If you are going to respect animals, then limiting the amount of chemicals that are released into the ecosystem should be a priority as well. Aside from being bad for humans to eat, mercury is not good for any other animals either.
NZ is 4.5 million people in an area almost the size of Japan. The problems that you face are much more tractable than, say, Japan with 110 million people, the United States with 300 million or China and India with populations around a billion.
Manapouri puts out 850 MW. New Zealand's total generating capacity is about 9500 MW. By comparison, Fukushima, before the accident, put out about 4700 MW, or over five times the power of Manapouri and nearly half the generating capacity of your entire country.
Per capita, Japan consumes about 8500 kWh/person/year. By comparison, New Zealand consumes 9600 kWh/person/year. New Zealand is listed as being one of the least energy efficient when it comes to electricity (though nowhere near the consumption of the US). But, because you don't have so many people in the area, it doesn't create the same kind of problems.
California has 14,000 MW of hydroelectric power capacity. Again, more than all of New Zealand in an area about twice the size. There's not a lot of suitable sites left. There's also 30 million people and a lot of heavy industry.
Most of the problems in this world are directly traceable to there being too many people. Unfortunately, there's no short term, ethically reasonable, solution to that.
I would also note that while you, as a New Zealander, would be ashamed to be using coal to generate power, 69% of New Zealand's electricity comes from fossil fuels, including coal.
Except that hydropower messes up fish runs. And turns beautiful valleys into reservoirs. And the dams silt up eventually. Absolute worse case is the dam breaks and everyone downstream from it dies. It has happened before and it will happen again. More people have been killed by dams bursting than by nuclear power.
We used to take hydropower as being ideal - clean, efficient, renewable. However, today there is a growing movement to "tear down the dams" because of many of the problems I listed above.
Coal is the primary source for electricity today, worldwide. Aside from emitting greenhouse gases and acids, coal puts out mercury that gets into the ocean and into fish that we would like to eat. Have you noticed that pregnant women are advised not to eat too much fish these days? Much worse than nuclear as far as I can tell.
The real problem is that many people are not willing to make tradeoffs. Everything we do has risks. It's time to put them all on the table together and start making tradeoffs. Is nuclear power the best answer? I dunno. Before you say "no", though, I think it's important to start looking at what the alternatives are. Your own description of hydropower's worst case as "power goes out in certain regions" is, frankly, untrue. That's not to say hydropower is bad - I think it's a great source of energy, and mostly safe. But you have to be honest and realistic. Hit most dams with a 7.0 earthquake and you're talking about catastrophe.
I actually wrote an implementation of the Kermit protocol in Basic Plus for the DEC PDP 11/70 back in about 1983. Used to bring the whole system to its knees transferring a file.
The big difference is that when someone says they see a miracle, all they can offer is "Because I said so."
You may have to do a lot of studying and it may not be possible for you to learn enough to verify some things or the equipment is too expensive/difficult but it's at least theoretically possible.
Anyone with a high school education should be able to do things like verify Newton's laws for themselves. You don't have to take it on faith. Many things we do take on trust, but that is different than taking something on faith. Taking something on trust means that you have the option of verifying it yourself. Taking something on faith means that you simply believe and you have no option of ever verifying it yourself.
I skimmed the document, I didn't see anything particularly exciting about ATLAS or ABEL. ABEL apparently had drum storage and core memory. There's no way any of the stuff in that document was running at 600MHz.
The Cray-1 ran at 100MHz and the NSA and national labs snatched them up. There would have been no market for the Cray if there were secret machines running at 600MHz.
I worked in supercomputing in the late 80's and early nineties. At that time it was still possible to assemble processors out of discrete components and outperform microprocessors. Relatively small teams could build really fast machines. By the mid nineties this was no longer possible. Today, the industrial base required to make a high performance processor is huge. The government can't have machines significantly faster than what's commercially available. There's not enough money in the black budget to fund it. That's why you see the Air Force making a supercomputer out of Playstations.
I don't think they really had a choice. The diesels were apparently in the same area as the generating plant itself so it looks to me that the main generators would have been knocked out by the tsunami as well.
Getting the power back on should have been a national priority. I don't understand why TEPCO wasn't on the phone with the SDF right away asking them to bring in generators by helicopter.
The plant survived the tsunami. Nothing much around it did though. Roads are wiped out and the power grid is down.
The plant went through all the emergency fallbacks that they could as an independent entity. No one planned for the rest of the infrastructure to be knocked out for so long.
I think the failure in planning here wasn't in any of the systems in the plant. It was in not realizing that something like a tsunami would cause so much devastation around the plant that restoring power would be so difficult.
It started long before the rootkit nonsense. Once Sony bought a record company it was all downhill from there. I had a conversation with a Sony engineer in the early 90's in Japan over a couple of beers. He had worked on MiniDisc and I ragged on him about their crappy lossy compression. He said it was because the content guys (i.e. Sony Records) made a fuss. Once they brought content into the company they went nuts.
No, you're right. Apple claims 160 million iOS devices. So this averages to 62 per device. I have 3 - an iPhone that I use, an iPhone that the company bought for testing and an iPod Touch the company bought for testing. I have about 20 apps on my personal device and 2 or 3 on the others. My wife has an iPhone and she doesn't have 60 apps downloaded to it. I think they are counting any download which includes upgrades.
Printers don't need public addresses but it is nice to have UNIQUE addresses. That way when you take your laptop to another network it doesn't try talking to the wrong IP.
Using "public" addresses in IPV4 is more of a security hole because most subnets are small, address space wise, and it's easy to start guessing IP addresses from outside and see what you hit. In IPV6 the host part of the address is 64 bits and they're usually assigned using the MAC address, rather than starting at 1. Therefore, it's pretty hard to guess an address and hit it even if your firewall doesn't block the traffic.
This supposedly secure system shouldn't be letting you suck 250,000 files out of it without some kind of flags being triggered or a higher access required. Really, why would you need to access all of the files? And if you were doing some kind of automated analysis you should need clearance for that and permission and be monitored to make sure you don't abuse the access.
I used to work with a guy who had been in Silicon Valley forever. One time we were playing one of those party games where you have to match some "claim to fame" to the person. His was "I tipped Larry Ellison on his ass" - the longer story was they were playing tennis (back when Larry was not such a big deal) and he was an asshole and tried to start a fight and got bounced.
If you make a general purpose wrapper layer, yes, you'll end up with a mess. A different way to do is to decompose your GUI along MVC (Model View Controller) lines and make different View layers for the different OS's/toolkits. Rather than making a general purpose wrapper you have a single purpose wrapper. I've done this and it works quite well.
Dead on! One might note that Google's campus up until now was the old Silicon Graphics campus - and its construction just about coincides with the beginning of SGI's slide. Campuses are like cocaine for companies - God's way of telling you you have too much money.
In general anyone can buy and use lockpicks for legitimate purposes. It's when you possess them with the intent to commit a crime that they are classed as "burglary tools" and get you some extra time.
If I had my way, software patents would be simply disallowed. If they're not going to be disallowed, then the number needs to be reduced AND they need to start showing some benefit to society. Right now, you can patent things that aren't even close to being implemented, and if you patent something that has been implemented you get to keep the copyright on the code as well.
Software patents should require full disclosure of the source code AND that code should not be eligible for copyright. That should slow down the number of patents filed.
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If you are going to respect animals, then limiting the amount of chemicals that are released into the ecosystem should be a priority as well. Aside from being bad for humans to eat, mercury is not good for any other animals either.
NZ is 4.5 million people in an area almost the size of Japan. The problems that you face are much more tractable than, say, Japan with 110 million people, the United States with 300 million or China and India with populations around a billion.
Manapouri puts out 850 MW. New Zealand's total generating capacity is about 9500 MW. By comparison, Fukushima, before the accident, put out about 4700 MW, or over five times the power of Manapouri and nearly half the generating capacity of your entire country.
Per capita, Japan consumes about 8500 kWh/person/year. By comparison, New Zealand consumes 9600 kWh/person/year. New Zealand is listed as being one of the least energy efficient when it comes to electricity (though nowhere near the consumption of the US). But, because you don't have so many people in the area, it doesn't create the same kind of problems.
California has 14,000 MW of hydroelectric power capacity. Again, more than all of New Zealand in an area about twice the size. There's not a lot of suitable sites left. There's also 30 million people and a lot of heavy industry.
Most of the problems in this world are directly traceable to there being too many people. Unfortunately, there's no short term, ethically reasonable, solution to that.
I would also note that while you, as a New Zealander, would be ashamed to be using coal to generate power, 69% of New Zealand's electricity comes from fossil fuels, including coal.
Except that hydropower messes up fish runs. And turns beautiful valleys into reservoirs. And the dams silt up eventually. Absolute worse case is the dam breaks and everyone downstream from it dies. It has happened before and it will happen again. More people have been killed by dams bursting than by nuclear power.
We used to take hydropower as being ideal - clean, efficient, renewable. However, today there is a growing movement to "tear down the dams" because of many of the problems I listed above.
Coal is the primary source for electricity today, worldwide. Aside from emitting greenhouse gases and acids, coal puts out mercury that gets into the ocean and into fish that we would like to eat. Have you noticed that pregnant women are advised not to eat too much fish these days? Much worse than nuclear as far as I can tell.
The real problem is that many people are not willing to make tradeoffs. Everything we do has risks. It's time to put them all on the table together and start making tradeoffs. Is nuclear power the best answer? I dunno. Before you say "no", though, I think it's important to start looking at what the alternatives are. Your own description of hydropower's worst case as "power goes out in certain regions" is, frankly, untrue. That's not to say hydropower is bad - I think it's a great source of energy, and mostly safe. But you have to be honest and realistic. Hit most dams with a 7.0 earthquake and you're talking about catastrophe.
I actually wrote an implementation of the Kermit protocol in Basic Plus for the DEC PDP 11/70 back in about 1983. Used to bring the whole system to its knees transferring a file.
The big difference is that when someone says they see a miracle, all they can offer is "Because I said so."
You may have to do a lot of studying and it may not be possible for you to learn enough to verify some things or the equipment is too expensive/difficult but it's at least theoretically possible.
Anyone with a high school education should be able to do things like verify Newton's laws for themselves. You don't have to take it on faith. Many things we do take on trust, but that is different than taking something on faith. Taking something on trust means that you have the option of verifying it yourself. Taking something on faith means that you simply believe and you have no option of ever verifying it yourself.
I skimmed the document, I didn't see anything particularly exciting about ATLAS or ABEL. ABEL apparently had drum storage and core memory. There's no way any of the stuff in that document was running at 600MHz.
The Cray-1 ran at 100MHz and the NSA and national labs snatched them up. There would have been no market for the Cray if there were secret machines running at 600MHz.
I worked in supercomputing in the late 80's and early nineties. At that time it was still possible to assemble processors out of discrete components and outperform microprocessors. Relatively small teams could build really fast machines. By the mid nineties this was no longer possible. Today, the industrial base required to make a high performance processor is huge. The government can't have machines significantly faster than what's commercially available. There's not enough money in the black budget to fund it. That's why you see the Air Force making a supercomputer out of Playstations.
I don't think they really had a choice. The diesels were apparently in the same area as the generating plant itself so it looks to me that the main generators would have been knocked out by the tsunami as well.
Getting the power back on should have been a national priority. I don't understand why TEPCO wasn't on the phone with the SDF right away asking them to bring in generators by helicopter.
The plant survived the tsunami. Nothing much around it did though. Roads are wiped out and the power grid is down.
The plant went through all the emergency fallbacks that they could as an independent entity. No one planned for the rest of the infrastructure to be knocked out for so long.
I think the failure in planning here wasn't in any of the systems in the plant. It was in not realizing that something like a tsunami would cause so much devastation around the plant that restoring power would be so difficult.
Microsoft has it everywhere too. They just call it C# :-)
Which Memory Stick is that again? I lost track because every damn generation of their products had a new and different Memory Stick.
It started long before the rootkit nonsense. Once Sony bought a record company it was all downhill from there. I had a conversation with a Sony engineer in the early 90's in Japan over a couple of beers. He had worked on MiniDisc and I ragged on him about their crappy lossy compression. He said it was because the content guys (i.e. Sony Records) made a fuss. Once they brought content into the company they went nuts.
No, you're right. Apple claims 160 million iOS devices. So this averages to 62 per device. I have 3 - an iPhone that I use, an iPhone that the company bought for testing and an iPod Touch the company bought for testing. I have about 20 apps on my personal device and 2 or 3 on the others. My wife has an iPhone and she doesn't have 60 apps downloaded to it. I think they are counting any download which includes upgrades.
If you hold onto stocks for more than 5 years you will pay capital gains tax (15%) and not income tax.
Printers don't need public addresses but it is nice to have UNIQUE addresses. That way when you take your laptop to another network it doesn't try talking to the wrong IP.
Using "public" addresses in IPV4 is more of a security hole because most subnets are small, address space wise, and it's easy to start guessing IP addresses from outside and see what you hit. In IPV6 the host part of the address is 64 bits and they're usually assigned using the MAC address, rather than starting at 1. Therefore, it's pretty hard to guess an address and hit it even if your firewall doesn't block the traffic.
I'm outside the Perl community and I agree with him. Maybe you should get out more often?
In Soviet Russia, BSD backdoors FBI!
Hmmmm...maybe it wasn't all bad.
This supposedly secure system shouldn't be letting you suck 250,000 files out of it without some kind of flags being triggered or a higher access required. Really, why would you need to access all of the files? And if you were doing some kind of automated analysis you should need clearance for that and permission and be monitored to make sure you don't abuse the access.
Well, they backed down on Peoplesoft at least for a while. I haven't looked - is Peoplesoft still a standalone, supported product line?
I used to work with a guy who had been in Silicon Valley forever. One time we were playing one of those party games where you have to match some "claim to fame" to the person. His was "I tipped Larry Ellison on his ass" - the longer story was they were playing tennis (back when Larry was not such a big deal) and he was an asshole and tried to start a fight and got bounced.
If you make a general purpose wrapper layer, yes, you'll end up with a mess. A different way to do is to decompose your GUI along MVC (Model View Controller) lines and make different View layers for the different OS's/toolkits. Rather than making a general purpose wrapper you have a single purpose wrapper. I've done this and it works quite well.
Dead on! One might note that Google's campus up until now was the old Silicon Graphics campus - and its construction just about coincides with the beginning of SGI's slide. Campuses are like cocaine for companies - God's way of telling you you have too much money.
In general anyone can buy and use lockpicks for legitimate purposes. It's when you possess them with the intent to commit a crime that they are classed as "burglary tools" and get you some extra time.
If I had my way, software patents would be simply disallowed. If they're not going to be disallowed, then the number needs to be reduced AND they need to start showing some benefit to society. Right now, you can patent things that aren't even close to being implemented, and if you patent something that has been implemented you get to keep the copyright on the code as well.
Software patents should require full disclosure of the source code AND that code should not be eligible for copyright. That should slow down the number of patents filed.
The laptops were being used at home and snapshots were being taken with the cameras on the laptops, at home.
So, you don't agree with the feds here.
Multics lives!