Then buy all the talent. If you outbid the labels for the artists then they have no copyrights to leverage.
The problem is that you could only buy artists that are out of contract and looking for a new contract - the real value (at least to me) is in the back catalog of older, but *good* artists. Most new artists today suck. (again, this is my opinion... many people seem to love Rebecca Black ).
So it would take years for any "good" music to come out this.
When I need to rescue a server, I boot with a recovery USB flashdrive, and then I have a full linux environment at my disposal Including Perl (and probably Python and Ruby, but I've never checked).
Gone are the days when you only get what's in/sbin and if you can't fix it with cat and sed then you're out of luck.
finally invoking and disposing a command like awk many times in a row makes for very poor memory management and system resource utilization compared to keeping one program like perl resident.
Poor memory management? The awk binary and its libraries will stay resident in the pagecache between invocations, and awk+bash has a lower memory footprint than perl (on my system, running perl uses around 19MB of Virtual memory, awk+bash is around 14MB).
So, it could be argued that running awk+bash is better for memory overhead.
fork+exec overhead is so low that unless the script is calling awk thousands of times, it's not worth the time to even think about it. It takes around 2ms for me to call awk from a script.
I still use Bash for most automation tasks because there's no guarantee that the next person in my job is going to be familiar with Perl, Ruby, and Python, but every unix admin is going to know Bash.
If all I need to do is start up a job, make sure it created a non-zero length output file, and log a message if it ends with a non-normal return code, bash is simple and easy and has no real drawbacks.
For anything non-trivial (i.e. a monitoring plugin to do a transaction on our website) than I would use Perl (because it's what I'm most comfortable with, someone else might choose Python or Ruby), but 90% of the time when I need a script to do something, Bash is just fine and I know that the next guy in my job is going to be able to maintain the script.
As interesting as this looks, it seems that it would have limited applicability. I rarely want to include verbatim text from another source into my paper, I want to paraphrase it and rewrite it to match my own writing (with a footnote for attribution, which would contain a link to the source).
Why would I want to blindly include someone else's text when I don't know that he's not going to rewrite it or restructure his document in such a way that it is no longer relevant?
Oh sarcasm, that's much better than trying to see the point I was making. Which is that there is no shortage of energy. As for wiring, look up HVDC and DESERTEC.
You missed the point I was making, while there may be plenty of energy, the areas that have an abundance of solar and wind are not the areas where there are an abundance of people to use it. Worse, solar is only available during part of the day on sunny days - not on rainy days or during sandstorms.
To use your example of generating power in the Sahara for the world, if you want to ship that power to the USA, you need 1000GW of transmission lines for about 8000 miles. The largest HVDC link is around 8GW, the longest is around 1600 miles.
You throw out solar in the Sahara as an answer while ignoring the real engineering difficulties (not to mention cost) of building power transmission lines 125 times larger and 5 times longer than the biggest ones in existence.
The same problem exists (in a smaller scale) with domestic power production in USA deserts - getting the power from the desert to where it's needed.
And of course, the issue of storing solar energy during the day to provide power at night (or rainy days) is sitll far from solved for large-scale needs.
I'm not worried about the wi-fi because I have a wireless router.
Wouldn't you have less to worry about Wifi if you did *not* have a wireless router?
But the cell phone reception is horrendous. I take a few steps outside and it's fine. While I was fixing the place up I had poked some holes in the walls and found metal beams inside. The place is like a giant Faraday cage. The fact that it's the bottom floor of a three-story condo doesn't help either.
Lots of new construction uses metal studs instead of wood, but it doesn't (usually) kill cell phone & wifi because the studs are not in a grid with gaps less than the wavelength of cell & wifi.
Even my 900Mhz Nextel iDEN phone gets good signal in my server room (which has metal studs in all 4 walls).
So far they haven't cleaned anything up. This is going to cost many billions of dollars, I can assure you
The last cleanup cost I saw quoted was $10B, how does that compare to the overall Tsunami costs where millions of people were displaced, with some entire villages erased. There are other non-cleanup costs like loss of electrical sales, but those costs would have applied whether it was a nuclear plant, coal plant or solar plant that was overwelmed by an earthquake + tsunami.
And, what about the cost of permanently relocating everyone within the 30km exclusion zone?
I hadn't heard anything about a permanent 30km exclusion zone, I thought the mandatory exclusion zone was 20km, and I hadn't heard that any exclusion zone was permanent... even Chernobyl has only a 30km exclusion zone and the fallout from that was much worse.
Yeah, see the thing is, there aren't a lot of modern nuclear plants - cause they cost so much to build and cause they are uninsurable and people, rightly in my opinion, don't want to live near then.
You're right that modern plants are exceptionally difficult to build, and while you see that as a good thing, I see it as a large part of the problem - old plants can't easily be decommissioned because no new plants can be built in their place.
Since you see the death of nuclear as a good thing, what is your solution to provide base load 24x7 electrical power for a nation that's increasing looking toward electricity as a way to wean itself from fossil fuels?
They never stop to think about how much energy we actually need and compare it to how much energy can be captured by the green efforts. Unfortunately, there is a HUGE gap between those two numbers and no amount of "good faith" will close that gap.
Covering 2% of the uninhabited portions of the Sahara with PV cells would supply all of the planet's power requirements.
There's just the tiny problem of getting the power from where people don't live to where they do live. But hey, it's just wires, right? How hard could it be to build an 8000 mile transatlantic 1000GW power cable?
I think the capital costs in the Wikipedia article I quoted include fueling costs, but not decommissioning costs.
So far, the cost of a Fukushima style cleanup is not too expensive....There are around 400 nuclear power plants world-wide, so one $10B Fukushima accident per decade only costs a few million dollars per plant per year.
Of course, an accident like the one at the 40 year old Fukushima plant is much less likely to occur in a modern nuclear plant.
I haven't seen any estimates for operating costs for a large-scale solar plant like this -- does anyone know? Is it better or worse than a nuclear (or even coal) plant?
Is a solar plant cost effective yet against traditionally fueled plants?
A new 2GW nuclear plant costs around $10B, this plant is $1.7B for 400MW. Since it's solar, divide rated power by around 3 to account for nighttime, so it's more like a 133MW plant.
So, cost per watt of nuclear is $10B / 2GW = $5/watt versus 1.7B / 133MW = $12.75/watt
Can they sell electricity at a high enough price to recoup their costs? Are operating costs for a solar plant like this much lower than for a nuclear plant? The sheer size of the plant seems like it will take a lot of maintenance. Keeping 173,000 heliostats in operation sounds like a huge undertaking.
a) Built a slightly safer nuclear plant that will set you back, $7500-3500 a kilowatt, insurance, decommissioning and long term waste disposal not included. b) Spend $5000-3000 a kilowatt on a solar thermal plant in the Mojave desert.
Except that $7500/KW nuclear plant produces power 24 hours/day, while that $4000/KW solar plant only produces its rated power for around 8 hours/day, so it's really a $12000/KW solar plant and still has no way to produce steady power all night long (even if it has some nominal energy storage in the molten salt)
For me, it's the fact that it's small, portable, and has a real keyboard.
If I have a bunch of numbers on paper to add up, I grab my HP-15C because I can set it right next to the paper, and I can use the keyboard to type the numbers on it much faster than doing it on my computer and having to look at the screen to compare with what's on the paper.
I have an RPN calculator on my smartphone, but it's not as usable as the calculator without a keyboard.
If I were doing graphics or anything more advanced, then I'd just use my computer. I have an old HP-48 which I never use because it's too complicated for anything non-trivial and for anything trivial, the HP-15C is better. When I bought it, it was great and I even wrote some programs to automate some tasks, but now it's much easier to use a real computer.
I recall a video interview with a scientist made before Chernobyl. EVERYTHING that the scientist had said was still true and accurate after that disaster. But in practice somebody thought it was ok to run some test disabling the safeguards and Chernobyl happened. In practice somebody else forgot that in case of flooding the backup diesel generators would also fail and Fukushima happened.
It's not so much that they forgot about flooding, but that it wasn't in the design spec -- they designed for a 6 meter Tsunami but experienced a 15 meter Tsunami.
Engineers aren't (often) given free reign to design for any arbitrary level of safety, they are given design parameters that they need to take into account. And everything comes at a cost - a plant that's twice as safe might cost 4 times as much, making its power unaffordable. Depending on who you talk to, that might be a good thing - some people think that nuclear *should* be unaffordable and replaced with "safe" power plants like fossil fuels, and alternative energy.
Ok... so you are saying we need to fix and/or refit two reactors to ensure they are more robust than they currently are.
I don't think you'll find anyone here who will argue with you on that, except maybe whoever has to foot the bill of course.
I'm not saying anything, just answering the parent poster's question.
But since you asked, I doubt that retrofitting any additional safeguards into the current reactors would be cost effective, and you still end up with a 30 year old reactor that's a bit safer.
If it were up to me, I'd say scrap the current reactors and replace them with a more modern design that is more intrinsically safe. Oh, and maybe move farther from the shoreline since if there ever was a big radiation release, the proximity to the ocean just provides another avenue to spread the radiation. Although the ocean does provide a convenient and unlimited source of cooling water, some newer reactor designs don't need water to stay safe.
How many of the hundreds of reactors are along known fault lines?
Of those, how many are susceptible to tsunamis?
Two are in California, near (but not directly on ) fault lines.
One is on a high cliffside, so it's likely not susceptible to tsunami, but the other is close to the sea so is vulnerable.
One plant was built to withstand a 7.0 quake, the other a 7.5 quake, but there's a good chance of a 7.5 or larger quake in California over the next 30 years. Oh and one plant had the entire reactor vessel installed backwards, and at the other plant the earthquake reinforcements were installed backwards.
Neither plant uses the same BWR design as Fukushima, but both plants are 25 - 30 years old.
The problem with giving the desktop market to Microsoft means that corporations are stuck with a Microsoft-heavy server environment too and it's hard to move to other server platforms.
I disagree with your comment. I work for a software dev house (we have roughly 250 staff). 90% of our desktops are Ubuntu however we use Active Directory, Microsoft email servers, sharepoint, fileservers etc and would consider ourself's to be a "Microsoft-heavy server environment"
I think you misunderstood what I was saying. I was saying that any corporation that has a large number of MS desktops is going to have a large number of MS servers to support them. Thus when it comes time to add another server (web server, etc), they're likely going to stick with MS.
Obviously you can choose to run MS servers even if you don't have a single MS desktop, but few companies would run large numbers of MS desktops without MS servers.
I'd bet that your company is in the minority, if I had 225 Linux workstations + 25 windows workstations, I'd look to non-MS solutions to manage them and provide infrastructure like collaboration and email. User CAL's must be a significant portion of your MS licensing costs.
The problem with giving the desktop market to Microsoft means that corporations are stuck with a Microsoft-heavy server environment too and it's hard to move to other server platforms.
Once you include Active Directory, print servers, fileservers, sharepoint, system center, exchange, sql server and other support servers to run it all, a mid-sized company might have 20 or more servers just to run their Microsoft infrastructure. (many of those applications *could* run on Linux, but MS products integrate together and have interdependencies that make it hard to break loose)
So since they are already paying for Windows Admins to run their Windows infrastructure, when it comes time to add a web or application server, the easy choice is to go with MS -- licensing doesn't cost much more on top of their existing MS licensing costs and they already have Windows expertise in house.
There's a real simple shutdown plan.... trigger the explosives that release helium from containers that were designed to be broken in a case like this into the reactor zone, and you've got a tight seal that radiation can't pass through.
Downside to that plan is if you do it, that reactor is offline for good. Power supply in Japan would go down, and that's an economic impact.
What are you talking about!? Helium? What is that supposed to do? How does helium make a seal?
TEPCO has no hope that these reactors can ever be brought back online - they lost all such hope back in the beginning when they pumped seawater into them. Releasing helium won't make it any worse or better.
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Then buy all the talent. If you outbid the labels for the artists then they have no copyrights to leverage.
The problem is that you could only buy artists that are out of contract and looking for a new contract - the real value (at least to me) is in the back catalog of older, but *good* artists. Most new artists today suck. (again, this is my opinion... many people seem to love Rebecca Black ).
So it would take years for any "good" music to come out this.
When I need to rescue a server, I boot with a recovery USB flashdrive, and then I have a full linux environment at my disposal Including Perl (and probably Python and Ruby, but I've never checked).
Gone are the days when you only get what's in /sbin and if you can't fix it with cat and sed then you're out of luck.
It's trivial to do it in perl!
#!/usr/bin/perl
system("du -x / | sort -n");
finally invoking and disposing a command like awk many times in a row makes for very poor memory management and system resource utilization compared to keeping one program like perl resident.
Poor memory management? The awk binary and its libraries will stay resident in the pagecache between invocations, and awk+bash has a lower memory footprint than perl (on my system, running perl uses around 19MB of Virtual memory, awk+bash is around 14MB).
So, it could be argued that running awk+bash is better for memory overhead.
fork+exec overhead is so low that unless the script is calling awk thousands of times, it's not worth the time to even think about it. It takes around 2ms for me to call awk from a script.
I still use Bash for most automation tasks because there's no guarantee that the next person in my job is going to be familiar with Perl, Ruby, and Python, but every unix admin is going to know Bash.
If all I need to do is start up a job, make sure it created a non-zero length output file, and log a message if it ends with a non-normal return code, bash is simple and easy and has no real drawbacks.
For anything non-trivial (i.e. a monitoring plugin to do a transaction on our website) than I would use Perl (because it's what I'm most comfortable with, someone else might choose Python or Ruby), but 90% of the time when I need a script to do something, Bash is just fine and I know that the next guy in my job is going to be able to maintain the script.
As interesting as this looks, it seems that it would have limited applicability. I rarely want to include verbatim text from another source into my paper, I want to paraphrase it and rewrite it to match my own writing (with a footnote for attribution, which would contain a link to the source).
Why would I want to blindly include someone else's text when I don't know that he's not going to rewrite it or restructure his document in such a way that it is no longer relevant?
Oh sarcasm, that's much better than trying to see the point I was making. Which is that there is no shortage of energy. As for wiring, look up HVDC and DESERTEC.
You missed the point I was making, while there may be plenty of energy, the areas that have an abundance of solar and wind are not the areas where there are an abundance of people to use it. Worse, solar is only available during part of the day on sunny days - not on rainy days or during sandstorms.
To use your example of generating power in the Sahara for the world, if you want to ship that power to the USA, you need 1000GW of transmission lines for about 8000 miles. The largest HVDC link is around 8GW, the longest is around 1600 miles.
You throw out solar in the Sahara as an answer while ignoring the real engineering difficulties (not to mention cost) of building power transmission lines 125 times larger and 5 times longer than the biggest ones in existence.
The same problem exists (in a smaller scale) with domestic power production in USA deserts - getting the power from the desert to where it's needed.
And of course, the issue of storing solar energy during the day to provide power at night (or rainy days) is sitll far from solved for large-scale needs.
I'm not worried about the wi-fi because I have a wireless router.
Wouldn't you have less to worry about Wifi if you did *not* have a wireless router?
But the cell phone reception is horrendous. I take a few steps outside and it's fine. While I was fixing the place up I had poked some holes in the walls and found metal beams inside. The place is like a giant Faraday cage. The fact that it's the bottom floor of a three-story condo doesn't help either.
Lots of new construction uses metal studs instead of wood, but it doesn't (usually) kill cell phone & wifi because the studs are not in a grid with gaps less than the wavelength of cell & wifi.
Even my 900Mhz Nextel iDEN phone gets good signal in my server room (which has metal studs in all 4 walls).
So far they haven't cleaned anything up. This is going to cost many billions of dollars, I can assure you
The last cleanup cost I saw quoted was $10B, how does that compare to the overall Tsunami costs where millions of people were displaced, with some entire villages erased. There are other non-cleanup costs like loss of electrical sales, but those costs would have applied whether it was a nuclear plant, coal plant or solar plant that was overwelmed by an earthquake + tsunami.
And, what about the cost of permanently relocating everyone within the 30km exclusion zone?
I hadn't heard anything about a permanent 30km exclusion zone, I thought the mandatory exclusion zone was 20km, and I hadn't heard that any exclusion zone was permanent... even Chernobyl has only a 30km exclusion zone and the fallout from that was much worse.
Yeah, see the thing is, there aren't a lot of modern nuclear plants - cause they cost so much to build and cause they are uninsurable and people, rightly in my opinion, don't want to live near then.
You're right that modern plants are exceptionally difficult to build, and while you see that as a good thing, I see it as a large part of the problem - old plants can't easily be decommissioned because no new plants can be built in their place.
Since you see the death of nuclear as a good thing, what is your solution to provide base load 24x7 electrical power for a nation that's increasing looking toward electricity as a way to wean itself from fossil fuels?
They never stop to think about how much energy we actually need and compare it to how much energy can be captured by the green efforts. Unfortunately, there is a HUGE gap between those two numbers and no amount of "good faith" will close that gap.
Covering 2% of the uninhabited portions of the Sahara with PV cells would supply all of the planet's power requirements.
There's just the tiny problem of getting the power from where people don't live to where they do live. But hey, it's just wires, right? How hard could it be to build an 8000 mile transatlantic 1000GW power cable?
I think the capital costs in the Wikipedia article I quoted include fueling costs, but not decommissioning costs.
So far, the cost of a Fukushima style cleanup is not too expensive....There are around 400 nuclear power plants world-wide, so one $10B Fukushima accident per decade only costs a few million dollars per plant per year.
Of course, an accident like the one at the 40 year old Fukushima plant is much less likely to occur in a modern nuclear plant.
I haven't seen any estimates for operating costs for a large-scale solar plant like this -- does anyone know? Is it better or worse than a nuclear (or even coal) plant?
Is a solar plant cost effective yet against traditionally fueled plants?
A new 2GW nuclear plant costs around $10B, this plant is $1.7B for 400MW. Since it's solar, divide rated power by around 3 to account for nighttime, so it's more like a 133MW plant.
So, cost per watt of nuclear is $10B / 2GW = $5/watt versus 1.7B / 133MW = $12.75/watt
Can they sell electricity at a high enough price to recoup their costs? Are operating costs for a solar plant like this much lower than for a nuclear plant? The sheer size of the plant seems like it will take a lot of maintenance. Keeping 173,000 heliostats in operation sounds like a huge undertaking.
Certainly! Then you have two choices
a) Built a slightly safer nuclear plant that will set you back, $7500-3500 a kilowatt, insurance, decommissioning and long term waste disposal not included.
b) Spend $5000-3000 a kilowatt on a solar thermal plant in the Mojave desert.
Except that $7500/KW nuclear plant produces power 24 hours/day, while that $4000/KW solar plant only produces its rated power for around 8 hours/day, so it's really a $12000/KW solar plant and still has no way to produce steady power all night long (even if it has some nominal energy storage in the molten salt)
For me, it's the fact that it's small, portable, and has a real keyboard.
If I have a bunch of numbers on paper to add up, I grab my HP-15C because I can set it right next to the paper, and I can use the keyboard to type the numbers on it much faster than doing it on my computer and having to look at the screen to compare with what's on the paper.
I have an RPN calculator on my smartphone, but it's not as usable as the calculator without a keyboard.
If I were doing graphics or anything more advanced, then I'd just use my computer. I have an old HP-48 which I never use because it's too complicated for anything non-trivial and for anything trivial, the HP-15C is better. When I bought it, it was great and I even wrote some programs to automate some tasks, but now it's much easier to use a real computer.
I recall a video interview with a scientist made before Chernobyl. EVERYTHING that the scientist had said was still true and accurate after that disaster. But in practice somebody thought it was ok to run some test disabling the safeguards and Chernobyl happened. In practice somebody else forgot that in case of flooding the backup diesel generators would also fail and Fukushima happened.
It's not so much that they forgot about flooding, but that it wasn't in the design spec -- they designed for a 6 meter Tsunami but experienced a 15 meter Tsunami.
Engineers aren't (often) given free reign to design for any arbitrary level of safety, they are given design parameters that they need to take into account. And everything comes at a cost - a plant that's twice as safe might cost 4 times as much, making its power unaffordable. Depending on who you talk to, that might be a good thing - some people think that nuclear *should* be unaffordable and replaced with "safe" power plants like fossil fuels, and alternative energy.
Ok... so you are saying we need to fix and/or refit two reactors to ensure they are more robust than they currently are.
I don't think you'll find anyone here who will argue with you on that, except maybe whoever has to foot the bill of course.
I'm not saying anything, just answering the parent poster's question.
But since you asked, I doubt that retrofitting any additional safeguards into the current reactors would be cost effective, and you still end up with a 30 year old reactor that's a bit safer.
If it were up to me, I'd say scrap the current reactors and replace them with a more modern design that is more intrinsically safe. Oh, and maybe move farther from the shoreline since if there ever was a big radiation release, the proximity to the ocean just provides another avenue to spread the radiation. Although the ocean does provide a convenient and unlimited source of cooling water, some newer reactor designs don't need water to stay safe.
How many of the hundreds of reactors are along known fault lines?
Of those, how many are susceptible to tsunamis?
Two are in California, near (but not directly on ) fault lines.
One is on a high cliffside, so it's likely not susceptible to tsunami, but the other is close to the sea so is vulnerable.
One plant was built to withstand a 7.0 quake, the other a 7.5 quake, but there's a good chance of a 7.5 or larger quake in California over the next 30 years. Oh and one plant had the entire reactor vessel installed backwards, and at the other plant the earthquake reinforcements were installed backwards.
Neither plant uses the same BWR design as Fukushima, but both plants are 25 - 30 years old.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Onofre_Nuclear_Generating_Station
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant
What does this mean (from the article summary):
Facebook will be offering webmasters to place facebook ads on their websites."
Facebook is offering everyone free webmasters?
.. if you look carefully you will see that all zeebas have the UPC 666.
Good thing we're talking about zebras then, else I'd be worried.
A Zeeba *is* a Zebra. It's just that crocodiles aren't great spellers.
Could someone put 30 years into perspective for me?
No problem, I can put it into units that most Slashdot readers are familiar with.
The Library of Congress is 211 years old, so 30 years is around .14 Library of Congresses.
In comparison, a 2TB hard drive is around .2 Library of Congresses (printed material only).
So, in conclusion, Fukushima's cleanup is less than one 2 TB hard drive.
The problem with giving the desktop market to Microsoft means that corporations are stuck with a Microsoft-heavy server environment too and it's hard to move to other server platforms.
I disagree with your comment. I work for a software dev house (we have roughly 250 staff). 90% of our desktops are Ubuntu however we use Active Directory, Microsoft email servers, sharepoint, fileservers etc and would consider ourself's to be a "Microsoft-heavy server environment"
I think you misunderstood what I was saying. I was saying that any corporation that has a large number of MS desktops is going to have a large number of MS servers to support them. Thus when it comes time to add another server (web server, etc), they're likely going to stick with MS.
Obviously you can choose to run MS servers even if you don't have a single MS desktop, but few companies would run large numbers of MS desktops without MS servers.
I'd bet that your company is in the minority, if I had 225 Linux workstations + 25 windows workstations, I'd look to non-MS solutions to manage them and provide infrastructure like collaboration and email. User CAL's must be a significant portion of your MS licensing costs.
The problem with giving the desktop market to Microsoft means that corporations are stuck with a Microsoft-heavy server environment too and it's hard to move to other server platforms.
Once you include Active Directory, print servers, fileservers, sharepoint, system center, exchange, sql server and other support servers to run it all, a mid-sized company might have 20 or more servers just to run their Microsoft infrastructure. (many of those applications *could* run on Linux, but MS products integrate together and have interdependencies that make it hard to break loose)
So since they are already paying for Windows Admins to run their Windows infrastructure, when it comes time to add a web or application server, the easy choice is to go with MS -- licensing doesn't cost much more on top of their existing MS licensing costs and they already have Windows expertise in house.
True
1
There's a real simple shutdown plan.... trigger the explosives that release helium from containers that were designed to be broken in a case like this into the reactor zone, and you've got a tight seal that radiation can't pass through.
Downside to that plan is if you do it, that reactor is offline for good. Power supply in Japan would go down, and that's an economic impact.
What are you talking about!? Helium? What is that supposed to do? How does helium make a seal?
TEPCO has no hope that these reactors can ever be brought back online - they lost all such hope back in the beginning when they pumped seawater into them. Releasing helium won't make it any worse or better.
+1 doesn't appear in a stream of any kind: it's just reflected in search results.
I'm not sure what you mean by "a stream of any kind", but all of your +1's are aggregated into your Google Profile.