way more people than are gonna die from this event.
Yep. The hideously deformed babies born from pregnancies affected by radioisotopes, the ocean fish stock die-offs, and the early cancers hidden in the statistical noise, don't count as actual "deaths", so it's all good.
Let corporations keep a bit more of their money and they will have more money to spend on either engineering for safety to appease some boring pencilhead tech guy somewhere or massive bonuses for their executives and investors and marketing department, that is simple logic.
Would it be economically viable to overbuild it? Would the taxpayers be willing to pay for it? Would that necessarily even solve the problems? I wonder if it would even have been physically possible to overbuild Fukushima to withstand this assault.
If you run that calculation and come up with "no", then perhaps now you understand why anti-nuclear advocates are so worried. The numbers suggest that it's simply not possible to make nuclear fission any more than one at once of cheap, safe and plentiful.
But not to worry! We're shooting for "plentiful".
There's absolutely nothing that can possibly ever go wrong with this solution to climate change.
The tech behind nuclear power is potentially very safe.
"Potential safety" sounds a bit like "possible correctness". That doesn't get you very far in math. Why should it be a free pass in engineering?
A thing is either safe, or it's dangerous. If in itself it's dangerous, but can be sorta-kinda "made" safe, within limits, by constantly pushing a massive amount of active resources at it... and if those resources go away, the process runs away on you and does something very toxic and very irreversible... in most people's books, that's actually the opposite of "safe".
It's just that the danger of nuclear power is so long-term that most people don't think in those terms. Short-term, yes, it's "safe" until one day isn't. But the universe lays a long game.
There's a big unstated "if" in that phrase, and that's that newer reactor designs are in fact safer.
I mean, technically, on paper, sure, these third and fourth generation designs em>sound safer. Passive cooling, foolproof, failsafe, etc, etc. It's all very nice and clean and clinical. On paper.
But weren't last few generations of reactors also supposed to be literally failsafe? Never in a thousand years would we see the types of accidents we've had five or so of in the last forty years? We were assured that by people who literally swore on their childrens' lives that it would be perfectly safe.
And of course, the only way we can tell for sure if these new designs - which of course are going to be "lighter" and "cheaper" because they'll have smaller containments - is to build them and run them. And then there'll be pressure to rapidly deploy them. Oh, what does that remind me of? a little thing called the "boiling water reactor" which was a second generation model improved from the old clunky pressurised water systems and didn't need the big heavy containment, because it had this neat "torus" to suppress leakage?
But these new reactors are different you say? Of course they are. They're built by the same companies who made the old, inferior, should never have been deployed ones? Gee, now that's an odd coincidence. I'm sure there's nothing to it. I'm sure we can trust this new generation of nuclear advocates in exactly the way we couldn't trust their fathers.
Lie to me once, shame on me. Lie to me twice... don't let the spent fuel pool blow up and contaminate your farmland on the way out.
I'm not entirely sure I agree with you when you say "we don't like [moral ambiguity] in games".
I'd argue the problem is more moral ambiguity is difficult to write in games.
I think true moral ambiguity in games would require scoring ambiguity. And it's difficult (more than difficult, counterproductive) to be ambiguous about something which, by the nature of the artform, must be precise.
In a story, all that matters is that you reach the end. But the point of games is to optimise your strategy over many iterations in order to win. The scoring mechanism which determines whether you "win" is basically an artificial moral compass. If you win by killing people, you get good at killing people. If you win by not dying, you get good at not dying. If you win by not killing people, you get good at not killing people. You do what you have to to make the game continue.
Sadly, there aren't many games where "preserve the lives of X hostile NPCs" is a scored mechanic or even noticed. About the only one I can think of is Iji (which I highly recommend).
You *could* try to argue that Bioshock attempted moral ambiguity by making the player complicit in dubious acts by virtue of following instructions - in which case, I think I'm one of the few people who actually "won" that game by refusing to continue playing after a point (long before "that scene"). The lack of freedom NOT to kill people really pissed me off. But that's not really a win for the designer.
Better advertising technology doesn't lead anywhere. Yes, there's progress on classifier systems, but that technology came from robotics. It's inherently a zero-sum game.
WOPR, 2011: "An even stranger game. The only way to win is... stuff it, I'm going back to thermonuclear war. It's safer."
We are leaving behind the world where "sociology scientists" could only run limited and poorly-defined experiments over their own student population; now "social companies" like Facebook have at their disposal an incredible amount of relevant, up-to-date, *exact*, aggregated data. The field will never be the same.
So we should expect a "Das Kapital 2011" Facebook page sometime soon?
i thought iphone os was supposed to be the perfect example of consistency and intuitiveness?
It is, valued customer. For the first time in all history, we have created a garden of pure ideology, where the consumer may bloom free from the pests of contradictory and confusing truths. Our enemies shall gesture themselves to death. We will prevail!
This article has been rated "C" on the Truthiness Scale for "Makes Steve Cry". Please report to your nearest Apple reseller for mandatory ungoodthink memoryholing.
If you want to improve the state of standardization, convince either the companies to stop getting or wielding these patents, or convince your government to eliminate/defang them.
Government-enforced standardization? What are you, some kind of commie socialist? Let's do it the American way! If I want to drive on the left side of the road and you want to drive on the right, we'll solve the dispute like civilized private gentlemen: with pistols!
and forgets to implement half of the expected semantics.
I know! Those poor overworked programmers. If only we had some kind of "code reuse" idea that let programmers embed standardised interfaces, let's call them, I don't know, "objects", via some sort of "inheritance" mechanism, into their code. Then we could write an interface once, at the operating system level, get it right, distribute it in some kind of "user interface toolkit", and never have to mess with it again.
Isn't it a pity that we have no such concept in modern programming? But since we don't, everyone has to write interfaces from scratch in Flash. It's hard, thankless drudgery and there's no end in sight.
Oh well! That's obviously the best anyone can ever do! Onto the next bold innovation! Hey, I know, let's reinvent the VT-100 terminal and call it "Web Applications"!
[Your sarcasm filter has just exploded. Replace it? Y/N]
Fukushima meltdown means your backup cooling method goes out after a scram (and tsunami), and you are basically screwed. This requires a failure of imagination about worst possible scenarios combined with a bad plant location.
In their defense, failure of imagination about worst-case scenarios is the only way nuclear engineers can sleep at night. You have to have a very robust sense of "nonsense old chap, the fuel rods could never melt!" or you might start to dwell on "but what if they did...? and how many decades would the and be unfarmable...?" scenarios.
And that way lies the screaming jeebies and men in white suits and dosimeters. It's all much better for everyone just to learn not to speculate too deeply about how long those isotopes you're working with take to decay and what they might do to the food chain.
Gee willikers! It's our friend Mr Neutron on the Radio-Isotope with his pals Millie Sievert and Terry Becquerel! Time to harness the power of Atoms For Peace!
Of course it takes all kinds. I wouldn't want to rely on a hacker to process my reimbursement requests and get me paid on time.
Your first payslip would arrive immaculately printed and three weeks early.
Your second payslip would arrive three weeks late, soaked in Mountain Dew, and the ink would also perform a waltz rendition of the "ESB Imperial Theme" while it dialled NORAD.
The Blackberry's claim to fame in the corporate world is their willingness to hand back office operations over to its corporate customers. RIM can't read this data. It just passes it on to the appropriate server.
And in the West, we know that the "appropriate server" is not running in Langley because....?
Slashdot Mirror
way more people than are gonna die from this event.
Yep. The hideously deformed babies born from pregnancies affected by radioisotopes, the ocean fish stock die-offs, and the early cancers hidden in the statistical noise, don't count as actual "deaths", so it's all good.
Let corporations keep a bit more of their money and they will have more money to spend on either engineering for safety to appease some boring pencilhead tech guy somewhere or massive bonuses for their executives and investors and marketing department, that is simple logic.
Fixed that for you.
Would it be economically viable to overbuild it? Would the taxpayers be willing to pay for it? Would that necessarily even solve the problems? I wonder if it would even have been physically possible to overbuild Fukushima to withstand this assault.
If you run that calculation and come up with "no", then perhaps now you understand why anti-nuclear advocates are so worried. The numbers suggest that it's simply not possible to make nuclear fission any more than one at once of cheap, safe and plentiful.
But not to worry! We're shooting for "plentiful".
There's absolutely nothing that can possibly ever go wrong with this solution to climate change.
The tech behind nuclear power is potentially very safe.
"Potential safety" sounds a bit like "possible correctness". That doesn't get you very far in math. Why should it be a free pass in engineering?
A thing is either safe, or it's dangerous. If in itself it's dangerous, but can be sorta-kinda "made" safe, within limits, by constantly pushing a massive amount of active resources at it... and if those resources go away, the process runs away on you and does something very toxic and very irreversible... in most people's books, that's actually the opposite of "safe".
It's just that the danger of nuclear power is so long-term that most people don't think in those terms. Short-term, yes, it's "safe" until one day isn't. But the universe lays a long game.
solar lobbies.
Yeah, who do those freaking sun-lovers think they are? Don't they realise if we all use the sun it will go out faster?
Sorry, I meant this new generation of nucler advocates.
rather than building newer and safer design
There's a big unstated "if" in that phrase, and that's that newer reactor designs are in fact safer.
I mean, technically, on paper, sure, these third and fourth generation designs em>sound safer. Passive cooling, foolproof, failsafe, etc, etc. It's all very nice and clean and clinical. On paper.
But weren't last few generations of reactors also supposed to be literally failsafe? Never in a thousand years would we see the types of accidents we've had five or so of in the last forty years? We were assured that by people who literally swore on their childrens' lives that it would be perfectly safe.
And of course, the only way we can tell for sure if these new designs - which of course are going to be "lighter" and "cheaper" because they'll have smaller containments - is to build them and run them. And then there'll be pressure to rapidly deploy them. Oh, what does that remind me of? a little thing called the "boiling water reactor" which was a second generation model improved from the old clunky pressurised water systems and didn't need the big heavy containment, because it had this neat "torus" to suppress leakage?
But these new reactors are different you say? Of course they are. They're built by the same companies who made the old, inferior, should never have been deployed ones? Gee, now that's an odd coincidence. I'm sure there's nothing to it. I'm sure we can trust this new generation of nuclear advocates in exactly the way we couldn't trust their fathers.
Lie to me once, shame on me. Lie to me twice... don't let the spent fuel pool blow up and contaminate your farmland on the way out.
Well, that and prepare for unforeseen consequences...
Fricken' Combine Advisors.
The Borealis just better make a cameo in Portal 2, that's all I'm sayin'.
And it's literally about the half-life.
In other words, they can't get into the trench under the reactor because it's full of bullsquids.
I'm not entirely sure I agree with you when you say "we don't like [moral ambiguity] in games".
I'd argue the problem is more moral ambiguity is difficult to write in games.
I think true moral ambiguity in games would require scoring ambiguity. And it's difficult (more than difficult, counterproductive) to be ambiguous about something which, by the nature of the artform, must be precise.
In a story, all that matters is that you reach the end. But the point of games is to optimise your strategy over many iterations in order to win. The scoring mechanism which determines whether you "win" is basically an artificial moral compass. If you win by killing people, you get good at killing people. If you win by not dying, you get good at not dying. If you win by not killing people, you get good at not killing people. You do what you have to to make the game continue.
Sadly, there aren't many games where "preserve the lives of X hostile NPCs" is a scored mechanic or even noticed. About the only one I can think of is Iji (which I highly recommend).
You *could* try to argue that Bioshock attempted moral ambiguity by making the player complicit in dubious acts by virtue of following instructions - in which case, I think I'm one of the few people who actually "won" that game by refusing to continue playing after a point (long before "that scene"). The lack of freedom NOT to kill people really pissed me off. But that's not really a win for the designer.
landscape paintings are definitely art, and not remotely "morally ambiguous"
Tell that to someone whose wife and family were brutally murdered by a pastoral sunset. All glowy clouds and rippling grass and then, wham! Cows.
Wants to say I'm sorry
Doesn't mean I'm sorry
Better advertising technology doesn't lead anywhere. Yes, there's progress on classifier systems, but that technology came from robotics. It's inherently a zero-sum game.
WOPR, 2011: "An even stranger game. The only way to win is... stuff it, I'm going back to thermonuclear war. It's safer."
We are leaving behind the world where "sociology scientists" could only run limited and poorly-defined experiments over their own student population; now "social companies" like Facebook have at their disposal an incredible amount of relevant, up-to-date, *exact*, aggregated data. The field will never be the same.
So we should expect a "Das Kapital 2011" Facebook page sometime soon?
i thought iphone os was supposed to be the perfect example of consistency and intuitiveness?
It is, valued customer. For the first time in all history, we have created a garden of pure ideology, where the consumer may bloom free from the pests of contradictory and confusing truths. Our enemies shall gesture themselves to death. We will prevail!
This article has been rated "C" on the Truthiness Scale for "Makes Steve Cry". Please report to your nearest Apple reseller for mandatory ungoodthink memoryholing.
If you want to improve the state of standardization, convince either the companies to stop getting or wielding these patents, or convince your government to eliminate/defang them.
Government-enforced standardization? What are you, some kind of commie socialist? Let's do it the American way! If I want to drive on the left side of the road and you want to drive on the right, we'll solve the dispute like civilized private gentlemen: with pistols!
and forgets to implement half of the expected semantics.
I know! Those poor overworked programmers. If only we had some kind of "code reuse" idea that let programmers embed standardised interfaces, let's call them, I don't know, "objects", via some sort of "inheritance" mechanism, into their code. Then we could write an interface once, at the operating system level, get it right, distribute it in some kind of "user interface toolkit", and never have to mess with it again.
Isn't it a pity that we have no such concept in modern programming? But since we don't, everyone has to write interfaces from scratch in Flash. It's hard, thankless drudgery and there's no end in sight.
Oh well! That's obviously the best anyone can ever do! Onto the next bold innovation! Hey, I know, let's reinvent the VT-100 terminal and call it "Web Applications"!
[Your sarcasm filter has just exploded. Replace it? Y/N]
But hey, Apple.
Indeed. Perhaps we need a new word: "annoyovation". Inventing new methods of incompatibility.
Fukushima meltdown means your backup cooling method goes out after a scram (and tsunami), and you are basically screwed. This requires a failure of imagination about worst possible scenarios combined with a bad plant location.
In their defense, failure of imagination about worst-case scenarios is the only way nuclear engineers can sleep at night. You have to have a very robust sense of "nonsense old chap, the fuel rods could never melt!" or you might start to dwell on "but what if they did...? and how many decades would the and be unfarmable...?" scenarios.
And that way lies the screaming jeebies and men in white suits and dosimeters. It's all much better for everyone just to learn not to speculate too deeply about how long those isotopes you're working with take to decay and what they might do to the food chain.
Gee willikers! It's our friend Mr Neutron on the Radio-Isotope with his pals Millie Sievert and Terry Becquerel! Time to harness the power of Atoms For Peace!
Of course it takes all kinds. I wouldn't want to rely on a hacker to process my reimbursement requests and get me paid on time.
Your first payslip would arrive immaculately printed and three weeks early.
Your second payslip would arrive three weeks late, soaked in Mountain Dew, and the ink would also perform a waltz rendition of the "ESB Imperial Theme" while it dialled NORAD.
Your third payslip would contain a live bobcat.
That's the problem with trying to make things foolproof - fools keep getting smarter.
The best minds of his generation are not, in fact, thinking about how to make people click ads.
Of course not. They're thinking about how to make robots click ads and take the people completely out of the loop.
The Blackberry's claim to fame in the corporate world is their willingness to hand back office operations over to its corporate customers. RIM can't read this data. It just passes it on to the appropriate server.
And in the West, we know that the "appropriate server" is not running in Langley because....?
Does the person posting this really think that RIM is happy to hand over data to foreign governments?
Yes.
When the king holds your entire business for ransom
I didn't realise the House of Saud had bought Canada. That explains a lot!