Java is a fine language that not only is widely used in a lot of different settings (like, er, Android), but which clearly inspired C#. Without Java C# wouldn't exist, nor would its runtime library so closely mimic Java's.
The other thing to be admired about Java is it brought us the JVM, which hosts fine languages such as Scala and Gosu. Because of the widespread support Java enjoys, the JVM implementations have explored groundbreaking improvements in garbage collection performance, multithreading, IPC techniques and so on.
C#, on the other hand, is directly tied to Windows and will thus continue its descent into irrelevance. Perhaps Mono will start to get traction at some point, but many are wary of possible patent issues.
This is one of those times where "correlation is not causation" is mandated.
Could it be because these people, knowing that they were at risk, went to the doctor more often for the rest of their lives? Would it be too far fetched to think that these people may have had a healthier lifestyle from then on, along with above-average doctor supervision? I'm willing to bet you might live longer that your peers if your health is of greater concern to doctors than your peers' health.
In effect, the mere fact of scaring a group by telling them they have radiation poisoning could make them live longer...
Not really, since the effects of radiation were thought to be incurable, with many of the resulting cancers being untreatable. Given the significant doses many of these folks received, the expectation was clearly for markedly reduced lifespans.
No, no matter how you try and spin it this result clearly shows that rather high doses of radiation are not the death sentence they were once thought to be.
That's fine, as the motivation there is to prevent people from intentionally irradiating themselves in the belief that radiation is good for you.
On the other hand, the Japanese bomb data clearly shows beyond a statistical doubt that much larger radiation doses than most would have believed are harmless or slightly beneficial over the long term. That is unexpected, and reassuring in the nuclear age.
It might also have good implications for manned space travel.
I should actually clarify this a bit - the Hiroshima bomb was U-235, the Nagasaki weapon was Pu-239. The fission products are quite similar between the two, though.
If only we were talking about radiation instead radionuclide(s) your post may of actually been relevant.
First of all, quite a bit of the discussion has been about radiation dosage as opposed to "radionuclides". BTW, plenty of normal background radiation comes from "radionuclides", I hope you're enjoying them.:-)
Second, very few Japanese will be ingesting the iodine and cesium they're being warned about. As long as it's not ingested, it in fact amounts to nothing more than a slight additional radiation dose.
Third, you're making a huge leap in assuming that Japanese nuclear bomb survivors didn't come in contact with the same materials being emitted by the Japanese nuclear event. After all, the exact same reaction was the driving force in each case, with the same fission byproducts.
I hope this cleared things up for you a bit, "AC".
Actually that's just about right...since nothing resembling the movie's China Syndrome could in fact happen in the real world.
Additionally, I'm here to tell you that you live on a planet that had several hundred nuclear weapons detonated on its surface...amazing eh? Some of them were very large, to boot. Yet somehow the human race went on, with hardly a hiccup.
radiation kills long term (unless it's a massive dose)
That is commonly accepted thinking, but is apparently incorrect.
The tens of thousands more distant from Ground Zero, and who received lower exposures to radiation, did not die in droves. To the contrary, and surprisingly, they outlived their counterparts in the general population who received no exposure to radiation from the blasts.
These findings come from the Atomic Bomb Disease Institute of the Nagasaki University School of Medicine, which has been analyzing the medical records of survivors continuously since 1968.
Apple didn't choose to use it because C++ wasn't different enough; they chose to use it because that is what the NextStep was written with back when Objective-C and C++ were both still in their infancy.
There were better reasons than this. C++ is not well suited as a systems programming language. That's why there's still not a single major OS that uses the C++ object system at the system level. BeOS was the single failed experiment in this regard - remember the loveliness of "reserved slots"?
Objective-C's dynamic features make it a much better foundation for systems programming. Its relative simplicity is also attractive.
Do you honestly think that after taking on Goggle for the non-Java-but-Java-like innards (I forget the name... Davlik?... something like that) of Android they are gonna let cacao or any of the other JVMs slide?
This part of your (apparently) ADD inspired rant is beside the point. Languages that run on top of the JVM are orthogonal to whether or not some particular JVM is legal. Even without open source JVMs (gasp) there will still be performant JVMs from Oracle and IBM. The world goes on.;-)
Most likely the Dalvik tempest in a teapot will be resolved via a typical cross-licensing arrangement between Oracle and Google.
One "new" language (for some value of new, it's a few years old but was only recently released on a large scale) is Gosu, which has some very nice features. It is closer to C* syntax, which is nice from my perspective (I understand maybe not from others lol).
I'm a fan of terse, maximally expressive languages as I think they maximise productivity both for development and maintenance. Gosu seems close to a sweet spot.
The underlying problems with nuclear fission power are two-fold, and parent post touches on one of them.
As parent post implies, one major problem is that humans are involved, and humans make mistakes. They make mistakes in following procedures; they make mistakes in writing procedures. They screw up when implementing blueprints; they mess up when doing design. They can royally fuck up when choosing design specifications, as parent post describes. Humans are imperfect beings that cannot do anything for any length of time with the elegance that controlling fission requires.
The track record of fission reactors suggests that, in general, you're quite wrong about this. The US Navy has even operated mobile nuclear reactors on ships for decades with a great safety record.
Further, modern safety-critical automation techniques greatly reduce the potential for human error.
The other major problem is that current fission reactors are designed such that there are altogether too many modes of failure that lead to positive feedback situations. It is self-evident that if you leave any of today's light water nuclear reactors alone, it will eventually destroy the local environment in one way or another. Under good conditions, managing one is like pedaling a circus bicycle, backwards, on a high wire, without a net.
That was the case for forty-fifty year old reactor designs like those in Japan, but you're quite wrong about current reactor designs. Many of them physically cannot melt down, and loss of coolant simply results in a shutdown (the coolant moderates the neutrons so that fission may occur).
Other than those two problems, nuclear fission is perfectly safe.
Now that you're better informed, I'm sure you'll become a nuclear proponent.;-)
These problems with fission power cannot be solved with engineering or more teaching of the hard sciences.
You're right - instead, they've already been solved.
Hubris is nasty stuff. Much worse than entropy, really.
You may be right, and I hope you recognize the considerable hubris of what you've written here...
I think it's incredible how safe their reactors are and when you consider what has happened, I think this should calm many people's fear of nuclear energy.
Especially considering the age of these reactors and their design. Modern reactor designs are much safer, with absolutely no chance of a meltdown.
Now, the disposal of the waste....
I think the waste should be disposed of at the mid-Pacific subduction zone. Suitably packaged, it is dense enough to rather quickly find its way below surface, and then (over the space of thousands of years) into the mantle. Long before it could possibly resurface, it'd be inert.
All it would take is the will to do it, and the nuclear waste disposal issue would be solved for all time.
Most of the responses here show exactly why teaching that the United States is a Republic is a very good idea!
The US educational system is in drastic need of an overhaul! I find it entirely unsurprising that home schooled kids do better on standardized tests than the products of the public education system.
Invalid assumptions. Oil doesn't equally disperse and life isn't equally dispersed either. If the *heavy* oil drifts to the bottom, as the article suggests you're looking at layering the *life rich* ocean floor with 341 gallons per square mile. Too much for my taste.
And realistically its more like a 10,000 square mile affected, 21,000 gallons per square mile. = more than enough to kill off all life.
Invalid assumptions indeed. First off, most oil is lighter than water and floats. Secondly, the majority of the oil left the Gulf waters through various mechanisms. From "Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill: The Fate of the Oil" report produced by the Congressional Research Service:
Evaporated or Dissolved: 24%
Directly Recovered: 17%
Chemically Dispersed: 16%
Naturally Dispersed: 13%
Burned: 5%
Skimmed: 3%
That leaves a grand total of 22% of the oil unaccounted for, with an unknown amount being biodegraded by oil-eating bacteria.
Given that between 24 million gallons and 70+ million gallons of oil are released into North American waters each year from natural seepage, the ocean ecosystem clearly has the ability to thrive despite some oil release. It's quite likely the damage from the Deepwater Horizon spill is being exaggerated by the environuts for the usual reasons.
It was expected, by pretty much all the sane people, that the area right around the gusher would getted messed up. What wasn't expected (and what TFA discusses not at all) was that a substantial portion of the Gulf would be messed up.
Really? For what value of "messed up" would that be? Another appeal to emotion with no quantitative meat to back it up.
The thing that's really "messed up" is the state of the Gulf economy due to the 0 administration's moratorium on drilling. We're all paying the price at the pump as well.
I slipped a decimal or two...the 6.6e15 gallons should have been 6.6e17 gallons. I was off by only a single decimal when I did the calculation though, it should have been 0.00000003%, or one part in about 3 billion.
Drill baby drill! We need a sane energy policy or our already struggling economy will take another dive soon. Things aren't looking at all good given the unrest in the Middle East right now.
More drilling sounds like a plan to me as long as basic safety procedures are followed. It took multiple violations for this well to fail. Thousands of rigs have operated there for many years with no problems. After Deepwater Horizon I'm sure all of the companies involved realize there's no net cost savings in skimping on safety.
On a more scientific note, I notice there's absolutely no quantitative information in the linked article. Exactly how much of the 615,000 square miles of the Gulf of Mexico seafloor was affected? I'm guessing it was far less than 1%, but of course that wouldn't sound nearly so alarming...
According to Wikipedia, about 5 million barrels of oil were released into the Gulf, at 42 gallons per barrel for 210,000,000 gallons. Also according to Wikipedia, the total amount of water in the Gulf is 660 quadrillion gallons (6.6e15 gallons). So the oil released represented about 0.0000003% of the total volume of the seawater. If you released the same percentage of oil into a full standard bathtub (36 gallons) you'd be releasing about 0.0004 grams of oil...not even close to a single drop. Also reflect on the fact that around half the oil evaporated quite soon after the spill.
This is not to say such spills are negligible, but I hope the numbers put things into a bit more of a perspective. Newspapers sell (and websites get hit) based on how alarming the story sounds...
The recession ended quite some time ago, in case you missed it. It hasn't changed a generation any more than the past few recessions did.
There has been a brief spurt of economic growth in the current depression. None of the fundamentals have changed, and now inflation is really starting to bite after the government's ill-considered money printing binge. Officially unemployment remains at around 10%, but the real number is north of 17%.
Oil is less than $100/bbl now but is almost certainly going to be a lot more than $100/bbl by 2050 (unless, of course, we've switched most of our power generation to alternatives so that there's no longer the same demand)
That is by no means a given, although whether it's desirable to keep burning that much oil that long is a different question.
Coal gasification (and the Fischer–Tropsch process) was developed during WWII by the Germans, and can convert coal to oil at a cost of around $50/barrel. The problem is the environut movement which doesn't want such capabilities developed (or the plants in their back yard). Montana alone has enough coal for 200 years worth of such fuel at our current burn rate in the US.
Companies will often make many copies of a product before officially announcing it, so demand may be met after the announcement.
Given the extreme demand for Apple's excellent products in general, and the iPad in particular, it seems only plausible that production has already started.
We are, as a society, done with memorising trivia. The "expert" of yesterday is a relic, all you need is some logic skills and wikipedia and you can be an "expert" in something almost immediately.
I sure hope if I ever need brain surgery that's not what the surgeon thinks!
They indeed DID refer to themselves as teabaggers. The rest of the world laughed. They then learned what it meant to today's internet culture, then they tried to rewrite history.
Like you are now.
How 'bout one citation, genius? lol
If they only could get spellcheckers for the ridiculous signs.
Plenty of the signs are fine, and furthermore correct - unlike your silly rants.
BTW, why are all the teabaggers so fat? Is this a symptom of "Live free or Die"? How fat are you?
If being fat had anything to do with having a realistic view of the world, plenty more/. folk would be be Tea Partiers.
As for me, I'm doing great.
At any rate, gl with achieving a more informed worldview at some point. As Robert Anton Wilson said:
"It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea."
Slashdot Mirror
Java is a fine language that not only is widely used in a lot of different settings (like, er, Android), but which clearly inspired C#. Without Java C# wouldn't exist, nor would its runtime library so closely mimic Java's.
The other thing to be admired about Java is it brought us the JVM, which hosts fine languages such as Scala and Gosu. Because of the widespread support Java enjoys, the JVM implementations have explored groundbreaking improvements in garbage collection performance, multithreading, IPC techniques and so on.
C#, on the other hand, is directly tied to Windows and will thus continue its descent into irrelevance. Perhaps Mono will start to get traction at some point, but many are wary of possible patent issues.
This is one of those times where "correlation is not causation" is mandated.
Could it be because these people, knowing that they were at risk, went to the doctor more often for the rest of their lives? Would it be too far fetched to think that these people may have had a healthier lifestyle from then on, along with above-average doctor supervision? I'm willing to bet you might live longer that your peers if your health is of greater concern to doctors than your peers' health.
In effect, the mere fact of scaring a group by telling them they have radiation poisoning could make them live longer...
Not really, since the effects of radiation were thought to be incurable, with many of the resulting cancers being untreatable. Given the significant doses many of these folks received, the expectation was clearly for markedly reduced lifespans.
No, no matter how you try and spin it this result clearly shows that rather high doses of radiation are not the death sentence they were once thought to be.
Dr. David Gorski, a surgical oncologist, warns against making a conclusion that radiation hormesis is a real effect phenomenon. There just isn't enough data to call it one way or another. The conservative approach is to assume radiation hormesis does not exist until enough evidence demonstrates otherwise.
That's fine, as the motivation there is to prevent people from intentionally irradiating themselves in the belief that radiation is good for you.
On the other hand, the Japanese bomb data clearly shows beyond a statistical doubt that much larger radiation doses than most would have believed are harmless or slightly beneficial over the long term. That is unexpected, and reassuring in the nuclear age.
It might also have good implications for manned space travel.
I should actually clarify this a bit - the Hiroshima bomb was U-235, the Nagasaki weapon was Pu-239. The fission products are quite similar between the two, though.
Quotes are from Lawrence Solomon: Japan’s radioactive fallout could have silver lining.
Sometimes reality is surprising.
If only we were talking about radiation instead radionuclide(s) your post may of actually been relevant.
First of all, quite a bit of the discussion has been about radiation dosage as opposed to "radionuclides". BTW, plenty of normal background radiation comes from "radionuclides", I hope you're enjoying them. :-)
Second, very few Japanese will be ingesting the iodine and cesium they're being warned about. As long as it's not ingested, it in fact amounts to nothing more than a slight additional radiation dose.
Third, you're making a huge leap in assuming that Japanese nuclear bomb survivors didn't come in contact with the same materials being emitted by the Japanese nuclear event. After all, the exact same reaction was the driving force in each case, with the same fission byproducts.
I hope this cleared things up for you a bit, "AC".
"Hysterical fear-mongering", apparently.
Actually that's just about right...since nothing resembling the movie's China Syndrome could in fact happen in the real world.
Additionally, I'm here to tell you that you live on a planet that had several hundred nuclear weapons detonated on its surface...amazing eh? Some of them were very large, to boot. Yet somehow the human race went on, with hardly a hiccup.
radiation kills long term (unless it's a massive dose)
That is commonly accepted thinking, but is apparently incorrect.
Quotes are from Lawrence Solomon: Japan’s radioactive fallout could have silver lining.
Sometimes reality is surprising.
Apple didn't choose to use it because C++ wasn't different enough; they chose to use it because that is what the NextStep was written with back when Objective-C and C++ were both still in their infancy.
There were better reasons than this. C++ is not well suited as a systems programming language. That's why there's still not a single major OS that uses the C++ object system at the system level. BeOS was the single failed experiment in this regard - remember the loveliness of "reserved slots"?
Objective-C's dynamic features make it a much better foundation for systems programming. Its relative simplicity is also attractive.
Do you honestly think that after taking on Goggle for the non-Java-but-Java-like innards (I forget the name... Davlik?... something like that) of Android they are gonna let cacao or any of the other JVMs slide?
This part of your (apparently) ADD inspired rant is beside the point. Languages that run on top of the JVM are orthogonal to whether or not some particular JVM is legal. Even without open source JVMs (gasp) there will still be performant JVMs from Oracle and IBM. The world goes on. ;-)
Most likely the Dalvik tempest in a teapot will be resolved via a typical cross-licensing arrangement between Oracle and Google.
One "new" language (for some value of new, it's a few years old but was only recently released on a large scale) is Gosu, which has some very nice features. It is closer to C* syntax, which is nice from my perspective (I understand maybe not from others lol).
I'm a fan of terse, maximally expressive languages as I think they maximise productivity both for development and maintenance. Gosu seems close to a sweet spot.
The underlying problems with nuclear fission power are two-fold, and parent post touches on one of them.
As parent post implies, one major problem is that humans are involved, and humans make mistakes. They make mistakes in following procedures; they make mistakes in writing procedures. They screw up when implementing blueprints; they mess up when doing design. They can royally fuck up when choosing design specifications, as parent post describes. Humans are imperfect beings that cannot do anything for any length of time with the elegance that controlling fission requires.
The track record of fission reactors suggests that, in general, you're quite wrong about this. The US Navy has even operated mobile nuclear reactors on ships for decades with a great safety record.
Further, modern safety-critical automation techniques greatly reduce the potential for human error.
The other major problem is that current fission reactors are designed such that there are altogether too many modes of failure that lead to positive feedback situations. It is self-evident that if you leave any of today's light water nuclear reactors alone, it will eventually destroy the local environment in one way or another. Under good conditions, managing one is like pedaling a circus bicycle, backwards, on a high wire, without a net.
That was the case for forty-fifty year old reactor designs like those in Japan, but you're quite wrong about current reactor designs. Many of them physically cannot melt down, and loss of coolant simply results in a shutdown (the coolant moderates the neutrons so that fission may occur).
Other than those two problems, nuclear fission is perfectly safe.
Now that you're better informed, I'm sure you'll become a nuclear proponent. ;-)
These problems with fission power cannot be solved with engineering or more teaching of the hard sciences.
You're right - instead, they've already been solved.
Hubris is nasty stuff. Much worse than entropy, really.
You may be right, and I hope you recognize the considerable hubris of what you've written here...
I think it's incredible how safe their reactors are and when you consider what has happened, I think this should calm many people's fear of nuclear energy.
Especially considering the age of these reactors and their design. Modern reactor designs are much safer, with absolutely no chance of a meltdown.
Now, the disposal of the waste ....
I think the waste should be disposed of at the mid-Pacific subduction zone. Suitably packaged, it is dense enough to rather quickly find its way below surface, and then (over the space of thousands of years) into the mantle. Long before it could possibly resurface, it'd be inert.
All it would take is the will to do it, and the nuclear waste disposal issue would be solved for all time.
Most of the responses here show exactly why teaching that the United States is a Republic is a very good idea!
The US educational system is in drastic need of an overhaul! I find it entirely unsurprising that home schooled kids do better on standardized tests than the products of the public education system.
The fastest rifle rounds go around 3800...
Actually the fastest rounds will easily top 4000 FPS. For instance, the .204 Ruger with a 40 grain bullet hits 4135 FPS.
That is a cool Mach 3.7. :-)
Invalid assumptions. Oil doesn't equally disperse and life isn't equally dispersed either. If the *heavy* oil drifts to the bottom, as the article suggests you're looking at layering the *life rich* ocean floor with 341 gallons per square mile. Too much for my taste.
And realistically its more like a 10,000 square mile affected, 21,000 gallons per square mile. = more than enough to kill off all life.
Invalid assumptions indeed. First off, most oil is lighter than water and floats. Secondly, the majority of the oil left the Gulf waters through various mechanisms. From "Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill: The Fate of the Oil" report produced by the Congressional Research Service:
That leaves a grand total of 22% of the oil unaccounted for, with an unknown amount being biodegraded by oil-eating bacteria.
Given that between 24 million gallons and 70+ million gallons of oil are released into North American waters each year from natural seepage, the ocean ecosystem clearly has the ability to thrive despite some oil release. It's quite likely the damage from the Deepwater Horizon spill is being exaggerated by the environuts for the usual reasons.
HTC said that Flyer would get Honeycomb at at lunch or right after launch.
Calm down, now. They're only tablet computers, not anything terribly exciting... ;-)
Your post did make me realize I'm hungry though.
It was expected, by pretty much all the sane people, that the area right around the gusher would getted messed up. What wasn't expected (and what TFA discusses not at all) was that a substantial portion of the Gulf would be messed up.
Really? For what value of "messed up" would that be? Another appeal to emotion with no quantitative meat to back it up.
The thing that's really "messed up" is the state of the Gulf economy due to the 0 administration's moratorium on drilling. We're all paying the price at the pump as well.
I slipped a decimal or two...the 6.6e15 gallons should have been 6.6e17 gallons. I was off by only a single decimal when I did the calculation though, it should have been 0.00000003%, or one part in about 3 billion.
Yeah... drill baby drill. Oh, hang on...
Drill baby drill! We need a sane energy policy or our already struggling economy will take another dive soon. Things aren't looking at all good given the unrest in the Middle East right now.
More drilling sounds like a plan to me as long as basic safety procedures are followed. It took multiple violations for this well to fail. Thousands of rigs have operated there for many years with no problems. After Deepwater Horizon I'm sure all of the companies involved realize there's no net cost savings in skimping on safety.
On a more scientific note, I notice there's absolutely no quantitative information in the linked article. Exactly how much of the 615,000 square miles of the Gulf of Mexico seafloor was affected? I'm guessing it was far less than 1%, but of course that wouldn't sound nearly so alarming...
According to Wikipedia, about 5 million barrels of oil were released into the Gulf, at 42 gallons per barrel for 210,000,000 gallons. Also according to Wikipedia, the total amount of water in the Gulf is 660 quadrillion gallons (6.6e15 gallons). So the oil released represented about 0.0000003% of the total volume of the seawater. If you released the same percentage of oil into a full standard bathtub (36 gallons) you'd be releasing about 0.0004 grams of oil...not even close to a single drop. Also reflect on the fact that around half the oil evaporated quite soon after the spill.
This is not to say such spills are negligible, but I hope the numbers put things into a bit more of a perspective. Newspapers sell (and websites get hit) based on how alarming the story sounds...
The recession ended quite some time ago, in case you missed it. It hasn't changed a generation any more than the past few recessions did.
There has been a brief spurt of economic growth in the current depression. None of the fundamentals have changed, and now inflation is really starting to bite after the government's ill-considered money printing binge. Officially unemployment remains at around 10%, but the real number is north of 17%.
Hold on, the ride gets rougher from here.
Oil is less than $100/bbl now but is almost certainly going to be a lot more than $100/bbl by 2050 (unless, of course, we've switched most of our power generation to alternatives so that there's no longer the same demand)
That is by no means a given, although whether it's desirable to keep burning that much oil that long is a different question.
Coal gasification (and the Fischer–Tropsch process) was developed during WWII by the Germans, and can convert coal to oil at a cost of around $50/barrel. The problem is the environut movement which doesn't want such capabilities developed (or the plants in their back yard). Montana alone has enough coal for 200 years worth of such fuel at our current burn rate in the US.
Actually the iPhone models were:
So, Apple has been all over the place with its naming "conventions".
Companies will often make many copies of a product before officially announcing it, so demand may be met after the announcement.
Given the extreme demand for Apple's excellent products in general, and the iPad in particular, it seems only plausible that production has already started.
We are, as a society, done with memorising trivia. The "expert" of yesterday is a relic, all you need is some logic skills and wikipedia and you can be an "expert" in something almost immediately.
I sure hope if I ever need brain surgery that's not what the surgeon thinks!
They indeed DID refer to themselves as teabaggers. The rest of the world laughed. They then learned what it meant to today's internet culture, then they tried to rewrite history.
Like you are now.
How 'bout one citation, genius? lol
If they only could get spellcheckers for the ridiculous signs.
Plenty of the signs are fine, and furthermore correct - unlike your silly rants.
BTW, why are all the teabaggers so fat? Is this a symptom of "Live free or Die"? How fat are you?
If being fat had anything to do with having a realistic view of the world, plenty more /. folk would be be Tea Partiers.
As for me, I'm doing great.
At any rate, gl with achieving a more informed worldview at some point. As Robert Anton Wilson said:
Heh.