In what political universe do they imagine the people of the UK would be interested in giving operational control of a nuclear reactor in Somerset to a foreign government, esp. one they don't particularly trust?
Yes that's true. They were arguing a political agenda and using whatever they could think of to justify their act of rebellion against a tyrannical authority. And most of them believed in a God that I do not believe in. Like all religious people at every time and place, they projected their own desires into the mind of god. Likewise the king imagined God had given him the right to rule over them.
You should be aware that the self-evidentness of rights was a novel concept in the Enlightenment. Up to that point, it had been anything but self-evident which is to say that it wasn't. The political theory that governments derived their powers from the consent fo those governed was both new to the enlightenment and contrary to the facts of thousands of years of history in which foreign goverments imposed themselves upon unwilling populations. It was even contrary to the regime that half the States imposed on a considerable portion of their own populations. The preceding theories were (1) that God had appointed certain people to rule over others and (2) that certain people imposed government upon the willing and the unwilling by force of arms. As much as I would like to believe differently, I think #2 is the truth because we see it happening in every age.
Thomas Jefferson was a politician. He was pushing a political agenda (IMO a good one) when he said that. The fact that I wish it were true doesn't make it actually true. And read what I read again. I didn't say a legal document gave anybody rights. I said PEOPLE give each other rights.
You're conflating what people generally WANT with what they ALLOW EACH OTHER TO DO WITHOUT INTERFERENCE. The latter is a right. The former is not. People are not born with any fixed set of rights. They're born with whatever rights that their people allow them.
You're out of your mind. Rights exist only because and to the extent that people recognize them, particularly governments that are in a position to defend or deny them. There are no god given rights and if there were, you weren't offered any right to privacy according to any religion that I know of. As for their being innate, that can't be true. If the were innate, people would have had the same rights everywhere and throughout history. They manifestly have not and do not. Your rights depend on where you are and who you are with. Thinking otherwise is simply asking for trouble you can avoid by recognising the facts.
That's a completely fucked up way to state things.
The kicker is that no 'average' home consumes power evenly, nor does any power plant produce it perfectly evenly. So it's all a series of averages.
so 1400TWh/year divided by 11280 kWh/year/home equals about 124 million homes.
and that works out to 1 TWh/year equals 88.6k homes per TWh, which seems reasonable based on where you get your average use data and how you average/round.
Of course, I wonder where you got 1.4k TWh from 4k TWh.
BTW, on average home power consumption - you can divide the USA into regions; the northeast matches Europe(more or less), the South uses enough juice to drag up the average. The NW tends to use more power as well because electricity is so cheap there huge proportions heat everything via electric.
I didn't get it from 1.4TWh. I got it from here: http://www.eia.gov/electricity/"Electricity consumption totaled nearly 3,856 billion Kilowatthours (kWh) in 2011."
Over a long period (hundreds of years) the forest is CLOSE to carbon neutral. Over a very long time, it's not, unless you count the fact that every billion years or so, some species will come along and burn all the coal.
1TWh is a unit of energy, not a unit of power. One TWh or electricity is about enough to power 85000 homes FOR A YEAR. That's a completely fucked up way to state things.
1400 TWh per year equals 159.8 GW. US annual electricity production is about 4000 TWh/year.
average home power consumption is about (http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=97&t=3) 11280 kWh/year,
so 1400TWh/year divided by 11280 kWh/year/home equals about 124 million homes.
That is the relevant figure, if you believe it. Personally, I think capturing that amount of wave energy sounds far fetched. One thing's for sure. You're not going to get that amount of power for $16 Million.
Unfortunately, it seems to happen in bursts, which is hugely disruptive to getting anything done. But I was focusing largely on the cost of losing an employee. I figure losing one engineer means losing a consequent 9 man-months of productivity and often some schedule slippage. If you're running 50% margin on your engineering hours (which you should be), that's like losing 1.5x the final year's salary of the guy you lost. If you had spread that over 15 employees, you would have been paying them above par for industry and you'd hardly every lose an engineer. You'd make it back in a more productive workplace.
This is how I think and it's why I will never be promoted above functional manager.
That was a whole different situation. Chernobyl was a reactor core on fire. The core was constructed of graphite (what were they thinking?) and it burned, evaporating much of the nuclear fuel. At Fukushima, we were discussing spent fuel, which isn't going to go critical on you because it can't and is stored in a hole in the ground. Can the fuel rods BURN without something to provide external (chemical) heat? That's what it would take to make a Chernobyl-scale nuclear contamination problem.
How did this comment get modded UP? Tokyo is 300km from the affected reactors for God's sake. Tokyo isn't going to become uninhabitable EVER due to fuel rods at Soma unless they physically ship the rods to Tokyo.
The severity of a scald injury depends on the temperature to which the skin is exposed and
how long it is exposed. The most common re
gulatory standard for the maximum temperature
of water delivered by residential water heaters to the tap is 120 degrees Fahrenheit/48
degrees Celsius. At this temperature, the skin of adults requires an average of five minutes of
exposure for a full thickness burn to occur. When the temperature of a hot liquid is increased
to 140
o
F/60
o
C it takes only five seconds or less for a serious burn to occur
1
. Coffee, tea, hot
chocolate and other hot beverages are usually served at 160 to 180
o
F/71-82
o
C, resulting in
almost instantaneous burns that will require surgery. Since immediate removal of the hot
liquid from the skin may lessen severity, splash and spill burns may not be as deep as burns
suffered in a bathtub.
And similarly, the government is alleging that the "Buckyballs" product should not have been sold as a toy at all. Packaging and marketing materials clearly identifiy it as a toy, and the manufacturer clearly was aware it was being sold in toy stores, which are primarily frequented by parents of young children. Yes, the parent is to blame for letting HIS kid play with buckyballs, or for not clearing them out of reach when he had friend with kids over, but that does not absolve the manufacturers and distributors and marketers of all responsibility.
Two questions:
1. How long does it take you to find a GOOD programmer?
2. How long would it take you to train one in the top third of those you interview to be a GOOD programmer?
If the answer to #1 is greater than the answer to #2, you're doing it wrong.
Yet both approaches seen to result in companies that work. The Japanese system builds in institutional memory. Perhaps too much in some cases. But the American system is wasteful too. You're constantly training new people at every career level here because they come from another company and sometimes another branch of industry and have to learn fundamentals. Other companies are constantly cherry-picking your most productive workers and bringing them into their companies where they are less productive for a while because they're learning systems and technology that are new to them.
I work now in a medium sized company. Every time we lose a an engineer, we suffer a noticeable loss of engineering capacity. It can take 2 to 6 months to find a suitable replacement and then 6 months to a year before they settle in and really get productive. Yet our top management thinks it's OK to have 6 percent turnover in our technical staff.
This is despite there being a huge body of potential employees with good enough general training and good work habits out there working non-STEM jobs. It's perceived that we must spend four months finding JUST the right replacement for any employee we lose. But we lose four months finding her and we could have hired another person who would take 2 months longer to train...
This should be no surprise, since these positions are for pure scientific research with no way to calculate the ROI for the money spent. Countries have debt problems caused by borrowing and their budgets are already stretched to pay benefits for retirees and other non-workers. Add a long recession, a weak recovery, and very little prospect for robust future economic growth, and ultimately you don't end up with the sort of fiscal environment that can support lots of pure research.
Wealthy societies have discretionary funds for things like pure scientific research. Poor societies have to struggle just to get by. If you want more pure research, you need more people in your society to be employed productively. And you need them to generate lots of wealth -- far beyond "the amount they need" or "their fair share" -- so there will be a lot extra left over for things like pure research.
When you're doing basic research, you must figure on the ROI of your research being possibly zero. There's always a chance that what you're doing will pay off for society at some point in a big way, but the fact is most basic research doesn't. Most of it is exploring blind alleys and some of it has negative impacts so devastating that they may offset the value of a great deal of research. So yes, it's the province of wealthy countries who can afford to spend a good deal of effort on something that may not ever pay off.
High energy particle physics in particlar has no foreseeable prospect of ever paying off from this point forward.
What has your example got to do with this situation? The company was told to stop selling a product because it was dangerous. The CEO personally decided to carry on selling it anyway, instead of stopping and then fighting the ruling.
It has nothing to do with the stupidity of the user, and everything to do with the CEO personally making a decision he had been warned could lead to people being hurt, and then some people got hurt. Feel free to debate personal responsibility all you like, but it is irrelevant here. No matter how stupid the government's decision to ban the product was failure to comply with the ban makes him liable.
Speaking of personal responsibility, they're holding him personally responsible for his actions.
Slashdot Mirror
In what political universe do they imagine the people of the UK would be interested in giving operational control of a nuclear reactor in Somerset to a foreign government, esp. one they don't particularly trust?
I think he actually must have meant parsecs per megasecond. You obviously shouldn't be driving your car faster than 100 parsecs per megasecond.
From the summary.
Yes that's true. They were arguing a political agenda and using whatever they could think of to justify their act of rebellion against a tyrannical authority. And most of them believed in a God that I do not believe in. Like all religious people at every time and place, they projected their own desires into the mind of god. Likewise the king imagined God had given him the right to rule over them.
You should be aware that the self-evidentness of rights was a novel concept in the Enlightenment. Up to that point, it had been anything but self-evident which is to say that it wasn't. The political theory that governments derived their powers from the consent fo those governed was both new to the enlightenment and contrary to the facts of thousands of years of history in which foreign goverments imposed themselves upon unwilling populations. It was even contrary to the regime that half the States imposed on a considerable portion of their own populations. The preceding theories were (1) that God had appointed certain people to rule over others and (2) that certain people imposed government upon the willing and the unwilling by force of arms. As much as I would like to believe differently, I think #2 is the truth because we see it happening in every age.
Thomas Jefferson was a politician. He was pushing a political agenda (IMO a good one) when he said that. The fact that I wish it were true doesn't make it actually true. And read what I read again. I didn't say a legal document gave anybody rights. I said PEOPLE give each other rights.
You're conflating what people generally WANT with what they ALLOW EACH OTHER TO DO WITHOUT INTERFERENCE. The latter is a right. The former is not. People are not born with any fixed set of rights. They're born with whatever rights that their people allow them.
You're out of your mind. Rights exist only because and to the extent that people recognize them, particularly governments that are in a position to defend or deny them. There are no god given rights and if there were, you weren't offered any right to privacy according to any religion that I know of. As for their being innate, that can't be true. If the were innate, people would have had the same rights everywhere and throughout history. They manifestly have not and do not. Your rights depend on where you are and who you are with. Thinking otherwise is simply asking for trouble you can avoid by recognising the facts.
That's a completely fucked up way to state things.
The kicker is that no 'average' home consumes power evenly, nor does any power plant produce it perfectly evenly. So it's all a series of averages.
so 1400TWh/year divided by 11280 kWh/year/home equals about 124 million homes.
and that works out to 1 TWh/year equals 88.6k homes per TWh, which seems reasonable based on where you get your average use data and how you average/round.
Of course, I wonder where you got 1.4k TWh from 4k TWh.
BTW, on average home power consumption - you can divide the USA into regions; the northeast matches Europe(more or less), the South uses enough juice to drag up the average. The NW tends to use more power as well because electricity is so cheap there huge proportions heat everything via electric.
I didn't get it from 1.4TWh. I got it from here: http://www.eia.gov/electricity/ "Electricity consumption totaled nearly 3,856 billion Kilowatthours (kWh) in 2011."
Over a long period (hundreds of years) the forest is CLOSE to carbon neutral. Over a very long time, it's not, unless you count the fact that every billion years or so, some species will come along and burn all the coal.
Yes, but you can't conclude from that alone that using "correlation is not causation" makes people ignorant.
Because when Europeans find out they can get their hands on twice as much power, they'll all move over here and we'll need the capacity.
1TWh is a unit of energy, not a unit of power. One TWh or electricity is about enough to power 85000 homes FOR A YEAR. That's a completely fucked up way to state things.
1400 TWh per year equals 159.8 GW. US annual electricity production is about 4000 TWh/year.
average home power consumption is about (http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=97&t=3) 11280 kWh/year,
so 1400TWh/year divided by 11280 kWh/year/home equals about 124 million homes.
That is the relevant figure, if you believe it. Personally, I think capturing that amount of wave energy sounds far fetched. One thing's for sure. You're not going to get that amount of power for $16 Million.
Meters per second? Bushels per acre?
Unfortunately, it seems to happen in bursts, which is hugely disruptive to getting anything done. But I was focusing largely on the cost of losing an employee. I figure losing one engineer means losing a consequent 9 man-months of productivity and often some schedule slippage. If you're running 50% margin on your engineering hours (which you should be), that's like losing 1.5x the final year's salary of the guy you lost. If you had spread that over 15 employees, you would have been paying them above par for industry and you'd hardly every lose an engineer. You'd make it back in a more productive workplace.
This is how I think and it's why I will never be promoted above functional manager.
I wish I had that option. Upper management sets my budget.
That was a whole different situation. Chernobyl was a reactor core on fire. The core was constructed of graphite (what were they thinking?) and it burned, evaporating much of the nuclear fuel. At Fukushima, we were discussing spent fuel, which isn't going to go critical on you because it can't and is stored in a hole in the ground. Can the fuel rods BURN without something to provide external (chemical) heat? That's what it would take to make a Chernobyl-scale nuclear contamination problem.
How did this comment get modded UP? Tokyo is 300km from the affected reactors for God's sake. Tokyo isn't going to become uninhabitable EVER due to fuel rods at Soma unless they physically ship the rods to Tokyo.
Take your equivocation and stick it where your head is. You want medical research? Well it has been done: http://www.ameriburn.org/Preven/ScaldInjuryEducator'sGuide.pdf.
The severity of a scald injury depends on the temperature to which the skin is exposed and how long it is exposed. The most common re gulatory standard for the maximum temperature of water delivered by residential water heaters to the tap is 120 degrees Fahrenheit/48 degrees Celsius. At this temperature, the skin of adults requires an average of five minutes of exposure for a full thickness burn to occur. When the temperature of a hot liquid is increased to 140 o F/60 o C it takes only five seconds or less for a serious burn to occur 1 . Coffee, tea, hot chocolate and other hot beverages are usually served at 160 to 180 o F /71-82
o
C, resulting in
almost instantaneous burns that will require surgery. Since immediate removal of the hot
liquid from the skin may lessen severity, splash and spill burns may not be as deep as burns
suffered in a bathtub.
One point if you can find the words "fun" and "toy" in this image. 100 points if you can find a warning that this product is not safe for children. http://www.geardiary.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/buckyballs_photo_three.png
Two questions: 1. How long does it take you to find a GOOD programmer? 2. How long would it take you to train one in the top third of those you interview to be a GOOD programmer? If the answer to #1 is greater than the answer to #2, you're doing it wrong.
What would he do with the women? We're talking about a programmer, for God's sake.
Yet both approaches seen to result in companies that work. The Japanese system builds in institutional memory. Perhaps too much in some cases. But the American system is wasteful too. You're constantly training new people at every career level here because they come from another company and sometimes another branch of industry and have to learn fundamentals. Other companies are constantly cherry-picking your most productive workers and bringing them into their companies where they are less productive for a while because they're learning systems and technology that are new to them.
I work now in a medium sized company. Every time we lose a an engineer, we suffer a noticeable loss of engineering capacity. It can take 2 to 6 months to find a suitable replacement and then 6 months to a year before they settle in and really get productive. Yet our top management thinks it's OK to have 6 percent turnover in our technical staff.
This is despite there being a huge body of potential employees with good enough general training and good work habits out there working non-STEM jobs. It's perceived that we must spend four months finding JUST the right replacement for any employee we lose. But we lose four months finding her and we could have hired another person who would take 2 months longer to train...
Correction: a shortage of engineering jobs means that manufacturing and design have been offshored.
This should be no surprise, since these positions are for pure scientific research with no way to calculate the ROI for the money spent. Countries have debt problems caused by borrowing and their budgets are already stretched to pay benefits for retirees and other non-workers. Add a long recession, a weak recovery, and very little prospect for robust future economic growth, and ultimately you don't end up with the sort of fiscal environment that can support lots of pure research.
Wealthy societies have discretionary funds for things like pure scientific research. Poor societies have to struggle just to get by. If you want more pure research, you need more people in your society to be employed productively. And you need them to generate lots of wealth -- far beyond "the amount they need" or "their fair share" -- so there will be a lot extra left over for things like pure research.
When you're doing basic research, you must figure on the ROI of your research being possibly zero. There's always a chance that what you're doing will pay off for society at some point in a big way, but the fact is most basic research doesn't. Most of it is exploring blind alleys and some of it has negative impacts so devastating that they may offset the value of a great deal of research. So yes, it's the province of wealthy countries who can afford to spend a good deal of effort on something that may not ever pay off.
High energy particle physics in particlar has no foreseeable prospect of ever paying off from this point forward.
What has your example got to do with this situation? The company was told to stop selling a product because it was dangerous. The CEO personally decided to carry on selling it anyway, instead of stopping and then fighting the ruling.
It has nothing to do with the stupidity of the user, and everything to do with the CEO personally making a decision he had been warned could lead to people being hurt, and then some people got hurt. Feel free to debate personal responsibility all you like, but it is irrelevant here. No matter how stupid the government's decision to ban the product was failure to comply with the ban makes him liable.
Speaking of personal responsibility, they're holding him personally responsible for his actions.
My kid ate one or your magnets and had to have his bowel removed is not necessarily a bogus claim.