But here is the problem, underneath the data is a pattern. And the calculations are a pattern, as a result a pattern emerges. The pattern is called human language.
I think you're getting a bit confused here? The 'pattern' in my mind is the data - whether it be a text, a picture, or a multimedia stream. The ciphers today only see a stream of bits.
Many encryption programs will zip/compress text files before encryption due to the extra order caused by large numbers of zeros, and relatively low number of patterns per character.
To give you an understanding, I deal with random numbers and I cannot use a computer based random number generator because they generate patterns.
I'm fully aware of those. Part of the reason for those patterns is the encryption isn't perfect - just good enough that it'd take forever and a day to find the original data if you lack the key.
Still, would you be able to tell the difference between a file full of flawed computer generated random numbers and an encrypted file?
if you use the wrong block cipher mode, it's easy to distinguish between an encrypted file and random noise.
Maybe I should have said 'properly encrypted'. If you're using the 'wrong' cipher mode, or a weak encryption, you are indeed going to be leaving patterns - patterns which will assist in breaking the code.
The 'ideal' encryption, a one time pad, will leave a result that can't be told from random noise of the quality the pad was made from.
That's the goal. Other encryption systems that are more complicated mathematically(OTP by default is a simple XOR), but with shorter keys, should imitate this ideal, and generally quite well.
The fact that there's order in the encrypted information doesn't change the fact that, to an outside observer that doesn't know the original information or the key can't tell the difference between the encrypted information and true random noise. That's part of the point.
If they can tell that it's not random, that's a start on cracking the encryption and gaining the original information.
hmm... I certainly think that it can result in waste, but on the whole, proper patent laws are a benefit.
If the inventer/patent holder licenses/commercializes/sells their work for a good price, they get rich if the idea's good enough.
If they're unwilling to sell for a good price, people are forced to find a work around. In the process, they may or may not find another way that's more efficient than the original patent.
Finally, you get to the point that patents, unlike copyrights, will expire in most people's lifetimes. Thus, any delays are only temporary.
Remember, letting an inventor earn a profit off of their invention isn't a bad thing.
All the security camera/fingerprint stuff only matter if the fact that you got the records comes out before the camera footage is overwritten and people have handled the records enough to destroy any fingerprints. Not all paperwork takes fingerprints well anyways.
Personally, the biggest problem I forsee is getting past the people in the records room - you might be able to walk the halls dressed up as a worker there, but the records people DO tend to know who works there.
Only if you're willing to sign a waiver and/or specify on your insurance that you don't wear a belt.
That's my extent of caring. The family I mentioned? Terribly tragic, but the guy(and his family) died for their beliefs. Plenty have. It was their right to drive and ride without a seatbelt in the belief that they wouldn't get into an accident or would be safely ejected if they were.
Darn it all, now my insurance paperwork's disappeared.
Unfortunately the AP-1000's design still falls short.
Falls short by what standard? Don't forget that the AP-1000 is substantially SMALLER than the EPR design.
None of the designs incorporate features to ease the teardown and eventual decommissioning of the facility. For example, Yankee Rowe, was a controlled shutdown of a functioning reactor. It cost half a billion dollars to clean-up and it was only 137 Megawatts, less than a quarter of the size of TMI-2.
In the USA a levy per kwh goes towards a fund to pay for the eventual decommissioning. Any Yankee Rowe doesn't seem like a good example, little economy of scale for it's small size, and it's cost a lot more than many other reactor decommisioning. The NRC estimates $280-612 million.
Compare that to the costs to clean up a long running coal plant to those 'greenfield' standards.
Accident Sequence Precursors.
Thanks. I think part of the problem is that it's a very expensive and complicated thing to input an existing reactor into such a system.
Well this is actually one of those cases where I would put the government in charge, they already own the liability anyway and $100 million is chicken feed compared to almost a trillion dollars of damages in todays dollars.
It's still something. Each additional reactor piles more on the power companies and less on the government. That's how I'd get rid of the act - just keep increasing the private liability.
I think the Navy's certification process for subs would work if implemented for power reactors, they have best practices and it could work counter cyclical to the private economic cycle.
Is it really that relevant to a ground based commercial power nuclear plant? Besides, given the USA's track record over my lifespan, does it really NEED huge changes? Oh, and 'too cheap to meter' was always a wild idea.
Tough to just shut down a plant providing 35% of a state's electricity, but in the context that we've built the replacement first, acceptable.
I know I've mentioned in this thread that any extensive building of new nuclear plants would be to shut down older, inefficient, more dangerous plants, whether coal or nuclear, with safer modern plants.
Utility wiring? Well, you can't pull a terminated cable nearly as easily as you can unterminated wire.
Sounds like you have a good install - the hand terminated stuff is in the wall where it's supposed to be, unlikely to get damaged.
If you're looking at in wall stuff, you're stuck with home/professionally made - and I can show you some horribly terminated 'professional'* cables. Even the professionally made stuff will be hand run and terminated - the benefits would be that you're not using up YOUR professionals to do the work, and they may have equipment to make it go faster, or the relatively expensive equipment to test for certification purposes.
*In the sense that the dudes were paid to terminate it.
Also, some government agencies (at least the ones I worked with) require special cabling for fire reasons. I can't remember if it's PVC or non-PVC coated wire that generates more smoke in a fire, but they were insistent that we ordered the specific type for building code reasons.
Plenum rated. It's not that they won't burn/smoke, it's that the burning/smoking will be less toxic than the 'cheap' stuff.
Basically, with anything commercial, if it goes through the air handling system, it has to be plenum rated, and in a lot of buildings the space above the ceiling tiles is the return air flow, there's no specific ducting for it, so everything up there has to be rated or placed in it's own duct/protective container. Cheaper to buy the rated stuff.
I've been driving for over 20 years without a single accident. Not one. I'm not worried about it. Regardless if I care or not, why should anyone be trying to force me to wear a seat belt? How does it help them?
Had a guy like that over when I was in Nebraska. Didn't believe in seatbelts...
Him, his wife, two daughters all died in a collision, except for the boyfriend of one of the daughters. He walked away from the accident. He was also the only one buckled up.
How does it help them? Well, it helps keep MY insurance rates down and insures that a bed is available if I'm hurt. On average you'll use less hospital resources if you DO get into an accident.
I keep a fire extinguisher in my kitchen, and a first responder kit in my truck. I've never had a kitchen fire, nor have I been first on scene at a car accident w/injuries. But I want to be prepared for it.
Just pick up a bunch of different lengths of pre-terminated cable from the good folks at deep-surplus.com. Buy a bunch of 1-foot cables, along with some 3-foot cables. 5-foot cables. 7-foot cables. 12-foot cables. So on, so forth. Then, when you need a cable of a given length, you've (gasp!) already got one!
For anything below 20 feet, we've found that the pre-built cables are cheaper, as long as they're bought in bulk. Though we did have some issues with our purchase guy when he paid $7/cable for 200 cat6 3 footers. The company was 'kind enough' to ship them 3 day... I sat there and showed him 3 different suppliers that would have provided the same thing for $1-2/cable. But it wasn't worth it to worry about it much.
What irked us about that shipment is that our previous bulk buy had each cable come to us with 1 or 2 twist ties or in a bag without any for the real short ones. These came with 2 twist ties in a pain in the butt to open plastic bag. As far as we were concerned, as long as they came individually rolled in a box, the less packing material the better.
Basically, by the time you figure the cost of the connectors, the cable, and individual's time to terminate them, you're better off buying standard patch cables pre-made. The nice boots add a few cents, after all.
We still have all the stuff needed to make cable for the ocassional odd situation, of course.
And if college ed was cheaper, she wouldn't be looking at having the loans paid off when your kids are going to college...
Unfortuantly, subsidizing loans/schools isn't the answer, because expenses will rise to payments. In my experience, there's a LOT many schools can do to more efficienty and economically provide educations.
Even teachers can make enough money to pay for college; assuming that you don't go to one of the most expensive schools, take enough of a courseload you don't linger there and so on.
Plenty of people get degrees today with the assistance of loans. If it was cheaper, well, so much the better.
I worked through college at a networking lab dealing with Gigabit Ethernet, but 10Gig, but while there are tons of connectors out there, but only two are really ever used on the NIC: SC and LC
I've had to deal with three different proprietary connectors for desktop use... Not fun.
Oh, and I was referring not to the connection to the switch, but for the connection to the desktop, density isn't too terribly important there, but expense is. LC is nice enough, and you can get adapting patch cables in bulk if you need to.
In some states, the state universities are allowed to increase their tuition rates by a certain state mandated maxiumum every year. This effect has been building up over decades.
I know some universities are restricted on how much they increase tuition. My point is that even if they were allowed to raise tuition in an unlimited fashion, if students can't get the money to go, they can't go.
If the allowable amounts of student aid/loans hadn't increased ahead of inflation along with the increases in tuition, the more expensive colleges and universities would have found themselves having to restrain
A university can charge $100k for their education if they want, but if the students can only raise $40k, they can't go to that university, even if they're willing to pay the $100k, because they can't get the cash.
Universities need that cap on tuition expenses because they tend to expand uncontrollably - many haven't constrained their spending otherwise.
My arguement would be that even if you capped them at BELOW inflation spending for quite a few years, they'd find ways to adapt and keep teaching at the lower funding levels, and students would be graduating with substantially less debt.
Loans drive up the cost of any item for the reasons you put forth in your argument.
Especially for something like a college education, the market isn't actually constrained, more college courses can be 'constructed' and put on the market, especially as the price increases. The trick is to find a sweet spot where we have enough colleges/courses but the prices isn't too high.
That's why I specified 'easy' loans - IE credit is TOO easy to get, such that people find it easy to get over their heads with it. Same with businesses, credit is good for industry, but too much credit can lead to wasteful spending, and companies operating in dangerous territory as they operate completely off of loans, not having any actual capital of their own.
The best way to be "recession proof" is requiring significant down payments on loans. This will decrease the cost of the collateral, but make it harder for people to get the loan. It's a sliding scale from 100% down to 0% down (and perhaps negative amounts down as we saw in CA and FL).
How do you require a down payment on a college education loan? There's no physical object that the lender can confiscate to make himself whole if the borrower doesn't pay back.
Sure, you can make students pay a percentage of their class with unborrowed money, but that often doesn't work well either.
I'm not worrying about recession profing loans, at least not educational ones. What I'm looking at is if we make getting a loan more difficult, or decrease the amount somebody can get, the colleges would end up responding by dropping costs - or get fewer students.
I see americans on/. talk about this as if it's a normal thing. Maybe it is in the USA, that doesn't mean it is everywhere.
Like a lot of things in the USA, we're actually very fragmented. Remember, we don't have a national school system, we have 50 state level systems.
Some universities this practice is prevalent, in others it's actually forbidden. I remember one university that would allow a professor to teach from his own book - but such book had to be sold to the students at printing cost.
printed a large chunk of the content for us free in the form of a handout
Time for me to get a bit technical. Assuming said book had enough copies for economies of scale to take effect(several thousand copies IIRC), it's actually substantially cheaper to print the book than to 'copy' it using a laser printer/copier. You can get better results as well.
I have to say I think the american system which drives students into insane ammounts of debt both directly with fees and with very high other expenses is pretty strange/fucked up.
I have a theory that easy availability of credit/assistance has actually skewed the cost of a degree higher, much like the housing market.
Easy availability of credit means that individuals that wouldn't have gone go, and those that would have gone to a cheaper school go to an expensive one instead.
As a result, many universities haven't had to control their spending in quite a long time, despite all the moaning about not wanting to raise tuition. They've almost forgotten how to economize. To save money.
Restrict credit such that students don't actually HAVE the money to go to their college, and I'm willing to bet that the college would find a lot of ways to save money and reduce their expenses.
It's my personal philosophy that students DO need to pay for most of their degree; it's a good way to make sure they value it.
This site sounds almost needlessly limited; libraries have been doing similar transfers for decades, and not just limited to textbooks.
Which kinda makes sense. Textbooks tend to be for a specific class. Research books and materials, on the other hand, are both more universal and often rarer.
Then again, it could be a translation issue and be about research/professional books and not just about the american definition of 'textbook' being a book mostly used for a class.
Token ring gives each device on the ring roughly equal time, I'd imagine switched ethernet with a decent switch would have similar behaviour. I beleive some of them can also prioritise data.
Ethernet switches do indeed often support QoS, which is the prioritization of traffic.
Even my home router box does, though as a router it's smarter than at least some switches. I'm not aware of any modern gigabit switches that aren't at least that smart though.
Please do, and let me know if you find any specific wavier.
Found it. A little research though, says that the plant that released it is liable irregardless of fault. Ah well, shouldn't be that much worse than trying to get compensation from somebody else's insurance company after they hit you.
I don't think it's a fair comparison because Nuclear plant never had a 'production' model in America. They are generally individually designed so design improvements cannot be applied to subsequent Nuclear installations like a production line.
Very good point. Looking at the 24 proposed new construction, 7 plants are looking to install the AP 1000, 14 reactors total(2 per site), 5 EPR, 5(6) ESBWR, 1(2) US-APWR, 1(2) ABWR, 1 PWR.
Combined with the fact that China and other nations are looking to build a bunch, the AP 1000 will be considered 'production', and be able to enjoy the subsequent engineering cost savings.
so comparing a Nuclear plant to another Nuclear plant is the only valid comparison that can be made.
True, we can make comparisons, I'm simply saying that calling increasing numbers of incidents at OLD plants a problem is unfair to NEW plants.
Whilst the AP-1000 does go some way to reducing the complexity of the reactor it does introduce new base design issues. If new failure mode modelling is to be of any use for Nuclear plant then we should have seen the identification of new ASP's in existing reactors.
ASP? I'm unfamiliar with this abbreviation other than for active server pages...
For the simulations I'm thinking of, it's like for new airplanes - it works better when you're designing a NEW system, it helps you simplify systems and identify potential trouble spots to redesign from the get go.
As a result, one of the advertisements for the AP1000 is 50% fewer valves - a valve that doesn't exist can't malfunction, for example.
What we see instead is evidenced by the Davis-Besse Plant, that identification of failure-mode's can only be of any use if management is prepared to take a step back and act on the potential for failure. Clearly, maintaining the plant's income stream trumps safety and failure mode analysis is ignored if it means downtime for the plant.
Just read up on it. Yeah, there were some problems. Still, those problems were mostly 'what ifs', and 'could have beens'. The people involved were stupid though - it would have been shut down less if they'd done stuff like they were supposed to, before extensive damage was done, and they'd have likely been shut down permanently(IE making no money), if they'd waited much longer. They were also criminal - 3 people are up on felony criminal charges if the wiki is right.
If design improvements were implemented I might agree that it is necessary however (as mentioned in another thread), to save money on construction costs the AP-1000 cuts (waaay) back on concrete and steel. The result is a ratio of containment volume to thermal power below that of today's PWRs, thereby increasing the risk of containment over-pressurization and failure in event of a severe accident.
On the other hand, the reactor is also designed with passive safety and cooling systems that should reduce/eliminate the need for the higher stress structures.
I wouldn't underestimate the savings of proper design, after all, concrete and steel in the wrong spot don't increase safety.
The AP-1000 incorporates none of the design changes, that would make nuclear power reactors less vulnerable to sabotage, recommended 25 years ago by an NRC chartered an industry panel. The AP-1000 incorporates none of the EPR design enhancements which appears to be the safest and most secure design among new reactor designs for PWR.
You totally overlook the fact that 15x background is just an average
It's all law of averages. On average, you'd need a HUGE population with that exposure to expect one additional cancer from the radiation release, and that's assuming the assumption of linearality is true. Realistically, most of those DNA bumps simply result in nothing or a dead cell. Heck, there's evidence that people get lots more cancer than we detect, it's just that the body's own systems kill it before it gets anywhere.
Basically, the radiation release was small enough that NATURAL radiation would cause far more cancers. A not insignifcant amount of the radiation exposure I listed is for Radon, and that'll get you in the lungs. Xenon gas isn't exactly known for being absorbed. Heck, as a noble gas, it's not exactly reactive period.
Plus your thyroid and many fish concentrate radioactive iodine and other elements by factors of, say, 10,000 and more.
It was chernobyl that released radioactive iodine. TMI was primarily Xenon gas(~13M Curies). Only 13-17 curies of I-131 was released. Compared the Chernobyl, that's a tiny amount. Estimates vary widely, but one figure, has 10-15% of the radiation being I-131, and the release being in the billions of curies.
Chernobyl and surface nuclear weapon tests are blamed for the increase in thyroid cancer. I'll note that I-131 is used medically today, so there has to be a reasonably safe dosage level.
I think it's obvious to most people that coal is even worse than nuclear. However, being better than the worst option doesn't automatically make nuclear the best option. As long as the majority of your electricity comes from coal, it might make it a viable option, though.
Note that I simply proposed flipping the proportion of nuclear and coal power. I will admit to misremembering coal's share. From doe.gov, in 2007: Coal: 48.5% Natural Gas: 21.6 Nuclear: 19.4 Hydro: 5.8(thought it was higher) Other Renewable: 2.5 Petroleum: 1.6 Other Gases:.3 Other:.3
So instead of the 110 odd nuke plants we currently have, we'd have 220. As a result, our CO2 emissions for electricity would be over a third less. Our pollution would be a LOT less.
Of all the non-polluting, non-primary CO2 emitting(IE not including construction/maintenance emissions) power sources, nuclear has been the cheapest, especially back then.
Still, to me, it sounds like a temporary solution at best. I prefer safer, fool-proof, small-scale energy production.
Personally, I think cheaper needs to be in there. The problem with small-scale is that it's expensive. Please note that this doesn't mean that I'm not perfectly willing to make exceptions when it makes sense - such as co/trigeneration plants. A university using their own steam plant to provide heat AND electricity is a model of efficiency, and I'd much prefer to burn NG there than to simply produce electricity.
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But here is the problem, underneath the data is a pattern. And the calculations are a pattern, as a result a pattern emerges. The pattern is called human language.
I think you're getting a bit confused here? The 'pattern' in my mind is the data - whether it be a text, a picture, or a multimedia stream. The ciphers today only see a stream of bits.
Many encryption programs will zip/compress text files before encryption due to the extra order caused by large numbers of zeros, and relatively low number of patterns per character.
To give you an understanding, I deal with random numbers and I cannot use a computer based random number generator because they generate patterns.
I'm fully aware of those. Part of the reason for those patterns is the encryption isn't perfect - just good enough that it'd take forever and a day to find the original data if you lack the key.
Still, would you be able to tell the difference between a file full of flawed computer generated random numbers and an encrypted file?
if you use the wrong block cipher mode, it's easy to distinguish between an encrypted file and random noise.
Maybe I should have said 'properly encrypted'. If you're using the 'wrong' cipher mode, or a weak encryption, you are indeed going to be leaving patterns - patterns which will assist in breaking the code.
The 'ideal' encryption, a one time pad, will leave a result that can't be told from random noise of the quality the pad was made from.
That's the goal. Other encryption systems that are more complicated mathematically(OTP by default is a simple XOR), but with shorter keys, should imitate this ideal, and generally quite well.
The fact that there's order in the encrypted information doesn't change the fact that, to an outside observer that doesn't know the original information or the key can't tell the difference between the encrypted information and true random noise. That's part of the point.
If they can tell that it's not random, that's a start on cracking the encryption and gaining the original information.
hmm... I certainly think that it can result in waste, but on the whole, proper patent laws are a benefit.
If the inventer/patent holder licenses/commercializes/sells their work for a good price, they get rich if the idea's good enough.
If they're unwilling to sell for a good price, people are forced to find a work around. In the process, they may or may not find another way that's more efficient than the original patent.
Finally, you get to the point that patents, unlike copyrights, will expire in most people's lifetimes. Thus, any delays are only temporary.
Remember, letting an inventor earn a profit off of their invention isn't a bad thing.
All the security camera/fingerprint stuff only matter if the fact that you got the records comes out before the camera footage is overwritten and people have handled the records enough to destroy any fingerprints. Not all paperwork takes fingerprints well anyways.
Personally, the biggest problem I forsee is getting past the people in the records room - you might be able to walk the halls dressed up as a worker there, but the records people DO tend to know who works there.
Only if you're willing to sign a waiver and/or specify on your insurance that you don't wear a belt.
That's my extent of caring. The family I mentioned? Terribly tragic, but the guy(and his family) died for their beliefs. Plenty have. It was their right to drive and ride without a seatbelt in the belief that they wouldn't get into an accident or would be safely ejected if they were.
Darn it all, now my insurance paperwork's disappeared.
Unfortunately the AP-1000's design still falls short.
Falls short by what standard? Don't forget that the AP-1000 is substantially SMALLER than the EPR design.
None of the designs incorporate features to ease the teardown and eventual decommissioning of the facility. For example, Yankee Rowe, was a controlled shutdown of a functioning reactor. It cost half a billion dollars to clean-up and it was only 137 Megawatts, less than a quarter of the size of TMI-2.
In the USA a levy per kwh goes towards a fund to pay for the eventual decommissioning. Any Yankee Rowe doesn't seem like a good example, little economy of scale for it's small size, and it's cost a lot more than many other reactor decommisioning. The NRC estimates $280-612 million.
Compare that to the costs to clean up a long running coal plant to those 'greenfield' standards.
Accident Sequence Precursors.
Thanks. I think part of the problem is that it's a very expensive and complicated thing to input an existing reactor into such a system.
Well this is actually one of those cases where I would put the government in charge, they already own the liability anyway and $100 million is chicken feed compared to almost a trillion dollars of damages in todays dollars.
It's still something. Each additional reactor piles more on the power companies and less on the government. That's how I'd get rid of the act - just keep increasing the private liability.
I think the Navy's certification process for subs would work if implemented for power reactors, they have best practices and it could work counter cyclical to the private economic cycle.
Is it really that relevant to a ground based commercial power nuclear plant? Besides, given the USA's track record over my lifespan, does it really NEED huge changes? Oh, and 'too cheap to meter' was always a wild idea.
Tough to just shut down a plant providing 35% of a state's electricity, but in the context that we've built the replacement first, acceptable.
I know I've mentioned in this thread that any extensive building of new nuclear plants would be to shut down older, inefficient, more dangerous plants, whether coal or nuclear, with safer modern plants.
clinton had the budget balanced and in a yearly surplus by the end of his two terms
I always had the impression that that was more due to him and the republicans in control of congress being at loggerheads.
Still, not a bad situation to be in. I like congress/the president having to fight huge battles to do anything.
Patch cables - buy 'em cheap in bulk.
Utility wiring? Well, you can't pull a terminated cable nearly as easily as you can unterminated wire.
Sounds like you have a good install - the hand terminated stuff is in the wall where it's supposed to be, unlikely to get damaged.
If you're looking at in wall stuff, you're stuck with home/professionally made - and I can show you some horribly terminated 'professional'* cables. Even the professionally made stuff will be hand run and terminated - the benefits would be that you're not using up YOUR professionals to do the work, and they may have equipment to make it go faster, or the relatively expensive equipment to test for certification purposes.
*In the sense that the dudes were paid to terminate it.
Also, some government agencies (at least the ones I worked with) require special cabling for fire reasons. I can't remember if it's PVC or non-PVC coated wire that generates more smoke in a fire, but they were insistent that we ordered the specific type for building code reasons.
Plenum rated. It's not that they won't burn/smoke, it's that the burning/smoking will be less toxic than the 'cheap' stuff.
Basically, with anything commercial, if it goes through the air handling system, it has to be plenum rated, and in a lot of buildings the space above the ceiling tiles is the return air flow, there's no specific ducting for it, so everything up there has to be rated or placed in it's own duct/protective container. Cheaper to buy the rated stuff.
I've been driving for over 20 years without a single accident. Not one. I'm not worried about it. Regardless if I care or not, why should anyone be trying to force me to wear a seat belt? How does it help them?
Had a guy like that over when I was in Nebraska. Didn't believe in seatbelts...
Him, his wife, two daughters all died in a collision, except for the boyfriend of one of the daughters. He walked away from the accident. He was also the only one buckled up.
How does it help them? Well, it helps keep MY insurance rates down and insures that a bed is available if I'm hurt. On average you'll use less hospital resources if you DO get into an accident.
I keep a fire extinguisher in my kitchen, and a first responder kit in my truck. I've never had a kitchen fire, nor have I been first on scene at a car accident w/injuries. But I want to be prepared for it.
Just pick up a bunch of different lengths of pre-terminated cable from the good folks at deep-surplus.com. Buy a bunch of 1-foot cables, along with some 3-foot cables. 5-foot cables. 7-foot cables. 12-foot cables. So on, so forth. Then, when you need a cable of a given length, you've (gasp!) already got one!
For anything below 20 feet, we've found that the pre-built cables are cheaper, as long as they're bought in bulk. Though we did have some issues with our purchase guy when he paid $7/cable for 200 cat6 3 footers. The company was 'kind enough' to ship them 3 day... I sat there and showed him 3 different suppliers that would have provided the same thing for $1-2/cable. But it wasn't worth it to worry about it much.
What irked us about that shipment is that our previous bulk buy had each cable come to us with 1 or 2 twist ties or in a bag without any for the real short ones. These came with 2 twist ties in a pain in the butt to open plastic bag. As far as we were concerned, as long as they came individually rolled in a box, the less packing material the better.
Basically, by the time you figure the cost of the connectors, the cable, and individual's time to terminate them, you're better off buying standard patch cables pre-made. The nice boots add a few cents, after all.
We still have all the stuff needed to make cable for the ocassional odd situation, of course.
And if college ed was cheaper, she wouldn't be looking at having the loans paid off when your kids are going to college...
Unfortuantly, subsidizing loans/schools isn't the answer, because expenses will rise to payments. In my experience, there's a LOT many schools can do to more efficienty and economically provide educations.
Even teachers can make enough money to pay for college; assuming that you don't go to one of the most expensive schools, take enough of a courseload you don't linger there and so on.
Plenty of people get degrees today with the assistance of loans. If it was cheaper, well, so much the better.
I worked through college at a networking lab dealing with Gigabit Ethernet, but 10Gig, but while there are tons of connectors out there, but only two are really ever used on the NIC: SC and LC
I've had to deal with three different proprietary connectors for desktop use... Not fun.
Oh, and I was referring not to the connection to the switch, but for the connection to the desktop, density isn't too terribly important there, but expense is. LC is nice enough, and you can get adapting patch cables in bulk if you need to.
Especially today, it often takes Doctors longer to pay back their loans than others, and it's still a difficult course.
Too many lawyers and their wages would drop, making them less able to pay back any loans.
There's plenty of career fields other than those two where you can make back your education expenses and more.
In some states, the state universities are allowed to increase their
tuition rates by a certain state mandated maxiumum every year. This effect has been building up over decades.
I know some universities are restricted on how much they increase tuition. My point is that even if they were allowed to raise tuition in an unlimited fashion, if students can't get the money to go, they can't go.
If the allowable amounts of student aid/loans hadn't increased ahead of inflation along with the increases in tuition, the more expensive colleges and universities would have found themselves having to restrain
A university can charge $100k for their education if they want, but if the students can only raise $40k, they can't go to that university, even if they're willing to pay the $100k, because they can't get the cash.
Universities need that cap on tuition expenses because they tend to expand uncontrollably - many haven't constrained their spending otherwise.
My arguement would be that even if you capped them at BELOW inflation spending for quite a few years, they'd find ways to adapt and keep teaching at the lower funding levels, and students would be graduating with substantially less debt.
Loans drive up the cost of any item for the reasons you put forth in your argument.
Especially for something like a college education, the market isn't actually constrained, more college courses can be 'constructed' and put on the market, especially as the price increases. The trick is to find a sweet spot where we have enough colleges/courses but the prices isn't too high.
That's why I specified 'easy' loans - IE credit is TOO easy to get, such that people find it easy to get over their heads with it. Same with businesses, credit is good for industry, but too much credit can lead to wasteful spending, and companies operating in dangerous territory as they operate completely off of loans, not having any actual capital of their own.
The best way to be "recession proof" is requiring significant down payments on loans. This will decrease the cost of the collateral, but make it harder for people to get the loan. It's a sliding scale from 100% down to 0% down (and perhaps negative amounts down as we saw in CA and FL).
How do you require a down payment on a college education loan? There's no physical object that the lender can confiscate to make himself whole if the borrower doesn't pay back.
Sure, you can make students pay a percentage of their class with unborrowed money, but that often doesn't work well either.
I'm not worrying about recession profing loans, at least not educational ones. What I'm looking at is if we make getting a loan more difficult, or decrease the amount somebody can get, the colleges would end up responding by dropping costs - or get fewer students.
I see americans on /. talk about this as if it's a normal thing. Maybe it is in the USA, that doesn't mean it is everywhere.
Like a lot of things in the USA, we're actually very fragmented. Remember, we don't have a national school system, we have 50 state level systems.
Some universities this practice is prevalent, in others it's actually forbidden. I remember one university that would allow a professor to teach from his own book - but such book had to be sold to the students at printing cost.
printed a large chunk of the content for us free in the form of a handout
Time for me to get a bit technical. Assuming said book had enough copies for economies of scale to take effect(several thousand copies IIRC), it's actually substantially cheaper to print the book than to 'copy' it using a laser printer/copier. You can get better results as well.
I have to say I think the american system which drives students into insane ammounts of debt both directly with fees and with very high other expenses is pretty strange/fucked up.
I have a theory that easy availability of credit/assistance has actually skewed the cost of a degree higher, much like the housing market.
Easy availability of credit means that individuals that wouldn't have gone go, and those that would have gone to a cheaper school go to an expensive one instead.
As a result, many universities haven't had to control their spending in quite a long time, despite all the moaning about not wanting to raise tuition. They've almost forgotten how to economize. To save money.
Restrict credit such that students don't actually HAVE the money to go to their college, and I'm willing to bet that the college would find a lot of ways to save money and reduce their expenses.
It's my personal philosophy that students DO need to pay for most of their degree; it's a good way to make sure they value it.
This site sounds almost needlessly limited; libraries have been doing similar transfers for decades, and not just limited to textbooks.
Which kinda makes sense. Textbooks tend to be for a specific class. Research books and materials, on the other hand, are both more universal and often rarer.
Then again, it could be a translation issue and be about research/professional books and not just about the american definition of 'textbook' being a book mostly used for a class.
You have to ask?
Porn. It's always Porn. ;)
After all, the internet is for porn.
Token ring gives each device on the ring roughly equal time, I'd imagine switched ethernet with a decent switch would have similar behaviour. I beleive some of them can also prioritise data.
Ethernet switches do indeed often support QoS, which is the prioritization of traffic.
Even my home router box does, though as a router it's smarter than at least some switches. I'm not aware of any modern gigabit switches that aren't at least that smart though.
Please do, and let me know if you find any specific wavier.
Found it. A little research though, says that the plant that released it is liable irregardless of fault. Ah well, shouldn't be that much worse than trying to get compensation from somebody else's insurance company after they hit you.
I don't think it's a fair comparison because Nuclear plant never had a 'production' model in America. They are generally individually designed so design improvements cannot be applied to subsequent Nuclear installations like a production line.
Very good point. Looking at the 24 proposed new construction, 7 plants are looking to install the AP 1000, 14 reactors total(2 per site), 5 EPR, 5(6) ESBWR, 1(2) US-APWR, 1(2) ABWR, 1 PWR.
Combined with the fact that China and other nations are looking to build a bunch, the AP 1000 will be considered 'production', and be able to enjoy the subsequent engineering cost savings.
so comparing a Nuclear plant to another Nuclear plant is the only valid comparison that can be made.
True, we can make comparisons, I'm simply saying that calling increasing numbers of incidents at OLD plants a problem is unfair to NEW plants.
Whilst the AP-1000 does go some way to reducing the complexity of the reactor it does introduce new base design issues. If new failure mode modelling is to be of any use for Nuclear plant then we should have seen the identification of new ASP's in existing reactors.
ASP? I'm unfamiliar with this abbreviation other than for active server pages...
For the simulations I'm thinking of, it's like for new airplanes - it works better when you're designing a NEW system, it helps you simplify systems and identify potential trouble spots to redesign from the get go.
As a result, one of the advertisements for the AP1000 is 50% fewer valves - a valve that doesn't exist can't malfunction, for example.
What we see instead is evidenced by the Davis-Besse Plant, that identification of failure-mode's can only be of any use if management is prepared to take a step back and act on the potential for failure. Clearly, maintaining the plant's income stream trumps safety and failure mode analysis is ignored if it means downtime for the plant.
Just read up on it. Yeah, there were some problems. Still, those problems were mostly 'what ifs', and 'could have beens'. The people involved were stupid though - it would have been shut down less if they'd done stuff like they were supposed to, before extensive damage was done, and they'd have likely been shut down permanently(IE making no money), if they'd waited much longer. They were also criminal - 3 people are up on felony criminal charges if the wiki is right.
If design improvements were implemented I might agree that it is necessary however (as mentioned in another thread), to save money on construction costs the AP-1000 cuts (waaay) back on concrete and steel. The result is a ratio of containment volume to thermal power below that of today's PWRs, thereby increasing the risk of containment over-pressurization and failure in event of a severe accident.
On the other hand, the reactor is also designed with passive safety and cooling systems that should reduce/eliminate the need for the higher stress structures.
I wouldn't underestimate the savings of proper design, after all, concrete and steel in the wrong spot don't increase safety.
The AP-1000 incorporates none of the design changes, that would make nuclear power reactors less vulnerable to sabotage, recommended 25 years ago by an NRC chartered an industry panel. The AP-1000 incorporates none of the EPR design enhancements which appears to be the safest and most secure design among new reactor designs for PWR.
Do you have sources on this? doe.gov list
You totally overlook the fact that 15x background is just an average
It's all law of averages. On average, you'd need a HUGE population with that exposure to expect one additional cancer from the radiation release, and that's assuming the assumption of linearality is true. Realistically, most of those DNA bumps simply result in nothing or a dead cell. Heck, there's evidence that people get lots more cancer than we detect, it's just that the body's own systems kill it before it gets anywhere.
Basically, the radiation release was small enough that NATURAL radiation would cause far more cancers. A not insignifcant amount of the radiation exposure I listed is for Radon, and that'll get you in the lungs. Xenon gas isn't exactly known for being absorbed. Heck, as a noble gas, it's not exactly reactive period.
Plus your thyroid and many fish concentrate radioactive iodine and other elements by factors of, say, 10,000 and more.
It was chernobyl that released radioactive iodine. TMI was primarily Xenon gas(~13M Curies). Only 13-17 curies of I-131 was released. Compared the Chernobyl, that's a tiny amount. Estimates vary widely, but one figure, has 10-15% of the radiation being I-131, and the release being in the billions of curies.
Chernobyl and surface nuclear weapon tests are blamed for the increase in thyroid cancer. I'll note that I-131 is used medically today, so there has to be a reasonably safe dosage level.
I think it's obvious to most people that coal is even worse than nuclear. However, being better than the worst option doesn't automatically make nuclear the best option. As long as the majority of your electricity comes from coal, it might make it a viable option, though.
Note that I simply proposed flipping the proportion of nuclear and coal power. I will admit to misremembering coal's share. From doe.gov, in 2007: .3 .3
Coal: 48.5%
Natural Gas: 21.6
Nuclear: 19.4
Hydro: 5.8(thought it was higher)
Other Renewable: 2.5
Petroleum: 1.6
Other Gases:
Other:
So instead of the 110 odd nuke plants we currently have, we'd have 220. As a result, our CO2 emissions for electricity would be over a third less. Our pollution would be a LOT less.
Of all the non-polluting, non-primary CO2 emitting(IE not including construction/maintenance emissions) power sources, nuclear has been the cheapest, especially back then.
Still, to me, it sounds like a temporary solution at best. I prefer safer, fool-proof, small-scale energy production.
Personally, I think cheaper needs to be in there. The problem with small-scale is that it's expensive. Please note that this doesn't mean that I'm not perfectly willing to make exceptions when it makes sense - such as co/trigeneration plants. A university using their own steam plant to provide heat AND electricity is a model of efficiency, and I'd much prefer to burn NG there than to simply produce electricity.