In fact, the conspiracy theory that the government is funding climate scientists who say that global warming is real and caused by human activity with the purpose to strengthen the government's authoritarian grip on society is a myth. But also the more plausible idea that scientists exaggerate their findings to get more funding does not seem to be true: http://arstechnica.com/science...
The Koch' brothers also funded the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatur project, which started out with key people being sceptical about global warming. But the data convinced them otherwise: http://www.theguardian.com/sci...
I wish we would actually debate how to best deal with global warming instead of whether it exists or what causes it.
That is exactly what we are debating.
Obviously we are also debating whether global warming exists or is caused by humans. To me - as a scientist - this is a deeply worrying sign of ignorance.
And the best way of dealing with it is to ignore it, because the costs of dealing with global warming down the road are tiny compared to the costs of limiting emissions right now, for any realistic IPCC scenario.
This is an interesting opinion. You present it as obvious, but it is the opposite of what most people who studied this seems to think.
The problem is that climate scientists and their activist friends are unwilling to accept basic economics and keep making proposals outside their domain of expertise.
This is clearly not basic economics. Is is more about estimating future risks and estimating economic cost which seems difficult to me. The term "climate scientists and their activist friends" also indicates a bit of paranoid thinking.
I think a lot of people, even some actual scientists, do not understand the role of skepticism in Science. There's a difference between scientific skepticism and peanut gallery skepticism. Scientific skepticism is healthy.
Scientists can speculate and debate as much as they want whether it's getting warmer or colder. The issue with the global warming debate is the political demands to translate the science into specific actions, often by scientists who have no qualifications in economics or politics.
Nonsense. The issue is that people who do fear certain political actions are badmouthing the underlying science and the scientists involved instead of debating political questions. I wish we would actually debate how to best deal with global warming instead of whether it exists or what causes it.
I don't see your point. Xrender works just fine and just traced some applications using xtrace and they happily make use of it. And yes, this works perfectly over the network.
Changing this would mean breaking a binary protocol with decades of backwards compatibility. I do not think the Linux community could do something more stupid than breaking compatibility with X11. As if those many applications magically rewrite themselves. And applications which use direct rendering work exactly the same way on X as anywhere else, so there is not even something to gain.
What is missing for the desktop is a consistent and polished GUI on top of that. Unfortunately, gnome, Ubuntu, all made the same mistake as Microsoft: Abandoning their old stuff to get something hip which also works on tablets. Now we have an inconsistent mess that is worse than what we had a few years ago.
If you change a private implementation detail in a class, you have to recompile everything which uses the class. This is the opposite of encapsulation.
As with most everything, there's a way to solve that problem in C++, it just takes some work and knowledge to know what, when, and how to use it.
Sure, but why waste so much time working around short-comings in the language? This idiom is a very good example. A lot of code and complexity which does nothing useful but is required to work around the stupidity of the language designer.
I do agree that the language is too big though; conceptually, C++ could be broken into 4 distinct components (C, STL, templates, OOP), as each have their own quirks and idioms that don't necessarily carry over well to the other, and some are even Turing complete on their own (ie template metaprogramming)
I use the C component. It is not perfect, but not as mis-designed as what has been added in C++.
If you change a private implementation detail in a class, you have to recompile everything which uses the class. This is the opposite of encapsulation. And no, it is not my only gripe with C++...
The problem with C++ is not that it is large or that it backwards compatible with C. The problem with C++ is that almost every language feature has been added in without much thought because it seemed cool at some point in time. So the whole thing is a mess of incoherent, incomplete, and sometimes broken features, which do not work together.
My point is that France's electricity is cheap because the government pays so it cannot be used as argument why nuclear is cheap did.
Care to demonstrate this?
Basically it has been claimed that the French nuclear scale-up was super cheap because of standardized design and the regulatory framework, while everybody else did it wrong and had exploding cost. But this seems only partially true. French nuclear was not magically much cheaper than elsewhere. Ofcourse, this is very hard to estimate because there is a lot of government money involved. But there are studies which looked at this:
The costs of the French nuclear scale-up: A case of negative learning by doing A Grubler - Energy Policy, 2010
Based on recent number from an audit by the Court of Audit there are better estimates:
The cost of nuclear electricity: France after Fukushima, N Boccard - Energy Policy, 2014
That nuclear is generally not economically viable is very well known. Building of nuclear power plants basically stopped because cost exploded ans was increasing with newer designs. Then there is the trend in recent decades to create de-regulated energy markets so government involvment was reduced and new projects have to be financed by private companties. But this is not usually considered to be economical. See for example a recent analysis of the levelized cost of energy by Lazard. Also just take a look at actual projects. Where advanced nuclear reactors are build there massive cost overruns. The project at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H... could only be financed by garantueeing prices well over the market price. For a mature industry which took an insane amount of money for R&D and exists for a long term, the fact that it is currently not possible to build plants which are economically competitive is not very convincing.
Also, Germany's renewable sector is also heavily subsidized, so even if I accepted that France's electrical production (not R&D - that's a whole different story) is subsidized, you could at best say that both countries do production subsidies. Even then the French are getting the better end of the deal with lower rates.
The problem is that the German subsidies are not for a mature industry but to build up the economy of scale and drive innovation. They play a similar role to initial R&D cost in nuclear. They are not meant to stay and are already much less for newer plants. They also have been very sucessful in driving down the cost. Also putting the additional fee (which is only a small part of the total price) on top of the rate was intentional done do promote conservation while the cost of nuclear in France is hidden in the general taxes.
An LFTR is an *engineering* nightmare.
I presume you've worked on LFTR engineering then? Can you name some of the engineering nightmarish points?
Corrosion. Operating it will also be a nightmare. Can you put a diver into molton salt to fix things? But I am happy to be proven wrong. I am not against nuclear for some ideological reasos. I looked at this and think it is not worth it. With LFTR, I would not mind if we spend some money to explore this option further, but - honestly - I do not see this becoming an economical option.
while renewables are already competitive and getting cheaper every year.
Oh really? Without a guaranteed feed-in tariff and market distortion by forcing the grid operator to take renewables first and make the rest of the traditional generators pay for their intermittency?
Yes, wind is already clearly economical. And solar is on a good way. Also you forgot that nuclear has an even bigger problem than renewables: It is only good for
And there is also the possibiity that onsite reactors fail without Tsunami. See Forsmark, Sweden in 2006. After power loss half of the redundant backup power systems were lost due to a failure mode which *could* have affected all backup power. Also control room equipment and half of the cooling was lost.
France electricity prices do not reflect the actual cost. This is not a free market situation.
Most electrical systems are not "free market" systems, as rates are heavily regulated by rate commissions and production is tightly controlled by government planning and approval. In any case, can you demonstrate that France's electricity price is not real? I'm pretty sure rate payers there don't see more than the billed amount get debited each month from their accounts. From a taxation perspective France is also lower than Denmark, so what's your point again?
My point is that France's electricity is cheap because the government pays so it cannot be used as argument why nuclear is cheap did. The general lexel of taxation has nothing to do with this.
Even for existing technology nuclear is not really competive, actual 3rd generation projects see immensive cost explosion
There's a couple of reasons for this:
We haven't been building them, so building few units at a time is expensive.
True. But see below..
Curiously though constructing over 50 units over 15 years didn't bankrupt France in the 1970s and 1980s.
Yes. it did not bankrupt France but is was very expensive. The true cost was not know for a long time but had to be estimated in public studies (e.g. Grubler A, The costs of the French nuclear scale-up: A case of negative learning by doing, Energy Policy 2012, 38: 5174-5188, let me quote from the abstract: "Its most significant finding is that even this most successful nuclear scale-up was characterized by a substantial escalation of real-term construction costs."). Only recently (2011) there was an audit by France's Court of Audit with the result hat is was much more expensive that previously thought.
thorium is currently just vapourware
Complete and utter vaporware, just like the other vaporware that was actually ready for deployment in 1994, but was killed by political action (although the concept having survived in Russia).
"The design is ready." As I said: currently just vapourware. You need to build a complete fuel cycle. This means building up a complete industry, developing technology, procedures, etc.. India is trying to do this.
As for LFTR, you are right, there are currently no ready and licensed designs, but that doesn't mean that we can't pursue them. The physics is clear, as is most of the chemistry.
Neither physics nor chemistry is the problem. An LFTR is an *engineering* nightmare.
If we'd spent a small fraction of the money sunk into renewables into these nuclear projects we could have had a design ready to roll a decade ago (we had the IFR, as I said before, but that was killed for political reasons).
Nonsens. We have already spent much more money for nuclear than for renewables and the technology is still so expensive that nobody seriously invests into it without massive amount government subsidies. And newer designs are *more* expensive while renewables are already competitive and getting cheaper every year. Economically, investing in nuclear is a poor decision.
No, it could work. He wants to capture different information from different parts of the bag. This is a multi-channel problem so you can go below Nyquist. Also you might have a model for speech and you can use to reduce the amount of required information. Finally, you co not need perfect recovery.
France electricity prices do not reflect the actual cost. This is not a free market situation.
Nuclear proponents are completely delusional about the actual cost of this technology. Even for existing technology nuclear is not really competive, actual 3rd generation projects see immensive cost explosion, and thorium is currently just vapourware. Come on guys, just get real.
We aleady have intellectual property laws which limit the information flow on the internet in extreme ways. Why should indviduals not have some rights on information about themselves?
Because Google is an American company. In America speech about something, particularly critical speech, is strongly protected. One of the protections for speech is ownership and rights to your own speech. Person X has no right to control what person Y says about them. That's the very meaning of free speech.
But how is this even related to free speech? It is not really about speech (opinions and ideas) but entries in a data base. It is not even a person speaking, it is a search engine. Also, the right to free speech is not absolute, but already limited even in the US in various ways, see hate speech, *bleep*, copyright...
I bet the most "right to be forgotten" requests will never get additional publicity. There is a reason it is called the Barbara Streisand effect and not the Jon Doe effect.
I also do not fully understand the hatred against these rights. We aleady have intellectual property laws which limit the information flow on the internet in extreme ways. Why should indviduals not have some rights on information about themselves?
That depends on your definition of "floundering". The handset unit was highly profitable and smartphone sales were much higher than any competitor and also increasing at a higher rate in absolute numbers. On the other hand, market share in smartphones was falling (no, this is not a contradiction in a growing market) and Symbian was perceived to be outdated. Nevertheless, I don't think there was any need for desperate decisions. Their old strategy was sound: Meego and Qt to create a joint ecosystem with Symbian. Switching to Windows Phone (which clearly was already floundering) was simply insane.
I get the impression you're trying to score points here by playing semantic games. I wish you would not do so.
What Chas was saying was that there is no such concept as absolute safety, and thus there is always a concept of 'acceptable risk', or 'minimum risk'. This is usually synonymous with safety -- most people are willing to recognize that we do not live in an ideal world.
Back on topic, you seem to be fixated on the idea that any increase in risk is unacceptable. Please explain why.
No you are misrepresenting what I said. My original point is exactly that there is a risk even from very small doses. I was attacked merely for pointing this out.
I never said that the risk in unacceptable, but merely stated that the risk has to be weighted against its potential benefits.
Slashdot Mirror
In fact, the conspiracy theory that the government is funding climate scientists who say that global warming is real and caused by human activity with the purpose to strengthen the government's authoritarian grip on society is a myth. But also the more plausible idea that scientists exaggerate their findings to get more funding does not seem to be true:
http://arstechnica.com/science...
Seriously?
http://www.theguardian.com/env...
The Koch' brothers also funded the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatur project, which started out with key people being sceptical about global warming. But the data convinced them otherwise:
http://www.theguardian.com/sci...
Where is the layman's textbook on Quantum Electrodynamics? Oh, it must be all fake!
there are some reaons why starting with zero might be better:
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users...
That is exactly what we are debating.
Obviously we are also debating whether global warming exists or is caused by humans. To me - as a scientist - this is a deeply worrying sign of ignorance.
And the best way of dealing with it is to ignore it, because the costs of dealing with global warming down the road are tiny compared to the costs of limiting emissions right now, for any realistic IPCC scenario.
This is an interesting opinion. You present it as obvious, but it is the opposite of what most people who studied this seems to think.
The problem is that climate scientists and their activist friends are unwilling to accept basic economics and keep making proposals outside their domain of expertise.
This is clearly not basic economics. Is is more about estimating future risks and estimating economic cost which seems difficult to me. The term "climate scientists and their activist friends" also indicates a bit of paranoid thinking.
Scientists can speculate and debate as much as they want whether it's getting warmer or colder. The issue with the global warming debate is the political demands to translate the science into specific actions, often by scientists who have no qualifications in economics or politics.
Nonsense. The issue is that people who do fear certain political actions are badmouthing the underlying science and the scientists involved instead of debating political questions. I wish we would actually debate how to best deal with global warming instead of whether it exists or what causes it.
I don't see your point. Xrender works just fine and just traced some applications using xtrace and they happily make use of it. And yes, this works perfectly over the network.
Changing this would mean breaking a binary protocol with decades of backwards compatibility. I do not think the Linux community could do something more stupid than breaking compatibility with X11. As if those many applications magically rewrite themselves. And applications which use direct rendering work exactly the same way on X as anywhere else, so there is not even something to gain.
What is missing for the desktop is a consistent and polished GUI on top of that. Unfortunately, gnome, Ubuntu, all made the same mistake as Microsoft: Abandoning their old stuff to get something hip which also works on tablets. Now we have an inconsistent mess that is worse than what we had a few years ago.
Give it up. The nuclear fanboys on slashdot will not believe it.
The nuclear industry itself states that this is the reason they don't build nuclear power plants (John Rowe):
http://www.bloomberg.com/video...
You mean where the citation is a broken link to a buisnessweek article from 2008?
26? Do you have a source for that? According to:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
This this seems a bit unlikely to me.
If you change a private implementation detail in a class, you have to recompile everything which uses the class. This is the opposite of encapsulation.
Yes, that's what the PIMPL idiom is for. Here's a nice introduction to it .
Yes I know this.
As with most everything, there's a way to solve that problem in C++, it just takes some work and knowledge to know what, when, and how to use it.
Sure, but why waste so much time working around short-comings in the language? This idiom is a very good example. A lot of code and complexity which does nothing useful but is required to work around the stupidity of the language designer.
I do agree that the language is too big though; conceptually, C++ could be broken into 4 distinct components (C, STL, templates, OOP), as each have their own quirks and idioms that don't necessarily carry over well to the other, and some are even Turing complete on their own (ie template metaprogramming)
I use the C component. It is not perfect, but not as mis-designed as what has been added in C++.
If you change a private implementation detail in a class, you have to recompile everything which uses the class. This is the opposite of encapsulation. And no, it is not my only gripe with C++...
The problem with C++ is not that it is large or that it backwards compatible with C. The problem with C++ is that almost every language feature has been added in without much thought because it seemed cool at some point in time. So the whole thing is a mess of incoherent, incomplete, and sometimes broken features, which do not work together.
My point is that France's electricity is cheap because the government pays so it cannot be used as argument why nuclear is cheap did.
Care to demonstrate this?
Basically it has been claimed that the French nuclear scale-up was super cheap because of standardized design and the regulatory framework, while everybody else did it wrong and had exploding cost. But this seems only partially true. French nuclear was not magically much cheaper than elsewhere. Ofcourse, this is very hard to estimate because there is a lot of government money involved. But there are studies which looked at this:
The costs of the French nuclear scale-up: A case of negative learning by doing
A Grubler - Energy Policy, 2010
Based on recent number from an audit by the Court of Audit there are better estimates:
The cost of nuclear electricity: France after Fukushima, N Boccard - Energy Policy, 2014
That nuclear is generally not economically viable is very well known. Building of nuclear power plants basically stopped because cost exploded ans was increasing with newer designs. Then there is the trend in recent decades to create de-regulated energy markets so government involvment was reduced and new projects have to be financed by private companties. But this is not usually considered to be economical. See for example a recent analysis of the levelized cost of energy by Lazard. Also just take a look at actual projects. Where advanced nuclear reactors are build there massive cost overruns. The project at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H... could only be financed by garantueeing prices well over the market price. For a mature industry which took an insane amount of money for R&D and exists for a long term, the fact that it is currently not possible to build plants which are economically competitive is not very convincing.
Also, Germany's renewable sector is also heavily subsidized, so even if I accepted that France's electrical production (not R&D - that's a whole different story) is subsidized, you could at best say that both countries do production subsidies. Even then the French are getting the better end of the deal with lower rates.
The problem is that the German subsidies are not for a mature industry but to build up the economy of scale and drive innovation. They play a similar role to initial R&D cost in nuclear. They are not meant to stay and are already much less for newer plants. They also have been very sucessful in driving down the cost. Also putting the additional fee (which is only a small part of the total price) on top of the rate was intentional done do promote conservation while the cost of nuclear in France is hidden in the general taxes.
An LFTR is an *engineering* nightmare.
I presume you've worked on LFTR engineering then? Can you name some of the engineering nightmarish points?
Corrosion. Operating it will also be a nightmare. Can you put a diver into molton salt to fix things? But I am happy to be proven wrong. I am not against nuclear for some ideological reasos. I looked at this and think it is not worth it. With LFTR, I would not mind if we spend some money to explore this option further, but - honestly - I do not see this becoming an economical option.
while renewables are already competitive and getting cheaper every year.
Oh really? Without a guaranteed feed-in tariff and market distortion by forcing the grid operator to take renewables first and make the rest of the traditional generators pay for their intermittency?
Yes, wind is already clearly economical. And solar is on a good way. Also you forgot that nuclear has an even bigger problem than renewables: It is only good for
And there is also the possibiity that onsite reactors fail without Tsunami. See Forsmark, Sweden in 2006. After power loss half of the redundant backup power systems were lost due to a failure mode which *could* have affected all backup power. Also control room equipment and half of the cooling was lost.
C++ has turned out to be a mess. It adds hiding to C without adding memory safety, an unfortunate feature combination unique to C++.
Adds hiding? You mean... encapsulation?
Is that the only thing you can think of that C++ adds to C? If so, that may explain why you have such a poor view of C++
Adds hiding? In C++ you put your classes in the header which makes the calling code dependent on it.
C++ is so broken that even Scott Meyer admits to making a living by having to explain this mess:
http://dconf.org/2014/talks/me...
Which is funny, because it reminds me about this famous interview with Bjarne Stroustrup..
France electricity prices do not reflect the actual cost. This is not a free market situation.
Most electrical systems are not "free market" systems, as rates are heavily regulated by rate commissions and production is tightly controlled by government planning and approval. In any case, can you demonstrate that France's electricity price is not real? I'm pretty sure rate payers there don't see more than the billed amount get debited each month from their accounts. From a taxation perspective France is also lower than Denmark, so what's your point again?
My point is that France's electricity is cheap because the government pays so it cannot be used as argument why nuclear is cheap did. The general lexel of taxation has nothing to do with this.
Even for existing technology nuclear is not really competive, actual 3rd generation projects see immensive cost explosion
There's a couple of reasons for this:
True. But see below..
Curiously though constructing over 50 units over 15 years didn't bankrupt France in the 1970s and 1980s.
Yes. it did not bankrupt France but is was very expensive. The true cost was not know for a long time but had to be estimated in public studies (e.g. Grubler A, The costs of the French nuclear scale-up: A case of negative learning by doing, Energy Policy 2012, 38: 5174-5188, let me quote from the abstract: "Its most significant finding is that even this most successful nuclear scale-up was characterized by a substantial escalation of real-term construction costs."). Only recently (2011) there was an audit by France's Court of Audit with the result hat is was much more expensive that previously thought.
thorium is currently just vapourware
Complete and utter vaporware, just like the other vaporware that was actually ready for deployment in 1994, but was killed by political action (although the concept having survived in Russia).
"The design is ready." As I said: currently just vapourware. You need to build a complete fuel cycle. This means building up a complete industry, developing technology, procedures, etc.. India is trying to do this.
As for LFTR, you are right, there are currently no ready and licensed designs, but that doesn't mean that we can't pursue them. The physics is clear, as is most of the chemistry.
Neither physics nor chemistry is the problem. An LFTR is an *engineering* nightmare.
If we'd spent a small fraction of the money sunk into renewables into these nuclear projects we could have had a design ready to roll a decade ago (we had the IFR, as I said before, but that was killed for political reasons).
Nonsens. We have already spent much more money for nuclear than for renewables and the technology is still so expensive that nobody seriously invests into it without massive amount government subsidies. And newer designs are *more* expensive while renewables are already competitive and getting cheaper every year. Economically, investing in nuclear is a poor decision.
Are you confusing pressurized water reactors with boiling water reactors?
No, it could work. He wants to capture different information from different parts of the bag. This is a multi-channel problem so you can go below Nyquist. Also you might have a model for speech and you can use to reduce the amount of required information. Finally, you co not need perfect recovery.
France electricity prices do not reflect the actual cost. This is not a free market situation.
Nuclear proponents are completely delusional about the actual cost of this technology. Even for existing technology nuclear is not really competive, actual 3rd generation projects see immensive cost explosion, and thorium is currently just vapourware. Come on guys, just get real.
Because Google is an American company. In America speech about something, particularly critical speech, is strongly protected. One of the protections for speech is ownership and rights to your own speech. Person X has no right to control what person Y says about them. That's the very meaning of free speech.
But how is this even related to free speech? It is not really about speech (opinions and ideas) but entries in a data base. It is not even a person speaking, it is a search engine. Also, the right to free speech is not absolute, but already limited even in the US in various ways, see hate speech, *bleep*, copyright...
I bet the most "right to be forgotten" requests will never get additional publicity. There is a reason it is called the Barbara Streisand effect and not the Jon Doe effect.
I also do not fully understand the hatred against these rights. We aleady have intellectual property laws which limit the information flow on the internet in extreme ways. Why should indviduals not have some rights on information about themselves?
That depends on your definition of "floundering". The handset unit was highly profitable and smartphone sales were much higher than any competitor and also increasing at a higher rate in absolute numbers. On the other hand, market share in smartphones was falling (no, this is not a contradiction in a growing market) and Symbian was perceived to be outdated. Nevertheless, I don't think there was any need for desperate decisions. Their old strategy was sound: Meego and Qt to create a joint ecosystem with Symbian. Switching to Windows Phone (which clearly was already floundering) was simply insane.
I get the impression you're trying to score points here by playing semantic games. I wish you would not do so.
What Chas was saying was that there is no such concept as absolute safety, and thus there is always a concept of 'acceptable risk', or 'minimum risk'. This is usually synonymous with safety -- most people are willing to recognize that we do not live in an ideal world.
Back on topic, you seem to be fixated on the idea that any increase in risk is unacceptable. Please explain why.
No you are misrepresenting what I said. My original point is exactly that there is a risk even from very small doses. I was attacked merely for pointing this out.
I never said that the risk in unacceptable, but merely stated that the risk has to be weighted against its potential benefits.
The view that "there is no safe level" is idiotic in light of this. Obviously there ARE safe levels.
I'm telling you, flat out, that there's no such THING as "safe". PERIOD.
No comment.
Then your argument makes even less sense.