The Wayland API is nothing like X11 except in broad concepts that all display / input APIs share - listening for input events, connecting to a display, creating a drawing area and so on. It's just that Wayland's map onto modern concepts such as GPU surfaces and compositing so that rendering is as efficient as possible.
I disagree. Wayland is essentially a subset of what X11 can do. It is based on sending messages over a unix domain socket and sharing buffers. This is exactly what modern X clients also do. This is no surprise: It was designed to support exactly what is needed for modern clients and no more with the explicit goal to get rid of everything else. But it does not add anything which you cannot also do in basically the same way with X.
As for the primitives, nobody has ever said they slow modern clients. The point is that clients don't even use the primitives any more and its the same story applies for most of the rest of X11.
This is true. This is about retaining backwards compatibility.
It has a 1980s 2D-centric, damage based view of the desktop and extensions are used to fool it into supporting surfaces and composition.
Extensions are nice way to make modern rendering possible without breaking backwards possibility. "fool" "2D-centric" "1980" is just FUD to make it sound bad, but X supports modern applications just fine. You have no technical argument.
But those extensions are workarounds which are design compromised by the architecture and so they are slower and less efficient than they would be.
Because modern clients work essentially in the same way on X as on Wayland,nothing is slower or less efficient. Just because some API is based on an extension or not doesn't make it faster or slower. This is simply FUD.
Hence the push for Wayland. It will ultimately lead to a more lightweight and responsive desktop.
No. Mostly, it will break backwards compatibility, and remove features. The few kilobytes on unused drawing API in X11 will not make any noticable different on desktops (or mobiles) with gigabytes of ram.
It doesn't slow down, but they also don't help. That's the point I was making, that the lines, text, and pattern primitives that X was able to simply describe aren't leveraged in modern UI.
Yes, this is why XRENDER was introduced 15 years ago.
Now I can't speak to the question of what Wayland fixes in exchange for getting to ignore having X11 as part of the core,
Well they don't have to deal with the old code, I can understand this. But it breaks compatibility on the protocol level, this is really stupid IMHO.
and whether it's worth it. I can say that even if it Xorg, it's time for most folks to move on to strategies like Xpra that preserve the awesome facets of seamless remote applications, perform better, and are not sensitive to things like network disconnects trashing the ability for the application to keep running.
Xpra is nice if you have a slow connection, but I use X applications just fine over the network every single day and it works just fine. Being able to disconnect would be nice though, and I do not understand why toolkits still do not support this. Well, the reason is that rewriting everything from scratch all the time is apparently more fun...
It's not that supporting the old things slows things down, it's that it doesn't speed things up. It actually does cause some problems, because various things in the X11 protocol use 8-bit fields of which a significant space is used by legacy stuff that no one uses anymore, but that's largely worked around in newer extensions.
Yep. I am not opposed to cleaning things up with extensions without breaking backwards and forwards compatibility.
If you're in a world where most applications are sending commands like 'draw line from x,y to x1,y1' then X11 network transparency is really fast.
X11 network transparency is also very fast if you move bitmaps over network and are a bit smart of how you do it (I wrote an image viewer which works quite well over the network).
At the protocol layer, anyway - if you use xlib then performance will suck unless network latency is very low because it adds a synchronous API on top of an synchronous protocol (XCB fixes this).
Yes, absolutely. But the important thing is: It is not a protocol problem. Replacing xlib is a sensible thing to do, inventing a new protocol is not.
Modern applications don't do that, they typically render pixmaps and just have the X server composite them. X11 can still do a reasonable job here, with XDAMAGE, XFIXES, and XRENDER, allowing you to keep most of a pixmap (a Picture, in fact) on the server, update image data in selected parts, and do all of the compositing in the server.
Absolutely. The great thing is: X11 lets you do all this stuff because it is based on a very generic framework. In contrast to almost everybody here, I think that X11 has a *great design*.
The problem is that none of the X11 toolkits actually do this very well.
It is still working OK for most stuff. But yes, the toolkits do not care about network transparency anymore, which is quite sad. But you can write clients which work really well over the network. And just yesterday I used Matlab over a trans-atlantic connections. This sucked because it was slow, but it was really really useful that I was able to do this.
Wayland doesn't solve this at all - it simply says 'well, grab an OpenGL context and send drawing commands'.
Wayland doesn't solve _anything_, because you can do the same stuff with X.
That works okay - the OpenGL protocol allows you to copy textures to the server (and the GPU) and composite them very fast. The problem is that this approach also works fine in X11, and with X11 you get network transparency when you do it (which works reasonably).
How is this a problem?
The main criticism I'd have of X11 is that it puts too much state on the server. There is no way, at the X protocol layer (or even in the low-level X libraries) of saying 'disconnect this window from this display, reconnect it here', or 'oh, my X server has crashed, recreate my state on this newly restarted version'.
Toolkits could easily do this. You can disconnect from one server on reconnect to another. For example, there is libdisplaymigration. I added it to my software in the past, then you could move windows from one server to another. GTK had a bug where it connect disconnect properly, but his was a bug in GTK and had nothing to do with X. Xlib had problems with recovering after a lost connection. But again, this was a problem with Xlib not with X.
The latter worked fine in BeOS almost 20 years ago and works fine in Windows today. The former worked on NeWS 30 years ago. Both are use cases that I'd love to see addressed for modern devices. The Wayland solution to this is 'write a web app'.
I wish people would work on adding disconnect, reconnect, and display migration to the X11 toolkits. Another useful feature would be drag&drop which works between windows on different clients by moving the data through the server (.i.e. the clients do not need to know anything about each other). You could do so much cool stuff with X, especially nowadays with fast wireless everywhere...
It is a myth that supporting old drawing primitives in X11 somehow slows down modern clients and you can essentially have the same buffer handling as Wayland with X. In fact, the design of Wayland is basically copied from X minus some old parts which are not needed by modern clients. The problem with this is: Breaking compatibility with a decades old protocol for no good reason is just moronic.
I know. The problem is that the pro-nuclear slashdotters already think they know what is right and what is wrong before even seriously looking at the scientific literature, just because the "low doses of radiation are harmless", "LNT has been debunked", "there have been only 50 deaths from chernobyl", etc.. myths just fit so well with their prejudices. I believe myself that the radiation risks of nuclear power are quite manageable with good engineering and regulatory oversight, but as a professional scientist I cannot stand when they search for the biggest bullshit on the internet and misrepresent it as the scientific consensus.
My point is that you should acquire a bit of scientific literacy yourself, which includes being able to evaluate the quality of information based on its source. Then we can have a serious discussion. Ofcourse, if all you aim for are the cheers of the uncritical pro-nuclear crowd on slashdot, this is not necessary.
If you cherry-pick your sources as you obviously do, you will always confirm you ideas by finding articles like this, but it will usually be one published in a journal with no reputation at all. Both dose-response and Health-Phys are such journals operated by societies with an obvious bias. Dose-response is the journal by the dose-reponse society, formerly known as Hormesis Society which is a collection of "scientists" who think that a little bit of pollution is actually good for you. Needless to say, they get plenty of funding by certain industries. The Health Physics Society essentially became a "labor union for the nuclear industry" (as one of its own founders put it).
Instead, I suggest you try the following strategy: Try to come up with some reasonable keywords, restrict yourself to journals with high reputation (e.g.: Nature, Science, Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine, Radiology, etc. ), and then look at all articles which come up. As a first approximation, you can look at impact factor or google scholar metrics if you want to know what journals have a good reputation. You may learn something.
Because, of course, both the IAEA and George Johnson are completely unbiased when it comes to nuclear power...
I honestly don't know about Johnson, but I've often seen guys of his age involved in science such as him to be quite pro-nuclear: quite enough for most to not be particularly thorough when it comes to researching positive outlooks.
I also see that it is very easy to get confused about what the scientific community actually believes about something. Especially if you are not a scientist and already have a bias. The reason is that science is very open and even fringe opinions are tolerated. So if you are looking for a confirmation for a something you believe in you can always find some study in an obscure journal which seems to confirm your idea. For science, this is not a problem because scientists are usually able to judge by themselves whether something is a reliable source of information. But It is a problem for pubic policy. Especially if there are special interest groups who fund those fringe-science communities. For example, this is clearly the case for all these people promoting the questionable idea of hormesis who get (or got) funding from all kinds of industries who want to downplay the risk of pollution (tobacco industry, industries causing air pollution, nuclear industry). Quite a few people and articles mentioned in the article are from this camp. Unfortunately, some pro-nuclear slashdotters fall for this nonsense far too easily. And don't get me wrong: Being pro-nuclear is not an unreasonable position, but believing this pseudo-scientific crap (hormesis, LNT is debunked, etc.) is.
The IAEA report on Fukushima is quite clear that no statistical increase in deaths is likely to be observed. Not for adults, children, or offspring.
This may be true, but it is rather irrelevant statement. Additional cancers causes by Fukushima are extremely hard to detect statistically because there are many people who get cancer anyway. For sake of argument, let's just assume Fukushima caused (or will cause) the death 100 people. This would not be detectable at all. Your argument is basically: Because we cannot detect it, it is not there or irrelevant. This is obviously nonsense. 100 dead people are very well a problem. Just be cause we don't "see" something doesn't mean it is not there.
A study from Stanford estimates "130 (15-1100)" mortalities. (Ten Hoeve and Jacobson, Energy & Environmental Science, 2012) But you know this. I told you before.
Interestingly, a tidbit is that the children thyroid exposure at Chernobyl was 1000 times that of a child in the Fukushima district. From what I can find, there is still no observed statistical increase in negative health effects associated with those exposures at Chernobyl.
You are kidding? There was a very obvious increase in Thyroid cancers after Chernobyl. And even conservative estimates are 5000 additional deaths from Chernobyl. And this estimate if for a subset of the population (of all people affected). So this is a low estimate.
But my recommendation is to not just google for stuff which agrees with your opinion. You will always find some "arguments". Numbers how electricity is produced in Germany can be found here: http://www.ag-energiebilanzen....
From that it is very clear that shutting down some nuclear plants did not cause any increase in coal consumption in Germany. I know a lot of pundits claim just that. They are wrong.
I tend to agree, although I would put the time point later when Microsoft screwed up with Windows Vista and the UI of Windows 7. Just before that time, we had polished and stable Linux distributions which were almost perfect. But then Ubuntu/Gnome/... all screwed up too by giving up all the stability and polishment for rewriting everything related to user interfaces. Since then, I never had a stable and feature-complete Linux desktop which worked well for me. It is just sad.
"Environmentalists" fighting tooth and nail to dismantle carbon-free nuclear generation, and insisting that we can decarbonize with renewables alone will doom the oceans if they have their way
Ah, the "only nuclear can safe us" myth. When looking at this without ideology, one quickly learns that nuclear is simply too expensive. As such, it is not a solution to any problem - investing in nuclear makes the situation worse by wasting resources.
No, you are operating under the myth that we have the time to wait for renewables like solar and wind. We don't, decades of science and engineering are ahead of us.
Renewables are already today more cost effective than nuclear. There is no engineering needed. More engineering will only make it better.
Even then the ability to manufacture sufficient battery (or alternative) storage is unknown.
This is another myth. Renewables can easily be expanded by a significant amount without additional storage. In fact, Germany has a bit of pumped storage which are currently under-utlized today because renewables fit better to the demand curve.
We need nuclear as a bridge. The cost of nuclear is not an issue since we don't have the time.
Ofcourse it is an issue: It prevents us from deploying other more cost effective options.
We need to take coal offline immediately.
Yes, we need to take coal offline quickly.
However the shift to renewables combined with a shift away from nuclear is causing more coal to go online as a backup to renewables (i.e. no batteries or alternatives to store power in). Natural gas too which is admittedly not as bad as coal.
At least for Germany, this is another myth. There was - unfortunately - a shift from gas to coal, but this is a different matter. I also agree that it would have been better to remove old coal plants instead of nuclear plants. But that Germany has added coal because of the shift away from nuclear and as backup for renewables is simply not true.
Libraries of big universities could simply provide the infrastructure to publish (online only) journals. There is not much needed as most of the work is already done by volunteers (reviewers / editors) so this could be really cheap.
The problem is the huge momentum to publish in traditional journals with big impact factor. Young researchers have few options to publish is lesser known journals because this would hurt their careers and most older researchers do not seem to care to much. The problem is that there is no direct incentive because the cost of the libraries to for the subscriptions is shared by all researchers of a university or paid by the tax payer.
The most effective solution is simply for the funding sources to require open access.
Ah, the "only nuclear can safe us" myth. When looking at this without ideology, one quickly learns that nuclear is simply too expensive. As such, it is not a solution to any problem - investing in nuclear makes the situation worse by wasting resources.
But at least, I think that keeping our nuclear plants (it doesn't mean going all-nuclear) is better than investing in coal...
This is certainly true, (although at some point in time nuclear plants get so expensive to maintain that it is not worth any more - the total amount of energy nuclear will provide is negligible in the overall scheme of things).
We often use Germany as an example for "green" power because they do plenty of wind and solar but shutting down the nukes and replacing them with new generation coal plants is probably not the best for our planet.
Germany added so much renewables that the loss of nuclear plants was easily compensated for (from 2010-2014 about 55 TWh (for a year) increase in renewables vs ca 45 TWh reduction in nuclear). Coal was not needed as a replacement for nuclear - which you can also see by the fact that the use of gas went down at the same time by 30 TWh, The planned coal plants were mostly planned a long time ago, and were often replacements for older less efficient plants. But I agree that it would have been better to keep the nuclear plants running longer and shut down coal plants instead - which will also happen - just later.
"Environmentalists" fighting tooth and nail to dismantle carbon-free nuclear generation, and insisting that we can decarbonize with renewables alone will doom the oceans if they have their way
Ah, the "only nuclear can safe us" myth. When looking at this without ideology, one quickly learns that nuclear is simply too expensive. As such, it is not a solution to any problem - investing in nuclear makes the situation worse by wasting resources.
Sadly '-Y' is slow because RENDER is not available for untrusted clients. And '-X' does not offer more protection on most Linux systems because they usually default to trusted connections. It really a sad situation.
The proof may show that the implementation performs a certain function according to a certain specification. Knowing this rules out a lot of bugs in the implementation. E.g. a sorting function can be shown to return a correctly sorted list. Once you have a formal proof of this property you do not need to worry about any pesky implementation details of this sorting function anymore. The actual implementation could really complicated because it is highly optimized and has many special cases which may make it difficult to ensure correctness only with testing. Design reviews do not help here.
You haven't understood the point.The formal proof abstracts away implementation details which are irrelevant for correctness. For this reason, It is much simper to understand than the actual implementation. And it does not solve the same problem.
Please don't spread this myth. The company wasn't already dead. It was at that time - by far - the biggest smartphone vendor, which was growing faster in absolute numbers than anybody else, and the smartphone unit was highly profitable.
When the Windows Phone decision was done, the smart phone unit was worth much more than what they later got from Microsoft. So no, this explanation does not make any sense.
Nokia clearly had some problems, but it was nowhere that bad. First, Symbian was not as bad as people claim. Second, when Elop announced the switch and accidentally killed Symbian at the same time (by declaring it obsolete), the smartphone unit was still highly profitable and selling more phones than everybody else and even growing faster in absolute numbers than everybody else - with Symbian phones (people seem to believe that it was already collapsing - this is not true). Finally, there was a perfectly fine strategy to transition developers from Symbian to Meego using Qt as a common platform. And Meego was ready at that time as the excellent N9 showed which was released only a few months later. This was a strategy which made perfect sense at that time. Keep in mind Nokia was the clear market leader at that time - Android was nowhere as big as it is now.
In contrast, switching to a Windows which was already failing on the market (Microsoft had 15% market share with Windows Mobile but at that time maybe 3%), a system which was controlled by Microsoft and allowed almost no differentiating by Nokia itself. It also alienated all existing developers, the sales channels, the carriers, and their own employees. The decision was pure madness. Of course, this was entirely to be expected from Elop: http://mobile.slashdot.org/com...
IMHO the biggest strategic blunder of all this mobile Linux distributions is that they break compatibility with standard X11 / Linux. Why be incompatible?
I know for Sailfish the reason was that they could get access to Android drivers more easily by using Wayland instead of X11, but for me it meant that I completely lost interest in Sailfish at this point. Maybe XWayland will run someday... or does it already?
I also still believe that the networking of X11 would be really great if exploited properly - especially for a mobile device: Why can't I move the window of the address book app from my smartphone to my desktop, cut & paste some numbers from another application on my desktop, etc...
"In addition to land-use changes, we investigated whether pesticide use affected shifts in thermal and latitudinal range limits among bumblebees. Spatially detailed, annual pesticide measurements, including neonicotinoid insecticides, were available for the United States after 1991. Neither total pesticide nor neonicotinoid applications there relate to observed shifts in bumblebee speciesâ(TM) historical ranges or thermal limits (table S1). Neonicotinoid effects known from individual and colony levels certainly contribute to pollinator declines and could degrade local pollination services. Neonicotinoid effects on bumblebees have been demonstrated experimentally using field-realistic treatments (20). These locally important effects do not âoescale upâ to explain cross-continental shifts along bumblebee speciesâ(TM) thermal or latitudinal limits. The timing of climate changeâ"related shifts among bumblebee species underscores this observation: Range losses from speciesâ(TM) southern limits and failures to track warming conditions began before widespread use of neonicotinoid pesticides (figs. S2 and S3). "
Not that Nokia didn't have problems, but Symbian was growing profitable in 2010 and faster (in absolute numbers) than the competition. While Meego was delayed, it was finally ready in 2011. So there was absolutely no reason to commit suicide with Windows Phone.
If there were doubts that Meego could be successful, the obvious thing to do would have been to additionally produce some Android phones.
Slashdot Mirror
The Wayland API is nothing like X11 except in broad concepts that all display / input APIs share - listening for input events, connecting to a display, creating a drawing area and so on. It's just that Wayland's map onto modern concepts such as GPU surfaces and compositing so that rendering is as efficient as possible.
I disagree. Wayland is essentially a subset of what X11 can do. It is based on sending messages over a unix domain socket and sharing buffers. This is exactly what modern X clients also do. This is no surprise: It was designed to support exactly what is needed for modern clients and no more with the explicit goal to get rid of everything else. But it does not add anything which you cannot also do in basically the same way with X.
As for the primitives, nobody has ever said they slow modern clients. The point is that clients don't even use the primitives any more and its the same story applies for most of the rest of X11.
This is true. This is about retaining backwards compatibility.
It has a 1980s 2D-centric, damage based view of the desktop and extensions are used to fool it into supporting surfaces and composition.
Extensions are nice way to make modern rendering possible without breaking backwards possibility. "fool" "2D-centric" "1980" is just FUD to make it sound bad, but X supports modern applications just fine. You have no technical argument.
But those extensions are workarounds which are design compromised by the architecture and so they are slower and less efficient than they would be.
Because modern clients work essentially in the same way on X as on Wayland,nothing is slower or less efficient. Just because some API is based on an extension or not doesn't make it faster or slower. This is simply FUD.
Hence the push for Wayland. It will ultimately lead to a more lightweight and responsive desktop.
No. Mostly, it will break backwards compatibility, and remove features. The few kilobytes on unused drawing API in X11 will not make any noticable different on desktops (or mobiles) with gigabytes of ram.
It doesn't slow down, but they also don't help. That's the point I was making, that the lines, text, and pattern primitives that X was able to simply describe aren't leveraged in modern UI.
Yes, this is why XRENDER was introduced 15 years ago.
Now I can't speak to the question of what Wayland fixes in exchange for getting to ignore having X11 as part of the core,
Well they don't have to deal with the old code, I can understand this. But it breaks compatibility on the protocol level, this is really stupid IMHO.
and whether it's worth it. I can say that even if it Xorg, it's time for most folks to move on to strategies like Xpra that preserve the awesome facets of seamless remote applications, perform better, and are not sensitive to things like network disconnects trashing the ability for the application to keep running.
Xpra is nice if you have a slow connection, but I use X applications just fine over the network every single day and it works just fine. Being able to disconnect would be nice though, and I do not understand why toolkits still do not support this. Well, the reason is that rewriting everything from scratch all the time is apparently more fun...
It's not that supporting the old things slows things down, it's that it doesn't speed things up. It actually does cause some problems, because various things in the X11 protocol use 8-bit fields of which a significant space is used by legacy stuff that no one uses anymore, but that's largely worked around in newer extensions.
Yep. I am not opposed to cleaning things up with extensions without breaking backwards and forwards compatibility.
If you're in a world where most applications are sending commands like 'draw line from x,y to x1,y1' then X11 network transparency is really fast.
X11 network transparency is also very fast if you move bitmaps over network and are a bit smart of how you do it (I wrote an image viewer
which works quite well over the network).
At the protocol layer, anyway - if you use xlib then performance will suck unless network latency is very low because it adds a synchronous API on top of an synchronous protocol (XCB fixes this).
Yes, absolutely. But the important thing is: It is not a protocol problem. Replacing xlib is a sensible thing to do, inventing a new protocol is not.
Modern applications don't do that, they typically render pixmaps and just have the X server composite them. X11 can still do a reasonable job here, with XDAMAGE, XFIXES, and XRENDER, allowing you to keep most of a pixmap (a Picture, in fact) on the server, update image data in selected parts, and do all of the compositing in the server.
Absolutely. The great thing is: X11 lets you do all this stuff because it is based on a very generic framework. In contrast to almost everybody here, I think that X11 has a *great design*.
The problem is that none of the X11 toolkits actually do this very well.
It is still working OK for most stuff. But yes, the toolkits do not care about network transparency anymore, which is quite sad.
But you can write clients which work really well over the network. And just yesterday I used Matlab over a trans-atlantic connections.
This sucked because it was slow, but it was really really useful that I was able to do this.
Wayland doesn't solve this at all - it simply says 'well, grab an OpenGL context and send drawing commands'.
Wayland doesn't solve _anything_, because you can do the same stuff with X.
That works okay - the OpenGL protocol allows you to copy textures to the server (and the GPU) and composite them very fast. The problem is that this approach also works fine in X11, and with X11 you get network transparency when you do it (which works reasonably).
How is this a problem?
The main criticism I'd have of X11 is that it puts too much state on the server. There is no way, at the X protocol layer (or even in the low-level X libraries) of saying 'disconnect this window from this display, reconnect it here', or 'oh, my X server has crashed, recreate my state on this newly restarted version'.
Toolkits could easily do this. You can disconnect from one server on reconnect to another. For example, there is libdisplaymigration. I added it to my software in the past, then you could move windows from one server to another. GTK had a bug where it connect disconnect properly, but his was a bug in GTK and had nothing to do with X. Xlib had problems with recovering after a lost connection. But again, this was a problem with Xlib not with X.
The latter worked fine in BeOS almost 20 years ago and works fine in Windows today. The former worked on NeWS 30 years ago. Both are use cases that I'd love to see addressed for modern devices. The Wayland solution to this is 'write a web app'.
I wish people would work on adding disconnect, reconnect, and display migration to the X11 toolkits. Another useful feature would be drag&drop which works between windows on different clients by moving the data through the server (.i.e. the clients do not need to know anything about each other). You could do so much cool stuff with X, especially nowadays with fast wireless everywhere...
It is a myth that supporting old drawing primitives in X11 somehow slows down modern clients and you can essentially have the same buffer handling as Wayland with X. In fact, the design of Wayland is basically copied from X minus some old parts which are not needed by modern clients. The problem with this is: Breaking compatibility with a decades old protocol for no good reason is just moronic.
I know. The problem is that the pro-nuclear slashdotters already think they know what is right and what is wrong before even seriously looking at the scientific literature, just because the "low doses of radiation are harmless", "LNT has been debunked", "there have been only 50 deaths from chernobyl", etc.. myths just fit so well with their prejudices. I believe myself that the radiation risks of nuclear power are quite manageable with good engineering and regulatory oversight, but as a professional scientist I cannot stand when they search for the biggest bullshit on the internet and misrepresent it as the scientific consensus.
My point is that you should acquire a bit of scientific literacy yourself, which includes being able to evaluate the quality of information based on its source. Then we can have a serious discussion. Ofcourse, if all you aim for are the cheers of the uncritical pro-nuclear crowd on slashdot, this is not necessary.
If you cherry-pick your sources as you obviously do, you will always confirm you ideas by finding articles like this, but it will usually be one published in a journal with no reputation at all. Both dose-response and Health-Phys are such journals operated by societies with an obvious bias. Dose-response is the journal by the dose-reponse society, formerly known as Hormesis Society which is a collection of "scientists" who think that a little bit of pollution is actually good for you. Needless to say, they get plenty of funding by certain industries. The Health Physics Society essentially became a "labor union for the nuclear industry" (as one of its own founders put it).
Instead, I suggest you try the following strategy: Try to come up with some reasonable keywords, restrict yourself to journals with high reputation (e.g.: Nature, Science, Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine, Radiology, etc. ), and then look at all articles which come up. As a first approximation, you can look at impact factor or google scholar metrics if you want to know what journals have a good reputation. You may learn something.
Because, of course, both the IAEA and George Johnson are completely unbiased when it comes to nuclear power...
I honestly don't know about Johnson, but I've often seen guys of his age involved in science such as him to be quite pro-nuclear: quite enough for most to not be particularly thorough when it comes to researching positive outlooks.
I also see that it is very easy to get confused about what the scientific community actually believes about something. Especially if you are not a scientist and already have a bias. The reason is that science is very open and even fringe opinions are tolerated. So if you are looking for a confirmation for a something you believe in you can always find some study in an obscure journal which seems to confirm your idea. For science, this is not a problem because scientists are usually able to judge by themselves whether something is a reliable source of information. But It is a problem for pubic policy. Especially if there are special interest groups who fund those fringe-science communities. For example, this is clearly the case for all these people promoting the questionable idea of hormesis who get (or got) funding from all kinds of industries who want to downplay the risk of pollution (tobacco industry, industries causing air pollution, nuclear industry). Quite a few people and articles mentioned in the article are from this camp. Unfortunately, some pro-nuclear slashdotters fall for this nonsense far too easily. And don't get me wrong: Being pro-nuclear is not an unreasonable position, but believing this pseudo-scientific crap (hormesis, LNT is debunked, etc.) is.
The IAEA report on Fukushima is quite clear that no statistical increase in deaths is likely to be observed. Not for adults, children, or offspring.
This may be true, but it is rather irrelevant statement. Additional cancers causes by Fukushima are extremely hard to detect statistically because there are many people who get cancer anyway. For sake of argument, let's just assume Fukushima caused (or will cause) the death 100 people. This would not be detectable at all. Your argument is basically: Because we cannot detect it, it is not there or irrelevant. This is obviously nonsense. 100 dead people are very well a problem. Just be cause we don't "see" something doesn't mean it is not there.
A study from Stanford estimates "130 (15-1100)" mortalities. (Ten Hoeve and Jacobson, Energy & Environmental Science, 2012) But you know this. I told you before.
Interestingly, a tidbit is that the children thyroid exposure at Chernobyl was 1000 times that of a child in the Fukushima district. From what I can find, there is still no observed statistical increase in negative health effects associated with those exposures at Chernobyl.
You are kidding? There was a very obvious increase in Thyroid cancers after Chernobyl. And even conservative estimates are 5000 additional deaths from Chernobyl. And this estimate if for a subset of the population (of all people affected). So this is a low estimate.
TL;DR
But my recommendation is to not just google for stuff which agrees with your opinion. You will always find some "arguments". Numbers how electricity is produced in Germany can be found here:
http://www.ag-energiebilanzen....
From that it is very clear that shutting down some nuclear plants did not cause any increase in coal consumption in Germany. I know a lot of pundits claim just that. They are wrong.
I tend to agree, although I would put the time point later when Microsoft screwed up with Windows Vista and the UI of Windows 7. Just before that time, we had polished and stable Linux distributions which were almost perfect. But then Ubuntu/Gnome/... all screwed up too by giving up all the stability and polishment for rewriting everything related to user interfaces. Since then, I never had a stable and feature-complete Linux desktop which worked well for me. It is just sad.
"Environmentalists" fighting tooth and nail to dismantle carbon-free nuclear generation, and insisting that we can decarbonize with renewables alone will doom the oceans if they have their way
Ah, the "only nuclear can safe us" myth. When looking at this without ideology, one quickly learns that nuclear is simply too expensive. As such, it is not a solution to any problem - investing in nuclear makes the situation worse by wasting resources.
No, you are operating under the myth that we have the time to wait for renewables like solar and wind. We don't, decades of science and engineering are ahead of us.
Renewables are already today more cost effective than nuclear. There is no engineering needed. More engineering will only make it better.
Even then the ability to manufacture sufficient battery (or alternative) storage is unknown.
This is another myth. Renewables can easily be expanded by a significant amount without additional storage. In fact, Germany has a bit of pumped storage which are currently under-utlized today because renewables fit better to the demand curve.
We need nuclear as a bridge. The cost of nuclear is not an issue since we don't have the time.
Ofcourse it is an issue: It prevents us from deploying other more cost effective options.
We need to take coal offline immediately.
Yes, we need to take coal offline quickly.
However the shift to renewables combined with a shift away from nuclear is causing more coal to go online as a backup to renewables (i.e. no batteries or alternatives to store power in). Natural gas too which is admittedly not as bad as coal.
At least for Germany, this is another myth. There was - unfortunately - a shift from gas to coal, but this is a different matter. I also agree that it would have been better to remove old coal plants instead of nuclear plants. But that Germany has added coal because of the shift away from nuclear and as backup for renewables is simply not true.
Libraries of big universities could simply provide the infrastructure to publish (online only) journals. There is not much needed as most of the work is already done by volunteers (reviewers / editors) so this could be really cheap.
The problem is the huge momentum to publish in traditional journals with big impact factor. Young researchers have few options to publish is lesser known journals because this would hurt their careers and most older researchers do not seem to care to much. The problem is that there is no direct incentive because the cost of the libraries to for the subscriptions is shared by all researchers of a university or paid by the tax payer.
The most effective solution is simply for the funding sources to require open access.
Ah, the "only nuclear can safe us" myth. When looking at this without ideology, one quickly learns that nuclear is simply too expensive. As such, it is not a solution to any problem - investing in nuclear makes the situation worse by wasting resources.
But at least, I think that keeping our nuclear plants (it doesn't mean going all-nuclear) is better than investing in coal...
This is certainly true, (although at some point in time nuclear plants get so expensive to maintain that it is not worth any more - the total amount of energy nuclear will provide is negligible in the overall scheme of things).
We often use Germany as an example for "green" power because they do plenty of wind and solar but shutting down the nukes and replacing them with new generation coal plants is probably not the best for our planet.
Germany added so much renewables that the loss of nuclear plants was easily compensated for (from 2010-2014 about 55 TWh (for a year) increase in renewables vs ca 45 TWh reduction in nuclear). Coal was not needed as a replacement for nuclear - which you can also see by the fact that the use of gas went down at the same time by 30 TWh, The planned coal plants were mostly planned a long time ago, and were often replacements for older less efficient plants. But I agree that it would have been better to keep the nuclear plants running longer and shut down coal plants instead - which will also happen - just later.
"Environmentalists" fighting tooth and nail to dismantle carbon-free nuclear generation, and insisting that we can decarbonize with renewables alone will doom the oceans if they have their way
Ah, the "only nuclear can safe us" myth. When looking at this without ideology, one quickly learns that nuclear is simply too expensive. As such, it is not a solution to any problem - investing in nuclear makes the situation worse by wasting resources.
Sadly '-Y' is slow because RENDER is not available for untrusted clients. And '-X' does not offer more protection on most Linux systems because they usually default to trusted connections. It really a sad situation.
The proof may show that the implementation performs a certain function according to a certain specification. Knowing this rules out a lot of bugs in the implementation. E.g. a sorting function can be shown to return a correctly sorted list. Once you have a formal proof of this property you do not need to worry about any pesky implementation details of this sorting function anymore. The actual implementation could really complicated because it is highly optimized and has many special cases which may make it difficult to ensure correctness only with testing. Design reviews do not help here.
You haven't understood the point.The formal proof abstracts away implementation details which are irrelevant for correctness. For this reason, It is much simper to understand than the actual implementation. And it does not solve the same problem.
Please don't spread this myth. The company wasn't already dead. It was at that time - by far - the biggest smartphone vendor, which was growing faster in absolute numbers than anybody else, and the smartphone unit was highly profitable.
When the Windows Phone decision was done, the smart phone unit was worth much more than what they later got from Microsoft. So no, this explanation does not make any sense.
Nokia clearly had some problems, but it was nowhere that bad. First, Symbian was not as bad as people claim. Second, when Elop announced the switch and accidentally killed Symbian at the same time (by declaring it obsolete), the smartphone unit was still highly profitable and selling more phones than everybody else and even growing faster in absolute numbers than everybody else - with Symbian phones (people seem to believe that it was already collapsing - this is not true). Finally, there was a perfectly fine strategy to transition developers from Symbian to Meego using Qt as a common platform. And Meego was ready at that time as the excellent N9 showed which was released only a few months later. This was a strategy which made perfect sense at that time. Keep in mind Nokia was the clear market leader at that time - Android was nowhere as big as it is now.
In contrast, switching to a Windows which was already failing on the market (Microsoft had 15% market share with Windows Mobile but at that time maybe 3%), a system which was controlled by Microsoft and allowed almost no differentiating by Nokia itself. It also alienated all existing developers, the sales channels, the carriers, and their own employees. The decision was pure madness. Of course, this was entirely to be expected from Elop:
http://mobile.slashdot.org/com...
IMHO the biggest strategic blunder of all this mobile Linux distributions is that they break compatibility with standard X11 / Linux. Why be incompatible?
I know for Sailfish the reason was that they could get access to Android drivers more easily by using Wayland instead of X11, but for me it meant that I completely lost interest in Sailfish at this point. Maybe XWayland will run someday... or does it already?
I also still believe that the networking of X11 would be really great if exploited properly - especially for a mobile device: Why can't I move the window of the address book app from my smartphone to my desktop, cut & paste some numbers from another application on my desktop, etc...
This has been considered. From the article:
"In addition to land-use changes, we investigated whether pesticide use affected shifts in thermal and latitudinal range limits among bumblebees. Spatially detailed, annual pesticide measurements, including neonicotinoid insecticides, were available for the United States after 1991. Neither total pesticide nor neonicotinoid applications there relate to observed shifts in bumblebee speciesâ(TM) historical ranges or thermal limits (table S1). Neonicotinoid effects known from individual and colony levels certainly contribute to pollinator declines and could degrade local pollination services. Neonicotinoid effects on bumblebees have been demonstrated experimentally using field-realistic treatments (20). These locally important effects do not âoescale upâ to explain cross-continental shifts along bumblebee speciesâ(TM) thermal or latitudinal limits. The timing of climate changeâ"related shifts among bumblebee species underscores this observation: Range losses from speciesâ(TM) southern limits and failures to track warming conditions began before widespread use of neonicotinoid pesticides (figs. S2 and S3). "
http://www.sciencemag.org/cont...
And it was predicted already in the 19th century.
Not that Nokia didn't have problems, but Symbian was growing profitable in 2010 and faster (in absolute numbers) than the competition. While Meego was delayed, it was finally ready in 2011. So there was absolutely no reason to commit suicide with Windows Phone.
If there were doubts that Meego could be successful, the obvious thing to do would have been to additionally produce some Android phones.
It seems you failed to understand that the linked document is just a summary of the actual report.