In most places, sport shooting uses specific, high precision, but low power guns that would only harm mildly a human target. The 357 magnum is not the weapon of choice for sport shooting. But anyways..
Not all guns are identical. In most of Europe, there are a LOT of guns available. But the vast majority a small caliber hunting rifles, that actually serve the purpose of hunting. Handguns are very rare, and concealed permit is pretty much non-existent. When you carry your gun, you have to have a reason, and it must be in parts so that it can't be used without assembly.
There is a lot to say about opportunity. Would you steal 100 dollars from the bank ? Would you steal 100 dollars that you found on the ground ? The opportunity, the ease, takes part in the decision process. Having guns available makes people more prone to use gun as a solution to solve perceived issues. Having lot of people carry guns just mean that statistically, lunatics will have guns too. If nobody has gun, only hardened criminals think guns, but these type quickly go to prison anyway, and if carrying is illegal, they can be arrested for just that, and the scum removed from the streets.
All in all, my view is that the mass availability of handguns is the problem. I'm all ok for hunting rifles that can't be concealed. They have a purpose, they serve 2nd amendment purpose, and they are difficult to use to kill fellow human without being spotted before the killing starts.
But handguns should be banned from free sale, and only available to law enforcement or other legitimate, regulated uses. Carrying a concealed handgun without a permit should yield a significant time in prison, that would solve the problem of "only the criminal have guns". Then, you'd get the same as most of the rest of the world, where being killed by a gun is a statistical anomaly.
I didn't talk about peak oil.
I'm not a "socialist". I'd certainly like to hear your articulate objections to what I said, if you have any. So far you just sound like LALALALALA I DON'T HEAR YOU. Whose "cornered" here?
Resources are finite. Oversimplifications of economic model work as long as the simplification is a good enough approximation of reality. The assumption that resources are infinite is good enough as long as work to extract the resource is the limiting factor. If it is not, then the assumption is wrong.
If labor is free, energy still is not (it cost energy to "mine" energy, there is a declining marginal return that's called thermodynamic law). Even if energy is free, other bare materials are in finite number, and they would be overexploited up to the point were they would become rare enough that they gain value from their scarcity, and would represent the most part of the price of anything. That, is capital cost.
The thing is that labor "cost" is the other end of the funnel called "consumer market". If economy has only capital cost, and no labor cost, it can produce cheaper in great quantity, but it has no absorption capacity for produced goods, because everybody is broke. Hence, overproduction crisis, deflation and economic collapse ensues.
Most PSU that do not sport the 80+ badge are outright junk that does not respect environmental and security norms in the first place, and will blow up in a variety of creative ways if you were to draw half of what is written as max wattage on the sticker. The 80+ badge weeds out most of the crap (not all though).
Price cannot drop to zero because of capital cost. Luddites were wrong, because they have not seen coming the boom of new jobs to produce new things in new ways. Maybe we are the new Luddites, but maybe there is no such new job field ready to plow, because machines are just so good that they can do "everything".
If that is the case, the consumer driven capitalism will just implode.
"Germany gets the same amount of solar energy as Alaska, but that hasn't stopped them from investing in solar power." Germany is 350,000 km^2m Alaska is 1.7 Mkm^2. That's pretty irrelevant statistic right there. Not that I agree with the rosy picture above, but you just make a fool of yourself and of your opinion by being so grossly partisan.
So over the lifetime of the station, that's 1/1000 of blowing up*. That's about 10 times more likely than you dying in a car accident of some sort in the US over the same time period. Seems pretty unsafe to me.
Anyway, you can't put a nuclear station anywhere, it needs massive amount of water for cooling, so it requires a major river or an ocean nearby.
What mesmerizes me, is that its only now that they are discussing this addition. That's an obvious need, when the station is flooded (as what almost happened to Cooper Nuclear Station last year), most on-site equipment get damaged, so there is a need to bring in undamaged equipment... And moving through flooded (or hurricane damaged) area by road is notoriously difficult. When we talk hours before a low level incident turns into a major catastrophe, such a lack of insight is criminal.
*(yeah I know, damaging earthquake will not always blow up the station, but it may provoke a release or other health hazard of some sort)
Have you ever heard of some sort of investment bubble that went out of control recently ? Where do you think all that money comes from ? Its because some people accumulate so much that they never take it back as "income" that such bubble form. Some people are getting too much money, and that destabilize the economy in many different ways. More balanced income prevent the formation of bubbles because nobody has insane amount of cash to move around and demand 15% returns every year (in a 2-4% growing economy, including the housing market bubble, that's very sustainable, right). The giant money drain is taking real money from the real economy, and makes it an improductive lump that moves around stock exchanges worldwide, putting pressure on industry to demand unsustainable ROE, and inflating the next bubble that will destroy the economy when (not if) it collapses. That must stop.
Um, the queen and royal family gets "separate" revenue from holdings and possession that should have been publicized in any republic. But whatever spin your wheel, I guess.
Not only that. You have a number of (paid) sick leaves. If you use them on runny nose, you have none left for when you get runny diarrhea, or whatever horrible condition that -really- prevents you from coming to work. So people don't take their sick leaves (even if they have some available), because no matter how sick you'll be in the future, there is no excuse: no sick days left, no pay.
In most European countries there is a "work medicine" branch, specialized in issuing (or refusing) official sick leaves. These leaves are fully paid for several month, and you cannot be fired while on sick leave. It can be abused, but less than complimentary doctor appointments. And knowing that if you get really sick, you won't be unpaid on top does not drive people to accumulate pointlessly sick days. The sick days are used for their actual purpose, when you are sick for a day. When you are sick for a month, you use the long term sick leaves.
Another lesser rich guy issue is that coins are inconvenient. They have a large volume, make noise and always settle in uncomfortable jean bulge. I'd rather see all coins turned into bills than the contrary. I hate coins.
Now I'm surprised that it costs less to stamp metallic coins than to print paper. Due to wear and turnover ?
I've not seen a BSOD for years now. Actually I cannot remember my Win7 machine ever crashing in any way (some seldom apps deadlock, but windows crashing, never). Seems your computer has a problem of some sort, this is not typical.
Not sure if it is a good move from Intel. Its a move toward "comoditization", thereby reduced margins. The intel Inside sticker is pure genius in term of preserving margins for Intel. People don't want a computer from Asus, HP or Dell, they want an Intel processor. Now, if the thing is just a soldered piece that can't be purchased independently, it becomes commodity and nobody cares about it (maybe a new sticker campaign can save from this demise?)
Checkpoints won't scale to future generations. But what is amusing is to see some random ph.D student being cited here instead of the people who actually came to that conclusion some time ago already:)
They are still at war with NK, you know. It's been 60 years, but they are still at war. And not always cold, as the bombing of civilians last year recall, or the sinking of navy units 2 years ago by a submarine. Praising a country you are actively at war with is often seen as treason, even in free countries. You may or may not agree, but it is not unusual.
Well, ok. But that's nothing like North Dakota or Iowa. Its freezing, sure. But dying on the Autobahn due to freezing in place is not a serious threat...
There are no blizzards in Germany, and there has been no blackouts in DECADES (and in particular, there has been no blackouts since renewable are a significant share of the baseload). What are you talking about??
Now, what is not shown in this trumpeting article is the amount of coal that gets burned compared to neighboring countries that do use nuclear power.
$500 million is aprox. the entire budget over the lifetime of the computer (including the electric bill, which is becoming increasingly the dominant cost to amortize). Typical build cost is around $100M.
However, there is a false dichotomy in your comparison. The supercomputer is not designed to perform the job of 1 billion workstations. It is designed to perform a single task that could not be done on another machinery. Just like you cannot build a supertanker in a million bathtubes but need a shipyard, you cannot simulate the entire climate of the earth (or protein folding, or DNA analysis, or nuclear explosions, or whatever) on a million workstations. You need a machine that has the network and storage/memory capacity to tackle the grotesquely enormous problem you want to solve.
Correct in general, but extensive research in the last 5 years has lead to many production codes today. GPU accelerators can indeed live to (most) of their promises, and would typically reach 55 to 70% of peak in typical deployments (Tian-he is a good example ~55% efficient). Top notch designs can extract as good as 85% of peak in LINPACK, that is obtained by Sequoia, unvailed last year. We'll see how Titan will fare, its the new Supercomputer GPU giant, that will be announced this year to replace the Jaguar. Its based on Cray XK6, Nvidia accelerated nodes. Usually, Cray machines are over 85% efficient, lets see if they can replicate the tour-de-force with GPUs.
No, its not. You should read Alexis de Toqueville, he explains that perfectly (especially in the first tome of "De la Démocratie en Amérique", the second is forgettable).
TMI essentially ended up well by luck. The operators were clueless of what was going on for quite a while, and many procedures were unfit. We learnt a lot from this one exactly for that reason, there was so many mistakes to learn from. But essentially, the catastrophic outcome was averted because the conditions kind of resolved for themselves.
Cernobyl ended up bad by lack of luck. After the initial mistake (could have been averted with better procedures, but again, no design is perfect, so we should consider failure as something that will happen), there was little time for the operators to detect and correct conditions as the reactor self destructed almost immediately due to bad design and bad luck colluding. Everything that could go wrong happened simultaneously to make things catastrophic.
Fukujima is another animal. Its not luck or lack of luck, it's bean counting and greed. Proper procedures have been overlooked and regulatory measures ignored. Unlike TMI were "we didn't knew", Fukujima owners should have known better. The lack of emergency diesel to be deployed by helicopter is puzzling, most other nuke operating countries do have such a strategic reserve for "defense in depth". The reactor remained in critical but manageable condition for several hours, the operators knew what was going on and the risks they were facing, yet no help from outside the station reached. Had the owners prepared for the event, the operators would have had enough options to handle without going over a 2/3 on the scale, similar to TMI. Without external help, they were doomed. (I understand that offsite help was stuck in the consequence of the earthquake, but Japan is known for earthquakes and tsunamis, so such a scenario is not exactly a surprise. A procedure that relies on road delivery of help is clearly inadequate and the failure to double it with helicopter or boat delivery of help and supplies is inexcusable).
I transited through Heathrow 2 month ago and it was very similar abuse to typical TSA american security. In particular they used one of these naked xray machines. It is quite sad that this useless security theater is expanding in so many countries these days.
You are posing half the questions, so you get the wrong conclusion. I'm not going to propose a conclusion, as there are none that fit all cases.
Should we do anything to get better ? If it has no adverse consequence, why not? The problem is that it has, more than often, consequences. Those athletes on steroid die young for a reason. L. Armstrong got a specific kind of cancer when he was still very young, he was lucky to survive it, but it is typical of a substance abuse induced cancer. Assuming that he did take pills to improve his performance (although proofs are becoming difficult to refute, it is still debated, but lets just assume for the sake of the argument that he did), was it ethical for Armstrong to sacrifice his health to improve his performance? Maybe it was free choice, so we should not interfere.
But then, what about the other competitors? If they don't take performance pills, they cannot compete, it is as simple as that. So now, just to be level, even if you don't want to, you have to take dangerous substance to stay level in the field.
Now we are talking about sports, an activity that can be mostly seen as an entertainment (even if big money can be entitled). But if we were to extend performance pill usage to all activities, then where is your choice ? You have the choice between being an unproductive, unfit and impoverished sorry food bond subside, and being a successful but short lived professional who made the "choice" of dying from performance enhancement ?
As for productivity, it has never been so high. Maybe so high that we are actually already starting to kill ourselves "thinking and working", as the stress has also never been so high. Past difficult works tended to be straining and physically dangerous. But they were also repetitive and less involving. Today's works are less physically dangerous (even in fields which are still dangerous or physical, machines and better practice have improved the situation), but they appeal to more creativity, involvement and are deadline oriented. To meet productivity milestone, it often takes more work that is normally possible, leading to stress from under-achievement (systematic as goals are unrealistic) and overwork. Should we make the picture even darker by adding the threat of chemical poisoning to meet ever increasing performance goals? Maybe not.
I have a newer computer with windows 7. It works well. I also have an older computer with windows XP. It works equally well, and delivers 95% of the windows 7 experience. Actually, the differences are so minor that its barely noticeable you're running one or the other, as soon as you set both in "legacy look".
Moral of the story, nobody wanted to upgrade to windows Vista, as it was a downgrade from something that worked to something that doesnt. Nobody cares about upgrading to 7, because just whatever. Windows 8 tries to part with that issue by introducing real change, but that might come back bitting, if people don't like "novelty".
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In most places, sport shooting uses specific, high precision, but low power guns that would only harm mildly a human target. The 357 magnum is not the weapon of choice for sport shooting. But anyways..
Not all guns are identical. In most of Europe, there are a LOT of guns available. But the vast majority a small caliber hunting rifles, that actually serve the purpose of hunting. Handguns are very rare, and concealed permit is pretty much non-existent. When you carry your gun, you have to have a reason, and it must be in parts so that it can't be used without assembly.
There is a lot to say about opportunity. Would you steal 100 dollars from the bank ? Would you steal 100 dollars that you found on the ground ? The opportunity, the ease, takes part in the decision process. Having guns available makes people more prone to use gun as a solution to solve perceived issues. Having lot of people carry guns just mean that statistically, lunatics will have guns too. If nobody has gun, only hardened criminals think guns, but these type quickly go to prison anyway, and if carrying is illegal, they can be arrested for just that, and the scum removed from the streets.
All in all, my view is that the mass availability of handguns is the problem. I'm all ok for hunting rifles that can't be concealed. They have a purpose, they serve 2nd amendment purpose, and they are difficult to use to kill fellow human without being spotted before the killing starts.
But handguns should be banned from free sale, and only available to law enforcement or other legitimate, regulated uses. Carrying a concealed handgun without a permit should yield a significant time in prison, that would solve the problem of "only the criminal have guns". Then, you'd get the same as most of the rest of the world, where being killed by a gun is a statistical anomaly.
I didn't talk about peak oil.
I'm not a "socialist".
I'd certainly like to hear your articulate objections to what I said, if you have any.
So far you just sound like LALALALALA I DON'T HEAR YOU. Whose "cornered" here?
Resources are finite. Oversimplifications of economic model work as long as the simplification is a good enough approximation of reality. The assumption that resources are infinite is good enough as long as work to extract the resource is the limiting factor. If it is not, then the assumption is wrong.
If labor is free, energy still is not (it cost energy to "mine" energy, there is a declining marginal return that's called thermodynamic law). Even if energy is free, other bare materials are in finite number, and they would be overexploited up to the point were they would become rare enough that they gain value from their scarcity, and would represent the most part of the price of anything. That, is capital cost.
The thing is that labor "cost" is the other end of the funnel called "consumer market". If economy has only capital cost, and no labor cost, it can produce cheaper in great quantity, but it has no absorption capacity for produced goods, because everybody is broke. Hence, overproduction crisis, deflation and economic collapse ensues.
Most PSU that do not sport the 80+ badge are outright junk that does not respect environmental and security norms in the first place, and will blow up in a variety of creative ways if you were to draw half of what is written as max wattage on the sticker. The 80+ badge weeds out most of the crap (not all though).
Price cannot drop to zero because of capital cost. Luddites were wrong, because they have not seen coming the boom of new jobs to produce new things in new ways. Maybe we are the new Luddites, but maybe there is no such new job field ready to plow, because machines are just so good that they can do "everything".
If that is the case, the consumer driven capitalism will just implode.
"Germany gets the same amount of solar energy as Alaska, but that hasn't stopped them from investing in solar power."
Germany is 350,000 km^2m Alaska is 1.7 Mkm^2. That's pretty irrelevant statistic right there. Not that I agree with the rosy picture above, but you just make a fool of yourself and of your opinion by being so grossly partisan.
So over the lifetime of the station, that's 1/1000 of blowing up*. That's about 10 times more likely than you dying in a car accident of some sort in the US over the same time period. Seems pretty unsafe to me.
Anyway, you can't put a nuclear station anywhere, it needs massive amount of water for cooling, so it requires a major river or an ocean nearby.
What mesmerizes me, is that its only now that they are discussing this addition. That's an obvious need, when the station is flooded (as what almost happened to Cooper Nuclear Station last year), most on-site equipment get damaged, so there is a need to bring in undamaged equipment... And moving through flooded (or hurricane damaged) area by road is notoriously difficult. When we talk hours before a low level incident turns into a major catastrophe, such a lack of insight is criminal.
*(yeah I know, damaging earthquake will not always blow up the station, but it may provoke a release or other health hazard of some sort)
Have you ever heard of some sort of investment bubble that went out of control recently ? Where do you think all that money comes from ? Its because some people accumulate so much that they never take it back as "income" that such bubble form. Some people are getting too much money, and that destabilize the economy in many different ways. More balanced income prevent the formation of bubbles because nobody has insane amount of cash to move around and demand 15% returns every year (in a 2-4% growing economy, including the housing market bubble, that's very sustainable, right). The giant money drain is taking real money from the real economy, and makes it an improductive lump that moves around stock exchanges worldwide, putting pressure on industry to demand unsustainable ROE, and inflating the next bubble that will destroy the economy when (not if) it collapses. That must stop.
Um, the queen and royal family gets "separate" revenue from holdings and possession that should have been publicized in any republic. But whatever spin your wheel, I guess.
Not only that. You have a number of (paid) sick leaves. If you use them on runny nose, you have none left for when you get runny diarrhea, or whatever horrible condition that -really- prevents you from coming to work. So people don't take their sick leaves (even if they have some available), because no matter how sick you'll be in the future, there is no excuse: no sick days left, no pay.
In most European countries there is a "work medicine" branch, specialized in issuing (or refusing) official sick leaves. These leaves are fully paid for several month, and you cannot be fired while on sick leave. It can be abused, but less than complimentary doctor appointments. And knowing that if you get really sick, you won't be unpaid on top does not drive people to accumulate pointlessly sick days. The sick days are used for their actual purpose, when you are sick for a day. When you are sick for a month, you use the long term sick leaves.
Rich guy's tough life :)
Another lesser rich guy issue is that coins are inconvenient. They have a large volume, make noise and always settle in uncomfortable jean bulge. I'd rather see all coins turned into bills than the contrary. I hate coins.
Now I'm surprised that it costs less to stamp metallic coins than to print paper. Due to wear and turnover ?
I've not seen a BSOD for years now. Actually I cannot remember my Win7 machine ever crashing in any way (some seldom apps deadlock, but windows crashing, never). Seems your computer has a problem of some sort, this is not typical.
Good insight.
Not sure if it is a good move from Intel. Its a move toward "comoditization", thereby reduced margins. The intel Inside sticker is pure genius in term of preserving margins for Intel. People don't want a computer from Asus, HP or Dell, they want an Intel processor. Now, if the thing is just a soldered piece that can't be purchased independently, it becomes commodity and nobody cares about it (maybe a new sticker campaign can save from this demise?)
Checkpoints won't scale to future generations. But what is amusing is to see some random ph.D student being cited here instead of the people who actually came to that conclusion some time ago already :)
They are still at war with NK, you know. It's been 60 years, but they are still at war. And not always cold, as the bombing of civilians last year recall, or the sinking of navy units 2 years ago by a submarine. Praising a country you are actively at war with is often seen as treason, even in free countries. You may or may not agree, but it is not unusual.
Well, ok. But that's nothing like North Dakota or Iowa. Its freezing, sure. But dying on the Autobahn due to freezing in place is not a serious threat...
There are no blizzards in Germany, and there has been no blackouts in DECADES (and in particular, there has been no blackouts since renewable are a significant share of the baseload). What are you talking about??
Now, what is not shown in this trumpeting article is the amount of coal that gets burned compared to neighboring countries that do use nuclear power.
$500 million is aprox. the entire budget over the lifetime of the computer (including the electric bill, which is becoming increasingly the dominant cost to amortize). Typical build cost is around $100M.
However, there is a false dichotomy in your comparison. The supercomputer is not designed to perform the job of 1 billion workstations. It is designed to perform a single task that could not be done on another machinery. Just like you cannot build a supertanker in a million bathtubes but need a shipyard, you cannot simulate the entire climate of the earth (or protein folding, or DNA analysis, or nuclear explosions, or whatever) on a million workstations. You need a machine that has the network and storage/memory capacity to tackle the grotesquely enormous problem you want to solve.
Correct in general, but extensive research in the last 5 years has lead to many production codes today. GPU accelerators can indeed live to (most) of their promises, and would typically reach 55 to 70% of peak in typical deployments (Tian-he is a good example ~55% efficient). Top notch designs can extract as good as 85% of peak in LINPACK, that is obtained by Sequoia, unvailed last year. We'll see how Titan will fare, its the new Supercomputer GPU giant, that will be announced this year to replace the Jaguar. Its based on Cray XK6, Nvidia accelerated nodes. Usually, Cray machines are over 85% efficient, lets see if they can replicate the tour-de-force with GPUs.
No, its not. You should read Alexis de Toqueville, he explains that perfectly (especially in the first tome of "De la Démocratie en Amérique", the second is forgettable).
TMI essentially ended up well by luck. The operators were clueless of what was going on for quite a while, and many procedures were unfit. We learnt a lot from this one exactly for that reason, there was so many mistakes to learn from. But essentially, the catastrophic outcome was averted because the conditions kind of resolved for themselves.
Cernobyl ended up bad by lack of luck. After the initial mistake (could have been averted with better procedures, but again, no design is perfect, so we should consider failure as something that will happen), there was little time for the operators to detect and correct conditions as the reactor self destructed almost immediately due to bad design and bad luck colluding. Everything that could go wrong happened simultaneously to make things catastrophic.
Fukujima is another animal. Its not luck or lack of luck, it's bean counting and greed. Proper procedures have been overlooked and regulatory measures ignored. Unlike TMI were "we didn't knew", Fukujima owners should have known better. The lack of emergency diesel to be deployed by helicopter is puzzling, most other nuke operating countries do have such a strategic reserve for "defense in depth". The reactor remained in critical but manageable condition for several hours, the operators knew what was going on and the risks they were facing, yet no help from outside the station reached. Had the owners prepared for the event, the operators would have had enough options to handle without going over a 2/3 on the scale, similar to TMI. Without external help, they were doomed. (I understand that offsite help was stuck in the consequence of the earthquake, but Japan is known for earthquakes and tsunamis, so such a scenario is not exactly a surprise. A procedure that relies on road delivery of help is clearly inadequate and the failure to double it with helicopter or boat delivery of help and supplies is inexcusable).
I transited through Heathrow 2 month ago and it was very similar abuse to typical TSA american security. In particular they used one of these naked xray machines. It is quite sad that this useless security theater is expanding in so many countries these days.
You are posing half the questions, so you get the wrong conclusion. I'm not going to propose a conclusion, as there are none that fit all cases.
Should we do anything to get better ? If it has no adverse consequence, why not? The problem is that it has, more than often, consequences. Those athletes on steroid die young for a reason. L. Armstrong got a specific kind of cancer when he was still very young, he was lucky to survive it, but it is typical of a substance abuse induced cancer. Assuming that he did take pills to improve his performance (although proofs are becoming difficult to refute, it is still debated, but lets just assume for the sake of the argument that he did), was it ethical for Armstrong to sacrifice his health to improve his performance? Maybe it was free choice, so we should not interfere.
But then, what about the other competitors? If they don't take performance pills, they cannot compete, it is as simple as that. So now, just to be level, even if you don't want to, you have to take dangerous substance to stay level in the field.
Now we are talking about sports, an activity that can be mostly seen as an entertainment (even if big money can be entitled). But if we were to extend performance pill usage to all activities, then where is your choice ? You have the choice between being an unproductive, unfit and impoverished sorry food bond subside, and being a successful but short lived professional who made the "choice" of dying from performance enhancement ?
As for productivity, it has never been so high. Maybe so high that we are actually already starting to kill ourselves "thinking and working", as the stress has also never been so high. Past difficult works tended to be straining and physically dangerous. But they were also repetitive and less involving. Today's works are less physically dangerous (even in fields which are still dangerous or physical, machines and better practice have improved the situation), but they appeal to more creativity, involvement and are deadline oriented. To meet productivity milestone, it often takes more work that is normally possible, leading to stress from under-achievement (systematic as goals are unrealistic) and overwork. Should we make the picture even darker by adding the threat of chemical poisoning to meet ever increasing performance goals? Maybe not.
I have a newer computer with windows 7. It works well. I also have an older computer with windows XP. It works equally well, and delivers 95% of the windows 7 experience. Actually, the differences are so minor that its barely noticeable you're running one or the other, as soon as you set both in "legacy look".
Moral of the story, nobody wanted to upgrade to windows Vista, as it was a downgrade from something that worked to something that doesnt. Nobody cares about upgrading to 7, because just whatever. Windows 8 tries to part with that issue by introducing real change, but that might come back bitting, if people don't like "novelty".