Congress has a right to regulate commerce. AM/FM Radio is under the commerce clause because it is in the 'public domain'. XM is not, it's a subscription service, so while they can be regulated, they can't be regulated as much.
Thats not quite what Ithiel Pool argued. The argument made in Technologies of Freedom was that media regulation should be prohibited under the first ammendment, it is a license on the press. The loophole that the FCC uses is the fact that radio spectrum is 'scarce'. Pool showed that this scarcity was actually artificial, due to the government arbitrarily reserving huge chunks of spectrum it never used.
That book is what set in motion the current scheme of auctions of radio spectrum.
I don't see how the FCC get to maintain a rule against local programming. It is not a necessary control, there is no necessary interest protecting a market monopolist like Clear Channel which actually holds all the stations in some markets.
XM radio is actually broadcasting all the material to all the radios. All they are doing is providing a gizmo that automatically selects material based on relevance.
The FCC is not going to touch this one, but not for the reason most would expect. Congress gets re-elected by taking in bribes from business to buy legislative favors (See Bob Dole / ADM as an exampole). They then use those bribes to outspend their opponents in elections. The scheme only works if people are listening to local rather than national stations.
Polticians are the only product that is intrinsically local in scope. Pretty much every other trade has been organized arround a handful of national brands with franchises serving local markets. That structure is the result of the media structure which is national.
I expect that in a short time we will see Howard Stern moving to Satelite Radio, the FCC can't censor him there. We will probably see the emergence of talk radio that is not 100% right wing idiots too. Rush Lumbago and co are profitable because there are lots of local business owners who will buy advertising on channels that tell them how important and right they are. Rush tends not to attract the type of national advertiser that uses sophisticated monitoring to check effectiveness.
What I hate the most is people with those hands free mobile ear/microphone sets. One of my colleagues whom I unfortunately have to work with alot has this annoying tendency to transition into a phonecall in the middle of a conversation.
That reminds me of the time I was at the IETF and everyone was playing 'who has the koolest new gadget'. Jeff Schiller was showing off his shortwave band radio the size of a matchbox, someone else had got an iPaq to run Linux, the next guy had a Zaurus running PocketPC, then this dude starts making a phone call without a phone.
The trick was subcutaneous implants, one set under the jaw bone which is a good sound conductor, practically a wave guide pointed to the ear. The second set was on the back of his hand for dialing.
Later in the evening the guy asked us to look after his laptop while he went to the mens room. We thought nothing of it until a few beers later we were wondering where he had gone.
So I go and find him in the bathroom. He is bent over the toilet bowl with a roll of bog roll up his butt. At this point I'm thinking that he has been mugged. "Hey are you ok?" I ask. "Yes I'm just waiting for a fax".
Blocking URLs is an "ACTIVE" measure - and one that opens very bad
possibilities for abuse.
Absolutely, but that does not mean that a very restricted blacklist might not have a place.
One of the frustrating things about the spam world is that every good idea gets grabbed by zealots who start to make a bigger nuisance of themselves than the spammers.
It would be really good to have some mechanism that could used to protect people against phishing frauds. If some web site is pretending to be citybank or paypal then they simply have no business doing that. It is not a first ammendment or censorship issue, its a public safety issue. People have no business carrying box cutters on airplanes and setting up phishing sites is the same thing.
But I really would like to see some better controls in place. I would like to have a transparent process for listing and unlisting the phishing sites. I would like to see efforts being made to notify the site admins (almost all phishing sites are on hijacked machines of some sort) about the listing.
Even with such a limited blacklist you need serious controls in place to stop abuse. Otherwise you will have people setting up phishing sites as a way to get a provider shut down. I think there are ways to make the scheme workable though.
Both wind and solar are non-storable (unless you use very expensive batteries).
Fortunately solar power produces electricity during the day which is also when a lot of energy tends to be used. But that hardly matters since solar power is not generally used for commercial generation. Its mostly used for homes far from power lines or mobile homes.
There are relatively few places where wind or wave power is so plentiful that it exceeds off peak demand. If it did the best thing to do with the surplus electricity would be to use some form of pumped storage scheme. Batteries are an expensive way to store power, pumping water uphill and running it back through a turbine is much cheaper.
Incidentally, plans to build a wind farm off cape cod are currently being held up by a bunch of NIMBY protesters even though the wind farm cannot be seen from cape cod without a telescope.
If the oil starts to run out a logical move would be to invest heavily in offshore wind power. It requires much less capital than nuclear and there are no waste disposal issues.
Of course there is, and it's generally the nighttime. In Mass there is even a generation facility, Northfield Mountain, which during the nighttime pumps water from the Connecticut River up into a high reservoir using that surplus electricity. Then, during the day, when demand is high and supply short, the reservoir dumps through turbines back into the river to feed the grid.
That is surplus generation capacity being used to boost available generating capacity at peak.
The claim made was that desalination is free because there is lots of wasted off peak electricity. That is simply not the case, using off peak power to boost capacity for on peak power is not wasting it (although it does cause significant losses)
If we don't have surplus power, why do Scottish Hydro pump water out of Loch Ness at night?
From the section on Foyers power station here:
Read the piece,"Foyers which lies on the shores of Loch Ness is a combined pumped storage and conventional hydro-electric scheme".
In other words they are using off peak electricity to pump water UP into the reservoir so they can release it back again at times of peak demand.
This is yet another way to meet on peak demand without having to build additional generating capacity. The off peak power still has to be paid for.
As for the argument about starting and stopping coal stations. Sure the optimum efficiency of most power stations is at about 80% to 95% of full load. But that does not mean that it costs nothing to run the station at 80% of load when there is only demand for 50%.
I have worked on power plants, albeit ones that were using power generated as a by product of generating steam for other uses. Sure it takes days or even weeks to turn a plant up from startup to full load. But all modern plant designs allow the output to be controlled over much shorter periods. If you are running chain grate you simply slow down the rate the chain is moving, or you decrease the amount of coal per bucket. If you are running pulverized fuel you have very fine control over output.
The reason that most coal plants run at full output most of the time is that they are capital intensive but cheap to run and there is almost always sufficient demand to use their entire output. The economics of the power industry have meant that almost all of the new plants built over the past twenty years have been gas turbine or similar low capital, high cost generators. That means that there is more than enough industrial demand to keep the coal stations busy.
Sorry, but there is no free lunch here, every kw/hr of electricity used by the desalination plants will be generated using carbon based fuels that would not have been used otherwise.
Sun has done a huge effort, trying to make people open their eyes (Perhaps a little too much, with McNealy alienating most people with his comments), and they never had any serious backing by the OSS crowd.
Sun spent a huge amount of money creating an alibi for McNealy when the company went down the toilet.
Sun's situation had nothing to do with Microsoft, their market is eroding because of Linux and cheap commodity hardware. They would be in serious trouble even if Linux had never been written, the cost of an Intel box plus a traditional Unix license is much less than the cost of the competing Sun box.
Sun has been going 'upmarket' for the past ten years. Read Clayton Christiansen and 'The Innovator's Solution' to understand why that is a long term strategic disaster. The market for large servers was a temporary phenomena that was always going to end up being turned into a commodity. Ten years ago a workstation was essential if you were going to do serious academic research in the comp/sci field. Today an Intel or AMD box is 'good enough' for 98% of users.
The trap that Sun is in is that a commodity Intel box is overkill for the vast majority of applications. The only customers who are buying Solaris are doing so because they have a big investment in legacy Solaris infrastructure.
As for the settlement, I'll believe it when we see the SEC statements. Microsoft has a long history of making settlements where the headline figure is much bigger than the real figure.
However, if you are smart you can use your desalination plant only at times when the demand on the power grid is below average, and i'll burn electricity which would have otherwise been wasted.
Err when would that be?
Power plants reduce their output to match forecast demand. There is never a point where there is surplus electricity.
Certain types of power such as hydro are used to meet peak demand because they can be turned on and off very quickly with little or no wasted energy. This is one of the reasons why gas turbines have become popular, they cost more to run than coal powered plants but they have low capital costs and they can concentrate on meeting the high profit peak energy market.
Just about the only type of power plant that is never turned down is nuclear. But very few countries have enough nuclear power to do more than meet the base load, they are capital intensive and it makes no sense to build them unless there is continuous demand.
There are a few anomalous situations where a country does have an excess of power. The Canadians have more hydro power than they need to meet peak load and so they are in the fortunate position of running hydro for base power needs. Thats why they have aluminium smelters in Canada. Aluminium double glasing would be completely uneconomic if it wasn't for the cheap power. It takes thirty years for alumninium double glasing to save the amount of energy it took to make even in a relatively cold climate like the UK.
The other country that has a bizare power situation is France where de Gaul decided that 80% of the power needs would be met by nuclear plants. The result is that the French export huge quantities of power to the rest of Europe at way below cost. But even then the power is being sold, it is not being 'thrown away'.
The amount of renewable energy (including nuclear) available at a given time is fixed. So every unit of power used by the desalination plants will result in additional carbon emissions. It makes a lot more sense to save energy by making better use of existing water resources.
This brings to mind the fable about the office worker who liked to use the phrase, "I'm going to kill you." He used that phrase nearly daily for over 20 years, and everybody who worked with him knew he was just saying it. One day, he did kill two people at the office.
That does not seem to be a very good analogy, besides missing the point entirely.
The point I was making was that slashweenies seem to think 'blame Microsoft' is the appropriate response in every situation. Cisco screws up so we get 'Blame Microsoft' and 'Well Microsoft would have done worse'.
Its precisely the same sort of irrational response we are seeing on the political side. And to think that the Bushies actually ran on a platform of 'accountability'.
As for the analogy, to make it accurate you would have to have your postal worker actually kill several people in a series of escalating incidents before destroying the entire office in a suicide bomb. Bin Laden had made a series of attacks against the US, he had even financed the first WTC bomb. He had come close to sinking a destroyer.
You know the problem with this thread is that most of the comments have nothing to do with the story. A problem is discovered in a Cisco product and so we get immediate speculation about how Microsoft would have reacted to the problem.
It brings to mind the GOP claim made immediately after 9/11 that it was all Clinton's fault, nothing at all to do with them, oh and no way would Gore have taken the decision to invade Afghanistan. As a result of making these silly statements the administration is now having to claim that they somehow were doing more against al-Qaeda when it is obvious that they were doing less. With 20-20 hindsight the Bush administration screwed up, that is understandable. What is not understandable is trying to claim that they did not screw up and the partisans claiming that the real problem was Clinton.
The connection to this case is that the slashdot partisans seem to use 'blame Microsoft' as a substitute for 'blame Clinton'.
In this case it really does not work. Bernard Aboba and Trevor Freeman were both there at the IETF promoting EAP-TLS as the strong solution to the LEAP issue. Microsoft simply does not have a problem designing cryptographic security protocols, they have hired the best in the business and they do at least as well as anyone else.
Where Microsoft has a security problem is in the design of application software. The biggest factor in their security problems is the legacy of applications that were never designed for use in hostile environments.
In this particular case Microsoft has implemented a perfectly sound security layer in Windows XP. As a matter of historical fact they started to respond to the 802.11b WEP security issue long before it became a story on Slashdot. The first team to discover that WEP was broken was Microsoft, they examined the WEP security specs before deploying it on their campus.
When the Berkley team reported the flaws in WEP at a cupherpunks meeting I attended, I contacted Microsoft the next morning. They were already six months into the development of a solution - one that looks very similar to the 802.1x scheme that is actually being used. They did not immediately report the flaw to the public but they did report it to the IEEE working group and they pushed for a solution.
Incidentaly, before assuming that this is all the fault of CISCO probably best to remember that they bought in most of their WiFi technology from startups. They certainly bear some responsibility for not reviewing the technology they purchased but they probably diud not do the actual initial design.
postmaster@ is required (RFC822 6.3, C.6), webmaster@ is just a convention, for now.
Not if you don't provide email service it isn't.
And in any case IETF RFCs are merely suggestions that people are making a 'request for comments' on. Oh dear you thought they were standards, you thought that the IETF had been merely asleep at the switch all these years when the sad truth is that there is no switch.
I once read a story by a Conan Doyle (do not know if it was Arthur or a relative) in which reference was made to a French torture that consisted in forcing the victim to drink (gulp actually, they used a funnel) great quantities of water until they confessed or died. Anybody can confirm this?
When Mussolini was captured at the tail end of WW II Italian partisans strung him, his mistress and a number of his aides from a lamp post and stuck hoses down their throats, filling them up with water until their stomachs bust.
This did not as it happens kill Mussolini or his mistress who had already been shot dead by a British commando a few hours earlier while the partisans were holding a short trial in another room. But some of the others were apparently alive.
Wasn't he also trained by the CIA to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan?
Probably, but that does not make him a CIA asset. Bin Laden was not a creation of or ever dependent on CIA aid. His role was completely different, channeling money from Saudis.
The US was certainly negligent in leaving the place to fall into a ten year long civil war after the Soviet retreat. But you are exagerating the impact on bin laden personally.
One quip about your bin Laden comment, the information I have read, and I am assuming is correct, says that bin Laden was trained by our CIA.
Clarke recons that the real mistake here was working through proxies, so there were not enough feet on the ground. The CIA worked mostly through Pakistan inteligence using them as the conduit for arms etc.
It is quite likely that some arms were in turn passed through Bin Laden. But the real problem was that the money was going to help Bin Laden and the warlords build private armies and there was no direct contact with them. It would have been much better if Bin Laden had seen the US forces for real, he would not have underestimated them.
The problem is that from Bin Laden's warped point of view the Mujahadein defeated one superpower with nothing more than a stack of Korans, a few good men and a few good weapons, therefore the other superpower should be a pushover. What he is unable to see is that the USSR was a paper tiger that had been dying on its feet ever since Kenedy decided to spend them into the ground with the moon shot (JFK commented that he would have just as happily had the US reduce the levels of the oceans by an inch if he thought the USSR would try to compete). The Afghanistan campaign was not the cause of the collapse of the USSR, it was merely the straw that broke the camel's back.
After the result of the Spanish elections the right went into a tizzy talking about sending the wrong messages to terrorists. The problem is that it is impossible not to end up sending the wrong message when you have an adversary that is determined to view every piece of data as a triumph and a success.
I was reading Clarke's book, I see the phrase 'do you want drugs in your Rice?'.
I think: 'no, I just want Condi to give a straight answer to the question of why conter-terrorism was totaly screwed up before 9/11.
I thought from the start that the invasion of Iraq should probably be called 'The war on drugs'.
The idea of growing genetically modified rice containing pharmaceuticals appears to me to be totaly whacko. First you have the whole problem of quality control, dosage etc. The whole point of synthetic drugs is to control the whole process. But the second, bigger problem is that the target populations for this type of program tends to be the third world and the problem there is that the biggest problem is overcomming distrust of governments, their own included but especially the US.
The polio vacination campaigns are currently stalled in Nigeria because a bunch of mad mullahs think the vaccines are deliberately contaminated with contraceptives. So what do you think they will make of the rice?
The "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" philosephy does not work well in the long term. The "friend" has a way of comming back to bite you in the ass. Examples:
Stalin
Hussien
bin Laden
Pinochet
I think you guys are going down the wrong road here. IBM today is nothing like the company of the 1980s, that company is long dead. The uber-dominant IBM was dominant in the mainframe business, that business is practically non-existent today. The vast bulk of the machines IBM produces in that performance class are upscale clustered microprocessor based machines. IBM is mainly a consulting operation today.
The examples of friend becomming enemy are not the best. Stalin was always an aliance of convenience, Churchil and FDR both knew what he was and that he had allied with Hitler to invade Poland. Pinochet was installed by the CIA on the orders of Nixon and did exactly what he was meant to - murdered at least 30,000 opponents and established a dictatorship. This seems to be considered by the right to be a desirable outcome.
Saddam is a more complex issue since there the US decided he could not be allowed to lose the Iran-Iraq war he started. But nobody actually wanted him to win either. Bin Laden is an even worse example since he was the conduit for Saudi aid to the mujahadein, he was not the conduit for US aid.
The better conclusion to draw is that if a democracy intervenes in another country it should only support democratic regimes. The game that has consistently failled is the game of destabilising democratic regimes that pursue interests oppoed to the US and replacing them with dictatorships. If you look at all the operations of the CIA during the Eisenhower administration, the results have been completely counter productive. Meddling in Iran replaced an inconvenient Nationalist democratic government with a dictatorship under the Shah which inevitably collapsed under its own thuggery and corruption resulting in the current hyper-theocracy.
What I'd like to see is the sale of tickets to take out their spam-induced frustrations on the car. I'd pay $5 or $10 to beat upon the spammer's ill-gotten gains with a baseball bat, or to help fill the passenger compartment with a certain alleged meat product from a can.
Well maybe you would want to vent your frustrations with an idiotic act of vandalism on a work of art.
Now if it was the spammer, you might have a point.
Ah, but you miss an important point - USPTO grants patents because its also a source of income (and a pretty good one at that).
Actually you still pay the fees even if the application is rejected. But the USPTO has tended to allow everything because rejected applicants are allowed to sue them while the victims of maliciously invalid patents are not.
The way to rectify this is to start suing malicious applicants for perjury.
The particular patent in question is not simply for subdomains, it is for mapping subdomains onto email addresses so that alice@example.com has web site alice.example.com.
This is an old, old convention that was widely used long before 1998. the patent was filled in 1999, under the idiotic rules the 'inventor' is allowed to effectively claim to have invented it a year earlier. But even so, there is plenty of prior art.
One of the many reforms that is urgently needed at the USPTO is to make the filing date the date for prior art. At the moment a malicious applicant can go to a meeting, listen to a good idea, and file an application claiming to have invented it a year earlier. This goes on all the time.
Another overdue reform is publishing all applications for a challenge period of a year before they are issued and requiring the examiners to consider all prior art objections raised. At the moment the USPTO has deliberately tried to prevent the publication of applications being used as a challenge period, the examiners are not allowed to see arguments about prior art.
Decay heat is not an irrelavant snippet. Decay heat is a key concept in reactor safeguards. I know you probably won't trust my words for it (and there's nothing wrong with that), so I'll give a reference. If you want to see more, go to the NRC's reading room, or google for "decay heat and reactor safeguards". It was only decay heat that physically caused the TMI-2 nuclear accident. Everything else just contributed to not being able to remove it.
Your point is utterly irrelevant because what you are calling 'decay heat' is a fundamental process that is going on in the reactor all the time during operation.
Saying 'if it was not for that decay heat, well there would be no problem' is like saying 'if there had been no terrorists there would have been no 9/11'. It is an utterly irrelevant tautalogical statement, the fact you can cite it shows nothing. The fact that there would have been no 9/11 without the terrorists is irrelevant if you are looking into whether better security at Logan airport might have prevented the attack. The terrorists and the decay heat are simply factors that have to be taken into account in any analysis.
The argument you seem to keep trying to make is that somehow the fact that 'decay heat' caused part of the TMI core to overheat rather than proper uranium fission means that the partial meltdown somehow 'does not count'. It would be like if on 9/11 when the passenger lists of the hijacked planes were found and the FBI said 'its al qaeda', well according to your point of view Clake, Cheney, Bush etc would all have stopped work and gone home at that point. Oh we have a name for the problem, problem solved.
You seem to think that simply repeating further irrelevant details about decay heat somehow make up an argument. Let us imagine it had taken a bit longer to shut down the primary reaction, say another valve stuck or whatever and as a result the core had been even hotter when it shut down so that the decay heat caused the reactor bed to go into total meltdown and a chernobyl type situation, if this had happened and large numbers of people had been killed would it not really count because it was only the 'decay heat' what did it?
In control theory we would simply call what you are refering to as decay heat a time lag. There are time lags in pretty much every process control loop and being able to both control them and understand their effect is critical. Decay heat might be an immutable physical process but the implications are certainly not.
Mod parent down! The order forbidding cameras at Dover Air Foce Base was ordered by Bush Sr. in 1989 after Panama and kept there by Clinton.
A ridiculous case of telling a lie with an over-specific truth. Under Clinton the press do not appear to have had any difficulty gaining access since they were able to film the return of troops killed in Somalia, Saudi Arabia and Aden.
What you are doing here is playing games, the Bush order said that no filming was permitted without prior permission from the Whitehouse. This was always granted refused under Bush I and Bush II and consistently granted under Clinton.
All this flim-flam about when the order was given is just another GOP camouflage, a way of lying with the absolute litteral truth. And they criticized Clinton for prevaricating about the meaning of 'is'!
It doesn't help us to ignore reasonable discussion just because it doesn't support our desire to not re-elect a certain president. In fact, it hurts.
You think he was elected?
Why is this modded flamebait? It's a reasonable, non-vitriolic reply to a scathing, error-ridden post (which itself was closer to flamebait, but is instead at +5).
The best tactic for partisan moderation is to use 'overrated', that way your chance of being meta-moderated negatively is not great. They probably are modding flamebait because they forget this when they get mad.
The fact is that nothing hurts as much or as hard as the truth. What the republicans are reacting to in this thread is the fact that so many people don't believe Bush is a competent leader. Ever since 9/11 they have been looking at polls that say 75% plus of the population believe that Bush is a 'strong leader', 'tough on terror' etc. Its not just those particular views that are part of their core belief system, the fact that these views are near universal is also part of their core belief system
This is why they react so strongly when these ideas are questioned. That is why the mere questioning of Bush's competence results in inflated charges of 'treason' or as they are currently throwing at Clarke 'perjury'. They can't handle the fact that amongst people between the ages of 20 and 40 the idea 'Bush = Liar = Incompetent = Fool = Coward' is not merely a fringe view, it is now the overwhelming consensus.
I don't like ideology, I don't like religions where you are told what to believe. I have not even joined the Quakers because that is too organized for me. What I dislike about what the Republican party has become is the total subservience to dogma. When they accuse us of being blinkered for merely criticizing Bush they are merely projecting their own ideological blinkers that blind them totally.
The reason we are going to win and the right is going to lose can be seen on the Web. Go to any of the right wing blogs and you find a fan site which simply promotes whatever today's line from GOP headquartes might be. The left wing blog sites are very different, the typical story for a widely read left wing blog like atrios or Kos or Josh Micah Marshall consists of a immanent critique of the right. So say Drudge and cronies will put out a statement by Condi Rice attacking Clarke, the left wing blogs will then show that the statement is in direct contradiction with a previous statement by Cheney, or better yet by Rice herself. Right wing blogs often try to do this, but in order to create the 'contradiction' they usually have to end up doing some malicious editing to present words out of context, and that leads to the second typical story for a left wing blog, the post showing the manufacture of a specious quotation.
Please let us know what school, if any, you attended Zeinfeld. I want to be sure I don't send my kids there to be spoonfed their political opinions.
I very much doubt that they would pass the entrance exam. The school was founded by Henry VIII is run by the Church of England and is utterly establishment oriented. In US terms you would call it a prep school, in the UK the elite private schools are called public schools for reasons you are unlikely to understand
I guess they might have been adding Marxist propaganda into the meals served in the cafeteria but I somehow doubt it, we had a holiday to celebrate the election of the blessed St Margaret of Thatcher to number 10. and in the sixth form general studies consisted mostly of lectures from serving NATO generals telling us the finer details of the Soviets plans for the invasion of Western Europe.
Anonymous Coward writes: You sound vaguely familiar to these people. Recommend you read this so you can understand your phobias.
The links in question connect to people who live near to TMI and were affected. I think that calling people who have been lied to and betrayed as they have 'paranoid' or 'phobic' is disgusting.
As I keep saying, look at the people, look at the tactics. It is possible that they are merely trolls or agent provocateurs from greanpeace, but I doubt it. It was exactly this type of attitude, that the only reason someone would doubt nuclear power would be if they were an imbecile that causes me to not trust them.
None of the profs I at any of the labs I have worked with would endorse your position. Even Teller, who I never met but was frequently compared to (for proposed applications, not insight into physics) would not endorse your position. You are asking for blind faith.
I am a scientist, blind faith is something I try to eliminate.
One final point. The worst effect the nuclear mafia had on energy policy was their ruthless campaigns to kill studies of 'alternative energy'. When I visisted Rutherford Appleton Labs the folk there were very upset about the way Salter's duck, a promising wave power technology was sunk by outright deception by the fanatically pro-nuclear 'review board'. They could not even bear to see the idea of alternative energy sources being examined. When the true costs of nuclear power came out during the privatisation fiasco it turned out that Salter's duck would have produced energy at half the real cost of nuclear - even with the ridiculously inflated costings used.
Wow. Being that you have a doctorate from Oxford I would have assumed that you would realize that personal attacks during arguments don't win the arguments.
You started it. "This shows the naivety of some people who are not nuclear scientists or reactor operators regrarding nuclear power. Let me give you a quick lesson. ".
One of the advantages of having a doctorate in nuclear physics from Oxford is not having to stand for cheap abuse like your opening line. I can tell you realize it looked arrogant and stupid because you avoided repeating it.
The point I was making is that it is people rather than technologies that are unsafe. Your inane repetition of 'decay heat', an irrelevant snippet of data that you appear to have read in a magazine article would seem to reinforce my point.
According to the appologists for the nuclear industry absolutely nothing went wrong at TMI, not a single thing, there was never the slightest danger at any time whatsoever and to merely suspect that there might have been makes you a complete fool.
Well one of the things you can do with a doctorate in nuclear physics from Oxford is to tell the rest of the world when they don't have to feel intimidated by this type of bullshit. People have every right to hold the nuclear industry to any standard of proof they choose. They are not being stupid, ignorant or paranoid. In fact just the opposite, they are merely exercising common sense in the light of the fact that they have been consistently lied to in the past.
TMI? That was 25 years ago, all those people have retired. Chernobyl? You understand that the lobbying group for nuclear power was not the same in Soviet Russia as it was in Capatalist USA, right?
Good heavens, I didn't know that the retirement age was now 45. I guess I should have put more into my 401K.
It is unfortunate that in the US freedom of thought is merely an option rather than an obligation. The attitudes you and other appologists for the industy show here and in other forums look remarkably similar to those that led to Chernobyl, complete inability to question received knowledge and considering all alternative points of view with contempt.
Slashdot Mirror
Thats not quite what Ithiel Pool argued. The argument made in Technologies of Freedom was that media regulation should be prohibited under the first ammendment, it is a license on the press. The loophole that the FCC uses is the fact that radio spectrum is 'scarce'. Pool showed that this scarcity was actually artificial, due to the government arbitrarily reserving huge chunks of spectrum it never used.
That book is what set in motion the current scheme of auctions of radio spectrum.
I don't see how the FCC get to maintain a rule against local programming. It is not a necessary control, there is no necessary interest protecting a market monopolist like Clear Channel which actually holds all the stations in some markets.
XM radio is actually broadcasting all the material to all the radios. All they are doing is providing a gizmo that automatically selects material based on relevance.
The FCC is not going to touch this one, but not for the reason most would expect. Congress gets re-elected by taking in bribes from business to buy legislative favors (See Bob Dole / ADM as an exampole). They then use those bribes to outspend their opponents in elections. The scheme only works if people are listening to local rather than national stations.
Polticians are the only product that is intrinsically local in scope. Pretty much every other trade has been organized arround a handful of national brands with franchises serving local markets. That structure is the result of the media structure which is national.
I expect that in a short time we will see Howard Stern moving to Satelite Radio, the FCC can't censor him there. We will probably see the emergence of talk radio that is not 100% right wing idiots too. Rush Lumbago and co are profitable because there are lots of local business owners who will buy advertising on channels that tell them how important and right they are. Rush tends not to attract the type of national advertiser that uses sophisticated monitoring to check effectiveness.
That reminds me of the time I was at the IETF and everyone was playing 'who has the koolest new gadget'. Jeff Schiller was showing off his shortwave band radio the size of a matchbox, someone else had got an iPaq to run Linux, the next guy had a Zaurus running PocketPC, then this dude starts making a phone call without a phone.
The trick was subcutaneous implants, one set under the jaw bone which is a good sound conductor, practically a wave guide pointed to the ear. The second set was on the back of his hand for dialing.
Later in the evening the guy asked us to look after his laptop while he went to the mens room. We thought nothing of it until a few beers later we were wondering where he had gone.
So I go and find him in the bathroom. He is bent over the toilet bowl with a roll of bog roll up his butt. At this point I'm thinking that he has been mugged. "Hey are you ok?" I ask. "Yes I'm just waiting for a fax".
Absolutely, but that does not mean that a very restricted blacklist might not have a place.
One of the frustrating things about the spam world is that every good idea gets grabbed by zealots who start to make a bigger nuisance of themselves than the spammers.
It would be really good to have some mechanism that could used to protect people against phishing frauds. If some web site is pretending to be citybank or paypal then they simply have no business doing that. It is not a first ammendment or censorship issue, its a public safety issue. People have no business carrying box cutters on airplanes and setting up phishing sites is the same thing.
But I really would like to see some better controls in place. I would like to have a transparent process for listing and unlisting the phishing sites. I would like to see efforts being made to notify the site admins (almost all phishing sites are on hijacked machines of some sort) about the listing.
Even with such a limited blacklist you need serious controls in place to stop abuse. Otherwise you will have people setting up phishing sites as a way to get a provider shut down. I think there are ways to make the scheme workable though.
Fortunately solar power produces electricity during the day which is also when a lot of energy tends to be used. But that hardly matters since solar power is not generally used for commercial generation. Its mostly used for homes far from power lines or mobile homes.
There are relatively few places where wind or wave power is so plentiful that it exceeds off peak demand. If it did the best thing to do with the surplus electricity would be to use some form of pumped storage scheme. Batteries are an expensive way to store power, pumping water uphill and running it back through a turbine is much cheaper.
Incidentally, plans to build a wind farm off cape cod are currently being held up by a bunch of NIMBY protesters even though the wind farm cannot be seen from cape cod without a telescope.
If the oil starts to run out a logical move would be to invest heavily in offshore wind power. It requires much less capital than nuclear and there are no waste disposal issues.
That is surplus generation capacity being used to boost available generating capacity at peak.
The claim made was that desalination is free because there is lots of wasted off peak electricity. That is simply not the case, using off peak power to boost capacity for on peak power is not wasting it (although it does cause significant losses)
Read the piece,"Foyers which lies on the shores of Loch Ness is a combined pumped storage and conventional hydro-electric scheme".
In other words they are using off peak electricity to pump water UP into the reservoir so they can release it back again at times of peak demand.
This is yet another way to meet on peak demand without having to build additional generating capacity. The off peak power still has to be paid for.
As for the argument about starting and stopping coal stations. Sure the optimum efficiency of most power stations is at about 80% to 95% of full load. But that does not mean that it costs nothing to run the station at 80% of load when there is only demand for 50%.
I have worked on power plants, albeit ones that were using power generated as a by product of generating steam for other uses. Sure it takes days or even weeks to turn a plant up from startup to full load. But all modern plant designs allow the output to be controlled over much shorter periods. If you are running chain grate you simply slow down the rate the chain is moving, or you decrease the amount of coal per bucket. If you are running pulverized fuel you have very fine control over output.
The reason that most coal plants run at full output most of the time is that they are capital intensive but cheap to run and there is almost always sufficient demand to use their entire output. The economics of the power industry have meant that almost all of the new plants built over the past twenty years have been gas turbine or similar low capital, high cost generators. That means that there is more than enough industrial demand to keep the coal stations busy.
Sorry, but there is no free lunch here, every kw/hr of electricity used by the desalination plants will be generated using carbon based fuels that would not have been used otherwise.
Sun spent a huge amount of money creating an alibi for McNealy when the company went down the toilet.
Sun's situation had nothing to do with Microsoft, their market is eroding because of Linux and cheap commodity hardware. They would be in serious trouble even if Linux had never been written, the cost of an Intel box plus a traditional Unix license is much less than the cost of the competing Sun box.
Sun has been going 'upmarket' for the past ten years. Read Clayton Christiansen and 'The Innovator's Solution' to understand why that is a long term strategic disaster. The market for large servers was a temporary phenomena that was always going to end up being turned into a commodity. Ten years ago a workstation was essential if you were going to do serious academic research in the comp/sci field. Today an Intel or AMD box is 'good enough' for 98% of users.
The trap that Sun is in is that a commodity Intel box is overkill for the vast majority of applications. The only customers who are buying Solaris are doing so because they have a big investment in legacy Solaris infrastructure.
As for the settlement, I'll believe it when we see the SEC statements. Microsoft has a long history of making settlements where the headline figure is much bigger than the real figure.
Err when would that be?
Power plants reduce their output to match forecast demand. There is never a point where there is surplus electricity.
Certain types of power such as hydro are used to meet peak demand because they can be turned on and off very quickly with little or no wasted energy. This is one of the reasons why gas turbines have become popular, they cost more to run than coal powered plants but they have low capital costs and they can concentrate on meeting the high profit peak energy market.
Just about the only type of power plant that is never turned down is nuclear. But very few countries have enough nuclear power to do more than meet the base load, they are capital intensive and it makes no sense to build them unless there is continuous demand.
There are a few anomalous situations where a country does have an excess of power. The Canadians have more hydro power than they need to meet peak load and so they are in the fortunate position of running hydro for base power needs. Thats why they have aluminium smelters in Canada. Aluminium double glasing would be completely uneconomic if it wasn't for the cheap power. It takes thirty years for alumninium double glasing to save the amount of energy it took to make even in a relatively cold climate like the UK.
The other country that has a bizare power situation is France where de Gaul decided that 80% of the power needs would be met by nuclear plants. The result is that the French export huge quantities of power to the rest of Europe at way below cost. But even then the power is being sold, it is not being 'thrown away'.
The amount of renewable energy (including nuclear) available at a given time is fixed. So every unit of power used by the desalination plants will result in additional carbon emissions. It makes a lot more sense to save energy by making better use of existing water resources.
That does not seem to be a very good analogy, besides missing the point entirely.
The point I was making was that slashweenies seem to think 'blame Microsoft' is the appropriate response in every situation. Cisco screws up so we get 'Blame Microsoft' and 'Well Microsoft would have done worse'.
Its precisely the same sort of irrational response we are seeing on the political side. And to think that the Bushies actually ran on a platform of 'accountability'.
As for the analogy, to make it accurate you would have to have your postal worker actually kill several people in a series of escalating incidents before destroying the entire office in a suicide bomb. Bin Laden had made a series of attacks against the US, he had even financed the first WTC bomb. He had come close to sinking a destroyer.
It brings to mind the GOP claim made immediately after 9/11 that it was all Clinton's fault, nothing at all to do with them, oh and no way would Gore have taken the decision to invade Afghanistan. As a result of making these silly statements the administration is now having to claim that they somehow were doing more against al-Qaeda when it is obvious that they were doing less. With 20-20 hindsight the Bush administration screwed up, that is understandable. What is not understandable is trying to claim that they did not screw up and the partisans claiming that the real problem was Clinton.
The connection to this case is that the slashdot partisans seem to use 'blame Microsoft' as a substitute for 'blame Clinton'.
In this case it really does not work. Bernard Aboba and Trevor Freeman were both there at the IETF promoting EAP-TLS as the strong solution to the LEAP issue. Microsoft simply does not have a problem designing cryptographic security protocols, they have hired the best in the business and they do at least as well as anyone else.
Where Microsoft has a security problem is in the design of application software. The biggest factor in their security problems is the legacy of applications that were never designed for use in hostile environments.
In this particular case Microsoft has implemented a perfectly sound security layer in Windows XP. As a matter of historical fact they started to respond to the 802.11b WEP security issue long before it became a story on Slashdot. The first team to discover that WEP was broken was Microsoft, they examined the WEP security specs before deploying it on their campus.
When the Berkley team reported the flaws in WEP at a cupherpunks meeting I attended, I contacted Microsoft the next morning. They were already six months into the development of a solution - one that looks very similar to the 802.1x scheme that is actually being used. They did not immediately report the flaw to the public but they did report it to the IEEE working group and they pushed for a solution.
Incidentaly, before assuming that this is all the fault of CISCO probably best to remember that they bought in most of their WiFi technology from startups. They certainly bear some responsibility for not reviewing the technology they purchased but they probably diud not do the actual initial design.
Not if you don't provide email service it isn't.
And in any case IETF RFCs are merely suggestions that people are making a 'request for comments' on. Oh dear you thought they were standards, you thought that the IETF had been merely asleep at the switch all these years when the sad truth is that there is no switch.
When Mussolini was captured at the tail end of WW II Italian partisans strung him, his mistress and a number of his aides from a lamp post and stuck hoses down their throats, filling them up with water until their stomachs bust.
This did not as it happens kill Mussolini or his mistress who had already been shot dead by a British commando a few hours earlier while the partisans were holding a short trial in another room. But some of the others were apparently alive.
Probably, but that does not make him a CIA asset. Bin Laden was not a creation of or ever dependent on CIA aid. His role was completely different, channeling money from Saudis.
The US was certainly negligent in leaving the place to fall into a ten year long civil war after the Soviet retreat. But you are exagerating the impact on bin laden personally.
Clarke recons that the real mistake here was working through proxies, so there were not enough feet on the ground. The CIA worked mostly through Pakistan inteligence using them as the conduit for arms etc.
It is quite likely that some arms were in turn passed through Bin Laden. But the real problem was that the money was going to help Bin Laden and the warlords build private armies and there was no direct contact with them. It would have been much better if Bin Laden had seen the US forces for real, he would not have underestimated them.
The problem is that from Bin Laden's warped point of view the Mujahadein defeated one superpower with nothing more than a stack of Korans, a few good men and a few good weapons, therefore the other superpower should be a pushover. What he is unable to see is that the USSR was a paper tiger that had been dying on its feet ever since Kenedy decided to spend them into the ground with the moon shot (JFK commented that he would have just as happily had the US reduce the levels of the oceans by an inch if he thought the USSR would try to compete). The Afghanistan campaign was not the cause of the collapse of the USSR, it was merely the straw that broke the camel's back.
After the result of the Spanish elections the right went into a tizzy talking about sending the wrong messages to terrorists. The problem is that it is impossible not to end up sending the wrong message when you have an adversary that is determined to view every piece of data as a triumph and a success.
I was reading Clarke's book, I see the phrase 'do you want drugs in your Rice?'.
I think: 'no, I just want Condi to give a straight answer to the question of why conter-terrorism was totaly screwed up before 9/11.
I thought from the start that the invasion of Iraq should probably be called 'The war on drugs'.
The idea of growing genetically modified rice containing pharmaceuticals appears to me to be totaly whacko. First you have the whole problem of quality control, dosage etc. The whole point of synthetic drugs is to control the whole process. But the second, bigger problem is that the target populations for this type of program tends to be the third world and the problem there is that the biggest problem is overcomming distrust of governments, their own included but especially the US.
The polio vacination campaigns are currently stalled in Nigeria because a bunch of mad mullahs think the vaccines are deliberately contaminated with contraceptives. So what do you think they will make of the rice?
I think you guys are going down the wrong road here. IBM today is nothing like the company of the 1980s, that company is long dead. The uber-dominant IBM was dominant in the mainframe business, that business is practically non-existent today. The vast bulk of the machines IBM produces in that performance class are upscale clustered microprocessor based machines. IBM is mainly a consulting operation today.
The examples of friend becomming enemy are not the best. Stalin was always an aliance of convenience, Churchil and FDR both knew what he was and that he had allied with Hitler to invade Poland. Pinochet was installed by the CIA on the orders of Nixon and did exactly what he was meant to - murdered at least 30,000 opponents and established a dictatorship. This seems to be considered by the right to be a desirable outcome.
Saddam is a more complex issue since there the US decided he could not be allowed to lose the Iran-Iraq war he started. But nobody actually wanted him to win either. Bin Laden is an even worse example since he was the conduit for Saudi aid to the mujahadein, he was not the conduit for US aid.
The better conclusion to draw is that if a democracy intervenes in another country it should only support democratic regimes. The game that has consistently failled is the game of destabilising democratic regimes that pursue interests oppoed to the US and replacing them with dictatorships. If you look at all the operations of the CIA during the Eisenhower administration, the results have been completely counter productive. Meddling in Iran replaced an inconvenient Nationalist democratic government with a dictatorship under the Shah which inevitably collapsed under its own thuggery and corruption resulting in the current hyper-theocracy.
Well maybe you would want to vent your frustrations with an idiotic act of vandalism on a work of art.
Now if it was the spammer, you might have a point.
Actually you still pay the fees even if the application is rejected. But the USPTO has tended to allow everything because rejected applicants are allowed to sue them while the victims of maliciously invalid patents are not.
The way to rectify this is to start suing malicious applicants for perjury.
The particular patent in question is not simply for subdomains, it is for mapping subdomains onto email addresses so that alice@example.com has web site alice.example.com.
This is an old, old convention that was widely used long before 1998. the patent was filled in 1999, under the idiotic rules the 'inventor' is allowed to effectively claim to have invented it a year earlier. But even so, there is plenty of prior art.
One of the many reforms that is urgently needed at the USPTO is to make the filing date the date for prior art. At the moment a malicious applicant can go to a meeting, listen to a good idea, and file an application claiming to have invented it a year earlier. This goes on all the time.
Another overdue reform is publishing all applications for a challenge period of a year before they are issued and requiring the examiners to consider all prior art objections raised. At the moment the USPTO has deliberately tried to prevent the publication of applications being used as a challenge period, the examiners are not allowed to see arguments about prior art.
Oh the fussion experiments work perfectly in the simulations.
The problem is that you can't plug a city into a simulation of a fussion plant.
Until you do the experiment you do not know if the simulation is accurate or not.
Your point is utterly irrelevant because what you are calling 'decay heat' is a fundamental process that is going on in the reactor all the time during operation.
Saying 'if it was not for that decay heat, well there would be no problem' is like saying 'if there had been no terrorists there would have been no 9/11'. It is an utterly irrelevant tautalogical statement, the fact you can cite it shows nothing. The fact that there would have been no 9/11 without the terrorists is irrelevant if you are looking into whether better security at Logan airport might have prevented the attack. The terrorists and the decay heat are simply factors that have to be taken into account in any analysis.
The argument you seem to keep trying to make is that somehow the fact that 'decay heat' caused part of the TMI core to overheat rather than proper uranium fission means that the partial meltdown somehow 'does not count'. It would be like if on 9/11 when the passenger lists of the hijacked planes were found and the FBI said 'its al qaeda', well according to your point of view Clake, Cheney, Bush etc would all have stopped work and gone home at that point. Oh we have a name for the problem, problem solved.
You seem to think that simply repeating further irrelevant details about decay heat somehow make up an argument. Let us imagine it had taken a bit longer to shut down the primary reaction, say another valve stuck or whatever and as a result the core had been even hotter when it shut down so that the decay heat caused the reactor bed to go into total meltdown and a chernobyl type situation, if this had happened and large numbers of people had been killed would it not really count because it was only the 'decay heat' what did it?
In control theory we would simply call what you are refering to as decay heat a time lag. There are time lags in pretty much every process control loop and being able to both control them and understand their effect is critical. Decay heat might be an immutable physical process but the implications are certainly not.
A ridiculous case of telling a lie with an over-specific truth. Under Clinton the press do not appear to have had any difficulty gaining access since they were able to film the return of troops killed in Somalia, Saudi Arabia and Aden.
What you are doing here is playing games, the Bush order said that no filming was permitted without prior permission from the Whitehouse. This was always granted refused under Bush I and Bush II and consistently granted under Clinton.
All this flim-flam about when the order was given is just another GOP camouflage, a way of lying with the absolute litteral truth. And they criticized Clinton for prevaricating about the meaning of 'is'!
You think he was elected?
Why is this modded flamebait? It's a reasonable, non-vitriolic reply to a scathing, error-ridden post (which itself was closer to flamebait, but is instead at +5).
The best tactic for partisan moderation is to use 'overrated', that way your chance of being meta-moderated negatively is not great. They probably are modding flamebait because they forget this when they get mad.
The fact is that nothing hurts as much or as hard as the truth. What the republicans are reacting to in this thread is the fact that so many people don't believe Bush is a competent leader. Ever since 9/11 they have been looking at polls that say 75% plus of the population believe that Bush is a 'strong leader', 'tough on terror' etc. Its not just those particular views that are part of their core belief system, the fact that these views are near universal is also part of their core belief system
This is why they react so strongly when these ideas are questioned. That is why the mere questioning of Bush's competence results in inflated charges of 'treason' or as they are currently throwing at Clarke 'perjury'. They can't handle the fact that amongst people between the ages of 20 and 40 the idea 'Bush = Liar = Incompetent = Fool = Coward' is not merely a fringe view, it is now the overwhelming consensus.
I don't like ideology, I don't like religions where you are told what to believe. I have not even joined the Quakers because that is too organized for me. What I dislike about what the Republican party has become is the total subservience to dogma. When they accuse us of being blinkered for merely criticizing Bush they are merely projecting their own ideological blinkers that blind them totally.
The reason we are going to win and the right is going to lose can be seen on the Web. Go to any of the right wing blogs and you find a fan site which simply promotes whatever today's line from GOP headquartes might be. The left wing blog sites are very different, the typical story for a widely read left wing blog like atrios or Kos or Josh Micah Marshall consists of a immanent critique of the right. So say Drudge and cronies will put out a statement by Condi Rice attacking Clarke, the left wing blogs will then show that the statement is in direct contradiction with a previous statement by Cheney, or better yet by Rice herself. Right wing blogs often try to do this, but in order to create the 'contradiction' they usually have to end up doing some malicious editing to present words out of context, and that leads to the second typical story for a left wing blog, the post showing the manufacture of a specious quotation.
I very much doubt that they would pass the entrance exam. The school was founded by Henry VIII is run by the Church of England and is utterly establishment oriented. In US terms you would call it a prep school, in the UK the elite private schools are called public schools for reasons you are unlikely to understand
I guess they might have been adding Marxist propaganda into the meals served in the cafeteria but I somehow doubt it, we had a holiday to celebrate the election of the blessed St Margaret of Thatcher to number 10. and in the sixth form general studies consisted mostly of lectures from serving NATO generals telling us the finer details of the Soviets plans for the invasion of Western Europe.
The links in question connect to people who live near to TMI and were affected. I think that calling people who have been lied to and betrayed as they have 'paranoid' or 'phobic' is disgusting.
As I keep saying, look at the people, look at the tactics. It is possible that they are merely trolls or agent provocateurs from greanpeace, but I doubt it. It was exactly this type of attitude, that the only reason someone would doubt nuclear power would be if they were an imbecile that causes me to not trust them.
None of the profs I at any of the labs I have worked with would endorse your position. Even Teller, who I never met but was frequently compared to (for proposed applications, not insight into physics) would not endorse your position. You are asking for blind faith.
I am a scientist, blind faith is something I try to eliminate.
One final point. The worst effect the nuclear mafia had on energy policy was their ruthless campaigns to kill studies of 'alternative energy'. When I visisted Rutherford Appleton Labs the folk there were very upset about the way Salter's duck, a promising wave power technology was sunk by outright deception by the fanatically pro-nuclear 'review board'. They could not even bear to see the idea of alternative energy sources being examined. When the true costs of nuclear power came out during the privatisation fiasco it turned out that Salter's duck would have produced energy at half the real cost of nuclear - even with the ridiculously inflated costings used.
You started it. "This shows the naivety of some people who are not nuclear scientists or reactor operators regrarding nuclear power. Let me give you a quick lesson. ".
One of the advantages of having a doctorate in nuclear physics from Oxford is not having to stand for cheap abuse like your opening line. I can tell you realize it looked arrogant and stupid because you avoided repeating it.
The point I was making is that it is people rather than technologies that are unsafe. Your inane repetition of 'decay heat', an irrelevant snippet of data that you appear to have read in a magazine article would seem to reinforce my point.
According to the appologists for the nuclear industry absolutely nothing went wrong at TMI, not a single thing, there was never the slightest danger at any time whatsoever and to merely suspect that there might have been makes you a complete fool.
Well one of the things you can do with a doctorate in nuclear physics from Oxford is to tell the rest of the world when they don't have to feel intimidated by this type of bullshit. People have every right to hold the nuclear industry to any standard of proof they choose. They are not being stupid, ignorant or paranoid. In fact just the opposite, they are merely exercising common sense in the light of the fact that they have been consistently lied to in the past.
TMI? That was 25 years ago, all those people have retired. Chernobyl? You understand that the lobbying group for nuclear power was not the same in Soviet Russia as it was in Capatalist USA, right?
Good heavens, I didn't know that the retirement age was now 45. I guess I should have put more into my 401K.
It is unfortunate that in the US freedom of thought is merely an option rather than an obligation. The attitudes you and other appologists for the industy show here and in other forums look remarkably similar to those that led to Chernobyl, complete inability to question received knowledge and considering all alternative points of view with contempt.