And how the heck is the geographical definition narrow?
Because it concerns just geography. Not history, language, trade, etc. There are clear delineations that e.g. don't include the russians (many, most of which are "Europeans" by your definition).
Enough said, I probably should not have replied to a trolling post.
Not trolling. Just pointing out that you've made the usual american mistake of trying to understand Europe based on your knowledge of the US. Europe as a concept is very much different from "US with countries instead of states".
And the Italians are a rather interesting case in point. They are rather divisive even as a country, let alone the larger grouping. Don't try to understand pretty much anywhere in terms of what you learned in Italy...
Europe goes east of Poland, and there are some poor countries there.
The poorest is very poor by our standards, "Moldova remains the poorest country in Europe in terms of earnings per capita which currently stands at $1,808.729"
No it doesn't. Poland is an EU-member state. The countries to the east of it are not. Never have been, and probably never will. When the wall came down it was pretty clear which of the eastern european countries that belonged in the EU right of the bat and which didn't. The states you refer to have never been considered part of "Europe" in any sense other than a narrow geographic one. (The one that says that "Europe" runs to the Ural mountains; and even that is in contention). To call Moldova part of Europe would get you laughed out of the room. That would be like me going to the US and say "Yes, I know several of your countrymen, Americans from Mexico and Canada..."
Well you could always buy a gun and start shooting up things to vent your frustration. That's something that's damn near impossible here.:-) (Both the buying and discharging a firearm outside a range.)
No, seriously, every place has their ups and downs. I'm just happy that we have one "up" in an area that's at least useful to me... You have others.
Yeah, that would cost me $50. But my "work" computer can only get about 30Mbps and 50 Mbps was the highest uplink I could get when I signed up, so I've stayed with that. Still, I'd call prices in the $30-$50 range reasonable.
Yes, well it's been a few years since I worked for the wireline division at Ericsson...:-) but as long as it's ATM transport I think that buffer bloat won't be much of a problem at least. Since ATM is basically a (half-assed compromise of a) telecoms standard it doesn't allow for much buffering, as that would hurt call quality. It should be low latency end-to-end. If you know that you're only going to forward IP, then you could start adding more buffering, but I don't know if that's routinely done (and I don't have my old buddies at work to ask). I know it wasn't common when I worked closer to the field, i.e. buffers in ATM-switches were very much managed with a low max latency in mind.
(In fact I remember one of the first trials of IP-over-ATM I witnessed where the network totally died from a related phenomenon. When the buffers in the ATM switches started to fill it would drop frames as they would be too late to deliver anyway. Only problem was that the frames are too short, all IP-packets have to be sent on multiple frames, so all but one frame of a packet would make it to the end. However, since the IP-packet couldn't be reassembled, it would be dropped and TCP would then resend the entire IP-packet again. Leading to additional load and overfilled buffers. The network was in effect busy forwarding the same frames with the same data over and over again... The "quick" fix was to tell the switches about IP so that if it found that it had to drop one frame of an IP-packet, it would drop the rest of them as well. No point spending any resources on forwarding them. Anyway it's a pretty useless standard for datacom, I'm happy to see it go the way of the do-do.)
No, not velocity factor but rather the problem of copper POTS having crappy channel characteristics and bandwidth, which means that you have to do heavier and heavier signal processing to squeeze ever more diminishing bitrate improvements out of them. And this signal processing takes time, i.e. adds latency, there's no way around that.
Case in point; pinging from work to home (250 miles, 10 hops) is on the order of 25 ms. That's with fibre all the way into my basement. (50 Mbps up/down for ca $35/mo inc. IP-telephony.)
My DSL way back when was on that order just for the first hop. So that cut my latency in half right there.
Now whether that actually matters in the greater scheme of things is another thing entirely. (It's not like the days of modems with 200-300 ms) And it doesn't detract from the buffer bloat problem when links begin to saturate, but that's a different problem.
Sort of playing the devil's advocate here, but a seemingly tiny, tiny increase in certain cancers across a large enough affected population could still be an unacceptable increase in absolute terms. It all depends on what tiny, tiny is and how large the population is.
Sure, but you also have to look at the benefits of having e.g. cell phones, i.e. the income side of the equation. For example, the death toll from automobile accidents is anything but trivial, but that's not to say that people would take kindly to a ban on driving. People obviously don't see the risk outweighing the benefits in that case and I suspect they'd say the same thing when it comes to their cell phones (esp. since the risks seem much smaller than driving).
then use a hex editor to change the kernel binary to use the hard disc for the root filesystem instead of the floppy.
No, no, no. You didn't need no stinking hex editor. I distinctly remember pressing Emacs into service to change offsets 142 and 143 to ^A and ^B (my memory is dim on the exact offsets).:-)
And you didn't have to log in (there wasn't an init yet to run "login") you were just dumped straight into a root shell. The release notes (readme) were two sheets of A4. Simpler times.
This was on 0.12 (I downloaded 0.11 but when I was ready to run it, 0.12 had already been released.
Yepp, just to give an example. I have fiber to the home in Gothenburg (pop about 1/2 mil, i.e. Sweden, not Nebraska), provided by the district heating company. They aren't the ISP though, I have a choice of about 8 ISPs.
I've gone with Bahnhof (Sweden's first ISP and well known for their support of TPB etc.) and pay about $40 for 50 Mbps symmetric (i.e. both up and down) including IP telephony subscription fees. (Calls are extra but competitively priced).
Network also delivers cable but that's extra and unfortunately there's only one provider. (Service was actually better when GothNet themselves were running it.)
BTW, it should be illegal to dig for a utility without pulling fiber, just in case.
People have accidentally made supercritical masses before. You can't just lump a sufficient amount of plutonium into one spot and magically it's a bomb.
If humans are involved in design, construction or operation, failures will happen. With nuclear, failure is not an option.
Indeed, failure is not an option. Close down your local hydro electric dam today! (Better get all the other energy production means while you're at it.
Well, the US Navy has not been without accidents and incidents, even though most US military radiological incidents have been related to nuclear weapons. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_nuclear_accidents). But if you include "we" to include the Russians, the picture darkens.
The thing is that if you're at sea, there's not a lot of people around to radiate, and lots of water to dump the discharge in, so together with the veil of secrecy that sourounds all things military there's usually not a lot of excitement to go with the accidents.
And my point was that during disasters, hydroelectric is not any better than nuclear. For example, they're still not growing anything down stream of many of the larger dam spills, since the top soil has been washed away. In Chernobyl at least it is still there, and will be returned to a safe state in a couple of decades.
I guess the poster's point was that hydroelectric even destroys land during normal operation, while it takes a disaster (of which we've had a grand total of what, 1-6 depending on how you do the maths, and whether to include mining etc.) for nuclear to have the same footprint.
Of course, what the poster wants most probably is just a radiation detector (and the Geiger counter is just the one radiation detector he knows of), so your advice isn't wrong; it's just wrong to call that a Geiger counter.
This discussion of course wouldn't be complete without a reference to the Kearny fallout meter. That you can build yourself from common household items. (Pictures.) Note though that you'd probably need to get inside one of the destroyed Fukushima reactor building for it to give a useful reading. It was designed for civil defence use after a major thermonuclear war after all.
So hydropower is bad because it "makes vast tracts of land unusable" and nuclear "simply kills less people"? Wow. Some people will simply refuse to look at reality. Fukushima? Hello? How big is the evacuation zone now? Did you just "forget" that nuclear does more than kill people?
You mean to say that you can't tell the difference between normal operation on the one hand, and the situation after a catastrophic loss on the other? If you think that the exclusion zone around Fukushima is in any was shape or form as badly affected as the downstream land (and population) after an hydro electric dam failure, you're in for a nasty bit of reality readjustment. (Hint: 46k died directly from flooding and another ~150k from famine and flooding.) Put that against the worst nuclear has had to offer you have to go to Hiroshima to get similar numbers. Civilian nuclear pales in every respect you care to compare.
The Swiss *ARE NOT* ending nuclear power. Rather, there is a proposal to gradually exit nuclear power by not building any new plants.
Pah, the Swiss are late to the game. We Swedes did this through a referendum in 1980. That should have had nuclear power shut down in 2010.
Didn't happen. We did shut down two of the more modern reactors in the very south of Sweden (because the Danes kept complaining) but we've upped the generated power in the other ones to more than compensate. In fact we're now at a higher percentage of energy generated by nuclear than we were in 1980. Instead we've had more than 20 years of no nuclear research and development (it was even banned by law... fine bit of thought crime legislation that) running evermore derilict plants for longer and longer past their design life.
So I would urge the Swiss to reconsider. Physics being what they are, you're in for much the same methinks.
P.S. Oh, and we have more hydro, and hydro power potential than the Swiss, and that still hasn't helped. So no easy fix there either.
I don't carry mine around any more as I don't really have the need, but I do use the Droid 48 emulator for my Android phone. Runs the original roms (that HP have released, kudos to them). Ah, the memories, and having a proper calculator on your phone that you can trust to boot. Recommended.
Probably because someone else is paying it for you.
Nope. We're paying for it. Sweden has a national debt of 43% of GDP. And that's with socialised medicine, 5 week vacation, 1.5 years parental leave, free schooling (all the way through the PhD level, where they'll typically pay you), working roads, railroads (well, almost...), welfare, unemployment benefits etc.
The US, 93% of GDP, with almost none of the above...
So, no, No one else is paying for it. We're paying for it.
Didn't know the details of that. You learn something every day. Yes, in northern Europe three phase 400V/230V is the most common subscriber hook up. I have it to my house, with 20A fuses I pay $300 a year in service fees. (I could probably get by with 16A easily, as there is no electric heating anymore, but I haven't bothered to have the meter fuses downgraded).
And we do transformers here also. We just don't put them on poles...:-) I have only something like 30 meters of underground cable to my substation. (They typically service a couple of houses). The feed to that is typically 10kV though it differs by country.
Single phase supplies (like yours but with only one voltage) are getting more common in southern Europe though, for no really good reason.
And then there is the political problem. Don't discount that (as we tend to do here). It's real. And it's ugly.
Yes indeed. And that's really the downfall of (early) Thorium. There was a reactor working very well, but it was shut down due to lack of interest as it could not produce fissile material for the nuclear weapons industry.
As for many of the other technologies you list Candu is already up and running and have for a long time. (There's close to thirty operating right now, many of them very large.) Fast breeders have been up and running and even produced electricity. But it took quite a while to work out the bugs, they weren't economical, and the political resistance was incredible. Pebble bed didn't have that much to show for it in Germany, but it also didn't have as much work put into it as the other two. Then there are the more modern ones such as thermal breeders, travelling wave etc that doesn't really have anything to show for themselves yet.
There's a lot to be done, but the political will is lacking. Maybe we're in violent agreement there?
Slashdot Mirror
And how the heck is the geographical definition narrow?
Because it concerns just geography. Not history, language, trade, etc. There are clear delineations that e.g. don't include the russians (many, most of which are "Europeans" by your definition).
Enough said, I probably should not have replied to a trolling post.
Not trolling. Just pointing out that you've made the usual american mistake of trying to understand Europe based on your knowledge of the US. Europe as a concept is very much different from "US with countries instead of states".
And the Italians are a rather interesting case in point. They are rather divisive even as a country, let alone the larger grouping. Don't try to understand pretty much anywhere in terms of what you learned in Italy...
Europe goes east of Poland, and there are some poor countries there. The poorest is very poor by our standards, "Moldova remains the poorest country in Europe in terms of earnings per capita which currently stands at $1,808.729"
No it doesn't. Poland is an EU-member state. The countries to the east of it are not. Never have been, and probably never will. When the wall came down it was pretty clear which of the eastern european countries that belonged in the EU right of the bat and which didn't. The states you refer to have never been considered part of "Europe" in any sense other than a narrow geographic one. (The one that says that "Europe" runs to the Ural mountains; and even that is in contention). To call Moldova part of Europe would get you laughed out of the room. That would be like me going to the US and say "Yes, I know several of your countrymen, Americans from Mexico and Canada..."
"How could a compiler?" Answer: Start by checking out Cyclone (cyclone.thelanguage.org) for instance and go from there.
Well you could always buy a gun and start shooting up things to vent your frustration. That's something that's damn near impossible here. :-) (Both the buying and discharging a firearm outside a range.)
No, seriously, every place has their ups and downs. I'm just happy that we have one "up" in an area that's at least useful to me... You have others.
Yeah, that would cost me $50. But my "work" computer can only get about 30Mbps and 50 Mbps was the highest uplink I could get when I signed up, so I've stayed with that. Still, I'd call prices in the $30-$50 range reasonable.
I have 50/50 Mbit fiber for about $40/month in Sweden. No caps. This includes IP telephony (pay cheap rate for calls but no subscription fee).
So $100 sounds expensive... :-)
Yes, well it's been a few years since I worked for the wireline division at Ericsson... :-) but as long as it's ATM transport I think that buffer bloat won't be much of a problem at least. Since ATM is basically a (half-assed compromise of a) telecoms standard it doesn't allow for much buffering, as that would hurt call quality. It should be low latency end-to-end. If you know that you're only going to forward IP, then you could start adding more buffering, but I don't know if that's routinely done (and I don't have my old buddies at work to ask). I know it wasn't common when I worked closer to the field, i.e. buffers in ATM-switches were very much managed with a low max latency in mind.
(In fact I remember one of the first trials of IP-over-ATM I witnessed where the network totally died from a related phenomenon. When the buffers in the ATM switches started to fill it would drop frames as they would be too late to deliver anyway. Only problem was that the frames are too short, all IP-packets have to be sent on multiple frames, so all but one frame of a packet would make it to the end. However, since the IP-packet couldn't be reassembled, it would be dropped and TCP would then resend the entire IP-packet again. Leading to additional load and overfilled buffers. The network was in effect busy forwarding the same frames with the same data over and over again... The "quick" fix was to tell the switches about IP so that if it found that it had to drop one frame of an IP-packet, it would drop the rest of them as well. No point spending any resources on forwarding them. Anyway it's a pretty useless standard for datacom, I'm happy to see it go the way of the do-do.)
No, not velocity factor but rather the problem of copper POTS having crappy channel characteristics and bandwidth, which means that you have to do heavier and heavier signal processing to squeeze ever more diminishing bitrate improvements out of them. And this signal processing takes time, i.e. adds latency, there's no way around that. Case in point; pinging from work to home (250 miles, 10 hops) is on the order of 25 ms. That's with fibre all the way into my basement. (50 Mbps up/down for ca $35/mo inc. IP-telephony.) My DSL way back when was on that order just for the first hop. So that cut my latency in half right there. Now whether that actually matters in the greater scheme of things is another thing entirely. (It's not like the days of modems with 200-300 ms) And it doesn't detract from the buffer bloat problem when links begin to saturate, but that's a different problem.
Or in other words; "Don't hate the game. Hate the player..." :-)
Sort of playing the devil's advocate here, but a seemingly tiny, tiny increase in certain cancers across a large enough affected population could still be an unacceptable increase in absolute terms. It all depends on what tiny, tiny is and how large the population is.
Sure, but you also have to look at the benefits of having e.g. cell phones, i.e. the income side of the equation. For example, the death toll from automobile accidents is anything but trivial, but that's not to say that people would take kindly to a ban on driving. People obviously don't see the risk outweighing the benefits in that case and I suspect they'd say the same thing when it comes to their cell phones (esp. since the risks seem much smaller than driving).
Oh, come on! This is slashdot. People here should know that the code is 0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0. ;-)
then use a hex editor to change the kernel binary to use the hard disc for the root filesystem instead of the floppy.
No, no, no. You didn't need no stinking hex editor. I distinctly remember pressing Emacs into service to change offsets 142 and 143 to ^A and ^B (my memory is dim on the exact offsets). :-)
And you didn't have to log in (there wasn't an init yet to run "login") you were just dumped straight into a root shell. The release notes (readme) were two sheets of A4. Simpler times.
This was on 0.12 (I downloaded 0.11 but when I was ready to run it, 0.12 had already been released.
Yepp, just to give an example. I have fiber to the home in Gothenburg (pop about 1/2 mil, i.e. Sweden, not Nebraska), provided by the district heating company. They aren't the ISP though, I have a choice of about 8 ISPs.
I've gone with Bahnhof (Sweden's first ISP and well known for their support of TPB etc.) and pay about $40 for 50 Mbps symmetric (i.e. both up and down) including IP telephony subscription fees. (Calls are extra but competitively priced).
Network also delivers cable but that's extra and unfortunately there's only one provider. (Service was actually better when GothNet themselves were running it.)
BTW, it should be illegal to dig for a utility without pulling fiber, just in case.
People have accidentally made supercritical masses before. You can't just lump a sufficient amount of plutonium into one spot and magically it's a bomb.
Nope. It'll seriously mess up your day, but a bomb it ain't.
If humans are involved in design, construction or operation, failures will happen. With nuclear, failure is not an option.
Indeed, failure is not an option. Close down your local hydro electric dam today! (Better get all the other energy production means while you're at it.
Well, the US Navy has not been without accidents and incidents, even though most US military radiological incidents have been related to nuclear weapons. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_nuclear_accidents). But if you include "we" to include the Russians, the picture darkens. The thing is that if you're at sea, there's not a lot of people around to radiate, and lots of water to dump the discharge in, so together with the veil of secrecy that sourounds all things military there's usually not a lot of excitement to go with the accidents.
And my point was that during disasters, hydroelectric is not any better than nuclear. For example, they're still not growing anything down stream of many of the larger dam spills, since the top soil has been washed away. In Chernobyl at least it is still there, and will be returned to a safe state in a couple of decades.
I guess the poster's point was that hydroelectric even destroys land during normal operation, while it takes a disaster (of which we've had a grand total of what, 1-6 depending on how you do the maths, and whether to include mining etc.) for nuclear to have the same footprint.
Of course, what the poster wants most probably is just a radiation detector (and the Geiger counter is just the one radiation detector he knows of), so your advice isn't wrong; it's just wrong to call that a Geiger counter.
This discussion of course wouldn't be complete without a reference to the Kearny fallout meter. That you can build yourself from common household items. (Pictures.) Note though that you'd probably need to get inside one of the destroyed Fukushima reactor building for it to give a useful reading. It was designed for civil defence use after a major thermonuclear war after all.
So hydropower is bad because it "makes vast tracts of land unusable" and nuclear "simply kills less people"? Wow. Some people will simply refuse to look at reality. Fukushima? Hello? How big is the evacuation zone now? Did you just "forget" that nuclear does more than kill people?
You mean to say that you can't tell the difference between normal operation on the one hand, and the situation after a catastrophic loss on the other? If you think that the exclusion zone around Fukushima is in any was shape or form as badly affected as the downstream land (and population) after an hydro electric dam failure, you're in for a nasty bit of reality readjustment. (Hint: 46k died directly from flooding and another ~150k from famine and flooding.) Put that against the worst nuclear has had to offer you have to go to Hiroshima to get similar numbers. Civilian nuclear pales in every respect you care to compare.
The Swiss *ARE NOT* ending nuclear power. Rather, there is a proposal to gradually exit nuclear power by not building any new plants.
Pah, the Swiss are late to the game. We Swedes did this through a referendum in 1980. That should have had nuclear power shut down in 2010.
Didn't happen. We did shut down two of the more modern reactors in the very south of Sweden (because the Danes kept complaining) but we've upped the generated power in the other ones to more than compensate. In fact we're now at a higher percentage of energy generated by nuclear than we were in 1980. Instead we've had more than 20 years of no nuclear research and development (it was even banned by law... fine bit of thought crime legislation that) running evermore derilict plants for longer and longer past their design life.
So I would urge the Swiss to reconsider. Physics being what they are, you're in for much the same methinks.
P.S. Oh, and we have more hydro, and hydro power potential than the Swiss, and that still hasn't helped. So no easy fix there either.
I don't carry mine around any more as I don't really have the need, but I do use the Droid 48 emulator for my Android phone. Runs the original roms (that HP have released, kudos to them). Ah, the memories, and having a proper calculator on your phone that you can trust to boot. Recommended.
Probably because someone else is paying it for you.
Nope. We're paying for it. Sweden has a national debt of 43% of GDP. And that's with socialised medicine, 5 week vacation, 1.5 years parental leave, free schooling (all the way through the PhD level, where they'll typically pay you), working roads, railroads (well, almost...), welfare, unemployment benefits etc.
The US, 93% of GDP, with almost none of the above...
So, no, No one else is paying for it. We're paying for it.
Didn't know the details of that. You learn something every day. Yes, in northern Europe three phase 400V/230V is the most common subscriber hook up. I have it to my house, with 20A fuses I pay $300 a year in service fees. (I could probably get by with 16A easily, as there is no electric heating anymore, but I haven't bothered to have the meter fuses downgraded).
And we do transformers here also. We just don't put them on poles... :-) I have only something like 30 meters of underground cable to my substation. (They typically service a couple of houses). The feed to that is typically 10kV though it differs by country.
Single phase supplies (like yours but with only one voltage) are getting more common in southern Europe though, for no really good reason.
And then there is the political problem. Don't discount that (as we tend to do here). It's real. And it's ugly.
Yes indeed. And that's really the downfall of (early) Thorium. There was a reactor working very well, but it was shut down due to lack of interest as it could not produce fissile material for the nuclear weapons industry.
As for many of the other technologies you list Candu is already up and running and have for a long time. (There's close to thirty operating right now, many of them very large.) Fast breeders have been up and running and even produced electricity. But it took quite a while to work out the bugs, they weren't economical, and the political resistance was incredible. Pebble bed didn't have that much to show for it in Germany, but it also didn't have as much work put into it as the other two. Then there are the more modern ones such as thermal breeders, travelling wave etc that doesn't really have anything to show for themselves yet.
There's a lot to be done, but the political will is lacking. Maybe we're in violent agreement there?
Furthermore NO ONE HAS BUILT A FUNCTIONAL, COMMERCIAL LEVEL THORIUM REACTOR yet.
Functional, yes. Commercial no. But considering that no one has tried that's not saying much.