People should define the video card by what works with their software, not the other way around.
That said, it's frustrating how poor the opensource drivers have been over the years. Even more so when the closed source ones don't support older devices. (I run a 4-head quadro rig. Nivida stopped supporting the cards in their driver 4 years ago.)
After getting desperate enough to go after humans, who are normally untouchable because whilst they may be easy to hunt individually, the predators learned long ago that this is a prey animal which forms groups and hunts back.
This is what the OP was referring to about them getting desperate.
Commercial air lanes were way higher than the shootdowns that had occurred. Noone was expecting the russians to be stupid enough to give a Buk to semi-trained operators.
Then again, by making ukrainian airspace effectively off limits, Russia managed to deprive Ukraine of valuable foreign income.
"this was a big problem in the development of the AEW radar system for the Hawker Siddeley Nimrod"
It might have been a problem in the early days, but by 1995 the systems onboard were good enough to notice and zoom in on a single bouy in the middle of the irish sea from 100 miles away ("show me everything that doesn't look like water" - which had enormous implications for SAR work) by 2005 they were boasting the Nimrod's systems could track people walking in Afghanistan
Helicoptors should be relatively easy anyway. They have those big spinny things on top which are moving fast and hard to make stealthy.
These have been detected for decades - the nuclear warning network sees them regularly and has to eliminate them as bombs.
I saw a Bolide in daylight around 1980 - just happened to look up at the right time, but that one didn't explode and probablt landed at sea. About 20 years later one passed over New Zealand and had lots of witnesses, including a dash-8 airliner crew who felt that it was uncomfortably close when it went past their flight deck.
"If we had a serious nuclear meltdown that caused widespead damage"
That's a big IF. Chernobyl was a dangerous design and Fukushima was a clusterfuck of management not listening to safety consultants before the event plus trying to pretend it wasn't happening afterwards (the hydrogen explosions were a direct result of trying to avoid venting shortlived radioactives to atmosphere and is specifically against safety protocol, but the number of fuck-ups that happened up to that point defies all sense of logic. Japanese refusal to ask for assistance when in deep shit didn't help (this is the same reason JAL123 had no survivors. When US observers flew over the site they saw some but the japanese refused to let them land+rescue and by the time japanese teams arrived they were all dead.)
In all likelihood the worst-case scenario for a USA meltdown is another TMI - some radioactive steam venting and then board the thing up for 40 years until it's safe to dismantle (TMI is being dismantled at the moment)
MSRs would be a lot safer (no radioactive steam/steam explosion risk), but even with current systems the biggest risk is public panic, not radiation exposure.
The relevance of nukes to this discussion: Going nuclear is the only viable long-term solution to stop putting CO2 in the atmosphere. Windmills and PV might just be able to match current gross electrical demands but electrical generation only accounts for 1/4 of carbon use worldwide so you need to move to a more-electric environment AND cater to all the poorer economies whose energy demands will rise to match developed countries - which means that you don't just need 4-5 times as much generation capacity, you need 20-30.
"People accept that steps cut into hillsides are irregular"
When my wife drags me off around various buddhist temples I invariably trip over the first few staircases until the wetware processes the factor that the steps are different heights and noticeably so.
There's a good point. People make a lot of assumptions about stuff in the real world which might be good enough for the local neighbourhood but don't scale beyond it.
The energy required to turn a kilogram of ice at 0C to a kilogram of water at 0C is close to the same amount of energy as it takes to heat that kilogram of water from 0C to 80C
When the amount of ice pouring into the sea around the antarctic starts tapering off (and when ice stops forming in the arctic), things can get very bad, very quickly thereafter - but long before that we'll probably see an anoxic oceanic event - these go hand in hand in geological records with CO2 spikes and it looks like one may already be starting.
European nuke plants all pay rates into decommissioning funds which are held at arms length to ensure that the fund is available no matter who owns the plant at end-of-life (they're specificially earmarked as "not an asset" in the case of bankruptcy or other failure to ensure what happens in the USA(*) can't happen here)
These are specifically setup to be unassailable by operating companies and pay all the costs associated with decommissioning at end of life.
Taxpayer cost - nil. Even the auditing fees (to ensure the fund is being funded) are paid for from the fund.
The USA model of socialising the costs is fundamentally broken, This is why the two largest environmental disasters so far this century have been coal power station ash-slurry dam bursts and you have hundreds more across the country the EPA is shitting itself over.
(*) USA companies often sell off their coal or nuke plants at knock-down prices to "another company" close to end of life. Said company then finds it can't pay the decommissioning costs, calls chapter 7 bankruptcy and sails off into the distance, leaving the taxpayer on the hook for cleanup costs.
A stat from several sites I work with - about 200,000 people in all.
Phishs are spotted and ignored by 97% of users - but that last 3% are a major problem
We've even had secretarial staff disable antivirus systems giving warnings about infected attachments in order to open things "because it might be important"
"Nuclear is not nearly as economical if you try throttling it. Basically you're wasting reactivity by doing so"
Actually nuclear is throttlable to a point.
You can throttle it down relatively easily, but xenon poisoning in the fuel rods (xenon is trapped in the rods and is a neutron poison) means that output won't increase no matter what you do until it's broken down. Inexperienced operators have been caught out by that when output fell by trying to turn the power up and then having the output snap to 200% or more when the xenon's gone. (This caused a couple of incidents and was a major contributor to why Chernobyl happened.)
MSR fuel salt reactors or MSR circulating fuel rods (a british design variant) are both largely immune to xenon poisoning as the circulating nature of the fuel allows xenon to outgas from the salt and collect in in the circulating pump surge space where it can be collected off and held until it's no longer radioactive (only a few hours - and then you can sell it).
It's worth noting that conventional fuel rods are a major problem because they get to 1000C in the middle (way hotter than the point where water and zirconium start catastrophically reacting - which is why having the cooling pumps stop is such a major issue) and all generated gasses are held inside. The result is that no matter what kind of pelletised fuel you use, it fractures and powders under normal use due to thermal and gas stresses, resulting in supremely difficult handling issues at end-of-life.
Conventional nuclear plants traditionally need to be derated in hot weather due to the fact that water-cooling means they can end up making water temperatures too high downstream or in the immediate vicinity of the plant (this is a big problem in france)
MSRs don't need water cooling (they're a lot hotter so you can reject heat to atmosphere and still come out a lot more efficient than a conventional plant) so this isn't an issue.
It may be possible to scavenge even more heat from MSRs after Brayton turbines (still under developmed) and steam turbines (well understood) by using an updraft vortex generator (originally a variant on solar chimney design) IF they work. http://vortexengine.ca/AVE_Des...
It's certainly possible to scavenge low-grade heat using stirling engines and this has been done on an experimental basis at power stations.
The more efficient way of using nuclear plants for heating or cooling is to build then closer to demand and then use district heating/cooling(*). MSRs are safe enough this is viable and it's certainly not a new concept - Battersea Power Station in London provided heating to 25,000 people in this manner.
Don't forget that almost all thermal electrical plants only convert 30% of the input heat energy into electricity. There's a LOT of waste energy which could (and should!) be harnessed rather than simply dumping it into the atmosphere or waterways.
(*) Cooling sounds odd from high heat sources but the technology to do this (ammonia bubble pumps) has been around over 200 years. See Solarfrost.com for one company who have put a lot of R&D into making them more efficient.
There may have been mass protests but the german people are in the process of changing their tune.
Their electricity as noted is now extremely expensive (they're having to import from France) and what's locally generated and isn't from gas is more-or-less all from dirty lignite coal. They're finding out very quickly how bad the alternatives are and they don't like it.
German nuclear providers are currently suing the govt there over the hysterical shutdowns and look highly likely to win.
I'm no great fan of conventional nuclear plants (they can be a lot safer), but the alternatives are a _all_ LOT worse in terms of both pollution (Solar PV being one of the biggest frauds perpetuated on the public, if you go look at what's happening in china around the production facilities you'll see what I mean) and CO2 emissions (windpower's lifetime reduction in end-to-end CO2 emissions isn't actually worth switching from coal, whilst the solar thermal plants in Tunisia and California turn out to only reduce CO2 emissions by 25% over a pure-gas plant as they need to burn significant quantities of gas overnight to keep the facility hot enough to start in the morning. The claim before building was originally 50-75% reduction but it's shown to be unfounded.)
Just because TEPCO listened to the exports about how to build a safe plant, then went away and did it the way they wanted (and which the exports had avised against) doesn't make all nuclear unsafe - but it does show that better auditing of the plants is needed, especially in Japan where there's been a far-too-cozy arrangement between the safety inspectors and the nuclear industry (Fukushima was both 100% avoidable through design and 100% avoidable after the tsunami - TEPCO management had their heads so far up their asses it was criminal mismanagement which allowed hydrogen to buildup and japanese "saving face" which caused them not to accept USA offers of help to get emergency generators onsite in the aftermath of the initial tsunami(*))
(*) This is the same japanese pride which resulted in the deaths of _all_ the 747 crash survivors from Flight 123. USA observers from Okinawa located and flew over the crashsite shortly after the crash and saw a number of survivors but the japanese refused to let them land and assist. By the time japanese rescue teams got onsite everyone was dead.
Apart from the rant above: Molten salt reactors are intrinsically a lot safer than any pressurised water reactor because if the lack of both pressure and water in the core. Anyone who thinks molten sodium is a good nuclear coolant in production systems needs to be locked up in a mental institution.
Apple could say "yes, we can create it, but there's a cost and it will take some time" then name something in the 9-10 figure range and 5-10 years, taking into account how badly it would affect their commercial goodwill, etc.
Courts cannot compel the creation of a tool "for free"
Or Apple simply moving its headquarters outside the USA.
If they were to stop selling in the USA due to this mind of order the repercussions would be far harder on the government than on Apple - they sell far more outside the USA than in it and such a stand would probably result in more sales as people take notice of the reasons behind it. Most people in most places are sick of the constant intrusions into personal privacy that occur at corporate and governmental levels.
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> OPM is attracted to big payouts. That's what VC funds, angel funds and at a large scale stock growth funds are about.
And why an alarming proportion of such things are revealed to be pyramid schemes or simply disappear.
People should define the video card by what works with their software, not the other way around.
That said, it's frustrating how poor the opensource drivers have been over the years. Even more so when the closed source ones don't support older devices. (I run a 4-head quadro rig. Nivida stopped supporting the cards in their driver 4 years ago.)
"The other is so hostile to Linux that Linus Torvalds himself gave them the finger and said "fuck you!" to the company."
Was.
After that incident, they've opened up a lot.
"Wolves and lions with bad teeth simply die."
After getting desperate enough to go after humans, who are normally untouchable because whilst they may be easy to hunt individually, the predators learned long ago that this is a prey animal which forms groups and hunts back.
This is what the OP was referring to about them getting desperate.
And the odd part is that a "Three level cell" is actually 8 levels (3 bits), so QLC will be 16 levels.
If so, it must be a robot in command. BMW drivers don't know how to use them.
Commercial air lanes were way higher than the shootdowns that had occurred. Noone was expecting the russians to be stupid enough to give a Buk to semi-trained operators.
Then again, by making ukrainian airspace effectively off limits, Russia managed to deprive Ukraine of valuable foreign income.
"this was a big problem in the development of the AEW radar system for the Hawker Siddeley Nimrod"
It might have been a problem in the early days, but by 1995 the systems onboard were good enough to notice and zoom in on a single bouy in the middle of the irish sea from 100 miles away ("show me everything that doesn't look like water" - which had enormous implications for SAR work) by 2005 they were boasting the Nimrod's systems could track people walking in Afghanistan
Helicoptors should be relatively easy anyway. They have those big spinny things on top which are moving fast and hard to make stealthy.
These have been detected for decades - the nuclear warning network sees them regularly and has to eliminate them as bombs.
I saw a Bolide in daylight around 1980 - just happened to look up at the right time, but that one didn't explode and probablt landed at sea. About 20 years later one passed over New Zealand and had lots of witnesses, including a dash-8 airliner crew who felt that it was uncomfortably close when it went past their flight deck.
"If we had a serious nuclear meltdown that caused widespead damage"
That's a big IF. Chernobyl was a dangerous design and Fukushima was a clusterfuck of management not listening to safety consultants before the event plus trying to pretend it wasn't happening afterwards (the hydrogen explosions were a direct result of trying to avoid venting shortlived radioactives to atmosphere and is specifically against safety protocol, but the number of fuck-ups that happened up to that point defies all sense of logic. Japanese refusal to ask for assistance when in deep shit didn't help (this is the same reason JAL123 had no survivors. When US observers flew over the site they saw some but the japanese refused to let them land+rescue and by the time japanese teams arrived they were all dead.)
In all likelihood the worst-case scenario for a USA meltdown is another TMI - some radioactive steam venting and then board the thing up for 40 years until it's safe to dismantle (TMI is being dismantled at the moment)
MSRs would be a lot safer (no radioactive steam/steam explosion risk), but even with current systems the biggest risk is public panic, not radiation exposure.
The relevance of nukes to this discussion: Going nuclear is the only viable long-term solution to stop putting CO2 in the atmosphere. Windmills and PV might just be able to match current gross electrical demands but electrical generation only accounts for 1/4 of carbon use worldwide so you need to move to a more-electric environment AND cater to all the poorer economies whose energy demands will rise to match developed countries - which means that you don't just need 4-5 times as much generation capacity, you need 20-30.
"People accept that steps cut into hillsides are irregular"
When my wife drags me off around various buddhist temples I invariably trip over the first few staircases until the wetware processes the factor that the steps are different heights and noticeably so.
There's a good point. People make a lot of assumptions about stuff in the real world which might be good enough for the local neighbourhood but don't scale beyond it.
"It takes a lot of heat to melt water"
Putting it in context:
The energy required to turn a kilogram of ice at 0C to a kilogram of water at 0C is close to the same amount of energy as it takes to heat that kilogram of water from 0C to 80C
When the amount of ice pouring into the sea around the antarctic starts tapering off (and when ice stops forming in the arctic), things can get very bad, very quickly thereafter - but long before that we'll probably see an anoxic oceanic event - these go hand in hand in geological records with CO2 spikes and it looks like one may already be starting.
I usually set mine to UTC, no matter where they are.
For this kind of leak I might "accidentally-on-purpose" select a timezone the machine doesn't happen to be in.
"we had a number of people protesting wind power because of environmental impacts including the birds that are potentially harmed by them."
Bats are definitely harmed by them. They only need to fly downwind of the turbines to get their lungs destroyed by the pressure changes
European nuke plants all pay rates into decommissioning funds which are held at arms length to ensure that the fund is available no matter who owns the plant at end-of-life (they're specificially earmarked as "not an asset" in the case of bankruptcy or other failure to ensure what happens in the USA(*) can't happen here)
These are specifically setup to be unassailable by operating companies and pay all the costs associated with decommissioning at end of life.
Taxpayer cost - nil. Even the auditing fees (to ensure the fund is being funded) are paid for from the fund.
The USA model of socialising the costs is fundamentally broken, This is why the two largest environmental disasters so far this century have been coal power station ash-slurry dam bursts and you have hundreds more across the country the EPA is shitting itself over.
(*) USA companies often sell off their coal or nuke plants at knock-down prices to "another company" close to end of life. Said company then finds it can't pay the decommissioning costs, calls chapter 7 bankruptcy and sails off into the distance, leaving the taxpayer on the hook for cleanup costs.
"Phishing is the most common,"
A stat from several sites I work with - about 200,000 people in all.
Phishs are spotted and ignored by 97% of users - but that last 3% are a major problem
We've even had secretarial staff disable antivirus systems giving warnings about infected attachments in order to open things "because it might be important"
And no, they can't be fired.
"Nuclear is not nearly as economical if you try throttling it. Basically you're wasting reactivity by doing so"
Actually nuclear is throttlable to a point.
You can throttle it down relatively easily, but xenon poisoning in the fuel rods (xenon is trapped in the rods and is a neutron poison) means that output won't increase no matter what you do until it's broken down. Inexperienced operators have been caught out by that when output fell by trying to turn the power up and then having the output snap to 200% or more when the xenon's gone. (This caused a couple of incidents and was a major contributor to why Chernobyl happened.)
MSR fuel salt reactors or MSR circulating fuel rods (a british design variant) are both largely immune to xenon poisoning as the circulating nature of the fuel allows xenon to outgas from the salt and collect in in the circulating pump surge space where it can be collected off and held until it's no longer radioactive (only a few hours - and then you can sell it).
It's worth noting that conventional fuel rods are a major problem because they get to 1000C in the middle (way hotter than the point where water and zirconium start catastrophically reacting - which is why having the cooling pumps stop is such a major issue) and all generated gasses are held inside. The result is that no matter what kind of pelletised fuel you use, it fractures and powders under normal use due to thermal and gas stresses, resulting in supremely difficult handling issues at end-of-life.
Conventional nuclear plants traditionally need to be derated in hot weather due to the fact that water-cooling means they can end up making water temperatures too high downstream or in the immediate vicinity of the plant (this is a big problem in france)
MSRs don't need water cooling (they're a lot hotter so you can reject heat to atmosphere and still come out a lot more efficient than a conventional plant) so this isn't an issue.
It may be possible to scavenge even more heat from MSRs after Brayton turbines (still under developmed) and steam turbines (well understood) by using an updraft vortex generator (originally a variant on solar chimney design) IF they work. http://vortexengine.ca/AVE_Des...
It's certainly possible to scavenge low-grade heat using stirling engines and this has been done on an experimental basis at power stations.
The more efficient way of using nuclear plants for heating or cooling is to build then closer to demand and then use district heating/cooling(*). MSRs are safe enough this is viable and it's certainly not a new concept - Battersea Power Station in London provided heating to 25,000 people in this manner.
Don't forget that almost all thermal electrical plants only convert 30% of the input heat energy into electricity. There's a LOT of waste energy which could (and should!) be harnessed rather than simply dumping it into the atmosphere or waterways.
(*) Cooling sounds odd from high heat sources but the technology to do this (ammonia bubble pumps) has been around over 200 years. See Solarfrost.com for one company who have put a lot of R&D into making them more efficient.
There may have been mass protests but the german people are in the process of changing their tune.
Their electricity as noted is now extremely expensive (they're having to import from France) and what's locally generated and isn't from gas is more-or-less all from dirty lignite coal. They're finding out very quickly how bad the alternatives are and they don't like it.
German nuclear providers are currently suing the govt there over the hysterical shutdowns and look highly likely to win.
I'm no great fan of conventional nuclear plants (they can be a lot safer), but the alternatives are a _all_ LOT worse in terms of both pollution (Solar PV being one of the biggest frauds perpetuated on the public, if you go look at what's happening in china around the production facilities you'll see what I mean) and CO2 emissions (windpower's lifetime reduction in end-to-end CO2 emissions isn't actually worth switching from coal, whilst the solar thermal plants in Tunisia and California turn out to only reduce CO2 emissions by 25% over a pure-gas plant as they need to burn significant quantities of gas overnight to keep the facility hot enough to start in the morning. The claim before building was originally 50-75% reduction but it's shown to be unfounded.)
Just because TEPCO listened to the exports about how to build a safe plant, then went away and did it the way they wanted (and which the exports had avised against) doesn't make all nuclear unsafe - but it does show that better auditing of the plants is needed, especially in Japan where there's been a far-too-cozy arrangement between the safety inspectors and the nuclear industry (Fukushima was both 100% avoidable through design and 100% avoidable after the tsunami - TEPCO management had their heads so far up their asses it was criminal mismanagement which allowed hydrogen to buildup and japanese "saving face" which caused them not to accept USA offers of help to get emergency generators onsite in the aftermath of the initial tsunami(*))
(*) This is the same japanese pride which resulted in the deaths of _all_ the 747 crash survivors from Flight 123. USA observers from Okinawa located and flew over the crashsite shortly after the crash and saw a number of survivors but the japanese refused to let them land and assist. By the time japanese rescue teams got onsite everyone was dead.
Apart from the rant above: Molten salt reactors are intrinsically a lot safer than any pressurised water reactor because if the lack of both pressure and water in the core. Anyone who thinks molten sodium is a good nuclear coolant in production systems needs to be locked up in a mental institution.
"And as they will now scale up their attacks, the problem will get a lot more pressing."
At some point they'll step on the wrong toes and find themselves floating face down in a pond somewhere.
Assuming it encrypted the stuff for 6 months, then refused to hand it over when you ran a DB query, etc.
If it's offering up unencrypted data for 6 months then you have 6 months of unencrypted data to work from until it locked the thing last week.
"It would be better if it became the habit to spend money on security."
And backups. $8500 buys a pretty decent box to run Bacula on.
" There's also the fruit of a poisoned tree that is along those lines."
The USA is one of the few countries with that rule.
The UK and most other common law countries will not exclude evidence obtained from illegal searches.
Apple could say "yes, we can create it, but there's a cost and it will take some time" then name something in the 9-10 figure range and 5-10 years, taking into account how badly it would affect their commercial goodwill, etc.
Courts cannot compel the creation of a tool "for free"
Or Apple simply moving its headquarters outside the USA.
If they were to stop selling in the USA due to this mind of order the repercussions would be far harder on the government than on Apple - they sell far more outside the USA than in it and such a stand would probably result in more sales as people take notice of the reasons behind it. Most people in most places are sick of the constant intrusions into personal privacy that occur at corporate and governmental levels.