I hold them to extreme corner cases as commensurate with the risk of what happens when those conditions manifest themselves.
No, you didn't. Your previous post assumes that people standing in a windy field next to a fatally defective wind turbine is equally as likely as reactor being built without a containment vessel, or being ill-prepared before being hit by a tsunami, this leads to an inaccurate calculation of risk. If risk is defined as probability of an event multiplied by its consequences, wind power is still the riskier bet. This is magnified when you consider that the probability of the windy-field scenario would be magnified if we were to scale wind-energy up to nuclear's specs.
Nuclear simply has consequences that no other power source does. In each and every other case I can quite safely walk the grounds of a failed power plant the very day after the accident. You simply can't do that with nuclear when it goes tits up.
The costs of nuclear that are not associated with loss of human life are a valid argument. Land becomes unusable for a period of time. Back to my original comment, I'm willing to bet that this area of land is very, very insignificant when you consider the land made unusable when mining for the input materials. Again, I think nuclear will fair favorably, but we would need more resources than I have at my fingertips at this computer to make a reasonable estimate.
Renewable sources do not have any fuel requirements, so once the systems are constructed the mining basically stops.
For that unit, for its lifetime. A finite quantity of mined material produces a finite quantity of energy in both cases, so I don't see why that's relevant. Everything can be recycled up to a point, steel silicon, even spent fuel if you care to.
Well if you read further on this page estimates are as high as almost a million.
You quote both the TORCH report and the Nesterenko, Nesterenko and Yablokov report, and lets not forget: Greenpeace.
My general response to this is, yeah we know. My nephew's highschool teacher claimed that Japan would have to be evacuated after Fukushima, and advised students to take precautions to avoid eating even American-grown food that may have been contaminated by the fallout. At some point, we need to set the bar for how much a given claim stands up to peer-review. Everything that falls short can be excluded from the depending-on-who-you-ask colloqialisms, and all of these reports fall below that bar IMHO.
Don't get me wrong, unlike my nephew's teacher, these studies have all made unique contributions to scientific knowledge and that is valuable. The conclusions they make, however cannot be touted as reputable estimates. None of them do any robust correlation between various reports of deleterious health effects and dosage. None of them account for increased rates of screening and improved screening technologies when calculating statistics on epidemiological diagnoses. Two of them even cite the IAEA Agreement WHA 12-40 as sources of error in previous WHO studies, apparently without having read the agreement and its conflict-of-interest clauses.
Exactly how many people die from solar panels simply sitting on a roof? Does your nuclear figure include the construction costs of the plants?
Most of the death toll from nuclear power since the adoption of the containment vessel probably comes from mining, not construction. I'm willing to bet the same for other forms of generation, except for fossil fuels and hydroelectric. Getting the raw materials out of the ground is a labor intensive process requiring heavy machinery and risky setups, and lives are invariably lost or shortened more so than in normal construction. In China alone, between 5,000 and 20,000 people die each year from mining accidents.
It has been 25 years since a nuclear disaster occured that resulted in the loss of human lives, 64 lives directly, according to UNSCEAR but up to 4,000 according to the World Health Organization when shortened lives are also accounted for. That means that since Chernobyl, the death toll from mining supercedes the nuclear death toll by between 30 and 7800 times over depending on who you trust. Keep in mind, this is for CHINA ALONE, and is assuming mining in China was NOT more dangerous 25 years ago.
Now lets take into account that Chernobyl implemented a design created primarily for weapons production, had no containment vessel, and was being run by a communist regime on the brink of collapse. The scale of melt-down that occured there would be near-impossible for a gifted group of well-funded terrorist engineers to cause in a modern reactor with containment. The worst nature has thrown at an ill-prepared plant (read: Fukushima) still resulted in no deaths.
So here would be my question: which energy source requires the most mined materials per TW. Honestly, I don't know. But my suspicions are that nuclear would be near the bottom of that list.
Wind ditto. It just sits there spinning and as long as you aren't within a few hundred yards on a *very* windy day...zero casualties.
As long as [ this | that ]. If you are going to hold nuclear to these extreme corner cases, please hold all other energy generation techniques to equally high standards.
I disagree whole heartedly with your theory that engineers are exposed to MORE toxins from manufactured products than construction workers, janitors, factory workers, restraunt workers, clerical staff and the whole host of other manual laborers out there. It just seems irrational.
But I do agree that whoever modded you as troll needs to go fuck themselves.
BAD engineers can be a detriment to science, but so can bad scientists.
Engineers do understand data. We collect data, model the data, draw conclusions, make predictions, test those predictions, and use them to generate wealth. So except for that last part, we ARE scientists, just not PURE scientists.
Many of us would love to do pure science, and we leverage pure science as much as possible to advance the state of our specific art, but while we understand the value of data, we also understand the importance of wealth. Or is that what you meant when you said "more conservative?"
France has some of the most experience in nuclear power at both the technical and the regulatory level. To boot, the political landscape is a lot more nuclear friendly, probably due to the high social status afforded to engineers (which tend to be pro-nuclear) in French culture. In economics, this is called a comparative advantage.
This means that international trade (of energy) is rational.
National security is a valid argument against trade, but in a tightly knit international community such as the EU, people are more friendly to the idea that engaging international trade is SUPPOSED to be stressed more than securing yourself against your neighbors. Their decision is rational.
Wish I had mod points. I graduated 2 years ago with a degree in Electrical Engineering. I finished with $82k in high-interest student loans, but I got a high paying job with a software company shortly after graduation. I don't use my EE background much but I couldn't be happier with the investment, and I'm paying it down VERY quickly.
My friend from high school graduated at the same time from a different college with a degree in Journalism and $60k of loans (she got a scholarship in high school). She was unemployed for a while, worked an unpayed internship up until last December when she was finally offered a job making $16 an hour at a marketing firm. THAT is the problem with Federal loan guarantees. STEM degrees and fluff degrees are not created equal and should not be treated as such.
Do you think OWS is comprised of mostly individuals like me, or like my friend?
Windows Phone is a good example here. They don't make much money on content, they don't make much money on search, but they still ship updates. The only real source of money is the OS and dev lisences (sort of), but they still ship updates. They don't have leverage over anyone, but they still hound the carriers to ship their updates. I wish the management of every platform would act like they had tiny market share.
A friend of mine worked for Microsoft on a couple of lesser-known projects. Apparently, getting anything baked into the OS which is currently supported by third-party solutions is a royal pain in the @$$ to get passed their legal team.
doesn't matter. They have sufficient market share to influence the market. If they use that influence in a way that unfairly jeopardizes competition in the market, they can be fined. So yes, 60-something percent of the market is enough for the FTC to take these complaints seriously. But I don't see the financial implications of the ruling to be of consequence. The fines that MSFT payed for its noncompetitive practices were not nearly as significant as the damages it caused to their reputation. Do people really think GOOG is vulnerable to the same tarnishing?
for a system by which you file thousands of complaints based on bogus patent infringment and receive an assload of cash in settlements because it would be less expensive than fighting you in court.
I'm think about filing for a few hundred injunctions if I get it.
The greatest problems in security exist between the keyboard and the chair. If your sysadmin thinks "lol we're secure we bought Macs" then sure you are in for a world of hurt. Windows has a big sign across it saying "Beware: People Will Try To Hack This." Ironically, that is the kind of environment that leads to more security on the side of both the developers of the OS and the end users.
AAPL figured it out, MSFT is coming around to the idea (very slowly as usual), and GOOG just isn't even trying. It is no longer sufficient to have one thing that keeps the lights on and a thousand things that everybody uses but don't make you any money.
Admittedly, they have built up incredible brand recognition, and that little logo at the bottom of the smart phone that says "Google" is basically understood by most people to be "The Good Guys" fighting the "Evil Empire" of Microsoft and Apple. It won't help you if all you can do is give your products away.
In that future, only engineers will have jobs. If I were Supreme Overlord, this would already be the case (well I would no longer be an engineer, I'd be Supreme Overlord). Once engineers figure out how to automate the job of an engineer, Marx's dream of a utopian society might actually become feasible. I don't expect that to happen in our lifetime though, so don't hold your breath.
that's exactly why our legal system uses juries. For much of our law, it comes down to what a "reasonable person" thinks. And "reasonable person" is legalese for the agregate of six or more random shmoes we pulled off the street. The jury instructions are there to keep these shmoes from having to use legal critical thinking. It's actually a pretty clever system, I think.
When you make a parody of something, think to yourself: "Would the average person (say, your own parents), having seen only the first 30 seconds of the parody, have any reason to suspect the parody was anything more than a parody?"
If the answer is yes, your parody isn't fair-usey enough. At least that will be the instructions that the judge gives the jury. Be it right or be it wrong, that's how it works.
of any features being labeled as "HTML5 compliant" right now, especially if they only work on one browser. Every browser maker has a code base that they use to add features to their browser, and every single one of them is going to try to push features into this "open specification" that best suit the code base THEY already have and best suit THEIR position in the browser market.
If web developers and users strongly favor one browser's list of supported features before the specification is even finalized, the open-ness of the specifcation doesn't make a difference. That browser gets to skip the first step and jump right to Extend and Extinguish.
I'd be curious to find out what Microsoft's initial goals were. Surely the bean counters did not expect breaking Google's stronghold on search would take a mere two years?
In most tech markets, a ton of competitors show up, duke it out, and one of them eventually emerges as the clear winner and we all go home. Any companies that show up after that have to either sell niche products or EXTEND the market in some way. It looks like MS tends to take an unusual strategy here on many products, not just Bing. Bing faces Google pretty much head on and any bean counting MBA knows that will be a very expensive and long term investment. Investors certainly care more about the heres-and-nows but execs care about reaching goals. If Microsoft is reaching its goals (anybody see their last quarterly?) I imagine they will continue with their old strategy of showing up late and dumping tons of money into experimental projects that compete directly with established market champions.
I'm no business analyst, but it looks like MS loves to have its fingers in every little place where software exists, in some small-but-significant corner of the market, for the infrequent moments when it gains dominance and gets some incremental shread of long-term relevancy.
Slashdot Mirror
I hold them to extreme corner cases as commensurate with the risk of what happens when those conditions manifest themselves.
No, you didn't. Your previous post assumes that people standing in a windy field next to a fatally defective wind turbine is equally as likely as reactor being built without a containment vessel, or being ill-prepared before being hit by a tsunami, this leads to an inaccurate calculation of risk. If risk is defined as probability of an event multiplied by its consequences, wind power is still the riskier bet. This is magnified when you consider that the probability of the windy-field scenario would be magnified if we were to scale wind-energy up to nuclear's specs.
Nuclear simply has consequences that no other power source does. In each and every other case I can quite safely walk the grounds of a failed power plant the very day after the accident. You simply can't do that with nuclear when it goes tits up.
The costs of nuclear that are not associated with loss of human life are a valid argument. Land becomes unusable for a period of time. Back to my original comment, I'm willing to bet that this area of land is very, very insignificant when you consider the land made unusable when mining for the input materials. Again, I think nuclear will fair favorably, but we would need more resources than I have at my fingertips at this computer to make a reasonable estimate.
Renewable sources do not have any fuel requirements, so once the systems are constructed the mining basically stops.
For that unit, for its lifetime. A finite quantity of mined material produces a finite quantity of energy in both cases, so I don't see why that's relevant. Everything can be recycled up to a point, steel silicon, even spent fuel if you care to.
Well if you read further on this page estimates are as high as almost a million.
You quote both the TORCH report and the Nesterenko, Nesterenko and Yablokov report, and lets not forget: Greenpeace.
My general response to this is, yeah we know. My nephew's highschool teacher claimed that Japan would have to be evacuated after Fukushima, and advised students to take precautions to avoid eating even American-grown food that may have been contaminated by the fallout. At some point, we need to set the bar for how much a given claim stands up to peer-review. Everything that falls short can be excluded from the depending-on-who-you-ask colloqialisms, and all of these reports fall below that bar IMHO.
Don't get me wrong, unlike my nephew's teacher, these studies have all made unique contributions to scientific knowledge and that is valuable. The conclusions they make, however cannot be touted as reputable estimates. None of them do any robust correlation between various reports of deleterious health effects and dosage. None of them account for increased rates of screening and improved screening technologies when calculating statistics on epidemiological diagnoses. Two of them even cite the IAEA Agreement WHA 12-40 as sources of error in previous WHO studies, apparently without having read the agreement and its conflict-of-interest clauses.
Exactly how many people die from solar panels simply sitting on a roof? Does your nuclear figure include the construction costs of the plants?
Most of the death toll from nuclear power since the adoption of the containment vessel probably comes from mining, not construction. I'm willing to bet the same for other forms of generation, except for fossil fuels and hydroelectric. Getting the raw materials out of the ground is a labor intensive process requiring heavy machinery and risky setups, and lives are invariably lost or shortened more so than in normal construction. In China alone, between 5,000 and 20,000 people die each year from mining accidents.
It has been 25 years since a nuclear disaster occured that resulted in the loss of human lives, 64 lives directly, according to UNSCEAR but up to 4,000 according to the World Health Organization when shortened lives are also accounted for. That means that since Chernobyl, the death toll from mining supercedes the nuclear death toll by between 30 and 7800 times over depending on who you trust. Keep in mind, this is for CHINA ALONE, and is assuming mining in China was NOT more dangerous 25 years ago.
Now lets take into account that Chernobyl implemented a design created primarily for weapons production, had no containment vessel, and was being run by a communist regime on the brink of collapse. The scale of melt-down that occured there would be near-impossible for a gifted group of well-funded terrorist engineers to cause in a modern reactor with containment. The worst nature has thrown at an ill-prepared plant (read: Fukushima) still resulted in no deaths.
So here would be my question: which energy source requires the most mined materials per TW. Honestly, I don't know. But my suspicions are that nuclear would be near the bottom of that list.
Wind ditto. It just sits there spinning and as long as you aren't within a few hundred yards on a *very* windy day...zero casualties.
As long as [ this | that ]. If you are going to hold nuclear to these extreme corner cases, please hold all other energy generation techniques to equally high standards.
I disagree whole heartedly with your theory that engineers are exposed to MORE toxins from manufactured products than construction workers, janitors, factory workers, restraunt workers, clerical staff and the whole host of other manual laborers out there. It just seems irrational.
But I do agree that whoever modded you as troll needs to go fuck themselves.
BAD engineers can be a detriment to science, but so can bad scientists.
Engineers do understand data. We collect data, model the data, draw conclusions, make predictions, test those predictions, and use them to generate wealth. So except for that last part, we ARE scientists, just not PURE scientists.
Many of us would love to do pure science, and we leverage pure science as much as possible to advance the state of our specific art, but while we understand the value of data, we also understand the importance of wealth. Or is that what you meant when you said "more conservative?"
^mod parent up
France has some of the most experience in nuclear power at both the technical and the regulatory level. To boot, the political landscape is a lot more nuclear friendly, probably due to the high social status afforded to engineers (which tend to be pro-nuclear) in French culture. In economics, this is called a comparative advantage.
This means that international trade (of energy) is rational.
National security is a valid argument against trade, but in a tightly knit international community such as the EU, people are more friendly to the idea that engaging international trade is SUPPOSED to be stressed more than securing yourself against your neighbors. Their decision is rational.
If that were true, these multinational tech giants wouldn't have such valuable brands. As it stands now slapping the MSFT logo on something adds perceived value and credibility to it. Like it or not, people think locked-down platforms are great! http://www.forbes.com/2010/07/28/apple-google-microsoft-ibm-nike-disney-bmw-forbes-cmo-network-most-valuable-brands.html
Keep going I haven't got BINGO yet.
Wish I had mod points. I graduated 2 years ago with a degree in Electrical Engineering. I finished with $82k in high-interest student loans, but I got a high paying job with a software company shortly after graduation. I don't use my EE background much but I couldn't be happier with the investment, and I'm paying it down VERY quickly.
My friend from high school graduated at the same time from a different college with a degree in Journalism and $60k of loans (she got a scholarship in high school). She was unemployed for a while, worked an unpayed internship up until last December when she was finally offered a job making $16 an hour at a marketing firm. THAT is the problem with Federal loan guarantees. STEM degrees and fluff degrees are not created equal and should not be treated as such.
Do you think OWS is comprised of mostly individuals like me, or like my friend?
Windows Phone is a good example here. They don't make much money on content, they don't make much money on search, but they still ship updates. The only real source of money is the OS and dev lisences (sort of), but they still ship updates. They don't have leverage over anyone, but they still hound the carriers to ship their updates. I wish the management of every platform would act like they had tiny market share.
A friend of mine worked for Microsoft on a couple of lesser-known projects. Apparently, getting anything baked into the OS which is currently supported by third-party solutions is a royal pain in the @$$ to get passed their legal team.
doesn't matter. They have sufficient market share to influence the market. If they use that influence in a way that unfairly jeopardizes competition in the market, they can be fined. So yes, 60-something percent of the market is enough for the FTC to take these complaints seriously. But I don't see the financial implications of the ruling to be of consequence. The fines that MSFT payed for its noncompetitive practices were not nearly as significant as the damages it caused to their reputation. Do people really think GOOG is vulnerable to the same tarnishing?
The patent trolling industry is a mine field of patents...
for a system by which you file thousands of complaints based on bogus patent infringment and receive an assload of cash in settlements because it would be less expensive than fighting you in court. I'm think about filing for a few hundred injunctions if I get it.
The greatest problems in security exist between the keyboard and the chair. If your sysadmin thinks "lol we're secure we bought Macs" then sure you are in for a world of hurt. Windows has a big sign across it saying "Beware: People Will Try To Hack This." Ironically, that is the kind of environment that leads to more security on the side of both the developers of the OS and the end users.
AAPL figured it out, MSFT is coming around to the idea (very slowly as usual), and GOOG just isn't even trying. It is no longer sufficient to have one thing that keeps the lights on and a thousand things that everybody uses but don't make you any money. Admittedly, they have built up incredible brand recognition, and that little logo at the bottom of the smart phone that says "Google" is basically understood by most people to be "The Good Guys" fighting the "Evil Empire" of Microsoft and Apple. It won't help you if all you can do is give your products away.
get-the-joke fail
In that future, only engineers will have jobs. If I were Supreme Overlord, this would already be the case (well I would no longer be an engineer, I'd be Supreme Overlord). Once engineers figure out how to automate the job of an engineer, Marx's dream of a utopian society might actually become feasible. I don't expect that to happen in our lifetime though, so don't hold your breath.
that's exactly why our legal system uses juries. For much of our law, it comes down to what a "reasonable person" thinks. And "reasonable person" is legalese for the agregate of six or more random shmoes we pulled off the street. The jury instructions are there to keep these shmoes from having to use legal critical thinking. It's actually a pretty clever system, I think.
When you make a parody of something, think to yourself: "Would the average person (say, your own parents), having seen only the first 30 seconds of the parody, have any reason to suspect the parody was anything more than a parody?" If the answer is yes, your parody isn't fair-usey enough. At least that will be the instructions that the judge gives the jury. Be it right or be it wrong, that's how it works.
of any features being labeled as "HTML5 compliant" right now, especially if they only work on one browser. Every browser maker has a code base that they use to add features to their browser, and every single one of them is going to try to push features into this "open specification" that best suit the code base THEY already have and best suit THEIR position in the browser market. If web developers and users strongly favor one browser's list of supported features before the specification is even finalized, the open-ness of the specifcation doesn't make a difference. That browser gets to skip the first step and jump right to Extend and Extinguish.
I'd be curious to find out what Microsoft's initial goals were. Surely the bean counters did not expect breaking Google's stronghold on search would take a mere two years? In most tech markets, a ton of competitors show up, duke it out, and one of them eventually emerges as the clear winner and we all go home. Any companies that show up after that have to either sell niche products or EXTEND the market in some way. It looks like MS tends to take an unusual strategy here on many products, not just Bing. Bing faces Google pretty much head on and any bean counting MBA knows that will be a very expensive and long term investment. Investors certainly care more about the heres-and-nows but execs care about reaching goals. If Microsoft is reaching its goals (anybody see their last quarterly?) I imagine they will continue with their old strategy of showing up late and dumping tons of money into experimental projects that compete directly with established market champions. I'm no business analyst, but it looks like MS loves to have its fingers in every little place where software exists, in some small-but-significant corner of the market, for the infrequent moments when it gains dominance and gets some incremental shread of long-term relevancy.