I don't think there's any danger of radiation release until the water boils down to a level where the rods are exposed (and presumably even in an extended power outage, additional purified water could be added to the pools to maintain water levels).
Rat induced power problems are not uncommon in large industrial plants. All it takes is an unsealed conduit cover while workers take a meal break, and a rat can slip inside. Rats wreaked havoc on network cables (both fiber and copper) at a building I once worked at -- many of the conduit runs were left unsealed by a vendor (or poorly sealed by foam plugs that eventually shrank enough to be displaced by the rodents) and the rats found them convenient for getting around the building (as well as a cozy place to live), and apparently they liked to nibble on cables or their feces+urine degraded the cables enough to cause failure. They ended up replacing almost all of the cables in uncapped conduit (and properly sealing the conduit this time).
What does this mean (if anything) for region-locked movies - can I legally break the region lock (or buy a player that does it) so I can watch a movie I bought overseas?
The real question i'd like answered is for someone to benchmark the GS4 Snapdragon version VS the GS4 Exynos 5 version. If the Exynos version benchmarks higher, I may have to fly out to Europe and pick one up.
Why would you spend considerable money and fly thousands of miles (I'm assuming you're in the USA) to pick up a phone that's faster in synthetic CPU benchmarks but may not be fully compatible with next generation 4G networks here in the USA? What do you do with your phone that requires the fastest possible CPU? And what do you do every 6 months when a faster phone comes out?
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I'm not sure how this could be enforced - power outages often come along with another disaster (earthquake, hurricane, etc), so in many cases merchants may not be able to even travel to their store, or the store may be severely understaffed.
Same way you handle all disaster readiness scenarios ... you check on them in advance and confirm compliance of the ability to do so BEFORE the disaster comes.
And how do you check that a store is staffed adequately BEFORE the disaster strikes? Do you require a certain number of employees to live within walking distance? Do you ensure that they live in houses that are outside of a flood zone (or meet some minimal resistance to seismic hazards?) What do you do when half the town is asked to evacuate? Do the cashiers get special ID cards that let them stay behind to help serve remaining residents and disaster workers?
Also, for big-box stores with lots of inventory, there's a security concern with having a lot of cash on-site when electric cash recyclers and other forms of securely storing money may not be working, and armored car service may not be running.
So you're seriously saying that its a problem because they make too much money ... I would love to have those problems, though they really are easy to solve.
If you want to have that problem, try working the graveyard shift at a 7/11 in a bad part of town - you'll see what it's like to have too much money, and people who are desperate to have it.
What is your solution to having too much cash on hand? Even corner supermarkets have problems with too much cash. What do you tell the minimum wage workers who are federally mandated to work during a disaster "Dear employees, you'll have $50,000 of cash on hand, no way to get it to the bank, police will be unable to respond to a robbery, so you're pretty much on your own in a disaster. Good luck"
Not having 'big' box stores in the first place would be a good start.
Good luck convincing most of the USA that the convenience that they've become accustomed to is no longer good for them. That went over great in NYC when they tried to ban large sized drinks.
Not that I think any of these things should be mandated. If the power is out for any length of time the store will compensate. People are going to want to make money and sell things,
Do you really think Home Depot cares if 5 stores out of 2000 are closed for a week due to a hurricane? They'll sell plenty after the power comes back on, no need to spend a hundred thousand dollars on a backup generator to keep a store open when they don't even know if employees are going to come in.
believe it or not, this was actually possible without cash registers at all at one point in time. This is actually what I use as the start of my argument as to why calculators should be illegal.
Yeah, well people did a lot of things before modern technology, but that doesn't mean things were better back then.
but they couldn't get their cash register system up and were unable to make any sales (not even cash sales) until the registers came back up. It took most of a day to get the registers working.
This is bothersome... I would favor a law, that in order to be a licensed retailer: one of the things you must do is show that you are prepared
to operate during an emergency where electricity or communication services are unavailable.
To be allowed the privilege of providing publicly accessible space and offering goods for sale on a regular basis, you must do this.
I'm not sure how this could be enforced - power outages often come along with another disaster (earthquake, hurricane, etc), so in many cases merchants may not be able to even travel to their store, or the store may be severely understaffed.
Also, for big-box stores with lots of inventory, there's a security concern with having a lot of cash on-site when electric cash recyclers and other forms of securely storing money may not be working, and armored car service may not be running.
Are you suggesting that Bitcoin is as safe as the USD? One of those still works when the lights go out...
Don't count on your paper US dollars working when the lights go out. I was in an area with an extended power outage -- the grocery store down the street had emergency generators to keep the freezers and lights on... but they couldn't get their cash register system up and were unable to make any sales (not even cash sales) until the registers came back up. It took most of a day to get the registers working.
This is a very simple problem to solve. Just make the authentication cookie contain a hash of several lines of key data (MD5 or whatever is considered secure today). The key data should include your password, IP address, and the cookie expiration time. It could also include your browser ID string and other things that might be useful to keep consistent.
The only problem with the above as described is that it requires the server to save your plaintext password, but the same scheme would work with a hash of the password. The cookie could even be generated by the browser without interacting with the web site at all, except that it would need to know the IP address as seen by the web site (NAT makes that difficult to know).
If you leave out the IP address from the hash, then it is more convenient for computers that move frequently, but is obviously less secure.
If you use the IP address as part of the authentication, every time my employer (or ISP) NATs my traffic through a different IP address, I'll have to log on again.
This is particularly troublesome with cell phones, my phone might get a dozen different IP addresses a day as I transition from home to the cellular network to various hot spots on my commute to work and back again.
thepiratebay.se has a bunch of NON DRM books also. Plus a price you can't beat.
ThePirateBay is free if your integrity has no value.
Integrity? When I buy a book, I want to read it on all of my devices, not just the one that supports whatever DRM the book came with. If I have to run a program of dubious legality to strip the DRM from my book, I may as well just get it from a source that provides it in an unencumbered format in the first place.
There is a lack of integrity on both sides.
I think the effect it would have on the public is to wonder why he is putting the country at risk by eschewing his expensive protective limo and is instead riding around in a glorified bicycle that provides no protection at all from gunfire or explosives, while being surrounded by a half dozen 8 MPG SUV's.
Or if you're suggesting that he should suspend the laws of physics to allow his current limo to be solar powered (even at night), then yeah, I think he should do that.
Well, solar the SUVs, as well!
Solar is a SUPPLEMENT, not a 100% powering source. The freakin' vehicle doesn't drive around for more than a few miles or for more than a short amount of time. Hell, that's perfect for solar and battery!
Really? What fraction of an escort SUV's power would be provided by a solar panel on the vehicle? Would it ever repay the energy that went into building the panel?
Beats the people that have to drive 50+ miles to and from work everyday in sticky highway traffic "going green".
Except that the commuter that has a 50 mile commute knows that his 50 mile commute will be 50 miles every day. He doesn't have to be prepared to make an unscheduled 150 mile trip from a public speaking event to Camp David because an airplane is flying toward the Whitehouse, and his life isn't in jeopardy every time he stops to refuel.
Of course, you needn't go Solar (or even electric) to be "green", there are lots of hybrids, plug-in hybrids, and high mileage diesels out there to choose from.
My point is to LEAD BY EXAMPLE.
And you know what, while I'm at it... You're saying that the guzzling SUVs and diesel Presidential limo serve a purpose for protection. If that's the case, everyone can say that their fuel-wasting vehicles serve a purpose of some kind for their protection and make up reasons why.
People already come up with all sorts of reasons to justify their choice of vehicle -- you just did it by bringing up a 50+ mile commute when most Americans have a 32 mile or less commute, well within the range of current electric vehicles.
Are you suggesting that some purposes can be justified but the ones of the citizens can't?
Yes, I'm suggesting that some use cases are better suited for electric vehicles than others. Like long-haul trucks. And commuters that have 100 mile daily commutes -- but that doesn't mean that I don't think the guy with a long commute shouldn't drive a fuel efficient vehicle.
If you're not saying that, then what in the hell is the problem with going ENERGY EFFICIENT to set an example?
Because pretending to be "green" is worse than actually being green? Spending $50,000 to put some solar panels on the roof of an SUV to supply 5% of its energy is just a hollow gesture. Fighting the strong oil lobby by increasing CAFE standards by just 1mph across 10M cars sold annually is a real gesture, not just window dressing.
I just don't get why people have to argue with me on this one. The point wasn't that I'm the begin-all, end-all of decisions. I'm saying that leaders lead and people follow. It's basic logic. I don't understand why mods and comments have to argue with me on this.
Because you're asking me to pay for some expensive "green theater" that accomplishes nothing in reality and is less "green" than the way it is now.
This is not a President who leads by example; he's one who leads by rhetoric and simple mind-capturing speaking methods.
If a solar vehicle were actually to be used by the P-rez, it's hard to say what effect it would have on the public, but my gut feeling is it would encourage heavy-pocketed individuals to try and 'catch up' to what the top dogs (gov't) are doing.
Trickle-down behavior ensues. Just a theory.
I think the effect it would have on the public is to wonder why he is putting the country at risk by eschewing his expensive protective limo and is instead riding around in a glorified bicycle that provides no protection at all from gunfire or explosives, while being surrounded by a half dozen 8 MPG SUV's.
Or if you're suggesting that he should suspend the laws of physics to allow his current limo to be solar powered (even at night), then yeah, I think he should do that.
I thought this was Slashdot - news for nerds and all that.
A simple back of the envelope calculation will tell you why the presidential limo (or any practical car) is not solar powered.
It *could* be battery powered, charged by a solar power station, but I'd rather not put yet another $100K - $200K of taxpayer money into the presidential limo (which already costs $300K) to add enough batteries to give that heavy car a reasonable range. Plus the presidential limo is not a good use-case for current electric power technology. It's not like the President uses it only to commute from the Whitehouse to the Capital building every day -- it's role includes the possibility of long-distance travel and every stop is a potential security risk.
era, (noun); a long period of time, often marked by distinctive characteristic events.
What did you think the word meant?
And yes, I would consider most US nuclear reactors to be at least borderline Soviet-era, though probably with better control and safety systems than soviet-built reactors. They're old, creaky reactors being operated long past their scheduled end of life, and bear only a passing resemblance to modern reactors.
Well, it just seemed like a weird way to say "20 or more years old" -- usually when people say "Soviet-era", they mean that it's associated with the Soviet Union. I.e. "Soviet era T-54 tanks" or "Soviet era nuclear missiles".
Referring to USA designed reactors as "Soviet era" just because they were designed when the Soviet Union still existed is a bit like saying "The Smithsonian Museum has the Ottoman Era Declaration of Independence on display".
4 days is apparently not enough. Have you heard of Fukushima? They didn't build it as a pile of wreckage to start with you know.
I don't know if you'd heard, but there was a major earthquake and a huge Tsunami that took away all of the redundant power systems. It wasn't a failure of the cooling system that caused the
A redundant cooling system doesn't do much good when you have no way to power it.
If you're suggesting that the power plant should have been built to survive the exact disaster that struck it, then you'll get no argument from me, but it's a lot easier to design something to protect against past (and known), disasters than to design it for an unknown disaster that will strike 40 years into the future.
Man...are you ever the buzzkill. I'm guessing we shouldn't be able to have corvettes or porsches, or be able to mod our cars in any fashion to go over 55mph to suit you?
Where's the fun in that? If you can't handle a performance car, don't get one...but why rain on the parade of those who can?
I'm not saying you shouldn't have fun, you should absolutely have fun on closed courses (work with your car club to shut down those fun mountain roads for your uninterupted enjoyment), just don't have your fun at the expense of innocent drivers that use the roads for transportation. And I say that as someone who lost a close friend who was T-boned by a 280Z traveling at high speed through a stop sign -- cops said the 280Z was driving so fast, that it's likely that my friend couldn't even see the car coming around the bend in the road when she entered the intersection.
This was on a curvy country road known to be fun to drive on.
I've actually been SAVED from a number of accidents by having a car with enough performance to get the fuck out of the way of some other idiots on the road that didn't know how to drive and usually, were trying to drive piece of shit cars like they WERE performance cars.
I hear that argument a lot: "I need this powerful car so I can get out of other people's way"... but I've been driving for over 30 years, and in all of that time, there was only once when I had to rely on my vehicle's performance to get out of the way of an accident. And that was when I was on my motorcycle at a stoplight and saw the car approaching from behind at a high rate of speed - I made a quick (and illegal) right turn on red - he squealed to a stop in the middle of the intersection.
Agreed, politics is by far the greatest impediment to deploying small scale nuclear reactors. I'd love to see small scale nuclear reactors deployed on a wide scale, it's the best green technology that we have. If you get down to it you /could/ fit one of those in a clean room. I was speaking more metaphorically than literally in this case.
I think you're on the wrong website - I flippantly ignored the point you were making and corrected something you said, and you didn't call me any names, and even agreed with something I said in a later post.
I think that Slashdot protocol requires that you make a derogatory comment about my mother, or at least attack my virility and/or sexual orientation..
TFA, which has the same headline, ends by mentioning that people point them at pilots in planes taking off or landing. So way to make a misleading headline, networkworld. Not getting the traffic you want?
From TFA:
Commercial grade green and red laser pointers emit energy far beyond what is safe, posing skin, eye and fire hazards.
So what is misleading by saying "Laser Pointers Produce Too Much Energy, Pose Risk For the Careless"? Do you think everyone understands the eye risk of the laser pointed they bought on eBay and understands that aiming it on people risks eye and even skin injury, and that even an errant reflection from a shiny surface has the same danger?
In other news, a report reports that automobiles produce too much energy and poses risks, including death, for the careless.
I fully agree that overly powerful cars should be banned from the roads. Or at least tamed down to "normal" car levels through a "track switch" that can enable the full performance of the car for use at the track (like the Bugatti Veyron's "high speed mode" that can only be activated while stopped with a special key). They are a hazard on the roads - I don't think anyone owns a 350+ HP sports car to drive in a safe and legal manner all the time, and the car commercials (with their trained drivers on a closed course) make that point too.
The difference between overpowered sports cars and overpowered lasers is that it's a lot easier to buy an overpowered laser without knowing that you have one.
Can you? This article was predicting they'd be on sale in less than five years, and was written over four years ago. They appear to be a little behind schedule. Their website (http://www.gen4energy.com/) still talks about everything as being still on the drawing board; no mention of actual deployment or any target dates or milestones.
There's a lot more than physics behind the inability of in newer (and safer) nuclear power plant designs being deployed.
There are other examples of small-scale reactor deployments - like the ones used in nuclear submarines (including the small NR-1), as well as the nuclear reactors used in spacecraft (not something you'd power a neighborhood with, but they are still reactors).
Correct me if I'm wrong, but is not Fukushima in fact a Soviet-era reactor, or nearly so? They could potentially perform massive refitting of the plant, but that's expensive, you're already complaining about the current energy prices
You are wrong. The reactors are Fukushima-I are all USA design BWR's (designed by General Electric, several were manufactured by GE). I'm not sure that "era" means what you think it does...Unless by "Soviet-era" you meant the period of time that the USSR existed? That would put most of the nuclear plants in the USA in the "Soviet-era".
I can see that I was modded down.
To put it another way: There's already a 100% guaranteed fail-safe in place to keep the stored fuel safe for at least 4 days after a cooling system failure: the physical properties of water.
What secondary system can you build that can beat the reliability of physics? What do you gain by having a secondary cooling system (to offset the doubled installation and operational costs)?
Mistakes, bugs or rodent problems are understandable. But c'mon, we're talking about nuclear power here. I expect at least some redundancy and fail-safety. Unless we're talking about some soviet era facility, I guarantee you that you'll never hear about such a problem on any other nuclear power plant in the world. It's like they didn't learn anything from two years ago. And Tepco is one of the most well-funded companies in Japan. Lack of money and staff shouldn't be a problem. As a guy who lives in Japan I hate Tepco. Thanks to them my power bill is freaking expensive and yet they can't even do a decent job. What a disgrace to Japan.
How much redundancy do you need in a system that stays at safe levels for 4 days after a failure?
I can see having full double or triple redundancy for systems that will result in unsafe conditions in hours or minutes, but for 4 days?
Nature is very good at serving us humility in small bite size portions that can bring great things down. Events like this should remind us that we are mere stewards of the planet and that the rest of the ecosystem will happily take over the best laid plans we have if we let our guard down even a little.
Isn't that the lesson Jeff Goldblum was trying to teach us in Jurassic Park?
No matter how well you design something nature can and will find a way to get in, and it is arrogance in the extreme to assume otherwise. About the only way to avoid something like that is to have a clean room environment, and I'm quite certain that you can't fit a nuclear power plant inside a clean room.
Sure you can:
http://techblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2008/11/neighborhood-nuclear-power-pla.html
They didn't say that the pools would risk releasing radiation after 4 days, they said:
Tepco said it would have taken several days for temperatures in the pools to have risen above the safe level of 65 degrees Celsius, or 149 degrees Fahrenheit.
The company said that temperatures in the fuel pools would have remained at safe levels for at least four days.
A rise above "safe" levels doesn't necessarily mean radiation release. I don't think there's any danger of radiation release until the water boils down to a level where the rods are exposed (and presumably even in an extended power outage, additional purified water could be added to the pools to maintain water levels).
Rat induced power problems are not uncommon in large industrial plants. All it takes is an unsealed conduit cover while workers take a meal break, and a rat can slip inside. Rats wreaked havoc on network cables (both fiber and copper) at a building I once worked at -- many of the conduit runs were left unsealed by a vendor (or poorly sealed by foam plugs that eventually shrank enough to be displaced by the rodents) and the rats found them convenient for getting around the building (as well as a cozy place to live), and apparently they liked to nibble on cables or their feces+urine degraded the cables enough to cause failure. They ended up replacing almost all of the cables in uncapped conduit (and properly sealing the conduit this time).
Do they teach proper capitalization in your son's kindergarten?
Suck my dick.
From what I hear in the news, they do teach that in public schools.
per however many kilowatts are used in an average 30 minute charge.
facepalm. You mean kilowatt-hours. Or, you can call them joules, or calories, or maybe even BTUs. come on, read a wikipedia article already.
In his defense, he did say "killowatts in 30 minutes", so if the power draw is constant, it's an easy conversion to KWh.
This means this is overturned as well.
Big win for Costco and Costco members.
You dropped the trailing period from the URL:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_S.A._v._Costco_Wholesale_Corp.
What does this mean (if anything) for region-locked movies - can I legally break the region lock (or buy a player that does it) so I can watch a movie I bought overseas?
The real question i'd like answered is for someone to benchmark the GS4 Snapdragon version VS the GS4 Exynos 5 version. If the Exynos version benchmarks higher, I may have to fly out to Europe and pick one up.
Why would you spend considerable money and fly thousands of miles (I'm assuming you're in the USA) to pick up a phone that's faster in synthetic CPU benchmarks but may not be fully compatible with next generation 4G networks here in the USA? What do you do with your phone that requires the fastest possible CPU? And what do you do every 6 months when a faster phone comes out?