It's already affordable to people who are in the market for cars that go 0-60 in 3.7 seconds. They can afford it so well that Tesla is back-ordered. That's proof of a market that you can take to the bank (literally).
Once those people pay the early adopter tax, they fund the transition to higher-volume, lower-price cars like the Model S.
The Tesla is a brilliant piece of product positioning.
The shutdown was one of the first things that happened, in fact. That wasn't the problem.
The problem is that the core continues to generate heat after the chain reaction stops and needs artificial cooling for many hours as fission products decay. Greed wasn't the reason for turning off the cooling system.
I went a-Googling to rebut this -- after all, there had been a similar chain of events at Davis-Besse 18 months earlier -- but I didn't find anything that answers the questions that http://www.tmia.com/old-website/tmisab.html points out.
The best argument against sabotage is that there was no way for a saboteur to know that it would work. Theoretically, even a complete loss of feedwater should have led to a scram and activation of one of the multiple emergency core cooling systems, disruptive but not destructive.
By displacing coal-fired power, the two reactors on site were saving 100 lives per year, based on the Office of Technology Assessment figures for premature deaths from coal burning. Those people, who would have lived if the reactors had stayed in operation, are dead now.
Good or bad UI, it better present the information
on
Three Mile Island Memories
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
>Operators who understood what they were doing would have checked what needed to be checked
What needed to be checked was the level of water in the core.
There was no instrument for that. I'm not kidding. See _Safeware_, by Nancy Leveson.
(It's a harder problem than it sounds like, if you think about the conditions in the core, but still...)
The operators, deprived of an accurate picture of what was happening, followed their training, which was to prevent overfilling the cooling system.
The UI failed on functionality, and even if it had succeeded there, ease of use saves time and bandwidth in a crisis.
All of my children are fictional drawings, and until you have fictional drawings of your own you can't understand how important it is to protect them with laws like this one. Parents of real children may consider laws like this repressive to artists and irrelevant to public safety, but that's because they don't know the pain of having your beloved pixels molested.
Information that does make it into electronic form is still at risk. The Usenet archives from Dejanews.com almost got thrown away. The "deep web" is inaccessible to the Wayback Machine.
If you wanted something to last a thousand years, would you post it to Usenet (zillions of copies, all gone in fifty years when the backup tapes rot) or would you etch it onto an iridium tablet?
The Rosetta Disk has spiraling text that gets smaller and smaller, telling you implicitly that what you need is a magnifier. It doesn't explain how to build a microscope, though.
>What facts can you think of that are both important, and will not be learnt by the children on their own?
Most of what's in that category are skills rather than facts, but still:
Vocabulary. People are not picking up the meaning of "theory" or "statistically significant" on their own.
Statistics. Anyone who votes should understand the base rate fallacy. Only a small minority actually does.
Civics/history, or what might be called political engineering: why things work the way they do and what problems they're meant to solve. People are clearly not picking this up on their own.
Does CNN management send memos to their reporters with instructions like "His [Bush's] political courage and tactical cunning ar[e] [wo]rth noting in our reporting through the day"? Memos that a former employee describes as "talking points instructing us what the themes are supposed to be, and God help you if you stray"?
If so, I promise to despise them. If not, then Fox is a different kind of organization than CNN, not a differently biased one of the same kind.
You can be biased and still be honest. You can be biased without being a party's house organ. I wish we had more bias like we get from The Economist, which wears their opinions on their sleeve while still doing real reporting.
The Japanese and the Koreans would be delighted to have as long a waiting list of customers as Tesla has, especially if they were selling those backordered cars at a price that would get you a house in many parts of the country.
If the flaming article is right, and if I've understood it correctly, that "cut" was negative: "Microsoft Certified Partners (MCP's), which are local companies that lobby the software, generally at a loss to themselves, as they know that Microsoft's lock-in is powerful enough that they can only get service contracts from the company if they offer a substantial discount on the Microsoft products." In other words, the MS licenses were a loss leader.
There's still a good argument that they're just like any business that gets stuck with unsold inventory when its customers get shot out from under it, but it doesn't sound like the MCPs were on a gravy train.
Of course, any other business whose retail customers disappeared could eliminate the bills from their wholesaler by simply stopping their wholesale purchases.
>once exposed they cannot be changed to avoid further compromise
Biometrics don't have to be secret. The picture on your driver's license is a biometric.
We're used to thinking in terms of secrecy because passwords have to be secret. They have to be secret because that's the only way to ensure an exclusive relationship between a person and a password. Your exclusive relationship with your face, retinal blood vessel pattern, or fingerprint depends only on having them attached to you (a dependency which leads to one of the real attacks on biometrics).
You need secrecy to make a password usefully secure. To make biometrics secure you need a trusted reading system that can distinguish between copies and originals. A "reading system" can include the human security guard at the entrance who will stop people from holding severed hands up to the handprint reader.
If you depend on keeping biometrics secret then you're doing it wrong.
>Is there any particular target you can think of that would be a viable candidate for a nuclear weapon strike?
Deeply buried or hardened weapons sites or leadership bunkers. Sprawling naval bases. Large tank formations, though they're probably a thing of the past.
If your friends don't like the idea of maybe having to testify, you can hire out that service to Documented Reference Check or one of their competitors.
>So...if carbon dioxide is not changing our climate, what is? Look to the Sun.
Yes, and in particular look at the direct measurements of solar output outside the atmosphere since 1978. Look at whether there's a trend, and look at how the current numbers compare with the numbers from the first measurements. Then look at what average temperature has been doing over the same time span.
Look to the research on proxy measurements of solar activity going back 250 years. Look at the upper bound it sets on the fraction of climate change that could be caused by solar output changes.
>There is already far more CO2 in the atmosphere than is needed to effectively absorb ALL infra-red radiation in the CO2 absorption band.
There's a complicated answer to this, but a simpler one is to look at Venus.
>It seems impossible to have any reasoned discussion about carbon dioxide.
Not impossible, but it's made difficult by a campaign that repeats provably false assertions so often that even technically literate people start taking them seriously.
Stop and figure out which one is right, just like when the satellite troposphere temperature data disagreed with everything else. But the main point of this mission is to gather new data that can't readily be collected from the ground.
>This confusingly assuming post is trying to say that techies are so stupid that they can only comprehend there being one piece of evidence in a trial and they think that if they cast doubt on this one piece of evidence then the accused is in the clear.
No. The point is that by the time you present the defense you think is so logical, your life has already been reduced to a shambles. I've seen people going through the system. He's right.
>for all lawyers that exist none of them have any interest other than money and sucking the blood out of other people.
If so, all the more reason to pay attention when someone tells you not to risk legal trouble.
Head for the law library and look through O'Neal's Oppression of Minority Shareholders. You have to work hard to protect yourself, and there's a lot to protect against.
One gotcha, for example: can the current owners sell their shares to an acquirer and leave you un-cashed out? They can unless you've got an agreement requiring your shares to be included in a liquidity event. Even then I've seen someone try to violate such an agreement.
Slashdot Mirror
It's already affordable to people who are in the market for cars that go 0-60 in 3.7 seconds. They can afford it so well that Tesla is back-ordered. That's proof of a market that you can take to the bank (literally).
Once those people pay the early adopter tax, they fund the transition to higher-volume, lower-price cars like the Model S.
The Tesla is a brilliant piece of product positioning.
You get funding by proposing to tramp across a glacier and drill holes. Then you report what you actually find.
US climate scientists largely agree about anthropogenic climate change, and for the last eight years they've been funded by the Bush administration.
Direct satellite measurements of solar output for the last 30 years.
>the average containment vessel would have failed
Citation needed?
There were overpressure spikes, but I don't remember them being remotely large enough to bust open a foot of reinforced concrete.
The shutdown was one of the first things that happened, in fact. That wasn't the problem.
The problem is that the core continues to generate heat after the chain reaction stops and needs artificial cooling for many hours as fission products decay. Greed wasn't the reason for turning off the cooling system.
I went a-Googling to rebut this -- after all, there had been a similar chain of events at Davis-Besse 18 months earlier -- but I didn't find anything that answers the questions that http://www.tmia.com/old-website/tmisab.html points out.
The best argument against sabotage is that there was no way for a saboteur to know that it would work. Theoretically, even a complete loss of feedwater should have led to a scram and activation of one of the multiple emergency core cooling systems, disruptive but not destructive.
Indirectly, it caused hundreds of deaths.
By displacing coal-fired power, the two reactors on site were saving 100 lives per year, based on the Office of Technology Assessment figures for premature deaths from coal burning. Those people, who would have lived if the reactors had stayed in operation, are dead now.
>Operators who understood what they were doing would have checked what needed to be checked
What needed to be checked was the level of water in the core.
There was no instrument for that. I'm not kidding. See _Safeware_, by Nancy Leveson.
(It's a harder problem than it sounds like, if you think about the conditions in the core, but still ...)
The operators, deprived of an accurate picture of what was happening, followed their training, which was to prevent overfilling the cooling system.
The UI failed on functionality, and even if it had succeeded there, ease of use saves time and bandwidth in a crisis.
All of my children are fictional drawings, and until you have fictional drawings of your own you can't understand how important it is to protect them with laws like this one. Parents of real children may consider laws like this repressive to artists and irrelevant to public safety, but that's because they don't know the pain of having your beloved pixels molested.
Information that doesn't make it onto the Internet is still at risk. Historically important audio recordings from the 60s and 70s are badly decayed ("For those unfamiliar with the Nixon tapes, other than telephone conversations, they are extremely difficult to hear (in analog versions, and with the available equipment, it would take approximately 15 hours to transcribe one hour of Nixon's conversations)", and tapes of Creighton Abrams running the Vietnam War were barely playable).
Information that does make it into electronic form is still at risk. The Usenet archives from Dejanews.com almost got thrown away. The "deep web" is inaccessible to the Wayback Machine.
If you wanted something to last a thousand years, would you post it to Usenet (zillions of copies, all gone in fifty years when the backup tapes rot) or would you etch it onto an iridium tablet?
Value is, pardon the phrase, a value judgment. We can only guess what historians of a thousand years from now will consider important.
The Rosetta Disk has spiraling text that gets smaller and smaller, telling you implicitly that what you need is a magnifier. It doesn't explain how to build a microscope, though.
>What facts can you think of that are both important, and will not be learnt by the children on their own?
Most of what's in that category are skills rather than facts, but still:
Vocabulary. People are not picking up the meaning of "theory" or "statistically significant" on their own.
Statistics. Anyone who votes should understand the base rate fallacy. Only a small minority actually does.
Civics/history, or what might be called political engineering: why things work the way they do and what problems they're meant to solve. People are clearly not picking this up on their own.
Newspapers already depend on being able to mail at Second Class rates, and government has used that as a lever in the past.
During World War I, Victor Berger's "Milwaukee Leader" was forbidden to use newspaper mailing rates after criticizing the war.
Does CNN management send memos to their reporters with instructions like "His [Bush's] political courage and tactical cunning ar[e] [wo]rth noting in our reporting through the day"? Memos that a former employee describes as "talking points instructing us what the themes are supposed to be, and God help you if you stray"?
If so, I promise to despise them. If not, then Fox is a different kind of organization than CNN, not a differently biased one of the same kind.
You can be biased and still be honest. You can be biased without being a party's house organ. I wish we had more bias like we get from The Economist, which wears their opinions on their sleeve while still doing real reporting.
The Japanese and the Koreans would be delighted to have as long a waiting list of customers as Tesla has, especially if they were selling those backordered cars at a price that would get you a house in many parts of the country.
If you think quarks are useless, eliminate them from your life and see what happens.
If the flaming article is right, and if I've understood it correctly, that "cut" was negative: "Microsoft Certified Partners (MCP's), which are local companies that lobby the software, generally at a loss to themselves, as they know that Microsoft's lock-in is powerful enough that they can only get service contracts from the company if they offer a substantial discount on the Microsoft products." In other words, the MS licenses were a loss leader.
There's still a good argument that they're just like any business that gets stuck with unsold inventory when its customers get shot out from under it, but it doesn't sound like the MCPs were on a gravy train.
Of course, any other business whose retail customers disappeared could eliminate the bills from their wholesaler by simply stopping their wholesale purchases.
>once exposed they cannot be changed to avoid further compromise
Biometrics don't have to be secret. The picture on your driver's license is a biometric.
We're used to thinking in terms of secrecy because passwords have to be secret. They have to be secret because that's the only way to ensure an exclusive relationship between a person and a password. Your exclusive relationship with your face, retinal blood vessel pattern, or fingerprint depends only on having them attached to you (a dependency which leads to one of the real attacks on biometrics).
You need secrecy to make a password usefully secure. To make biometrics secure you need a trusted reading system that can distinguish between copies and originals. A "reading system" can include the human security guard at the entrance who will stop people from holding severed hands up to the handprint reader.
If you depend on keeping biometrics secret then you're doing it wrong.
>Is there any particular target you can think of that would be a viable candidate for a nuclear weapon strike?
Deeply buried or hardened weapons sites or leadership bunkers. Sprawling naval bases. Large tank formations, though they're probably a thing of the past.
If your friends don't like the idea of maybe having to testify, you can hire out that service to Documented Reference Check or one of their competitors.
>So...if carbon dioxide is not changing our climate, what is? Look to the Sun.
Yes, and in particular look at the direct measurements of solar output outside the atmosphere since 1978. Look at whether there's a trend, and look at how the current numbers compare with the numbers from the first measurements. Then look at what average temperature has been doing over the same time span.
Look to the research on proxy measurements of solar activity going back 250 years. Look at the upper bound it sets on the fraction of climate change that could be caused by solar output changes.
>There is already far more CO2 in the atmosphere than is needed to effectively absorb ALL infra-red radiation in the CO2 absorption band.
There's a complicated answer to this, but a simpler one is to look at Venus.
>It seems impossible to have any reasoned discussion about carbon dioxide.
Not impossible, but it's made difficult by a campaign that repeats provably false assertions so often that even technically literate people start taking them seriously.
Stop and figure out which one is right, just like when the satellite troposphere temperature data disagreed with everything else. But the main point of this mission is to gather new data that can't readily be collected from the ground.
>This confusingly assuming post is trying to say that techies are so stupid that they can only comprehend there being one piece of evidence in a trial and they think that if they cast doubt on this one piece of evidence then the accused is in the clear.
No. The point is that by the time you present the defense you think is so logical, your life has already been reduced to a shambles. I've seen people going through the system. He's right.
>for all lawyers that exist none of them have any interest other than money and sucking the blood out of other people.
If so, all the more reason to pay attention when someone tells you not to risk legal trouble.
Head for the law library and look through O'Neal's Oppression of Minority Shareholders. You have to work hard to protect yourself, and there's a lot to protect against.
One gotcha, for example: can the current owners sell their shares to an acquirer and leave you un-cashed out? They can unless you've got an agreement requiring your shares to be included in a liquidity event. Even then I've seen someone try to violate such an agreement.