Data centers are not exclusively there for the ebooks, the cost is spread out across tens of millions of customers. Comparing the cost of distributing a paper book with the cost of distributing an ebook is the same as comparing the cost of a paper book and the cost to distribute a web page The web page and ebook are about the same size, yet billions of pages are free, costing a small fraction of a penny to serve. The high prices of ebooks are caused by the middle man, the publisher: the anachronism.
I don't buy the expensive ebooks. Just not at all. There are so many books to read, I move on. The model is changing, and once the authors have finished their contracts and can sell the ebooks directly and the new authors have moved up, the expensive ebooks will disappear.
Also, spreadsheets. I find I dislike spreadsheets that use mono-space fonts, Times New Roman, or Calibri. Arial just seems the natural font for spreadsheets.
Physician assisted suicide is when the doctor puts the patient in a position to commit suicide, usually through an apparatus which provides a lethal and non-painful death and is actuated by the patient. The way Adams describes his father, his father could not actuate anything, so the only option to end his father's suffering is through euthanasia. Euthanasia is what Dr. Kervorkian was actually imprisoned for, not assisted suicide.
Usually the Navy (and others, I'm sure) mitigates contamination with pressure. The system of greater concern will operate at a higher pressure, so when there is a leak it goes in one direction.
Walmart does pay as little as possible. They've probably just found that to get what they need, they have to offer that level of compensation. Walmart is reasonably good at that sort of thing, though I have observed key areas where they definitely need to increase salaries.
The U.S. has $3 trillion in revenues and $500 billion in debt payments. We couldn't find room for that? Do you follow the logic of "we have to borrow money to be able to continue paying our deb"?
"good intelligence" is not spying on everyone. They had to have been selective about who they spied on, and eventually the records and full accounting of what they did became public. With the current surveillance state, the records are sealed permanently, and if they are to be revealed, they are first screened by those who have most to lose from revealing the full nature of what has been done. In the incredibly rare event that elected officials become involved, the bureaucrats are authorized to lie, keep secrets, and hold closed-door meetings. Additionally, with this level of data acquisition, it is reasonable to assume that some amount of blackmail and extortion will occur. This is not 'oversight'. At the very least, oversight should include an expiration date of sealed operations activities that is far enough into the future that it won't threaten the operations, but near enough that it will threaten those who are involved in the operations such that they will follow the publicly known guidelines.
Yes, I believe them. They never lied to me one single time in the Naval Nuclear Power Program. I worked on the plants. I know how the plants work. Kind of hard to tell me lies about things I'm going to work on and maintain. The amount of radiation leaking out is insignificant, and everything I've ever read states that the radiation actually measured is the same as background radiation, however, I'm skeptical of how they measure radiation at such depths. When we checked for contamination, we used handheld detectors to check every surface, which isn't possible at those depths, so I imagine the best they can do is measure radioactivity of the vicinity, which would make sense that they wouldn't find the minute traces of radioactive particles leaking and then dispersing.
Does this make people psychopaths? After reading that article, apparently not. This word is thrown around so many times I can only think of the famous line spoken by the Inigo Montoya character in The Princess Bride.
If that is the case, then it's somehow in the design of the fuel meat. The first ship I was on was at the end of its life. Deactivation is based more on fiscal schedules than anything, so we deactivated in October, but had to shutdown for the last time a couple of months before that to get the core at a low enough temperature that it could be pulled on schedule. Even so, there were only a few more inches of available pull on the lowest rods, though none were at max, IIRC, and we were operating xenon-precluded during the last underway.
The Naval reactors can be run for quite a long time. There are enough redundancies built into the system that most of the components can be taken offline temporarily when maintenance is required without necessitating a reactor shutdown, though there were shutdowns for casualty simulations/training. The primary reason the plants get shutdown is to reduce manning requirements when pulling into port, but that definitely makes for more power cycling than a commercial plant, but it also means a lot more down-time, during which there is no fuel consumption. As I understand it, a commercial plant can replace fuel rods while at power, which blows my mind. Commercial plants also operate boiling water reactors, which are much more efficient than the Navy's pressurized water reactors.
Totally agree with most of that. I think incredibly few captains would bother operating beyond a reactor's stated limits even in wartime. The reason is that you are really only going to get a few more RPM from your screws for an enormous percent increase in reactor power, and at those speeds, this results in only a marginal increase in actual speed of the ship. It just doesn't pay off, while the risks to the equipment are very real. It wouldn't do any good to have an important electrical component fail because of high temperature and cause the reactor to be shut down. For example, a failure in a control rod drive mechanism would cause the rod to be released and the spring would shove the rod into the core, precluding criticality. Another issue is something that can occur based on core age and reactor power. If a core is old enough, it may not be able to be restarted in the event of an emergency shutdown for some period of time. This preclusion isn't a procedure, it's physics: the core has too many poisons exposed relative to available fuel, and the poisons will require a minimum amount of time to decay before the core may be restarted. However, in the event that a captain did order the plant to be operated beyond normal capacity, this would essentially be put into a calculation to determine how the plant is to be operated for the remainder of its life. In other words, the plants were designed with allowances to be operated beyond capacity.
I'm not aware of any power cycling that was not necessary, unless your stating that the procedures are set up that way, but I really can't see that. The only thing that really bothered me was that we always had to have one of the plants operating while in foreign port (surface ships have 2 plants, except the USS Enterprise, which had 8. The claim was that most ports cannot provide enough power for a naval ship, which is loaded with all kinds of pumps and such that do use a very high amount of power compared with most commercial ships, particularly when compared with a nuclear powered ship. Since I've never had any reference for comparison, I just had to hit the I believe button on that one.
In training we covered the incidents of the Thresher and the Scorpion, and neither will discharge anything of genuine concern around them. Even immediately following the shutdown of the reactors and assuming reactor coolant pumps and natural circulation failures, the decay heat would easily be absorbed by the sea water that would have filled the reactor compartment, thus it can safely be assumed that the core remained intact. The other areas that contain high amounts of contamination are the primary shield water tank, the ion exchanger, and the charcoal filters. These systems are closed systems designed to operate at incredibly high pressures and are made of very corrosion resistant materials. Although eventually leaks will form from corrosion, but the leakage would be very slow as there is not significant difference in densities, temperatures, pressures, etc, to cause rapid loss, and the leaks themselves would be quite small.
The other 'incidents' are more public embarrassment than actual environmental concerns. The 'radioactive' water that is discharged comes from the water that circulates through the reactor. Technically, there are radioactive contaminants that emit a small amount of gamma radiation. These contaminants are actually particles that will typically settle in the seabed, IIRC, and are typically borderline measurable in most plants as the water is continually circulated through an ion exchanger (resin bed) and an activated charcoal filter. However, the Navy is so anal it treats anything remotely contaminated as radioactive material. The 'father of Nuclear Power', Admiral Hyman Rickover, famously drank a glass of this water at a Congressional hearing to demonstrate how benign the water really is. I think it is also important to note that the Proteus is not a nuclear powered ship, but a sub tender.
Prior to some year, I forget which (1970, maybe?), the Navy would discharge all kinds of crap at sea, which is actually quite typical of many industries and nations even today. However, the Navy stopped discharge of highly radioactive materials, such as ion exchanger resin, and has set a fleet-wide goal to only discharge so much total annually, I think it's something like 50 Ci, and while I was in would regularly come in under that number.
'Radiation' can come from many other sources than nuclear power plants. I don't know if the limits have changed, but it used to be that coal plants would discharge far more radioactive materials than nuclear power plants, but this would never get mentioned anywhere except nuclear power propaganda. When we were going through our radiological controls training, we learned that porcelain dentures are among the highest sources that people are exposed to. One of the Navy's training facilities has a containment vessel built completely around a nuclear power plant, which is unusual, as containment usually only goes around the reactor compartment. This vessel was made of a material that contained a high amount of alpha radiation, and the subsequent painting with lead-based paint made the vessel itself a far higher in-practice contamination risk than the nuclear plant it contained! Keep in mind this is a product of the private contractor that build the vessel, not the Navy, and the vessel was quite old and built in a time when most people and organizations had less concern for such things.
This is my thinking, but it's the employees, thus management, that are the problem, not the equipment. I worked in the Naval Nuclear Power Program, where everything was essentially manual. One single operator could cause a meltdown, yet the U.S. Navy is one of the largest and one of the oldest operators of nuclear power plants (by hours critical) and has a spotless safety record. Keep in mind that the average age of the 'employees' is around 22 or 23, with a very low percentage of them over age 26.
No, just have the right insurances and demonstrate the entity is treated independently, and the liability protections are the same as for any other. The most common example of an entity not protecting from liability is when it is used by professionals, which has a strict meaning to be doctors, lawyers, CPAs, etc, where the business, by its nature, is purely the individual providing services which are essentially inseparable from the person (legal opinion, medical procedure/opinion, etc). Usually these professionals only bother incorporating for tax benefit purposes.
The real problem faced by the Social Fixer is that the entity will be just as liable as he would, and would require the same resources, same amount of work, legal defense, headache, etc, so it would likely not present any kind of solution to the person's problem unless the entity is used to pool resources of others. However, from what I've read of this guy, he doesn't have any aspirations to do much more than code alone in his basement, so it seems unlikely he would want to establish an organization.
Slashdot Mirror
It's fascism.
Data centers are not exclusively there for the ebooks, the cost is spread out across tens of millions of customers. Comparing the cost of distributing a paper book with the cost of distributing an ebook is the same as comparing the cost of a paper book and the cost to distribute a web page The web page and ebook are about the same size, yet billions of pages are free, costing a small fraction of a penny to serve. The high prices of ebooks are caused by the middle man, the publisher: the anachronism.
I don't buy the expensive ebooks. Just not at all. There are so many books to read, I move on. The model is changing, and once the authors have finished their contracts and can sell the ebooks directly and the new authors have moved up, the expensive ebooks will disappear.
Also, spreadsheets. I find I dislike spreadsheets that use mono-space fonts, Times New Roman, or Calibri. Arial just seems the natural font for spreadsheets.
Physician assisted suicide is when the doctor puts the patient in a position to commit suicide, usually through an apparatus which provides a lethal and non-painful death and is actuated by the patient. The way Adams describes his father, his father could not actuate anything, so the only option to end his father's suffering is through euthanasia. Euthanasia is what Dr. Kervorkian was actually imprisoned for, not assisted suicide.
Yep. Torrents are for porn.
Usually the Navy (and others, I'm sure) mitigates contamination with pressure. The system of greater concern will operate at a higher pressure, so when there is a leak it goes in one direction.
Walmart does pay as little as possible. They've probably just found that to get what they need, they have to offer that level of compensation. Walmart is reasonably good at that sort of thing, though I have observed key areas where they definitely need to increase salaries.
If you discount everything a person says, why are you posting here?
I used the wrong word, meant claimant. It is not valid. I don't care who or where the claim comes from, it should be disputed in logic and reason.
The U.S. has $3 trillion in revenues and $500 billion in debt payments. We couldn't find room for that? Do you follow the logic of "we have to borrow money to be able to continue paying our deb"?
Then dispute it with logic and reason. Using a logical fallacy to attack a claim adds weight to the claim.
"good intelligence" is not spying on everyone. They had to have been selective about who they spied on, and eventually the records and full accounting of what they did became public. With the current surveillance state, the records are sealed permanently, and if they are to be revealed, they are first screened by those who have most to lose from revealing the full nature of what has been done. In the incredibly rare event that elected officials become involved, the bureaucrats are authorized to lie, keep secrets, and hold closed-door meetings. Additionally, with this level of data acquisition, it is reasonable to assume that some amount of blackmail and extortion will occur. This is not 'oversight'. At the very least, oversight should include an expiration date of sealed operations activities that is far enough into the future that it won't threaten the operations, but near enough that it will threaten those who are involved in the operations such that they will follow the publicly known guidelines.
"as transparent as it can be"
"with as much oversight and citizens' understanding as there can be"
Yes, I believe them. They never lied to me one single time in the Naval Nuclear Power Program. I worked on the plants. I know how the plants work. Kind of hard to tell me lies about things I'm going to work on and maintain. The amount of radiation leaking out is insignificant, and everything I've ever read states that the radiation actually measured is the same as background radiation, however, I'm skeptical of how they measure radiation at such depths. When we checked for contamination, we used handheld detectors to check every surface, which isn't possible at those depths, so I imagine the best they can do is measure radioactivity of the vicinity, which would make sense that they wouldn't find the minute traces of radioactive particles leaking and then dispersing.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Does this make people psychopaths? After reading that article, apparently not. This word is thrown around so many times I can only think of the famous line spoken by the Inigo Montoya character in The Princess Bride.
My tool of preference was the magnifying glass.
Constitutional law professor. FTFY
IIRC, the form you fill out includes a perforated smaller piece that is to be put in your wallet and kept with your driver's license.
If that is the case, then it's somehow in the design of the fuel meat. The first ship I was on was at the end of its life. Deactivation is based more on fiscal schedules than anything, so we deactivated in October, but had to shutdown for the last time a couple of months before that to get the core at a low enough temperature that it could be pulled on schedule. Even so, there were only a few more inches of available pull on the lowest rods, though none were at max, IIRC, and we were operating xenon-precluded during the last underway.
The Naval reactors can be run for quite a long time. There are enough redundancies built into the system that most of the components can be taken offline temporarily when maintenance is required without necessitating a reactor shutdown, though there were shutdowns for casualty simulations/training. The primary reason the plants get shutdown is to reduce manning requirements when pulling into port, but that definitely makes for more power cycling than a commercial plant, but it also means a lot more down-time, during which there is no fuel consumption. As I understand it, a commercial plant can replace fuel rods while at power, which blows my mind. Commercial plants also operate boiling water reactors, which are much more efficient than the Navy's pressurized water reactors.
Totally agree with most of that. I think incredibly few captains would bother operating beyond a reactor's stated limits even in wartime. The reason is that you are really only going to get a few more RPM from your screws for an enormous percent increase in reactor power, and at those speeds, this results in only a marginal increase in actual speed of the ship. It just doesn't pay off, while the risks to the equipment are very real. It wouldn't do any good to have an important electrical component fail because of high temperature and cause the reactor to be shut down. For example, a failure in a control rod drive mechanism would cause the rod to be released and the spring would shove the rod into the core, precluding criticality. Another issue is something that can occur based on core age and reactor power. If a core is old enough, it may not be able to be restarted in the event of an emergency shutdown for some period of time. This preclusion isn't a procedure, it's physics: the core has too many poisons exposed relative to available fuel, and the poisons will require a minimum amount of time to decay before the core may be restarted. However, in the event that a captain did order the plant to be operated beyond normal capacity, this would essentially be put into a calculation to determine how the plant is to be operated for the remainder of its life. In other words, the plants were designed with allowances to be operated beyond capacity.
I'm not aware of any power cycling that was not necessary, unless your stating that the procedures are set up that way, but I really can't see that. The only thing that really bothered me was that we always had to have one of the plants operating while in foreign port (surface ships have 2 plants, except the USS Enterprise, which had 8. The claim was that most ports cannot provide enough power for a naval ship, which is loaded with all kinds of pumps and such that do use a very high amount of power compared with most commercial ships, particularly when compared with a nuclear powered ship. Since I've never had any reference for comparison, I just had to hit the I believe button on that one.
In training we covered the incidents of the Thresher and the Scorpion, and neither will discharge anything of genuine concern around them. Even immediately following the shutdown of the reactors and assuming reactor coolant pumps and natural circulation failures, the decay heat would easily be absorbed by the sea water that would have filled the reactor compartment, thus it can safely be assumed that the core remained intact. The other areas that contain high amounts of contamination are the primary shield water tank, the ion exchanger, and the charcoal filters. These systems are closed systems designed to operate at incredibly high pressures and are made of very corrosion resistant materials. Although eventually leaks will form from corrosion, but the leakage would be very slow as there is not significant difference in densities, temperatures, pressures, etc, to cause rapid loss, and the leaks themselves would be quite small.
The other 'incidents' are more public embarrassment than actual environmental concerns. The 'radioactive' water that is discharged comes from the water that circulates through the reactor. Technically, there are radioactive contaminants that emit a small amount of gamma radiation. These contaminants are actually particles that will typically settle in the seabed, IIRC, and are typically borderline measurable in most plants as the water is continually circulated through an ion exchanger (resin bed) and an activated charcoal filter. However, the Navy is so anal it treats anything remotely contaminated as radioactive material. The 'father of Nuclear Power', Admiral Hyman Rickover, famously drank a glass of this water at a Congressional hearing to demonstrate how benign the water really is. I think it is also important to note that the Proteus is not a nuclear powered ship, but a sub tender.
Prior to some year, I forget which (1970, maybe?), the Navy would discharge all kinds of crap at sea, which is actually quite typical of many industries and nations even today. However, the Navy stopped discharge of highly radioactive materials, such as ion exchanger resin, and has set a fleet-wide goal to only discharge so much total annually, I think it's something like 50 Ci, and while I was in would regularly come in under that number.
'Radiation' can come from many other sources than nuclear power plants. I don't know if the limits have changed, but it used to be that coal plants would discharge far more radioactive materials than nuclear power plants, but this would never get mentioned anywhere except nuclear power propaganda. When we were going through our radiological controls training, we learned that porcelain dentures are among the highest sources that people are exposed to. One of the Navy's training facilities has a containment vessel built completely around a nuclear power plant, which is unusual, as containment usually only goes around the reactor compartment. This vessel was made of a material that contained a high amount of alpha radiation, and the subsequent painting with lead-based paint made the vessel itself a far higher in-practice contamination risk than the nuclear plant it contained! Keep in mind this is a product of the private contractor that build the vessel, not the Navy, and the vessel was quite old and built in a time when most people and organizations had less concern for such things.
This is my thinking, but it's the employees, thus management, that are the problem, not the equipment. I worked in the Naval Nuclear Power Program, where everything was essentially manual. One single operator could cause a meltdown, yet the U.S. Navy is one of the largest and one of the oldest operators of nuclear power plants (by hours critical) and has a spotless safety record. Keep in mind that the average age of the 'employees' is around 22 or 23, with a very low percentage of them over age 26.
No, just have the right insurances and demonstrate the entity is treated independently, and the liability protections are the same as for any other. The most common example of an entity not protecting from liability is when it is used by professionals, which has a strict meaning to be doctors, lawyers, CPAs, etc, where the business, by its nature, is purely the individual providing services which are essentially inseparable from the person (legal opinion, medical procedure/opinion, etc). Usually these professionals only bother incorporating for tax benefit purposes.
The real problem faced by the Social Fixer is that the entity will be just as liable as he would, and would require the same resources, same amount of work, legal defense, headache, etc, so it would likely not present any kind of solution to the person's problem unless the entity is used to pool resources of others. However, from what I've read of this guy, he doesn't have any aspirations to do much more than code alone in his basement, so it seems unlikely he would want to establish an organization.