OK, but that's not very clear. I can see why a program that picked a completely random port might be awkward to get to work with a firewall. But restricting the range of ports that it can use, then permitting those, would work wouldn't it?
I'm not sure it's a good idea to restrict protocol flexibility in that way anyway. There's a fundamental issue with NAT or firewalls in that they need to know details of what the users behind them want and don't want to do. This may be true for a business with a central IT department who can configure the device as necessary, but it's not true in general. If my ISP runs a NAT to conserve IP space, am I supposed to contact them to forward whatever ports are necessary? I don't think that'll work well. I just hope IPv6 actually does get rolled out before that becomes necessary.
Does Java really work that way? I don't program in Java, so I really don't know, but that would be one of the most bizarre memory allocation systems I've heard of.
I've seen Java apps allocate tens of GB of virtual memory, but then not appear to touch it - the actual resident set size is much less.
Please realise that this story is published in a far-right newspaper originally started to publish the antisemitic views of Oswald Moseley.
Given that the Daily Mail was first published before Mosley was born, that's impressive.
Look, I don't like the Mail either, but characterising them as "far right" these days is just silly. They're just conservative in a downmarket, small-minded kind of way for not-too-deep thinkers.
There is no such thing as radioactive waste - if it's radioactive, it can be used as fuel.
Not in a practical way. Not all radioactive material will support a fission chain reaction (in fact most won't), and if you're just using the decay heat itself then you'd have a reactor that you can't turn off. Consider the trouble that decay heat of ~ 1-2% can cause in a normal reactor and it becomes clear why that's not the best idea.
For example, look at the fact that China's CO2 emissions are screaming upwards faster and faster, and yet, they have a fairly low-growth population.
Their land mass isn't changing much either.
Land is unrelated - land doesn't produce CO2 by itself, industrial activity does, and that depends on people. The only reason to go by land mass is if you happen to live in a huge country with a low population, because it makes your statistics look better.
CANDUs have decay heat like any other reactor, so are quite as vulnerable to meltdowns in the event of loss of cooling.
They're also better at making weapons grade plutonium than LWRs thanks to online refuelling - you can irradiate the fuel elements for a short time only to avoid the buildup of heavier isotopes of plutonium.
Not with light water reactors you can't. You run out of fissile material - natural uranium is more than 99% U-238, which isn't fissile. Some of this is converted to Pu-239 by neutron capture, but light water reactors only have a conversion ratio of 0.5 or so. For every 10 uranium atoms fissioned, you only get 5 plutonium ones. So at best you can only double the fuel utilisation, and in practice less.
The point of fast reactors was that the conversion ratio can be over 1, so there's no net consumption of fissile material, and all the U-238 can be converted and burned. However, this particular proposal is to use the reactor to consume the plutonium, not make more. I'm a bit surprised that they can claim to be able to build a reactor and fuel fabrication facility for it much cheaper than a MOX plant alone. Perhaps the fuel form for the PRISM is just that much cheaper to manufacture.
You can't get supercriticality/runaway fiisson like happened at Chernobyl
Fast reactors are somewhat notorious for being trickier to control than (well-designed) thermal ones. It's very difficult to avoid a positive void coefficient, and fairly small changes in the fuel geometry can lead to large changes in reactivity. There was a meltdown in an early FBR caused by thermal expansion causing the fuel to bow inwards, increasing the reactivity. Phenix in France also had unexplained loss of reactivity incidents.
The gap between assembly and a high level language in understanding and ease of use is much larger than the gap between two HLLs like Fortran and C though. Actually writing high performance assembly language is a very specialised skill, and there won't be many people who have both that skill and the mathematics/physics/algorithm knowledge necessary.
You don't need to have a walled garden to have an official app store though. You could just as easily have an app store with the same requirements as the current Apple one, but also allow the installation of software from elsewhere if the user wants it.
Market power can be just as limiting as government power. If nobody's making anything else because the walled gardeners have sewn up the market, what are you going to do?
C is twice as fast as anything else? I work in the oil business, and our very CPU intensive algorithms for imaging seismic data are typically written in F77 or maybe F90. The cost of clusters to run this code is very significant, and if we could get away with spending half as much on hardware by coding in C, we would.
I've had similar problems a few years back, but either TCP implementations are better or the buffer sizes in DSLAMs are better tuned these days because it doesn't seem to happen. Yes, latency goes up if I saturate the connection with a big download, but not so much that all other connections grind to a halt.
Not like a few years back when a big download would cause latency to go go up to ~ 2 seconds and you could kiss goodbye to doing anything else with the connection at the same time, at least at tolerable speed. Now it's about 100 ms, and everything else is a bit slower but still perfectly usable.
Fusion would be nice, but we could already do the same thing with fission. It's politic and economics that gets in the way - it's very unlikely that clean energy sources will be cheaper than fossil fuels any time soon, so each country has an individual incentive to pollute. There's no more reason for an individual nation to clean up unilaterally than there is for someone to unilaterally cooperate in the Prisoner's Dilemma. Collective, international agreements are the only way around this barring the invention of some super-cheap miracle energy source (which fusion won't be even if we could have it tomorrow).
Both of your examples quoted are for *two* reactors of 1.1 GWe each (and for the second case, some transmission lines as well). So that's less than $6000 per kW, not the $10,000 to $20,000 you claimed. Did you not even read your own links?
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Sure, but that's the fault of Windows, not the network protocol.
In fairness, modern WIndows versions are better. I left my Vista box with a public IP and no separate firewall for months and nothing bad happened.
OK, but that's not very clear. I can see why a program that picked a completely random port might be awkward to get to work with a firewall. But restricting the range of ports that it can use, then permitting those, would work wouldn't it?
I'm not sure it's a good idea to restrict protocol flexibility in that way anyway. There's a fundamental issue with NAT or firewalls in that they need to know details of what the users behind them want and don't want to do. This may be true for a business with a central IT department who can configure the device as necessary, but it's not true in general. If my ISP runs a NAT to conserve IP space, am I supposed to contact them to forward whatever ports are necessary? I don't think that'll work well. I just hope IPv6 actually does get rolled out before that becomes necessary.
Why is that bad in the absense of NAT?
Does Java really work that way? I don't program in Java, so I really don't know, but that would be one of the most bizarre memory allocation systems I've heard of.
I've seen Java apps allocate tens of GB of virtual memory, but then not appear to touch it - the actual resident set size is much less.
They were like, why should we care? We can always add more memory if we need it.
Have you seen the price of memory these days? It's virtually given away in cereal packets.
Please realise that this story is published in a far-right newspaper originally started to publish the antisemitic views of Oswald Moseley.
Given that the Daily Mail was first published before Mosley was born, that's impressive.
Look, I don't like the Mail either, but characterising them as "far right" these days is just silly. They're just conservative in a downmarket, small-minded kind of way for not-too-deep thinkers.
There is no such thing as radioactive waste - if it's radioactive, it can be used as fuel.
Not in a practical way. Not all radioactive material will support a fission chain reaction (in fact most won't), and if you're just using the decay heat itself then you'd have a reactor that you can't turn off. Consider the trouble that decay heat of ~ 1-2% can cause in a normal reactor and it becomes clear why that's not the best idea.
For example, look at the fact that China's CO2 emissions are screaming upwards faster and faster, and yet, they have a fairly low-growth population.
Their land mass isn't changing much either.
Land is unrelated - land doesn't produce CO2 by itself, industrial activity does, and that depends on people. The only reason to go by land mass is if you happen to live in a huge country with a low population, because it makes your statistics look better.
CANDUs have decay heat like any other reactor, so are quite as vulnerable to meltdowns in the event of loss of cooling.
They're also better at making weapons grade plutonium than LWRs thanks to online refuelling - you can irradiate the fuel elements for a short time only to avoid the buildup of heavier isotopes of plutonium.
Not with light water reactors you can't. You run out of fissile material - natural uranium is more than 99% U-238, which isn't fissile. Some of this is converted to Pu-239 by neutron capture, but light water reactors only have a conversion ratio of 0.5 or so. For every 10 uranium atoms fissioned, you only get 5 plutonium ones. So at best you can only double the fuel utilisation, and in practice less.
The point of fast reactors was that the conversion ratio can be over 1, so there's no net consumption of fissile material, and all the U-238 can be converted and burned. However, this particular proposal is to use the reactor to consume the plutonium, not make more. I'm a bit surprised that they can claim to be able to build a reactor and fuel fabrication facility for it much cheaper than a MOX plant alone. Perhaps the fuel form for the PRISM is just that much cheaper to manufacture.
You can't get supercriticality/runaway fiisson like happened at Chernobyl
Fast reactors are somewhat notorious for being trickier to control than (well-designed) thermal ones. It's very difficult to avoid a positive void coefficient, and fairly small changes in the fuel geometry can lead to large changes in reactivity. There was a meltdown in an early FBR caused by thermal expansion causing the fuel to bow inwards, increasing the reactivity. Phenix in France also had unexplained loss of reactivity incidents.
So pretty horrible then, just about enough time to work, eat and sleep.
There's always a catch isn't there?
What are the hours and stress like in that job though?
The gap between assembly and a high level language in understanding and ease of use is much larger than the gap between two HLLs like Fortran and C though. Actually writing high performance assembly language is a very specialised skill, and there won't be many people who have both that skill and the mathematics/physics/algorithm knowledge necessary.
You don't need to have a walled garden to have an official app store though. You could just as easily have an app store with the same requirements as the current Apple one, but also allow the installation of software from elsewhere if the user wants it.
Market power can be just as limiting as government power. If nobody's making anything else because the walled gardeners have sewn up the market, what are you going to do?
C is twice as fast as anything else? I work in the oil business, and our very CPU intensive algorithms for imaging seismic data are typically written in F77 or maybe F90. The cost of clusters to run this code is very significant, and if we could get away with spending half as much on hardware by coding in C, we would.
I've had similar problems a few years back, but either TCP implementations are better or the buffer sizes in DSLAMs are better tuned these days because it doesn't seem to happen. Yes, latency goes up if I saturate the connection with a big download, but not so much that all other connections grind to a halt.
Not like a few years back when a big download would cause latency to go go up to ~ 2 seconds and you could kiss goodbye to doing anything else with the connection at the same time, at least at tolerable speed. Now it's about 100 ms, and everything else is a bit slower but still perfectly usable.
Fusion would be nice, but we could already do the same thing with fission. It's politic and economics that gets in the way - it's very unlikely that clean energy sources will be cheaper than fossil fuels any time soon, so each country has an individual incentive to pollute. There's no more reason for an individual nation to clean up unilaterally than there is for someone to unilaterally cooperate in the Prisoner's Dilemma. Collective, international agreements are the only way around this barring the invention of some super-cheap miracle energy source (which fusion won't be even if we could have it tomorrow).
If you're living under a horrible government, what makes you think you'll be able to escape? See the Berlin Wall, North Korea etc.
You don't get rich from a paycheck, people. It's what you do with that paycheck that makes you rich.
And how does that many you money? By creaming off a slice off the labour of other people. Investment income is just as unearned as welfare.
Surprise! China is actually quite low per capita, lower than than any EU country.
Not any more - they overtook France recently and are still increasing rapidly.
Both of your examples quoted are for *two* reactors of 1.1 GWe each (and for the second case, some transmission lines as well). So that's less than $6000 per kW, not the $10,000 to $20,000 you claimed. Did you not even read your own links?
Got any examples for a recently built nuclear plant for that price? Because I can't think of any.
10-20 billion for one GW of nuclear capacity? What currency is *that* in, because it's certainly not dollars, euros, pounds or anything similar.