.. would not be a chimp. Aside from that, *all* of your ideas are highly impractical. Their strength and aggressiveness would make them *terrible* soldiers, because they'd be impossible to control. A lot of what makes armies effective are things humans are uniquely good at, like working together and suppressing our instinctual reactions.
As for athletic coaches, the most important thing in a coach is an understanding of individual and group human psychology.
The idea of using super-chimps as nannies comes from watching too many Tarzan movies, which use cute baby chimps. Next to polar bears, adult chimps are probably the most dangerously aggressive animal in the zoo.
Politicians are no worse than the people who elect them, albeit in different ways. The character faults of politicians are dishonesty, hypocrisy, egotism, and inattention to duty. The faults of the people who elect them (or allow them to be elected if they don't vote) are laziness, ignorance, credulity, cowardice and bigotry.
In the US given the difficulty of an Constitutional amendment, the only way to fix the system is to improve the electorate. That's why politicians either hate education, or love the status quo in education.
If you are hiring somebody as a *programmer*, the marginal value of intelligence beyond "rather bright" is nil. Looking at his code is an obvious thing to do if it's available, but based on my experience hiring and managing programmers these are the other kinds of things I'd look for (references are crucial!):
(1) Conscientious. Will he adhere to coding standards? Will he commit his work every day? Will he focus on what he's told to?
(2) Honest. Will he tell me if he's having a problem, or will he cover it up?
(3) Personailty: A little arrogance is a good thing, but can he work with others without alienating them or getting into stupid turf or status battles?
(4) Ambition: Is he interested enough in furthering his skills that he'll willingly learn new technologies? Will he stretch on his deliverables in a way that adds to the teams capabilities?
Now the puzzle test may well make sense for many jobs at Google *other* than programmer, such as an algorithm designer. Programming beautifully is always nice, but hiring conscientious craftsmen wouldn't have helped Google when it needed to devise something like BigTable, or how to handle the immense, geographically distributed work load its customers generate.
You can see this in how Google treats new technologies. Ever wonder why they keep coming up with new things like Wave then dropping them? It's because many new services it develops are a side effect of being able to solve really tough problems in its core business. It's not a *product* oriented company; it's a company that does algorithms and infrastructure really, really well but does new things opportunistically.
There are many technical positions other than programming, and they take different kinds of people. The best system architects, for example, aren't necessarily the best programmers. They need to have experience and understanding of the process, of course, but they need a whole bunch of interdisciplinary business, technical, and people skills because they're shaping the activities of the developing organization far into the future.
Please allow me to rephrase: "More phones are capable of running MIDlets than APKs."
Sure. But is there a functioning *market* for midlets? One that will bring a pack of uniformly targetable customers to developers and a selection of apps for users? Or is it divided up by handset manufacturer and implementation?
I followed Java ME for a decade; it was promising, but it was never one platform that could bring users and developers together because it was controlled by so many different middle men. It was the handset makers' role to provide an implementation, and they catered to the carriers, not users or developers. Consequently there could never have been anything like a J2ME app store because no two implementations were the same. Intentionally or not, that's just the way the carriers wanted it. They don't *want* customers using generic Internet services, they want them tied to proprietary services like "picture mail" or music stores. It took the strength of Apple on one hand, and the weakness of AT&T on the other, to break the inertia.
I haven't followed Java ME since Android came out on real hardware, so maybe things have changed, but when I *was* following it, it made no sense at all to add up all the J2ME phones because so many of the implementations had proprietary extensions, and there was never a robust common minimum user experience guaranteed across all the myriad handsets J2ME was installed upon. This meant there was never a unified market for buying and selling apps. That was the feudal era of mobile app development.
It's been my experience that most people don't have any opinions of their own; they just latch onto belief systems that are attractive to them and parrot arguments they've heard for them, often down to identical catchphrases. It's not a matter of intelligence, it's a matter of originality. Intelligent people are by in large no more original than stupid ones. The only thing that sets most clever people apart from stupid ones is how nicely they stitch together their second-hand arguments.
If we chose *prevalence* as the sole litmus test for normality, I suspect it might not be possible to classify necrophilia as "abnormal" without also classifying having original thoughts as "abnormal" as well.
So condemning an idea because it comes from a freak is pointless. Have you ever read about Isaac Newton's experiments on the optics of the human eye? If you're not squeamish, read Will Dunham's "Journey Through Genius: The Great Theorems of Mathematics". It's a relief to get Euler, who for once doesn't have freakish behavior to go along with his freakish creativity.
Well, I wouldn't call scientific opinions delivered by state officials in congressional testimony evidence for *anything*. If you know anything about bureaucrats and congressional testimony, you know that it is their job to deliver the opinion of the political leadership. I know someone who worked as a staff scientist for NOAA who in the early days of the Clinton-Bush transition had to testify to a Congressional committee that the agency had *no* opinion yet.
As for your second link, it doesn't establish at all what the article lead claims. It doesn't report on the establishment of any *theoretical maximum, only an empirical relationship derived from seven observations in which tremor size was proportional to the log of the amount of fluid injected. Naturally this is quite a handy numerical rule of thumb, but is not a "theoretical" limit. Furthermore, we have to be careful about semantics here, which we won't know until the authors actually publish. "Induced" might not be the same as "triggered"; I'd guess there's no theoretical limit to the size tremor that could be triggered in the presence of a fault.
I do agree one has to look at the seismic history of an area before jumping to any conclusions. It is possible even that inducing small tremors are beneficial in the long run.
And in some US states (California for example), a family spends 20% of its income on insurance premiums and out-of-pocket expenses [Source: "Family health care premiums exceed 20% of income", San Francisco Chronicle November 11, 2011]. Between 2003 and 2010, premiums and out-of-pocket expenses for employees has risen by 63% [Source:C. Schoen, A.-K. Fryer, S. R. Collins, and D. C. Radley, State Trends in Premiums and Deductibles, 2003–2010: The Need for Action to Address Rising Costs, The Commonwealth Fund, November 2011].
Basically, we were on track (pre Obama-care) to spending 50% of our incomes on health care by 2025 or so. Given the cautious, incremental nature of Obama-care, it would be remarkable if it managed to cut that rate of cost growth in half, but even then it would be pointed to as a miserable failure. If it is stripped of its individual mandate, then Obama-care is likely to have no effect at all. The prospect for robust employment recovery in this situation is bleak, since the marginal cost of hiring an employee is high and riding.
So basically, the health care cost crisis has us over a barrel, and Europe is spread-eagled by the sovereign debt crisis. We'll recover, but we aren't going to see the kind of economic growth we took for granted in the second half of the 20th C, because the solutions to our respective crises are politically unpopular.
Well, it *is* about controlling the customer *within the limits of what can feasibly be done*. Unfortunately, that starts with controlling yourself.
A successful interaction between two parties is one where both parties believe they can get what they want out of the other party, and thus each side feels a measure of "control". That means letting objective value govern your behavior, not instant emotional gratification. Getting *personal* turns the situation into a struggle which inflates costs and offers no satisfactory outcome for either party -- at least not since they outlawed dueling.
When the other guy gets personal first, self-control *feels* like an injustice to yourself, but in fact it's a way to obtain the most favorable outcome for yourself. In this case, given that the customer wanted the product, he might well be content to receive his widget late at the cost of nothing more than a sympathetic and informative response to his query. Even after the initial bungle he was telegraphing that he'd be happy with some kind of token response -- an apology and one of those T-shirts you were going to give away at CES might have done the trick.
When faced with a hostile customer, it's not easy to keep your cool and do the right thing. That's why we had to invent the word "professionalism" to describe a level of self-control, level-headedness and foresight that not everyone can achieve.
But not too many at once, because we want to learn slowly.
It's not a matter of wanting to learn slowly. It's a matter of wanting to learn more quickly than a particular reactor design or technology becomes politically "too big to fail".
And 4 massive nuclear disasters per century is an acceptable trade off.
Sure, but currently 14% of the world's electricity is generated from nuclear. Let's say it grew to 50%, and the electricity demand quadruples (reasonable given population growth, economic development, and a shift toward electric vehicles). We're now talking approximately *60* per century. Also if you are use 100 years as a denominator, you're including the years 1911- 1956 during which there were *no* nuclear power plants in existence, so you've got to start with a rate of 8/century. That means you're talking about around *120* major nuclear incidents per century, or *more than one per year*.
Is that an acceptable trade-off? Of course not. The bogus thing about this analysis of course is that it assumes our designs perform no better than designs of the last century historically did. So what is our base accident rate likely to be? There really is no defensible way of estimating that, which is why a *crash* program in building any *one* reactor design is a bad idea, as is immediately putting all our eggs in the nuclear basket, even if that's where we expect them to be in the long run.
It's not a matter of choosing to have accidents so we can learn from them. Accidents are inevitable so we ought to plan to have them before we can't do anything about the flaws they expose.
(1) no moving working fluid (2) no moving mechanical part (3) no signal inputs of 'intelligence' (4) no external power input or forces
The AP1000 design implements requirements 3 & 4, but not 1 (requires cooling water) or 2 (uses explosive "squib" valves). The system requires no external inputs of control or power to maintain cooling in the event of a main coolant system failure, but the operation of the backup cooling system is automated -- or perhaps it would be better say "automatic".
That's the first I've seen anyone characterize gravity as automation.
I am no more defining "gravity" as automation than I would define "electricity" as automation.. It is you who are defining "passive" as "using gravity in the design".
See my other post re: the IAEA's definition of "passive safety", which is the one I'm going with. Using the IAEA's terminology, the AP1000 uses "passive components", but the system as a whole does not qualify as "passively safe"; the AP1000 is a "category D" design, which according to the IAEA is in the "intermediary zone between active and passive where the execution of the safety function is made through passive methods..." [ref IAEA-TECODC-626 Appendix A, pp 15-18]
While I agree the passive cooling designs are promising, I think some people are counting their proverbial chickens before the designs are hatched. I think nuclear power can be done right, but that starts with getting a few of these promising designs built and thoroughly tested. It's not enough to get to the stage where you don't see a way the design can fail. *All* designs pass through that stage, then experience teaches us what we missed.
IIRC, it's a stretch to call the Ap1000 emergency cooling system "passive". I'd call it "automated". That's good, of course- possibly good enough - but not as good as a truly passively safe system would be,all else being equal.
Yes, only an idiot would expect a metaphor to be understood by the media, who while (ironically) paid to write, are mainly in the business of persuasion.
If a toy includes a rare earth magnet as a part and that part is easy to detach and consume, then a house with that toy would probably count as an environment where children have easy access to rare earth magnets, no?
Sure, but the two scenarios -- the one where you *intentionally* give a child a rare earth magnet and the other where you do so inadvertently -- are entirely different.
Nobody (at least in this conversation) is saying that we should hold manufacturers of rare earth magnet *as* toys responsible when someone is stupid enough to give them to a toddler. However using such a magnet in a toy intended for toddlers is irresponsible.
This issue is one of choosing the correct denominator for calculating the risk for a toy. Remember, we aren't talking about rare earth magnets per se, but ones used as components in toys targeting various age groups.
Roughly speaking here are your choices. (1) All the people in the US. (your choice) (2) All the children in the US. (3) All the children in the US in the target age group of the toy. (4) The number of children who will play with the specific toy in question.
A product doesn't have to be an iPad killer to be successful. In fact it's more likely to be successful if it isn't positioned that way. I'm very happy with my rooted Nook Color. It's not as nice as my wife's iPad 2, but not so much less nice that I feel like we need to have two iPads in the family, or that I need both a laptop AND an iPad.
Well, here's a bona fide quote from someone else, but it is nonetheless apropos. It is from Lord Macaulay's 1841 speech to the British Parliament opposing copyright extension In retrospect they appear prophetic.
Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers. At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot.
The point is that when copyright is perceived as abusive, voluntary compliance by otherwise law-abiding people is at an end.
Bullshit. Nuking the entire Muslim world would have been entirely possible in the context of the times.
Sure. So would nuking France. Or Great Britain. Or even ourselves (you do know we have more than twice the Muslim population of Djibouti; genocide starts at home). Nobody is saying it wasn't *physically* possible to nuke anyone, or *everyone* for that matter.
The real question is whether it was *politically* possible. The answer is no. In part this is because *George W. Bush* had too much sense to even consider that, but the *main* answer is that Americans as a whole would not have stood for it. Religious tolerance has been a basic American value since the founding of our country, and modern Americans as a whole have little enthusiasm for genocide. A somewhat smaller number would have opposed it purely on the obvious grounds that it would have been a disaster for ourselves (disrupting oil supplies, destroying the international economy, risking a global environmental radiological disaster and possibly climatic disruption that could disrupt agriculture even in this country).
That's not to say that *some* Americans don't hold to mainstream values of religious tolerance, dislike of pointless slaughter, and pursuing enlightened self-interest. In a nation of three hundred million the lunatic fringe is loud enough to make a lot of noise.
For that matter, we have our share of people who can't distinguish between things that are *possible* and things that are *advisable*, as can be readily seen in this discussion. Naturally one wouldn't entrust them with making more difficult distinctions, like between *right* and *wrong*. The primary mental defect of these people seems to be that when they feel the impulse to take some action they are incapable of considering whether it has any unintended consequences. In the old days before political correctness we had a name for such people. We used to call them "fools".
This is entirely allowed by our patent system and isn't evil at all.
This is a total non-sequitur. It's not like the Congress is Almighty God and gets to say what is right and wrong. It's legal to buy congressmen, as long as you have the resources to mount a complex campaign of money laundering. That doesn't mean it's not evil.
Neither is faking a pass and then running the ball right down the middle.
OK, if you need the difference spelled out for you, I'll do it. (1) In football, the two teams meet voluntarily. In lawsuits, the defendant is not a willing party to the affair. (2) In football, the by standanders benefit from the fake play *even when it is attempted against their own team*. A deceptive play is a test of defensive skill and a thrill when it is thwarted. In a lawsuit, the customers of the defendant have to pay higher prices.
But wouldn't YOU like to get paid for all the sales your competitors get?
Another non-sequitur. I'd like to have all the money in the bank vault. That doesn't excuse me dynamiting my way in.
Let me explain why what Apple is doing isn't necessarily as LEGALLY kosher as you think it is. It comes down to two words: anti-trust law. It's legal to be granted patents that give you an effective monopoly on a type of product. It's not legal to conspire with another company to restrain trade. The intersection of patent laws and anti-trust laws is a gray area, but the conspiracy angle adds a new wrinkle that's more than just PR.
So: is there any substantive difference between Apple using its patents to establish a monopoly itself, and having a third party do it for them? YES!
If Apple tried this itself, Motorola, Google, and others would retaliate with their own defensive patent lawsuits, forcing a settlement. By assigning their patents to DI under and agreement that exempts themselves, Apple has secured a de facto right it doesn't have under patent law: to be immune from countersuits. DI's legal attack can't be turned aside by counter-suit because DI doesn't make anything.
Let's get back to morality again and apply the categorical imperative here. What if *everyone* did this? What if everyone assigned their legal rights to third parties who do nothing but threaten lawsuits and have nothing to lose by being as aggressive and over-reaching as possible?
Pretty much. The hack was simply embedding javascript in an MP3 id3 tag.
While I'm in favor of jail breaking devices, this does NOT make me want to rush out and buy a Kindle Touch (although I was considering it before), because it reveals a flaw in the the device's basic use. Short of restricting myself to Amazon content, I'd have to check every file I use on it for malware.
This isn't like speculating on the transition between Middle English and modern English. That happened in an era before printing or widespread literacy, and surviving documents from the 15th C are extremely rare. The split between British and American pronunciation started in the mid 1700s and went on through the mid 1800s. We have tons of evidence from the writings of contemporary observers about when and how the changes took place. I actually think that this evidence is *stronger* than the evidence from the early days of recording, since you had to speak in an unnatural cadence and loudness to be heard clearly, and it is highly likely that the pronunciation used was affected and exaggerated. I doubt Teddy Roosevelt talked to his family the way he sounds on recordings. Barack Obama sounds quite different giving a speech than giving an interview, so if you used his recorded speeches as evidence of how Americans normally talk you'd be led astray.
So what were the complaints of the language purists of the early 1800s? Young Lord Byron was castigated by older critics for making rhymes that are now quite valid in modern RP but not in American English. Educated Britons complained of the loss of syllables in "necessary" and "secretary" ("neces-sree" and "secre-tree"), characterizing it as sloppy, lower-class speech. This process of the sloppy becoming the gold standard is still going on today. I suspect that in a hundred years' time Estuary English will supplant the Oxford/BBC/Received Pronunciation as the "correct" dialect.
As for Shakespeare, one can use evidence like rhyme choices, but English poets of yore were rather loose with their interpretation of rhyme. I think it's fairly safe to say that nobody is walking around speaking *exactly* the dialect of 17th C. London. Both Standard American English and RP share a common root in 18th C. English, but RP is more different from the common ancestor dialect than SAE. Nonetheless it's a fair guess that both dialects would sound strange in Elizabethan ears.
Slashdot Mirror
We *shifted* the majority of our carbon emissions involved in manufacturing to China. A lot of China's emissions should be charged to *us*.
A chimp with near-human intelligence
.. would not be a chimp. Aside from that, *all* of your ideas are highly impractical. Their strength and aggressiveness would make them *terrible* soldiers, because they'd be impossible to control. A lot of what makes armies effective are things humans are uniquely good at, like working together and suppressing our instinctual reactions.
As for athletic coaches, the most important thing in a coach is an understanding of individual and group human psychology.
The idea of using super-chimps as nannies comes from watching too many Tarzan movies, which use cute baby chimps. Next to polar bears, adult chimps are probably the most dangerously aggressive animal in the zoo.
Politicians are no worse than the people who elect them, albeit in different ways. The character faults of politicians are dishonesty, hypocrisy, egotism, and inattention to duty. The faults of the people who elect them (or allow them to be elected if they don't vote) are laziness, ignorance, credulity, cowardice and bigotry.
In the US given the difficulty of an Constitutional amendment, the only way to fix the system is to improve the electorate. That's why politicians either hate education, or love the status quo in education.
If you are hiring somebody as a *programmer*, the marginal value of intelligence beyond "rather bright" is nil. Looking at his code is an obvious thing to do if it's available, but based on my experience hiring and managing programmers these are the other kinds of things I'd look for (references are crucial!):
(1) Conscientious. Will he adhere to coding standards? Will he commit his work every day? Will he focus on what he's told to?
(2) Honest. Will he tell me if he's having a problem, or will he cover it up?
(3) Personailty: A little arrogance is a good thing, but can he work with others without alienating them or getting into stupid turf or status battles?
(4) Ambition: Is he interested enough in furthering his skills that he'll willingly learn new technologies? Will he stretch on his deliverables in a way that adds to the teams capabilities?
Now the puzzle test may well make sense for many jobs at Google *other* than programmer, such as an algorithm designer. Programming beautifully is always nice, but hiring conscientious craftsmen wouldn't have helped Google when it needed to devise something like BigTable, or how to handle the immense, geographically distributed work load its customers generate.
You can see this in how Google treats new technologies. Ever wonder why they keep coming up with new things like Wave then dropping them? It's because many new services it develops are a side effect of being able to solve really tough problems in its core business. It's not a *product* oriented company; it's a company that does algorithms and infrastructure really, really well but does new things opportunistically.
There are many technical positions other than programming, and they take different kinds of people. The best system architects, for example, aren't necessarily the best programmers. They need to have experience and understanding of the process, of course, but they need a whole bunch of interdisciplinary business, technical, and people skills because they're shaping the activities of the developing organization far into the future.
Please allow me to rephrase: "More phones are capable of running MIDlets than APKs."
Sure. But is there a functioning *market* for midlets? One that will bring a pack of uniformly targetable customers to developers and a selection of apps for users? Or is it divided up by handset manufacturer and implementation?
I followed Java ME for a decade; it was promising, but it was never one platform that could bring users and developers together because it was controlled by so many different middle men. It was the handset makers' role to provide an implementation, and they catered to the carriers, not users or developers. Consequently there could never have been anything like a J2ME app store because no two implementations were the same. Intentionally or not, that's just the way the carriers wanted it. They don't *want* customers using generic Internet services, they want them tied to proprietary services like "picture mail" or music stores. It took the strength of Apple on one hand, and the weakness of AT&T on the other, to break the inertia.
I haven't followed Java ME since Android came out on real hardware, so maybe things have changed, but when I *was* following it, it made no sense at all to add up all the J2ME phones because so many of the implementations had proprietary extensions, and there was never a robust common minimum user experience guaranteed across all the myriad handsets J2ME was installed upon. This meant there was never a unified market for buying and selling apps. That was the feudal era of mobile app development.
It's been my experience that most people don't have any opinions of their own; they just latch onto belief systems that are attractive to them and parrot arguments they've heard for them, often down to identical catchphrases. It's not a matter of intelligence, it's a matter of originality. Intelligent people are by in large no more original than stupid ones. The only thing that sets most clever people apart from stupid ones is how nicely they stitch together their second-hand arguments.
If we chose *prevalence* as the sole litmus test for normality, I suspect it might not be possible to classify necrophilia as "abnormal" without also classifying having original thoughts as "abnormal" as well.
So condemning an idea because it comes from a freak is pointless. Have you ever read about Isaac Newton's experiments on the optics of the human eye? If you're not squeamish, read Will Dunham's "Journey Through Genius: The Great Theorems of Mathematics". It's a relief to get Euler, who for once doesn't have freakish behavior to go along with his freakish creativity.
Well, I wouldn't call scientific opinions delivered by state officials in congressional testimony evidence for *anything*. If you know anything about bureaucrats and congressional testimony, you know that it is their job to deliver the opinion of the political leadership. I know someone who worked as a staff scientist for NOAA who in the early days of the Clinton-Bush transition had to testify to a Congressional committee that the agency had *no* opinion yet.
As for your second link, it doesn't establish at all what the article lead claims. It doesn't report on the establishment of any *theoretical maximum, only an empirical relationship derived from seven observations in which tremor size was proportional to the log of the amount of fluid injected. Naturally this is quite a handy numerical rule of thumb, but is not a "theoretical" limit. Furthermore, we have to be careful about semantics here, which we won't know until the authors actually publish. "Induced" might not be the same as "triggered"; I'd guess there's no theoretical limit to the size tremor that could be triggered in the presence of a fault.
I do agree one has to look at the seismic history of an area before jumping to any conclusions. It is possible even that inducing small tremors are beneficial in the long run.
And in some US states (California for example), a family spends 20% of its income on insurance premiums and out-of-pocket expenses [Source: "Family health care premiums exceed 20% of income", San Francisco Chronicle November 11, 2011]. Between 2003 and 2010, premiums and out-of-pocket expenses for employees has risen by 63% [Source:C. Schoen, A.-K. Fryer, S. R. Collins, and D. C. Radley, State Trends in Premiums and Deductibles, 2003–2010: The Need for Action to Address Rising Costs, The Commonwealth Fund, November 2011].
Basically, we were on track (pre Obama-care) to spending 50% of our incomes on health care by 2025 or so. Given the cautious, incremental nature of Obama-care, it would be remarkable if it managed to cut that rate of cost growth in half, but even then it would be pointed to as a miserable failure. If it is stripped of its individual mandate, then Obama-care is likely to have no effect at all. The prospect for robust employment recovery in this situation is bleak, since the marginal cost of hiring an employee is high and riding.
So basically, the health care cost crisis has us over a barrel, and Europe is spread-eagled by the sovereign debt crisis. We'll recover, but we aren't going to see the kind of economic growth we took for granted in the second half of the 20th C, because the solutions to our respective crises are politically unpopular.
Well, it *is* about controlling the customer *within the limits of what can feasibly be done*. Unfortunately, that starts with controlling yourself.
A successful interaction between two parties is one where both parties believe they can get what they want out of the other party, and thus each side feels a measure of "control". That means letting objective value govern your behavior, not instant emotional gratification. Getting *personal* turns the situation into a struggle which inflates costs and offers no satisfactory outcome for either party -- at least not since they outlawed dueling.
When the other guy gets personal first, self-control *feels* like an injustice to yourself, but in fact it's a way to obtain the most favorable outcome for yourself. In this case, given that the customer wanted the product, he might well be content to receive his widget late at the cost of nothing more than a sympathetic and informative response to his query. Even after the initial bungle he was telegraphing that he'd be happy with some kind of token response -- an apology and one of those T-shirts you were going to give away at CES might have done the trick.
When faced with a hostile customer, it's not easy to keep your cool and do the right thing. That's why we had to invent the word "professionalism" to describe a level of self-control, level-headedness and foresight that not everyone can achieve.
am I the only one considering fukushima not a disaster but a sucess?
I'm sure you're not the *only one*, but I think it's safe to say you are in the minority.
But not too many at once, because we want to learn slowly.
It's not a matter of wanting to learn slowly. It's a matter of wanting to learn more quickly than a particular reactor design or technology becomes politically "too big to fail".
And 4 massive nuclear disasters per century is an acceptable trade off.
Sure, but currently 14% of the world's electricity is generated from nuclear. Let's say it grew to 50%, and the electricity demand quadruples (reasonable given population growth, economic development, and a shift toward electric vehicles). We're now talking approximately *60* per century. Also if you are use 100 years as a denominator, you're including the years 1911- 1956 during which there were *no* nuclear power plants in existence, so you've got to start with a rate of 8/century. That means you're talking about around *120* major nuclear incidents per century, or *more than one per year*.
Is that an acceptable trade-off? Of course not. The bogus thing about this analysis of course is that it assumes our designs perform no better than designs of the last century historically did. So what is our base accident rate likely to be? There really is no defensible way of estimating that, which is why a *crash* program in building any *one* reactor design is a bad idea, as is immediately putting all our eggs in the nuclear basket, even if that's where we expect them to be in the long run.
It's not a matter of choosing to have accidents so we can learn from them. Accidents are inevitable so we ought to plan to have them before we can't do anything about the flaws they expose.
I'm just going on the IAEA's definition of passive safety:
(1) no moving working fluid
(2) no moving mechanical part
(3) no signal inputs of 'intelligence'
(4) no external power input or forces
The AP1000 design implements requirements 3 & 4, but not 1 (requires cooling water) or 2 (uses explosive "squib" valves). The system requires no external inputs of control or power to maintain cooling in the event of a main coolant system failure, but the operation of the backup cooling system is automated -- or perhaps it would be better say "automatic".
That's the first I've seen anyone characterize gravity as automation.
I am no more defining "gravity" as automation than I would define "electricity" as automation.. It is you who are defining "passive" as "using gravity in the design".
See my other post re: the IAEA's definition of "passive safety", which is the one I'm going with. Using the IAEA's terminology, the AP1000 uses "passive components", but the system as a whole does not qualify as "passively safe"; the AP1000 is a "category D" design, which according to the IAEA is in the "intermediary zone between active and passive where the execution of the safety function is made through passive methods..." [ref IAEA-TECODC-626 Appendix A, pp 15-18]
While I agree the passive cooling designs are promising, I think some people are counting their proverbial chickens before the designs are hatched. I think nuclear power can be done right, but that starts with getting a few of these promising designs built and thoroughly tested. It's not enough to get to the stage where you don't see a way the design can fail. *All* designs pass through that stage, then experience teaches us what we missed.
IIRC, it's a stretch to call the Ap1000 emergency cooling system "passive". I'd call it "automated". That's good, of course- possibly good enough - but not as good as a truly passively safe system would be,all else being equal.
Yes, only an idiot would expect a metaphor to be understood by the media, who while (ironically) paid to write, are mainly in the business of persuasion.
If a toy includes a rare earth magnet as a part and that part is easy to detach and consume, then a house with that toy would probably count as an environment where children have easy access to rare earth magnets, no?
Sure, but the two scenarios -- the one where you *intentionally* give a child a rare earth magnet and the other where you do so inadvertently -- are entirely different.
Nobody (at least in this conversation) is saying that we should hold manufacturers of rare earth magnet *as* toys responsible when someone is stupid enough to give them to a toddler. However using such a magnet in a toy intended for toddlers is irresponsible.
This issue is one of choosing the correct denominator for calculating the risk for a toy. Remember, we aren't talking about rare earth magnets per se, but ones used as components in toys targeting various age groups.
Roughly speaking here are your choices.
(1) All the people in the US. (your choice)
(2) All the children in the US.
(3) All the children in the US in the target age group of the toy.
(4) The number of children who will play with the specific toy in question.
Someone will have to pry my Jarts out of my cold dead hands.
HAHAHA! Oh, wait. That was intended to ironic, wasn't it?
A product doesn't have to be an iPad killer to be successful. In fact it's more likely to be successful if it isn't positioned that way. I'm very happy with my rooted Nook Color. It's not as nice as my wife's iPad 2, but not so much less nice that I feel like we need to have two iPads in the family, or that I need both a laptop AND an iPad.
Well, here's a bona fide quote from someone else, but it is nonetheless apropos. It is from Lord Macaulay's 1841 speech to the British Parliament opposing copyright extension In retrospect they appear prophetic.
Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers. At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot.
The point is that when copyright is perceived as abusive, voluntary compliance by otherwise law-abiding people is at an end.
Bullshit. Nuking the entire Muslim world would have been entirely possible in the context of the times.
Sure. So would nuking France. Or Great Britain. Or even ourselves (you do know we have more than twice the Muslim population of Djibouti; genocide starts at home). Nobody is saying it wasn't *physically* possible to nuke anyone, or *everyone* for that matter.
The real question is whether it was *politically* possible. The answer is no. In part this is because *George W. Bush* had too much sense to even consider that, but the *main* answer is that Americans as a whole would not have stood for it. Religious tolerance has been a basic American value since the founding of our country, and modern Americans as a whole have little enthusiasm for genocide. A somewhat smaller number would have opposed it purely on the obvious grounds that it would have been a disaster for ourselves (disrupting oil supplies, destroying the international economy, risking a global environmental radiological disaster and possibly climatic disruption that could disrupt agriculture even in this country).
That's not to say that *some* Americans don't hold to mainstream values of religious tolerance, dislike of pointless slaughter, and pursuing enlightened self-interest. In a nation of three hundred million the lunatic fringe is loud enough to make a lot of noise.
For that matter, we have our share of people who can't distinguish between things that are *possible* and things that are *advisable*, as can be readily seen in this discussion. Naturally one wouldn't entrust them with making more difficult distinctions, like between *right* and *wrong*. The primary mental defect of these people seems to be that when they feel the impulse to take some action they are incapable of considering whether it has any unintended consequences. In the old days before political correctness we had a name for such people. We used to call them "fools".
This is entirely allowed by our patent system and isn't evil at all.
This is a total non-sequitur. It's not like the Congress is Almighty God and gets to say what is right and wrong. It's legal to buy congressmen, as long as you have the resources to mount a complex campaign of money laundering. That doesn't mean it's not evil.
Neither is faking a pass and then running the ball right down the middle.
OK, if you need the difference spelled out for you, I'll do it. (1) In football, the two teams meet voluntarily. In lawsuits, the defendant is not a willing party to the affair. (2) In football, the by standanders benefit from the fake play *even when it is attempted against their own team*. A deceptive play is a test of defensive skill and a thrill when it is thwarted. In a lawsuit, the customers of the defendant have to pay higher prices.
But wouldn't YOU like to get paid for all the sales your competitors get?
Another non-sequitur. I'd like to have all the money in the bank vault. That doesn't excuse me dynamiting my way in.
Let me explain why what Apple is doing isn't necessarily as LEGALLY kosher as you think it is. It comes down to two words: anti-trust law. It's legal to be granted patents that give you an effective monopoly on a type of product. It's not legal to conspire with another company to restrain trade. The intersection of patent laws and anti-trust laws is a gray area, but the conspiracy angle adds a new wrinkle that's more than just PR.
So: is there any substantive difference between Apple using its patents to establish a monopoly itself, and having a third party do it for them? YES!
If Apple tried this itself, Motorola, Google, and others would retaliate with their own defensive patent lawsuits, forcing a settlement. By assigning their patents to DI under and agreement that exempts themselves, Apple has secured a de facto right it doesn't have under patent law: to be immune from countersuits. DI's legal attack can't be turned aside by counter-suit because DI doesn't make anything.
Let's get back to morality again and apply the categorical imperative here. What if *everyone* did this? What if everyone assigned their legal rights to third parties who do nothing but threaten lawsuits and have nothing to lose by being as aggressive and over-reaching as possible?
Pretty much. The hack was simply embedding javascript in an MP3 id3 tag.
While I'm in favor of jail breaking devices, this does NOT make me want to rush out and buy a Kindle Touch (although I was considering it before), because it reveals a flaw in the the device's basic use. Short of restricting myself to Amazon content, I'd have to check every file I use on it for malware.
This isn't like speculating on the transition between Middle English and modern English. That happened in an era before printing or widespread literacy, and surviving documents from the 15th C are extremely rare. The split between British and American pronunciation started in the mid 1700s and went on through the mid 1800s. We have tons of evidence from the writings of contemporary observers about when and how the changes took place. I actually think that this evidence is *stronger* than the evidence from the early days of recording, since you had to speak in an unnatural cadence and loudness to be heard clearly, and it is highly likely that the pronunciation used was affected and exaggerated. I doubt Teddy Roosevelt talked to his family the way he sounds on recordings. Barack Obama sounds quite different giving a speech than giving an interview, so if you used his recorded speeches as evidence of how Americans normally talk you'd be led astray.
So what were the complaints of the language purists of the early 1800s? Young Lord Byron was castigated by older critics for making rhymes that are now quite valid in modern RP but not in American English. Educated Britons complained of the loss of syllables in "necessary" and "secretary" ("neces-sree" and "secre-tree"), characterizing it as sloppy, lower-class speech. This process of the sloppy becoming the gold standard is still going on today. I suspect that in a hundred years' time Estuary English will supplant the Oxford/BBC/Received Pronunciation as the "correct" dialect.
As for Shakespeare, one can use evidence like rhyme choices, but English poets of yore were rather loose with their interpretation of rhyme. I think it's fairly safe to say that nobody is walking around speaking *exactly* the dialect of 17th C. London. Both Standard American English and RP share a common root in 18th C. English, but RP is more different from the common ancestor dialect than SAE. Nonetheless it's a fair guess that both dialects would sound strange in Elizabethan ears.
[Citation needed]
OK, here (O'Conner and Kellerman ) you go.
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Works Cited
O'Conner, Patricia T., and Stewart Kellerman. Origins Of The Specious, Myths And Misconceptions Of The English Language. Random House Inc, 2009.