I've been using BSD for servers for 20 years, and as much as I support the kind of things they are talking about here, I don't support making it a hard and fast policy, nor do I agree with mixing social issues with technical and commercial products and services.
I will be migrating all of my servers, probably to one or another flavor of Linux.
"Country with history of lying about foreign affairs accusing another country with a history of lying about foreign affairs of lying about foreign affairs."
Benjamin Sovacool has a known anti-nuclear bias, and his topics range from economics to engineering and now to safety, none of which are areas in which he has any education or expertise.
Yes, the cost would be a large chunk of our GDP; why is that a problem? Where else should that much of our GDP go, if not to food and shelter for people?
And how much would our GDP improve if, all of a sudden, we had a strong consumer base, again? I'm not an economist, so I can't run the numbers, but it seems obvious that the economy as a whole would improve massively.
We've been hearing the rhetoric that tax cuts increase tax revenue by stimulating the economy for decades, and that's true, IF, and only if, the tax cuts go to people who will spend more money. The problem is that they keep giving the tax cuts to rich people, who don't spend it, which leads to lower revenue and an even worse economy.
A Universal Basic Income is just the reverse; give money to people who sill spend it on goods and services, and it will drive the economy.
In an era where increased productivity and technology has radically improved the ability of an individual to accomplish work, it is only natural that fewer and fewer jobs will become available, and there is a strong argument that many jobs that exist today are make-work programs; effectively a UBI for certain people. We need to extend it to everyone, or there are going to be a major problem.
As usual, the Ars Technofools have completely and totally missed the point:
The shuttle program should have been canceled. It was a wasteful boondoggle with no purpose other than the one-up the Soviets; unless you want to add it to the Cold War strategy of forcing the USSR to spend money on similar boondoggles, but look how that turned out.
"new legislation would provide the government with the ability to force CSPs to "develop and maintain a technical capability to remove encryption that has been applied to communications or data"."
Next, lawmakers will demand that companies develop telepathy and magic.
Is the interviewer an idiot? Or are the scientists writing the book just out for publicity? I don't really care.
Of course String Theory and the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Physics are controversial; they are unproven, possibly unprovable, hypotheses, and I don't know a single physicist who says otherwise.
Does that make it a "crisis in science?" Were Newtonian mechanics and Special Relativity "crises?" If so, we need more crises, not fewer.
This is terrible news! It means that North Korea might actually become a viable, independent state that we cannot contain with economic sanctions and foreign policy arm-twisting.
That means that we might have to (gasp!) actually talk to them and treat them as a legitimate government with the right to sovereignty over their own land.
Has anyone else noticed that our "non-proliferation" programs have done nothing but increased nuclear weapon proliferation?
Something overlooked is that drug testing technology has advanced; in the wrong direction, but it has advanced.
They have made the tests more accurate, which sounds like a good thing until you realize that they sacrificed precision to do so. Yea, on average, the tests get good results, but at the cost of many "outliers," i.e. false positives and negatives.
Supposedly this is corrected by verification through a GC test at a lab, but more and more labs are getting caught confirming initial results without actually doing the test.
And I caught one last year: Knowing that I hadn't used anything in years, and knowing that I could pass (using home kits, afterwards), I gave a sample that tested positive and the lab confirmed. Ah, but I'm a chemist, so I asked them for the numbers, and they hung up on me.
Lost the job, anyway, but now I know: Clean or not, ALWAYS CHEAT!
They can make formic acid much more efficiently than methanol, and it is actually a better option for fuel cells since it does not cross the polymer membrane.
...and you can't look at something out of context.
Compared to any other energy source, nuclear power remains the cleanest and safest option currently available. Fusion power might change that, but everything else...
-Coal is hands-down the worst, and I hope no one is stupid enough to deny that;
-Oil is pretty bad, but less than a third of all petroleum goes to fuel; if you don't like it, quit using plastic, taking medicine and eating food grown with fertilizer;
-Natural gas is not good, even if it's cleaner and safer than coal or oil; the issue is that it is unnecessary, unless you plan on using solar or wind;
-Solar power is expensive, dirty and dangerous, mostly on the mining and manufacturing end, cannot possibly scale to meet demand in any reasonable time frame, and has such a low capacity factor that it has to either be load-followed with natural gas or use energy storage which completely negates the benefits;
-Wind is actually the best competitor, but like hydroelectric, it has a low capacity factor which requires load-following, but unlike hydroelectric, it cannot be stored and used on demand without the same kind of energy storage which makes solar so problematic, and like solar, it cannot possibly scale up to meet demand. In any case, is still dirtier and more dangerous than nuclear power.
We are at the exact moment when we should be massively expanding nuclear power, but instead we are letting neo-Luddite, faux-environmentalist scaremongers lead the discussion away from the best option available to us. I'm sure the gas, oil and coal companies appreciate it.
Yes, there are some legitimate problems with GMOs, but they are legal issues, not health or environmental ones, and no one is talking about the alternative: More fertilizer, more water, more land use, more fuel to get less food.
Oh, and to pad the profit margins of the laughable "organic" food industry, which, incidentally, is spending much more money on lobbying and propaganda than the GMO industry.
So, just lump this one in with climate-change denial, anti-vaccinet, chemtrail and moon-landing--was-a-hoax crowds.
I got hired with a local ISP/network service group, and my first assignment was to go install a new frac-t1 router in a new client's office (yea, this was ~15 years ago, cheap t1 routers were still ~$1k). So the boss takes me back into the storeroom, digs out a router from a pile, and grabs a random power supply by comparing the size of the plug to the hole in the router. I actually bother to check the rating, and find that the power supply is 24V, and the router wants 18V. The boss tells me to plug it in.
Me: "Um, I don't think this is the right power supply."
Boss: "It'll work, come on, we're in a hurry."
Me: "But this is a 24V supply, and the router wants 18V"
There are valid concerns about nuclear safety, but all too often these issues are spoken of as if they exist in a vacuum. Do you have any idea how many people solar panels and wind turbines kill, to say nothing of coal-fired power plants? More than nuclear, per unit power, even including accidents, and this is in normal operation, not an accident!
In any case, as with all technology, it gets better. The latest reactors can't have the kind of serious accident seen at Fukushima or Chernobyl, and they solve the waste problem, as well.
If there is a problem, it is that Russia and China are building them while we continue with these pipe-dream fantasies that we can somehow build enough solar and wind units before we start seeing serious climate disruption, that doing so would actually help, and that other, poor countries will just stop using energy, themselves.
"A BS in physics is the liberal arts degree of STEM"
Yea; good thing I minored in Chemistry or I'd be hosed:)
"grad school"
I plan on it, but I was totally wiped out, financially, by the time I got my B.S., and with no local grad program, I just didn't have the wherewithal at the time.
"3500 physicists laid off by NASA"/shrug
I just remember reading the figure at the time, and I found myself competing with them for crap jobs (seriously, lab tech at tiny chemical companies). It's not hard to imagine the news got the numbers wrong, but how many people did get laid off when the shuttle program was cancelled?
Slashdot Mirror
I've been using BSD for servers for 20 years, and as much as I support the kind of things they are talking about here, I don't support making it a hard and fast policy, nor do I agree with mixing social issues with technical and commercial products and services.
I will be migrating all of my servers, probably to one or another flavor of Linux.
"Country with history of lying about foreign affairs accusing another country with a history of lying about foreign affairs of lying about foreign affairs."
This story was a waste of electricity.
...and you can believe as much or as little of that as you like.
Basically, he's going to make it harder to graduate high school.
What an asshole.
I wasn't going to buy one of those pieces of crap, anyway, and now they won't even make the type of car that I would consider buying.
Ironically, I still use AMD graphics cards, but I switched to Intel CPUs a while back.
The Internet caters to the lowest common denominator; someone else will make the equivalent service without the ads, and Facebook will die.
Good riddance.
Benjamin Sovacool has a known anti-nuclear bias, and his topics range from economics to engineering and now to safety, none of which are areas in which he has any education or expertise.
Yes, the cost would be a large chunk of our GDP; why is that a problem? Where else should that much of our GDP go, if not to food and shelter for people?
And how much would our GDP improve if, all of a sudden, we had a strong consumer base, again? I'm not an economist, so I can't run the numbers, but it seems obvious that the economy as a whole would improve massively.
We've been hearing the rhetoric that tax cuts increase tax revenue by stimulating the economy for decades, and that's true, IF, and only if, the tax cuts go to people who will spend more money. The problem is that they keep giving the tax cuts to rich people, who don't spend it, which leads to lower revenue and an even worse economy.
A Universal Basic Income is just the reverse; give money to people who sill spend it on goods and services, and it will drive the economy.
In an era where increased productivity and technology has radically improved the ability of an individual to accomplish work, it is only natural that fewer and fewer jobs will become available, and there is a strong argument that many jobs that exist today are make-work programs; effectively a UBI for certain people. We need to extend it to everyone, or there are going to be a major problem.
As usual, the Ars Technofools have completely and totally missed the point:
The shuttle program should have been canceled. It was a wasteful boondoggle with no purpose other than the one-up the Soviets; unless you want to add it to the Cold War strategy of forcing the USSR to spend money on similar boondoggles, but look how that turned out.
"new legislation would provide the government with the ability to force CSPs to "develop and maintain a technical capability to remove encryption that has been applied to communications or data"."
Next, lawmakers will demand that companies develop telepathy and magic.
Is the interviewer an idiot? Or are the scientists writing the book just out for publicity? I don't really care.
Of course String Theory and the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Physics are controversial; they are unproven, possibly unprovable, hypotheses, and I don't know a single physicist who says otherwise.
Does that make it a "crisis in science?" Were Newtonian mechanics and Special Relativity "crises?" If so, we need more crises, not fewer.
This is terrible news! It means that North Korea might actually become a viable, independent state that we cannot contain with economic sanctions and foreign policy arm-twisting.
That means that we might have to (gasp!) actually talk to them and treat them as a legitimate government with the right to sovereignty over their own land.
Has anyone else noticed that our "non-proliferation" programs have done nothing but increased nuclear weapon proliferation?
Something overlooked is that drug testing technology has advanced; in the wrong direction, but it has advanced.
They have made the tests more accurate, which sounds like a good thing until you realize that they sacrificed precision to do so. Yea, on average, the tests get good results, but at the cost of many "outliers," i.e. false positives and negatives.
Supposedly this is corrected by verification through a GC test at a lab, but more and more labs are getting caught confirming initial results without actually doing the test.
And I caught one last year: Knowing that I hadn't used anything in years, and knowing that I could pass (using home kits, afterwards), I gave a sample that tested positive and the lab confirmed. Ah, but I'm a chemist, so I asked them for the numbers, and they hung up on me.
Lost the job, anyway, but now I know: Clean or not, ALWAYS CHEAT!
http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...
They can make formic acid much more efficiently than methanol, and it is actually a better option for fuel cells since it does not cross the polymer membrane.
...and you can't look at something out of context.
Compared to any other energy source, nuclear power remains the cleanest and safest option currently available. Fusion power might change that, but everything else...
-Coal is hands-down the worst, and I hope no one is stupid enough to deny that;
-Oil is pretty bad, but less than a third of all petroleum goes to fuel; if you don't like it, quit using plastic, taking medicine and eating food grown with fertilizer;
-Natural gas is not good, even if it's cleaner and safer than coal or oil; the issue is that it is unnecessary, unless you plan on using solar or wind;
-Solar power is expensive, dirty and dangerous, mostly on the mining and manufacturing end, cannot possibly scale to meet demand in any reasonable time frame, and has such a low capacity factor that it has to either be load-followed with natural gas or use energy storage which completely negates the benefits;
-Wind is actually the best competitor, but like hydroelectric, it has a low capacity factor which requires load-following, but unlike hydroelectric, it cannot be stored and used on demand without the same kind of energy storage which makes solar so problematic, and like solar, it cannot possibly scale up to meet demand. In any case, is still dirtier and more dangerous than nuclear power.
We are at the exact moment when we should be massively expanding nuclear power, but instead we are letting neo-Luddite, faux-environmentalist scaremongers lead the discussion away from the best option available to us. I'm sure the gas, oil and coal companies appreciate it.
"If I recall, the stone age stuff was pretty tasty."
Yes, that's why we continually bred different foods; to get stuff that was worse for us. Huh?
"Not messing with mother nature is not neo-luddite-ism."
Yes, it is.
"Messing with it is hubris"
So, you don't eat oranges? Corn? Potatoes? THOSE DON'T EXIST IN NATURE!
Do these people want us to go back to the Stone Age? Because that's what's going to happen.
These people are opposed to any progress that might actually solve the problems we face, which only leaves us with the option of going backwards.
Ah, another case of anti-science panic.
Yes, there are some legitimate problems with GMOs, but they are legal issues, not health or environmental ones, and no one is talking about the alternative: More fertilizer, more water, more land use, more fuel to get less food.
Oh, and to pad the profit margins of the laughable "organic" food industry, which, incidentally, is spending much more money on lobbying and propaganda than the GMO industry.
So, just lump this one in with climate-change denial, anti-vaccinet, chemtrail and moon-landing--was-a-hoax crowds.
"It's much easier to capture the CO2"
It's not easy to do at all, and where is the extra energy for THAT going to come from?
If they do that, though, they will have to price the co2 that went into making the batteries, at which point, EVs will die.
People don't like electric cars because:
1. They are expensive.
2. They have limited range.
3. They are environmentally disastrous.
Leave it to the halfwits at Ars to completely miss the point.
I got hired with a local ISP/network service group, and my first assignment was to go install a new frac-t1 router in a new client's office (yea, this was ~15 years ago, cheap t1 routers were still ~$1k). So the boss takes me back into the storeroom, digs out a router from a pile, and grabs a random power supply by comparing the size of the plug to the hole in the router. I actually bother to check the rating, and find that the power supply is 24V, and the router wants 18V. The boss tells me to plug it in.
Me: "Um, I don't think this is the right power supply."
Boss: "It'll work, come on, we're in a hurry."
Me: "But this is a 24V supply, and the router wants 18V"
Boss: "I said plug it in, what are you, deaf?"
Me: "OK..."
BANG! Fizzle-smoke-spark!
Boss: "What did you do that for?"
Shortest job I've ever had.
There are valid concerns about nuclear safety, but all too often these issues are spoken of as if they exist in a vacuum. Do you have any idea how many people solar panels and wind turbines kill, to say nothing of coal-fired power plants? More than nuclear, per unit power, even including accidents, and this is in normal operation, not an accident!
In any case, as with all technology, it gets better. The latest reactors can't have the kind of serious accident seen at Fukushima or Chernobyl, and they solve the waste problem, as well.
If there is a problem, it is that Russia and China are building them while we continue with these pipe-dream fantasies that we can somehow build enough solar and wind units before we start seeing serious climate disruption, that doing so would actually help, and that other, poor countries will just stop using energy, themselves.
"A BS in physics is the liberal arts degree of STEM"
Yea; good thing I minored in Chemistry or I'd be hosed :)
"grad school"
I plan on it, but I was totally wiped out, financially, by the time I got my B.S., and with no local grad program, I just didn't have the wherewithal at the time.
"3500 physicists laid off by NASA" /shrug
I just remember reading the figure at the time, and I found myself competing with them for crap jobs (seriously, lab tech at tiny chemical companies). It's not hard to imagine the news got the numbers wrong, but how many people did get laid off when the shuttle program was cancelled?
It might also be my proximity to Huntsville...