Excellent points. Yes, a good room is definitely the preferred (and ultimately easier) solution.
Yeah, my system went a little beyond controlling amplitude, in that if you know that some wave W reaches the listener and is not wanted then you start by saying that you need a wave W' (a wave that cancels out W) that also reaches the listener. By tracing that wave backwards through the acoustics of the room to the speaker, you can figure out what additional waves are needed to be generated by the speaker to produce the desired effect. You then have to trace forward again to determine the consequences of doing this, going back and forth until the distortions at every measured point are minimized.
If you wanted to take into account early reflections, then it would get a LOT worse. You're then not only adding in extra waves, but you can delay any of them and/or delay any of the original signal to any of the speakers. The maths for minimizing that - even for a single person - would take a LOT of computer power. It also starts adding up in terms of memory resources needed. Every speaker would need a buffer capable of storing actual composite waveforms for the required length of time.
Yes, reverberation etc might well not be uniform across the audio spectrum. You'd have to split the spectrum up and process each block of frequencies independently, in the hopes that a block was relatively uniform in behavior.
I can see this working for any room, provided you had a powerful-enough computer and enough speakers in enough directions. It would be extremely difficult to do, though, and would not work at all if there are any time-variant components to the system. (i.e.: something changes acoustic properties over time, a person moves from one place to another, etc.)
Your solution of the better room IS a far easier solution and a far better solution. Mine is of interest almost solely to me because I am fascinated by the problems involved in auto-correcting wave-based systems. It's a complicated field, to the point that most of the experts seem to have given up doing anything more than the basics.
Again, more of your twisting and writhing to make "connections" that never existed in the post.
The earthquakes and tsunamis are indeed well-documented.
The cost/benefit calculation of doing something retroactively to the facility to bring it in line with this documentation has NEVER BEEN DONE and therefore we are indeed completely in the dark as to what that calculation would show.
No they do not. They rely heavily on an earthquake probability map which is entirely based off a simple count of earthquakes in the past century. They do NOT use IAEA risk evaluation methods, NOR do they use standard geological earthquake risk calculations -- calculations every other nuclear reactor in the world DOES use.
You don't bother looking, which is very different from not buying it. You don't want to know and don't care to know, which is not the same thing as nobody else knowing.
The earthquake+tsunami occur once every 500 years.
I stated categorically that the probability of it occurring within any given interval of time is going to depend on whether you look at this being a one-in-five-hundred-year event or a one-in-fifty-year event on a 500 year cycle -- a point you quite casually ignored in your effort to "prove" me wrong. And, no, I didn't raise your hackles, you managed that quite well on your own. As has been repeatedly shown, you don't read my posts, you merely react to them.
The data showed a cyclic event, which fits with more modern theories on earthquakes. Can't help it if you're ignorant of seismology.
No, I did not make conflicting statements about the "right course of action". I stated that it was exceedingly likely that at SOME POINT in the lifetime of the reactor that an earthquake plus tsunami was exceedingly likely. It is also exceedingly likely that at SOME POINT in the lifetime of a commercial airline company that they will suffer the loss of an aircraft.
I said NOTHING about them having to do anything about it. First, the failures within the reactor were due to a whole series of errors, of which the flooding was only one. Had ANY of those errors not taken place, there would have been no disaster. Second, it STILL has not been shown that the cost of cleanup plus financial loss due to the evacuation (after subtracting those costs purely due to the earthquake and tsunami with NO contribution from Fukushima) would have exceeded the cost of fixing the engineering problems. The cost of building a new reactor somewhere else and totally decontaminating the Fukushima site on a short enough time scale that industry would be unaffected AND eliminate the tsunami risk would certainly have exceeded the cost of cleanup.
I am highly hostile against deceptive arguments, but I am not bigoted. I reason, I explain, I step through my arguments. You do none of those. You bluster, you fluster and you attempt to confuse by throwing up phony arguments. Your arguments remain highly bigoted, as do you. You are a fraud, a crook, a swindler of those who are confused by your bluster. You substitute knowledge for volume, a point you yourself concede. You know NOTHING of me, but draw conclusions about what I do or do not know. You ADMIT you have read nothing, but draw conclusions from your ignorance.
Everything on its own track would be good (you can sound-trace to cancel out the acoustics of the room, for example). An improvement on that would have one track for the primary sound and a second track the codified the nature of the harmonics at any given time. Reason for that is that harmonics outside of the audible range will nonetheless interfere with sound in the audible range. It becomes rapidly harder to store that information by sampling alone, but the characteristics of an instrument can be described in a very compact manner. You need then state only WHAT harmonics are active (a bitmap) to be able to define however many harmonics you want to compute.
Yes, the setting the music is played in matters, but you can sound-trace to take that out of the data you are sampling then sound-trace it back in when playing it. That's one dedicated data track that needs be loaded into the DSPs before the music can be played.
You could add on as many such extras to the sound source as you like, building closer and closer to the sound as it was originally played. Something like the above would require a highly specialized system and so would probably be of more interest to IMAX theaters than home theaters, but that's also a setting where ultra-realism is key to the illusion and they might well pay for the compute power needed to record and play back at that depth.
You're not going to be able to fit that kind of computer into an MPx player or any other ultra-light compute device. Because of the latency inherent in analyzing the room at both ends, nobody is going to want to fit that kind of computer into any mobile compute device. Home computers - maybe, but even there these aren't the days when the LAPC-1 was popular. You can't have large external boxes for sound processing, or a card the size of a modern tower unit. Again, people want low latency and this is not a low latency idea.
Absolutely true on (1), though one of the other conditions how good your hearing is. I can hear just fine up to 24KHz, whereas many adults my age would have trouble hearing past 18KHz. That makes a vast difference in sound perception. The sound source and the speaker have to support the best hearing of those listening, but for cost reasons it's usually "better" for a record label to only support the worst hearing of those listening.
(For those observing that CDs started at 44KHz, it is important to note that that is a sampling rate. You cannot describe a waveform of a given frequency with one or two samples spread out over one wavelength. The 44KHz rate assumes nobody has better hearing than the average middle-aged male. The 96KHz of higher-end audio recordings these days is better - 4 data points for a 24 KHz wave - but you only actually get that if the playback system is aware that some of us aren't deaf AND the speaker system has accurate-enough response at the higher end.)
You are correct on (2), but there is nothing to stop a sound system from emitting a controlled set of sounds, recording them with mikes, and calculating
For cables, it's a bit iffy but you're largely correct. Higher impedance in the cables means loss of power, assuming the signal is analogue. If the signal is digital, then yes you still lose power but your loss of data is essentially zero unless you have cables from hell. A lack of proper shielding means you've got a brilliant dipole aerial connected up. It'll play the sound ok, but it might also pick up the local taxi cab, the neighbor's Nintendo game, or any other RFI that happens to be around. This is just as true for digital, only you won't hear them, you'll just get clutter. The connectors only matter insofar as to whether you have a sustained connection or an intermittent one. No matter how expensive the rest of the cable is, an intermittent connection won't work when there is no connection taking place.
And that last point is why it is not price that matters but the quality of the product. The two may have no relationship to one another. We know that from fashion and computer software. In both cases, the price tag tells you nothing about the usefulness of what you get, all it tells you is the usefulness of what the vendor gets in return.
Most people with even a modicum of experience with electronics could (if there was any incentive to do so) build high-end sound systems for a fraction of what a similar system would cost from an online or bricks-and-mortar store, where (with a recording of sufficient quality) they could absolutely blow the cynics through the wall. But why bother? No CD comes at that kind of quality (DVDs don't count because you're splitting your attention between sound and video), so there's nothing to play on such a system that you could get any benefit from, and those capable of such a thing would want to spend their time elsewhere. It's not even as if you could build such systems to sell, because again there's nothing to play on it.
It's just too bad that the rest of us cannot be as confident about the stuff you pull out of your ass.
Too bad you're a troll who can't be assed to actually go do the research. These things were known, it's very well documented, anyone bothering to do the legwork would find as much.
In other words, you don't have much of a reason to believe they were in the wrong. It's just something you do.
Translation: You want me to be wrong, but can't be bothered to determine if I am. You just prefer anyone who is different to you to be somehow at fault - even if you don't know what the fault is.
Which I see you did.
No, I made no guesses. I stated a method of determining the right course of action, I made no determination as to what the outcome of the method would be. Again, your desire to make other people wrong if they happen to differ from you is transparent. You're a bigot of the highest order.
I wonder why people keep trying to shoehorn every accident of nuclear power into the format of the plot from the China Syndrome movie?
Well, as far as I can see, they aren't. So you can wonder all you like. You might as well wonder why people see pink ants climbing up the walls and talking to them. Your wonderings aren't real. Your observations are delusional. You're a paranoid SOB and need to get help.
Nobody has been able to show in the meantime that TEPCO or the Japanese nuclear regulatory agency did anything wrong with respect to protecting the plant
That is correct, but only because nobody has actually crunched the numbers. I made no claim that either had done anything wrong with respect to protecting the plant, my claim is that what they did wrong was fail in the design of their test. It did not handle historic events in the area and thus neither did the plant. Had they crunched the right numbers, it may have made ZERO difference to their decision, but we cannot know that until the numbers are crunched. Something nobody, YOU INCLUDED, has done.
I expect them to perform a reasonable range of simulations and drills to determine if their plans would definitely fail. They may not know what WILL work, but they can know what definitely won't. (If maximum traffic flow is X and there are Y cars, then you cannot evacuate faster than Y/X even if nothing fails, nothing breaks down and all drivers are intelligent and courteous. In reality, we know that some percentage of breakdowns is inevitable, that most drivers are stupid and that failures are inevitable. However, you can put numbers to the probabilities, run simulations according to different types of event, and then compare the simulations with what happens in a drill.)
Weather is a major factor in the spread of radioisotopes. You can't allow for all possible weather, but you can allow for a range of likely scenarios. The ideal would be a torrential downpour at the reactor, since then nothing is in the air. All the isotopes will fall in a very short distance of the reactor and provided you have sensible containment, you can buy yourself time. Water seeps through the ground, yes, but you know where the ground is and the area is very limited. Evacuation would only be needed over that area, so the hazardous road conditions won't impose much of a problem as you've only a few people to evacuate.
The worst possibility is light-to-medium showers away from the reactor itself but over nearby populated areas and the surroundings. This is when you get the isotopes washed out of the air into people's homes. Containment would be exceedingly difficult, evacuation would be hard (high density traffic on slightly slippery roads -- bad) and you'd have the least amount of time to do the evacuating.
If, between a reactor failing catastrophically and fallout via rain, you have a few days to prepare, you've got time to run weather forecasts to see where fallout is likely, the expected severity (the greater the distance, the more that will have fallen out as dust) and whether it'll even be in a place you care about. (If there is no rain expected until the airmass is over the ocean, it's not an issue beyond restricting deep sea fishing for a while.) You'd want to evacuate the areas contaminated by dust until they can be cleaned up, but it can be relatively controlled. Dust doesn't seep into the ground, so decontamination work doesn't need to be massively extensive.
Beyond that, the specific isotopes only matter to the NRC to the extent that (a) iodine tablets can reduce take-up of radioactive iodine or (b) where a radioisotope is either the same as one common in biology or (worse) "preferred" in chemical reactions over a different but biologically important element. Beyond that, it only matters what general health category the radioisotopes fall into : highly toxic (regular poison if ingested or in contact), highly carcinogenic if ingested (your alpha emitters fall into this category), or otherwise dangerous if around for longer than the time needed to perform a full evacuation plus decontamination.
Now, if people need hospital treatment, that information would need to be available to health professionals without delay (whether from office politics or government politics), but there should be no pressure to give information where it is not needed.
Because earthquakes and tsunamis in the area HAD been recorded as much larger than the ones used by the engineers of Fukushima -- just not within a 100 year timeframe. The best-available data actually agreed very well with the events that actually transpired. The best-available data within the selected timeframe did not.
Your question is therefore the wrong question.
The correct thing to do is ask a series of questions: What windowing parameters are the correct windowing parameters to use? What timeframe are you going to look over? (Is 100 years too short, since the earthquake and tsunami that hit are extremely regular 500-year cyclic events and occurred very close to peak probability of the next cycle starting?) What sort of probability of event should you consider? (Is it meaningful to talk of a 1-in-a-hundred-years event when the aforementioned cycle has a virtually zero probability of occurring in a 400 year timespan but is a near-certainty in a specific 100 year window? Non-cyclic earthquakes which are genuinely random can sensibly be talked of in that way, but this was not one of those. How do you allow for non-random events in risk management?) What level of probability should be considered and - given the sort of probability may need to be rethought - how do you decide what the actual value is during the forecast operational lifespan? What are the economic costs of this solution versus the costs of fixing the damage in the event of a failure? Given that there is a probability of making the assessment AND suffering a failure anyway, what is the total cost of this solution across all possible events? How does that compare with the total cost of other solutions across all possible events?
I can tell you with a very high level of confidence that the Japanese engineers were fully-aware that an earthquake plus tsunami on this scale was exceedingly likely at some point in the lifetime of the reactor and have been for over 20 years. I can also tell you that they were fully-aware of the requirements for avoiding the disaster that happened. What I CANNOT tell you is that meeting those requirements prior to the earthquake met the requirement of being the lowest-cost solution across all possible events.
They were and are totally wrong in claiming it could not be foreseen - it was and they'd had both data and conclusions for two decades. But that does NOT mean they were wrong in not engineering a better solution within that time. That is knowable only if you carry out the complete risk assessment, and I know of no such comprehensive assessment carried out by qualified engineers that is in the public domain.
Personally, I think they were in the wrong. I think they could have, and should have, made the necessary adjustments according to the data they had. However, whilst I may think this, I cannot KNOW this from what information is public. Doesn't have to be from TEPCO - they might never have performed a comprehensive review either. But sans a comprehensive analysis across all possible events weighted by probability and a reasonable range of solutions, their expense and the permutations of events they would protect against, along with the costs of any given solution failing, we can only make wild guesses in the dark.
Space Micro doesn't list the prices of their components or systems, nor can I find any from anyone else. Honeywell don't list their prices either. Atmel seem to have dropped out of the field. Linear don't list the prices for their space-hardened stuff. Don't see any for BAE either, or Intersil. Empire Magnetics require a lot of personal data before they give you access to even the price classification information. Not the prices, just how they're classified.
You've got to allow for a year's worth of traveling outside of an atmosphere and then operating on Mars for the duration of the mission. This analysis of radiation for manned missions suggests you're looking at 3.5 mSv per day, then 20 rems per year in most of the places of interest.
I'm going to figure that the top-line components will cost 100x that of their conventional counterparts, due to the higher-level of precision and QA that are required. It might well be a good deal more. In Russia, you've also got to pay for smuggling decent-grade hardware out of the US, as all of this stuff will be under massive amounts of regulation.
My guess is that the cuts would have saved enough that those doing the cost-cutting could buy second homes in Switzerland.
That is where the challenge comes in. How to make things fair to everyone. I would argue that privacy should be as optional as possible but no more so. In the case of porn, I would say that privacy should not be optional, that it should be in a space where it does not cause any problems for anyone else, that this is not a "good answer" but that it's a compromise that respects both sides and that it's a start.
However, I freely admit that in a rational, coherent discussion where all sides get heard, where all evidence is weighed according to merit and not volume, and where a rational, coherent decision is made at the end, that a different dividing line might be drawn. It might be that they conclude that porn should NOT be in a public library, in any form, under any conditions. Or they might conclude that the boundary has become so fuzzy that you cannot isolate a specific subject, only specific forms. They might conclude anything.
My point is that you've got to start somewhere, so you might as well start with the choice that shows the greatest respect to everyone -- even if it offends them. You should THEN go on to have aforementioned discussion, bearing in mind that if nobody has managed to have said discussion in the past 2000+ years (Ovid narrowly avoided execution for his poetry) that it might take a little time and effort to get people round a table without killing each other. If you don't start with the first step, you'll have both sides feeling persecuted and that never helps. If you do not move onto the second step, the first step has never lasted more than a decade when its been tried before.
The House of Lords does not make the decision en-masse. Only the Law Lords actually hear and decide cases. The bishops therefore are unimportant. However, these days, the UK has moved from the House of Lords to a Supreme Court system - a decision I consider incredibly flawed.
You are correct, however the Lords are entitled to apply the "reasonableness" clause which existed in Common Law at the time of conviction. Reasonableness allows someone to break a written law without being convicted, within very narrow parameters. It does NOT allow for convictions (hence the Lady Chatterly's Lover ruling). Reasonableness therefore allows moral values to be considered within a judgement. In this case, they do seem to have done exactly that. By wording it the way they did, they appear to have ruled that he would have regarded what he was doing to be unreasonable in the eyes of the law. Unlike Lord Denning - whose judgements I regard with some suspicion as he was ultra-conservative, but whose style in explaining his rationale I applaud as being sensationally clear (a quality sadly lacking in legal circles anywhere), these lords work incredibly had to make their reasoning obscure even though they do actually make an effort to make their conclusions clear.
That begs the question of what is "right". No two societies have ever agreed on this. Even the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights has almost zero actual enforcement anywhere, the US included.
Kings and Lords - ah, that's just as tricky an issue. Both have, at various times going back to 1102, rejected the legality of slavery. The most interesting case was paraphrased by the late Lord Denning when he stated that it was ruled that "the air was too pure for slaves to breath, so thus let all the slaves go free". This was not actually what the judge in the 1770 case said - Lord Denning was notorious for his use of artistic license to fancy-up legal texts - but it's a fair representation of the intent. Basically, the Lords had been split since they first formed, with roughly half favoring total abolition of slavery. Indeed, that particular case (where it was finally ruled that Virginia laws permitting slavery had no validity in Britain and that escaped slaves who reached Britain were automatically free) may have been a factor in the slave owners being a significant part of the American Revolution.
The Lords were just as divided over universal emancipation (which had also been under discussion for some time), sovereign immunity (technically illegal at the time in the UK, under the Magna Carta), controls on trade (technically, all international traders had diplomatic immunity under the Magna Carta), education (heavily discussed) and health-care (heavily discussed). All of these are "rights" somewhere, but most places don't consider them all to be "rights" and all places consider at least one of these to be "wrongs", but which one is "wrong" depends on the place.
Who is correct?
There are good reasons for thinking that nobody is entirely correct, that everyone has come closer to correct in some ways but have not really evolved much in others. This is one reason I like the idea of balancing up political development - make it a bit more even in how far we've come - and why I like the idea of forcing politics and society to evolve rather than assume everything that matters is known. We shouldn't be afraid of being more right than we are, even when it means disagreeing with an assumption we've held dear.
I dislike the notion of locking people up to "protect people", because you cannot really ever know when a person has become safe or will become safe. It seems far better - and far more logical - to divide a sentence up into the constituent parts (correcting any underlying problem that may prevent dealing with the problem that makes a person a threat, correcting the threat, rehabilitating the person into society) where all parts are carried out in a manner that protects innocent people in the short-term, with the goal of having the person safe to re-enter society in the long-term.
Prison, for the purpose of confinement, has a nasty habit of turning into a training ground for less successful criminals and also being a place where people become dehumanized, hardened and radicalized. That clearly is not something fit for the purpose for which it was intended. It's a lemon. Maybe my idea doesn't work, but a maybe is still better odds than a guaranteed failure.
(In the worst cases, judges have had sponsorship deals with private prisons, where the private prisons pay the judges to convict people so that they can earn more money. This isn't getting fixed because in a punishment mentality, it is politically dangerous to seem weak in the face of crime. If you eliminate the mindset, then you eliminate the motive for doing nothing.)
It will also cut down on legal, entirely reasonable uses of the computers that are a bit more sensitive. There simply isn't any way to divide up the uses in a way that avoids harming someone, the best you can ever achieve is a compromise - harm only a restricted group of legitimate users in order to prevent the greatest number of non-legitimate or embarrassing users. But the greater you make the latter group, the greater you make the former group. That's unavoidable. The challenge is how to randomize the harm to legitimate users so that the harm is diffused rather than concentrated in specific minority areas.
Requiring ID fails on the randomization test. It concentrates the harm in specific areas. True, those areas are small but they still exist.
Twin-engine planes are good only if they can handle the failure of one engine. Some can, some can't. Four-engine planes are usually designed to handle the failure of two engines, but the only rich guy I know of that flies those is Bruce Dickenson from Iron Maiden.
Depends on the risks. There is no real adventure in confronting the same challenges day-in, day-out. Once you pass an obstacle, the spirit of adventure is to move on to the next one, not to go back.
I'm not criticizing what these guys did - they did many things that really WERE adventures - but they didn't die in one. They died on simple, unadventurous excursions that went badly wrong. Had Fossett found the site for his attempt to break the land-speed record and then died in that record attempt, that would have been an adventure. He would have been pushing the limits of what was known. Donald Campbell died in an adventure - a little negligently, as he didn't wait for the water to calm, but nobody had ever built a boat that fast and nobody knew what would happen at any moment. That's an adventure.
The successful solo attempt to balloon around the world by Fossett was equally an adventure - and a brilliant one at that. He held 115 other records over his life. That's a hell of an achievement. It's tragic that he died during an extremely boring site-scouting flight due to something as mundane as a downdraft plunging him into a mountain. Low flying in turbulent air next to a mountain was certainly in the spirit of taking risks, but where's the adventure in it? He'd conquered worse in just about every vehicle known to man.
Agreed to both points. Having an additional room with computers in cubes rather than open-plan would help anyone wishing to use a computer with some measure of privacy, but that would create problems because people would feel they were being ostracized rather than having privacy respected, so that's not a good solution.
In the end, I don't know if there is a good answer -- in part because society has created so many "extra" meanings for things and has been hostile to anyone that it can label as "outsiders" that all of the technically good answers have become bad answers.
A lot of stuff is also faster on Linux, particularly on the x86. Solaris x86 is dog slow. AIX ("aches") is an appropriate name for a mainframe OS that never really got the hang of this new-fangled "interactive user" stuff. It's a good mainframe OS, that is what it is designed for, tuned for and intended for, but traditional mainframe batch transactional work isn't the sort of payload that is typically run these days. The high-end users want hard real-time (i.e.: they know to the microsecond - or nanosecond, in some cases - exactly when each process will start and stop) for data collection, data analysis and simulation. The data centers want massive multithreading for gigantic servers with minimal overhead and service guarantees per thread. The typical user wants extremely low latency interactive. None of these are pre-scripted batch jobs.
Now, if you wanted to develop a data warehouse for, say, technical writings, journalism, etc, where you're compiling a collection of things that can be typeset overnight, that may be doable as a batch job. However, anyone planning on publishing a journal that needs 72 terabytes of storage had best consider the marketplace a little more closely first. A publishing company, say Nature, might conceivably have use for AIX for batch work. I could see the number of submissions, referee responses and article selections per journal being such that a mainframe would be a perfectly valid way to do things. Even then, it might still be sufficiently small that a live transactional database would be more cost-effective.
Traditionally, batch processing has been a niche market for electrical and gas companies, etc, where the number of customers is staggering. Even then, it has largely been replaced with live transactional systems because customers want things adjusted NOW and not overnight or at the end of the week.
Mass mailers still use batch processing, but printing is the bottleneck and there is no point in having an expensive OS process everything in a fraction of a second on an expensive mainframe when it takes N actual real-world seconds before a printer becomes available to take the next block of data. You need run no faster than the slowest component because the end produce won't be delivered any faster. You would have to have a gigantic number of printers before the OS became a significant factor and most shops just don't have that kind of printing power.
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Excellent points. Yes, a good room is definitely the preferred (and ultimately easier) solution.
Yeah, my system went a little beyond controlling amplitude, in that if you know that some wave W reaches the listener and is not wanted then you start by saying that you need a wave W' (a wave that cancels out W) that also reaches the listener. By tracing that wave backwards through the acoustics of the room to the speaker, you can figure out what additional waves are needed to be generated by the speaker to produce the desired effect. You then have to trace forward again to determine the consequences of doing this, going back and forth until the distortions at every measured point are minimized.
If you wanted to take into account early reflections, then it would get a LOT worse. You're then not only adding in extra waves, but you can delay any of them and/or delay any of the original signal to any of the speakers. The maths for minimizing that - even for a single person - would take a LOT of computer power. It also starts adding up in terms of memory resources needed. Every speaker would need a buffer capable of storing actual composite waveforms for the required length of time.
Yes, reverberation etc might well not be uniform across the audio spectrum. You'd have to split the spectrum up and process each block of frequencies independently, in the hopes that a block was relatively uniform in behavior.
I can see this working for any room, provided you had a powerful-enough computer and enough speakers in enough directions. It would be extremely difficult to do, though, and would not work at all if there are any time-variant components to the system. (i.e.: something changes acoustic properties over time, a person moves from one place to another, etc.)
Your solution of the better room IS a far easier solution and a far better solution. Mine is of interest almost solely to me because I am fascinated by the problems involved in auto-correcting wave-based systems. It's a complicated field, to the point that most of the experts seem to have given up doing anything more than the basics.
Again, more of your twisting and writhing to make "connections" that never existed in the post.
The earthquakes and tsunamis are indeed well-documented.
The cost/benefit calculation of doing something retroactively to the facility to bring it in line with this documentation has NEVER BEEN DONE and therefore we are indeed completely in the dark as to what that calculation would show.
No they do not. They rely heavily on an earthquake probability map which is entirely based off a simple count of earthquakes in the past century. They do NOT use IAEA risk evaluation methods, NOR do they use standard geological earthquake risk calculations -- calculations every other nuclear reactor in the world DOES use.
You don't bother looking, which is very different from not buying it. You don't want to know and don't care to know, which is not the same thing as nobody else knowing.
The earthquake+tsunami occur once every 500 years.
I stated categorically that the probability of it occurring within any given interval of time is going to depend on whether you look at this being a one-in-five-hundred-year event or a one-in-fifty-year event on a 500 year cycle -- a point you quite casually ignored in your effort to "prove" me wrong. And, no, I didn't raise your hackles, you managed that quite well on your own. As has been repeatedly shown, you don't read my posts, you merely react to them.
The data showed a cyclic event, which fits with more modern theories on earthquakes. Can't help it if you're ignorant of seismology.
No, I did not make conflicting statements about the "right course of action". I stated that it was exceedingly likely that at SOME POINT in the lifetime of the reactor that an earthquake plus tsunami was exceedingly likely. It is also exceedingly likely that at SOME POINT in the lifetime of a commercial airline company that they will suffer the loss of an aircraft.
I said NOTHING about them having to do anything about it. First, the failures within the reactor were due to a whole series of errors, of which the flooding was only one. Had ANY of those errors not taken place, there would have been no disaster. Second, it STILL has not been shown that the cost of cleanup plus financial loss due to the evacuation (after subtracting those costs purely due to the earthquake and tsunami with NO contribution from Fukushima) would have exceeded the cost of fixing the engineering problems. The cost of building a new reactor somewhere else and totally decontaminating the Fukushima site on a short enough time scale that industry would be unaffected AND eliminate the tsunami risk would certainly have exceeded the cost of cleanup.
I am highly hostile against deceptive arguments, but I am not bigoted. I reason, I explain, I step through my arguments. You do none of those. You bluster, you fluster and you attempt to confuse by throwing up phony arguments. Your arguments remain highly bigoted, as do you. You are a fraud, a crook, a swindler of those who are confused by your bluster. You substitute knowledge for volume, a point you yourself concede. You know NOTHING of me, but draw conclusions about what I do or do not know. You ADMIT you have read nothing, but draw conclusions from your ignorance.
Frankly, you are a disgusting puke of a creature.
Everything on its own track would be good (you can sound-trace to cancel out the acoustics of the room, for example). An improvement on that would have one track for the primary sound and a second track the codified the nature of the harmonics at any given time. Reason for that is that harmonics outside of the audible range will nonetheless interfere with sound in the audible range. It becomes rapidly harder to store that information by sampling alone, but the characteristics of an instrument can be described in a very compact manner. You need then state only WHAT harmonics are active (a bitmap) to be able to define however many harmonics you want to compute.
Yes, the setting the music is played in matters, but you can sound-trace to take that out of the data you are sampling then sound-trace it back in when playing it. That's one dedicated data track that needs be loaded into the DSPs before the music can be played.
You could add on as many such extras to the sound source as you like, building closer and closer to the sound as it was originally played. Something like the above would require a highly specialized system and so would probably be of more interest to IMAX theaters than home theaters, but that's also a setting where ultra-realism is key to the illusion and they might well pay for the compute power needed to record and play back at that depth.
You're not going to be able to fit that kind of computer into an MPx player or any other ultra-light compute device. Because of the latency inherent in analyzing the room at both ends, nobody is going to want to fit that kind of computer into any mobile compute device. Home computers - maybe, but even there these aren't the days when the LAPC-1 was popular. You can't have large external boxes for sound processing, or a card the size of a modern tower unit. Again, people want low latency and this is not a low latency idea.
Absolutely true on (1), though one of the other conditions how good your hearing is. I can hear just fine up to 24KHz, whereas many adults my age would have trouble hearing past 18KHz. That makes a vast difference in sound perception. The sound source and the speaker have to support the best hearing of those listening, but for cost reasons it's usually "better" for a record label to only support the worst hearing of those listening.
(For those observing that CDs started at 44KHz, it is important to note that that is a sampling rate. You cannot describe a waveform of a given frequency with one or two samples spread out over one wavelength. The 44KHz rate assumes nobody has better hearing than the average middle-aged male. The 96KHz of higher-end audio recordings these days is better - 4 data points for a 24 KHz wave - but you only actually get that if the playback system is aware that some of us aren't deaf AND the speaker system has accurate-enough response at the higher end.)
You are correct on (2), but there is nothing to stop a sound system from emitting a controlled set of sounds, recording them with mikes, and calculating
For cables, it's a bit iffy but you're largely correct. Higher impedance in the cables means loss of power, assuming the signal is analogue. If the signal is digital, then yes you still lose power but your loss of data is essentially zero unless you have cables from hell. A lack of proper shielding means you've got a brilliant dipole aerial connected up. It'll play the sound ok, but it might also pick up the local taxi cab, the neighbor's Nintendo game, or any other RFI that happens to be around. This is just as true for digital, only you won't hear them, you'll just get clutter. The connectors only matter insofar as to whether you have a sustained connection or an intermittent one. No matter how expensive the rest of the cable is, an intermittent connection won't work when there is no connection taking place.
And that last point is why it is not price that matters but the quality of the product. The two may have no relationship to one another. We know that from fashion and computer software. In both cases, the price tag tells you nothing about the usefulness of what you get, all it tells you is the usefulness of what the vendor gets in return.
Most people with even a modicum of experience with electronics could (if there was any incentive to do so) build high-end sound systems for a fraction of what a similar system would cost from an online or bricks-and-mortar store, where (with a recording of sufficient quality) they could absolutely blow the cynics through the wall. But why bother? No CD comes at that kind of quality (DVDs don't count because you're splitting your attention between sound and video), so there's nothing to play on such a system that you could get any benefit from, and those capable of such a thing would want to spend their time elsewhere. It's not even as if you could build such systems to sell, because again there's nothing to play on it.
Dunno if Hot Linux Jobs is still around, but that would be where I'd start looking.
Too bad you're a troll who can't be assed to actually go do the research. These things were known, it's very well documented, anyone bothering to do the legwork would find as much.
Translation: You want me to be wrong, but can't be bothered to determine if I am. You just prefer anyone who is different to you to be somehow at fault - even if you don't know what the fault is.
No, I made no guesses. I stated a method of determining the right course of action, I made no determination as to what the outcome of the method would be. Again, your desire to make other people wrong if they happen to differ from you is transparent. You're a bigot of the highest order.
Well, as far as I can see, they aren't. So you can wonder all you like. You might as well wonder why people see pink ants climbing up the walls and talking to them. Your wonderings aren't real. Your observations are delusional. You're a paranoid SOB and need to get help.
That is correct, but only because nobody has actually crunched the numbers. I made no claim that either had done anything wrong with respect to protecting the plant, my claim is that what they did wrong was fail in the design of their test. It did not handle historic events in the area and thus neither did the plant. Had they crunched the right numbers, it may have made ZERO difference to their decision, but we cannot know that until the numbers are crunched. Something nobody, YOU INCLUDED, has done.
I expect them to perform a reasonable range of simulations and drills to determine if their plans would definitely fail. They may not know what WILL work, but they can know what definitely won't. (If maximum traffic flow is X and there are Y cars, then you cannot evacuate faster than Y/X even if nothing fails, nothing breaks down and all drivers are intelligent and courteous. In reality, we know that some percentage of breakdowns is inevitable, that most drivers are stupid and that failures are inevitable. However, you can put numbers to the probabilities, run simulations according to different types of event, and then compare the simulations with what happens in a drill.)
Weather is a major factor in the spread of radioisotopes. You can't allow for all possible weather, but you can allow for a range of likely scenarios. The ideal would be a torrential downpour at the reactor, since then nothing is in the air. All the isotopes will fall in a very short distance of the reactor and provided you have sensible containment, you can buy yourself time. Water seeps through the ground, yes, but you know where the ground is and the area is very limited. Evacuation would only be needed over that area, so the hazardous road conditions won't impose much of a problem as you've only a few people to evacuate.
The worst possibility is light-to-medium showers away from the reactor itself but over nearby populated areas and the surroundings. This is when you get the isotopes washed out of the air into people's homes. Containment would be exceedingly difficult, evacuation would be hard (high density traffic on slightly slippery roads -- bad) and you'd have the least amount of time to do the evacuating.
If, between a reactor failing catastrophically and fallout via rain, you have a few days to prepare, you've got time to run weather forecasts to see where fallout is likely, the expected severity (the greater the distance, the more that will have fallen out as dust) and whether it'll even be in a place you care about. (If there is no rain expected until the airmass is over the ocean, it's not an issue beyond restricting deep sea fishing for a while.) You'd want to evacuate the areas contaminated by dust until they can be cleaned up, but it can be relatively controlled. Dust doesn't seep into the ground, so decontamination work doesn't need to be massively extensive.
Beyond that, the specific isotopes only matter to the NRC to the extent that (a) iodine tablets can reduce take-up of radioactive iodine or (b) where a radioisotope is either the same as one common in biology or (worse) "preferred" in chemical reactions over a different but biologically important element. Beyond that, it only matters what general health category the radioisotopes fall into : highly toxic (regular poison if ingested or in contact), highly carcinogenic if ingested (your alpha emitters fall into this category), or otherwise dangerous if around for longer than the time needed to perform a full evacuation plus decontamination.
Now, if people need hospital treatment, that information would need to be available to health professionals without delay (whether from office politics or government politics), but there should be no pressure to give information where it is not needed.
Because earthquakes and tsunamis in the area HAD been recorded as much larger than the ones used by the engineers of Fukushima -- just not within a 100 year timeframe. The best-available data actually agreed very well with the events that actually transpired. The best-available data within the selected timeframe did not.
Your question is therefore the wrong question.
The correct thing to do is ask a series of questions: What windowing parameters are the correct windowing parameters to use? What timeframe are you going to look over? (Is 100 years too short, since the earthquake and tsunami that hit are extremely regular 500-year cyclic events and occurred very close to peak probability of the next cycle starting?) What sort of probability of event should you consider? (Is it meaningful to talk of a 1-in-a-hundred-years event when the aforementioned cycle has a virtually zero probability of occurring in a 400 year timespan but is a near-certainty in a specific 100 year window? Non-cyclic earthquakes which are genuinely random can sensibly be talked of in that way, but this was not one of those. How do you allow for non-random events in risk management?) What level of probability should be considered and - given the sort of probability may need to be rethought - how do you decide what the actual value is during the forecast operational lifespan? What are the economic costs of this solution versus the costs of fixing the damage in the event of a failure? Given that there is a probability of making the assessment AND suffering a failure anyway, what is the total cost of this solution across all possible events? How does that compare with the total cost of other solutions across all possible events?
I can tell you with a very high level of confidence that the Japanese engineers were fully-aware that an earthquake plus tsunami on this scale was exceedingly likely at some point in the lifetime of the reactor and have been for over 20 years. I can also tell you that they were fully-aware of the requirements for avoiding the disaster that happened. What I CANNOT tell you is that meeting those requirements prior to the earthquake met the requirement of being the lowest-cost solution across all possible events.
They were and are totally wrong in claiming it could not be foreseen - it was and they'd had both data and conclusions for two decades. But that does NOT mean they were wrong in not engineering a better solution within that time. That is knowable only if you carry out the complete risk assessment, and I know of no such comprehensive assessment carried out by qualified engineers that is in the public domain.
Personally, I think they were in the wrong. I think they could have, and should have, made the necessary adjustments according to the data they had. However, whilst I may think this, I cannot KNOW this from what information is public. Doesn't have to be from TEPCO - they might never have performed a comprehensive review either. But sans a comprehensive analysis across all possible events weighted by probability and a reasonable range of solutions, their expense and the permutations of events they would protect against, along with the costs of any given solution failing, we can only make wild guesses in the dark.
The links for International Rectifier, for those *#$% off with Congress and wanting to build their own damn Rover:
Some of their other military/avionics stuff may be space-rated or rad-hardened but it doesn't say so.
Space Micro doesn't list the prices of their components or systems, nor can I find any from anyone else. Honeywell don't list their prices either. Atmel seem to have dropped out of the field. Linear don't list the prices for their space-hardened stuff. Don't see any for BAE either, or Intersil. Empire Magnetics require a lot of personal data before they give you access to even the price classification information. Not the prices, just how they're classified.
You've got to allow for a year's worth of traveling outside of an atmosphere and then operating on Mars for the duration of the mission. This analysis of radiation for manned missions suggests you're looking at 3.5 mSv per day, then 20 rems per year in most of the places of interest.
Converting everything to rads, it's 0.1 rads per mSv and 1 rad per rem, so that's 12.75 rads to get to Mars if you assume a year-long trip, plus 20 rads for the mission, so anything with a rating of less than 32.75 rads is pretty much guaranteed to fail. However, over the course of a two years, the odds of there being a solar flare are not insignificant. To be safe, you want resistance to a further 400 rad. 432.75 rad is within the tolerance of most of the space-hardened components (some components can be taken up to 1000 rad, others up to 10,000). However, the cheapest space components would NOT survive. You're talking high-end on the space scale.
I'm going to figure that the top-line components will cost 100x that of their conventional counterparts, due to the higher-level of precision and QA that are required. It might well be a good deal more. In Russia, you've also got to pay for smuggling decent-grade hardware out of the US, as all of this stuff will be under massive amounts of regulation.
My guess is that the cuts would have saved enough that those doing the cost-cutting could buy second homes in Switzerland.
That is where the challenge comes in. How to make things fair to everyone. I would argue that privacy should be as optional as possible but no more so. In the case of porn, I would say that privacy should not be optional, that it should be in a space where it does not cause any problems for anyone else, that this is not a "good answer" but that it's a compromise that respects both sides and that it's a start.
However, I freely admit that in a rational, coherent discussion where all sides get heard, where all evidence is weighed according to merit and not volume, and where a rational, coherent decision is made at the end, that a different dividing line might be drawn. It might be that they conclude that porn should NOT be in a public library, in any form, under any conditions. Or they might conclude that the boundary has become so fuzzy that you cannot isolate a specific subject, only specific forms. They might conclude anything.
My point is that you've got to start somewhere, so you might as well start with the choice that shows the greatest respect to everyone -- even if it offends them. You should THEN go on to have aforementioned discussion, bearing in mind that if nobody has managed to have said discussion in the past 2000+ years (Ovid narrowly avoided execution for his poetry) that it might take a little time and effort to get people round a table without killing each other. If you don't start with the first step, you'll have both sides feeling persecuted and that never helps. If you do not move onto the second step, the first step has never lasted more than a decade when its been tried before.
The House of Lords does not make the decision en-masse. Only the Law Lords actually hear and decide cases. The bishops therefore are unimportant. However, these days, the UK has moved from the House of Lords to a Supreme Court system - a decision I consider incredibly flawed.
You are correct, however the Lords are entitled to apply the "reasonableness" clause which existed in Common Law at the time of conviction. Reasonableness allows someone to break a written law without being convicted, within very narrow parameters. It does NOT allow for convictions (hence the Lady Chatterly's Lover ruling). Reasonableness therefore allows moral values to be considered within a judgement. In this case, they do seem to have done exactly that. By wording it the way they did, they appear to have ruled that he would have regarded what he was doing to be unreasonable in the eyes of the law. Unlike Lord Denning - whose judgements I regard with some suspicion as he was ultra-conservative, but whose style in explaining his rationale I applaud as being sensationally clear (a quality sadly lacking in legal circles anywhere), these lords work incredibly had to make their reasoning obscure even though they do actually make an effort to make their conclusions clear.
That begs the question of what is "right". No two societies have ever agreed on this. Even the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights has almost zero actual enforcement anywhere, the US included.
Kings and Lords - ah, that's just as tricky an issue. Both have, at various times going back to 1102, rejected the legality of slavery. The most interesting case was paraphrased by the late Lord Denning when he stated that it was ruled that "the air was too pure for slaves to breath, so thus let all the slaves go free". This was not actually what the judge in the 1770 case said - Lord Denning was notorious for his use of artistic license to fancy-up legal texts - but it's a fair representation of the intent. Basically, the Lords had been split since they first formed, with roughly half favoring total abolition of slavery. Indeed, that particular case (where it was finally ruled that Virginia laws permitting slavery had no validity in Britain and that escaped slaves who reached Britain were automatically free) may have been a factor in the slave owners being a significant part of the American Revolution.
The Lords were just as divided over universal emancipation (which had also been under discussion for some time), sovereign immunity (technically illegal at the time in the UK, under the Magna Carta), controls on trade (technically, all international traders had diplomatic immunity under the Magna Carta), education (heavily discussed) and health-care (heavily discussed). All of these are "rights" somewhere, but most places don't consider them all to be "rights" and all places consider at least one of these to be "wrongs", but which one is "wrong" depends on the place.
Who is correct?
There are good reasons for thinking that nobody is entirely correct, that everyone has come closer to correct in some ways but have not really evolved much in others. This is one reason I like the idea of balancing up political development - make it a bit more even in how far we've come - and why I like the idea of forcing politics and society to evolve rather than assume everything that matters is known. We shouldn't be afraid of being more right than we are, even when it means disagreeing with an assumption we've held dear.
I dislike the notion of locking people up to "protect people", because you cannot really ever know when a person has become safe or will become safe. It seems far better - and far more logical - to divide a sentence up into the constituent parts (correcting any underlying problem that may prevent dealing with the problem that makes a person a threat, correcting the threat, rehabilitating the person into society) where all parts are carried out in a manner that protects innocent people in the short-term, with the goal of having the person safe to re-enter society in the long-term.
Prison, for the purpose of confinement, has a nasty habit of turning into a training ground for less successful criminals and also being a place where people become dehumanized, hardened and radicalized. That clearly is not something fit for the purpose for which it was intended. It's a lemon. Maybe my idea doesn't work, but a maybe is still better odds than a guaranteed failure.
(In the worst cases, judges have had sponsorship deals with private prisons, where the private prisons pay the judges to convict people so that they can earn more money. This isn't getting fixed because in a punishment mentality, it is politically dangerous to seem weak in the face of crime. If you eliminate the mindset, then you eliminate the motive for doing nothing.)
It will also cut down on legal, entirely reasonable uses of the computers that are a bit more sensitive. There simply isn't any way to divide up the uses in a way that avoids harming someone, the best you can ever achieve is a compromise - harm only a restricted group of legitimate users in order to prevent the greatest number of non-legitimate or embarrassing users. But the greater you make the latter group, the greater you make the former group. That's unavoidable. The challenge is how to randomize the harm to legitimate users so that the harm is diffused rather than concentrated in specific minority areas.
Requiring ID fails on the randomization test. It concentrates the harm in specific areas. True, those areas are small but they still exist.
Twin-engine planes are good only if they can handle the failure of one engine. Some can, some can't. Four-engine planes are usually designed to handle the failure of two engines, but the only rich guy I know of that flies those is Bruce Dickenson from Iron Maiden.
A great quote from Screaming Lord Sutch: "If at first you don't succeed, then skydiving isn't for you."
Even if he had been a golden parachute kind of guy, those things are useless for bailing out of single-seater aircraft. Way too heavy.
Depends on the risks. There is no real adventure in confronting the same challenges day-in, day-out. Once you pass an obstacle, the spirit of adventure is to move on to the next one, not to go back.
I'm not criticizing what these guys did - they did many things that really WERE adventures - but they didn't die in one. They died on simple, unadventurous excursions that went badly wrong. Had Fossett found the site for his attempt to break the land-speed record and then died in that record attempt, that would have been an adventure. He would have been pushing the limits of what was known. Donald Campbell died in an adventure - a little negligently, as he didn't wait for the water to calm, but nobody had ever built a boat that fast and nobody knew what would happen at any moment. That's an adventure.
The successful solo attempt to balloon around the world by Fossett was equally an adventure - and a brilliant one at that. He held 115 other records over his life. That's a hell of an achievement. It's tragic that he died during an extremely boring site-scouting flight due to something as mundane as a downdraft plunging him into a mountain. Low flying in turbulent air next to a mountain was certainly in the spirit of taking risks, but where's the adventure in it? He'd conquered worse in just about every vehicle known to man.
Agreed to both points. Having an additional room with computers in cubes rather than open-plan would help anyone wishing to use a computer with some measure of privacy, but that would create problems because people would feel they were being ostracized rather than having privacy respected, so that's not a good solution.
In the end, I don't know if there is a good answer -- in part because society has created so many "extra" meanings for things and has been hostile to anyone that it can label as "outsiders" that all of the technically good answers have become bad answers.
A lot of stuff is also faster on Linux, particularly on the x86. Solaris x86 is dog slow. AIX ("aches") is an appropriate name for a mainframe OS that never really got the hang of this new-fangled "interactive user" stuff. It's a good mainframe OS, that is what it is designed for, tuned for and intended for, but traditional mainframe batch transactional work isn't the sort of payload that is typically run these days. The high-end users want hard real-time (i.e.: they know to the microsecond - or nanosecond, in some cases - exactly when each process will start and stop) for data collection, data analysis and simulation. The data centers want massive multithreading for gigantic servers with minimal overhead and service guarantees per thread. The typical user wants extremely low latency interactive. None of these are pre-scripted batch jobs.
Now, if you wanted to develop a data warehouse for, say, technical writings, journalism, etc, where you're compiling a collection of things that can be typeset overnight, that may be doable as a batch job. However, anyone planning on publishing a journal that needs 72 terabytes of storage had best consider the marketplace a little more closely first. A publishing company, say Nature, might conceivably have use for AIX for batch work. I could see the number of submissions, referee responses and article selections per journal being such that a mainframe would be a perfectly valid way to do things. Even then, it might still be sufficiently small that a live transactional database would be more cost-effective.
Traditionally, batch processing has been a niche market for electrical and gas companies, etc, where the number of customers is staggering. Even then, it has largely been replaced with live transactional systems because customers want things adjusted NOW and not overnight or at the end of the week.
Mass mailers still use batch processing, but printing is the bottleneck and there is no point in having an expensive OS process everything in a fraction of a second on an expensive mainframe when it takes N actual real-world seconds before a printer becomes available to take the next block of data. You need run no faster than the slowest component because the end produce won't be delivered any faster. You would have to have a gigantic number of printers before the OS became a significant factor and most shops just don't have that kind of printing power.
Works best if you use the "Doom as Sys Admin" hack.