Umm, the person I was replying to was saying that copyright should automatically expire as soon as the author dies, because then he or she doesn't need the money any more.
Plumbers get paid for fixing the toilets at the time they fix them. And if the plumber dies before you pay your bill, you don't automatically get to forget the charges. Should the plumber have to buy insurance to cover that case? You might have life insurance to cover the fact that you won't be earning any more after you're dead, but do you buy insurance to cover your last paycheck because your employer won't have to pay it after you're dead?
Maybe a lot of slashdotters aren't old enough to have kids, but it seems to me that providing for one's widow and/or children is one of the things that an author would likely be concerned about, and probably even consider to be a "need".
Nobody is talking about locking up works "forever". This is about books that were written and published long after Mickey Mouse made his first appearance, and Mickey is still copyrighted (which seems to be stretching it a bit TOO far in my opinion).
Everything I've been reading suggests that ethanol has no advantages, other than for the subsidized corn producers. It takes more energy to grow the corn to be converted to ethanol than what you get out. You get lower mileage from running on a gasoline-ethanol mix than on pure gasoline. You produce less quantity of pollutants per amount of fuel burned, but this is pretty close to offset by the larger amount of fuel that you have to burn to go the same distance.
Maybe I'm wrong. I drive a diesel car that I run on biodiesel made from used restaurant oil, so I'm definitely not against biofuels in principle, but everything I've ever heard or read makes it seem like ethanol does not actually do anybody any good. Its only purpose is to make it SEEM like somebody is doing something, to make us feel good. But it raises the price of corn, and now, it appears, it destroys your car's engine as well.
Okay, I'm obviously missing something here. How is having an extra parameter for the destination size any safer? I always thought the third parameter to memcpy was the amount of data to copy, and since obviously it should never be set to anything larger than the size of the destination, how will having the destination size explicitly passed in help any?
Or are we just talking about a convenience feature that will make it easier for lazy programmers?
I make my own coffee, I get it from the coffee machine at work, I really like Tim Horton's coffee, I drink coffee from Coffee Time or Starbucks or whatever -- these are all palatable. Pretty much every time I've bought McDonald's coffee, I've had to pour out most of the cup because it was totally undrinkable.
Why, you ask, would I have bought it more than once in such a case? It's because people were telling me that "McDonald's is making GOOD coffee now, you should try it again." I did, and they aren't.
Why don't you read about what happened before you guess about it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald's_Restaurants seems to be a good summary of the case. Basically, a 79-year-old woman suffered third-degree burns on six percent of her skin and lesser burns over sixteen percent. She remained in the hospital for eight days while she underwent skin grafting. Two years of treatment followed. The issue was that McDonald's required franchises to serve coffee at 180-190 F, which (it was claimed) is much hotter than coffee from other places.
Not that I can understand why anybody would want to drink McDonald's coffee anyway -- it's HORRIBLE! But that's just my opinion.
But when *I* talk on the phone while driving, it's on roads where I could literally close my eyes for 5 seconds at a time without danger. And if it becomes a law that talking on a phone while driving is illegal, the police will charge someone driving along a road like that just as easily as someone who does it while in traffic.
But this doesn't have anything to do with real driving. Who would talk on the phone when in a situation requiring attention? Who would CONTINUE to talk on a phone if the situation turned into one requiring attention?
And there are several other jobs that I also feel very strongly should NEVER be done by someone who is only doing it for the money. A religious minister, for example.
Or a girlfriend:-)
I'd like to include teaching as something that should only be done by those who are passionate about it, but I can see that there would be practical problems with this. And yet, a good teacher can change a kid's life. I had several great math teachers, and that's how I ended up in this field. I've heard of great English teachers that made a difference to someone who ended up being an author. A great music teacher or art teacher could easily be the deciding factor in someone's further education and eventual career choice.
... there are people that wrote code just because it'll pay the bills. Those people generally like writing code as much as you liked mowing long grass.
Those people should find a different line of work that they DO enjoy.
It probably does cost a lot to find, vet and hire a good coder. But it's well worth the effort.
Let some other company bring the bad coders up to speed.
And also consider that just because someone is a bad coder, they may still be an excellent manager, or sales person, or documentation writer, or tester, or customer relations person, or project scheduler, or whatever. They don't necessarily have to be writing code. If they are a bad coder, and don't care enough, or have the ability, to become better coders, they SHOULD be doing something else.
We have a more informal system where I work. Whenever anybody checks in some code, whoever wants to automatically gets an email to notify them (for example, I am set up to receive notifications for any changes in a few directories where I do most of my work). Anybody who wants to then reviews the change. If there is nothing to comment on, it's completely transparent, and the person who checked in the changes is not even aware that they got reviewed. If there IS something to comment on, most likely someone will talk to the original coder (or send them an email), saying something to the effect of "by the way, did you consider such-and-such?", or maybe even "good idea!"
The system keeps track of who reviewed what change. As a check on the process, if there is any change that has been in the system for x days but has not been reviewed by at least m developers and n testers, the original coder gets an automatic email saying "please arrange for someone to review your code."
This is, of course, in addition to the automatic emails that get sent if a change actually BREAKS something. Those get dealt with right away.
So the review process does no harm to anybody's morale, except in the cases where that person really is producing bad code.
Strangely enough, it seems to work quite well.
As for your other point, about "A developer codes well and gets through a few audits. Now they're trusted, they can afford to let things slip for some time before anything is caught. There's less incentive to keep producing good code": I don't want anybody with that attitude in my group, period. I am not in any kind of supervisory position, but if there is someone on the team who only produces good code because of some "incentive", and the team lead doesn't do anything about that, then I don't want to work for that team lead, either. I will vote with my feet, and I don't think I would be the only one. And then this would become, no doubt, a much more "normal" software department, instead of an amazing one.
I was recently looking at a cheap computer that had *ONLY* 1 GB (that's GIGAbyte) of RAM, and was told that it only came with Vista, but that Vista doesn't really run in only 1 GB or RAM, so the computer came with some kind of crippled Vista. The salesperson told me that I couldn't get XP for the upgrade price either, because to go from Vista to XP wasn't an upgrade. It was an amusing conversation, which I admit I was only participating in to see just what a fool the salesperson could make of himself.
And at first I thought Windows 95 was such a memory hog, because you needed what, 4 MB, for it to run?
But when you think about it, what do I actually get for all of this "improved" hardware? I spend most of my day editing code, using a plain text editor with non-proportional fonts. (Yes, I do admit that my code builds a lot faster these days:-) When I write documents, I have a choice of many, many fonts that I could use, but I only use 2 on a daily basis (and could happily make do with one), and only EVER use maybe half a dozen. The title bars on my windows shade smoothly from dark on one side to light on the other, but how does that actually improve my productivity, or even my enjoyment? I use accounting programs that have pretty graphics, but I would actually RATHER just get my results in spreadsheet form -- what I really care about is the numbers themselves.
In law you can have "conflicting" statements via alternative arguments. For instance:
* I was not at the scene of the crime.
* alternatively, I was at the scene of the crime but was not involved and did not see the crime take place from my vantage point.
* in the further alternative, I was there, saw it happen but was unable to intervene or identify the culprits
It may seem to logically conflict, but each argument stands by itself. You could think of each alternative argument as a root to an individual tree (i.e. you can have multiple starting points for your arguments, they don't all have to start from one premise). Yeah, but I think that, if I was on a jury and heard a lawyer make a set of arguments like that, I would have to assume he or she was lying. Any of the three could be true, but it is impossible for all three to be true simultaneously.
If the facts seem to show that I am guilty, I think the way a truly innocent person would counter that would be to say "No, here is the real story, and here's the explanation for the suspicious facts." To come up with alternate, inconsistent explanations is practically ADMITTING that there IS no "real story" in which I am innocent, just that there COULD have been.
I've worked on the design of CANDU nuclear power plants, and about 15 years ago I did a little bit of work relating to the Ignalina RBMK reactor (just translating a document into English, not any design work). Ignalina is the same design as Chernobyl, only 50% larger.
I was *shocked* by some things I observed there. Yes, to get in for a tour, I had to get all sorts of permissions, go past armed guards who checked my passport, etc. BUT, on the way out, I asked my guide why I didn't have to go through the radiation monitors. He explained that it was because I was a guest, and they didn't want to be disrespectful. I tried to tell him that it had nothing to do with respect or disrespect, and that in Canada, if the Queen herself had visited in the potentially radioactive area of a nuclear power plant, she would have walked through the radiation monitors on the way out. He didn't seem to get it.
I heard a number of stories about Chernobyl as well, from an academic working in the nuclear field there. People were not told ANYTHING about what had happened. The day after the accident was some sort of holiday, and people were gathering in the streets, not knowing anything about the fallout that was even then coming down. This person ordered his own family to stay indoors for their own safety, even over their protests that not joining the crowd would be considered unpatriotic.
He also told of the story he heard about the guard at Chernobyl who was standing right in the direct line of radiation from the plant. This guard was told "Comrade, at least stand behind this wall, you can still guard the doorway from there", and the guard answered "I was ordered to stand right here, so I will stand right here."
But to get back to the question of RBMK design.
One of the principles of CANDU design is redundancy. The control computer should always be able to control the plant safely. The control computers are duplicated, and if one fails, the other one takes over. If both computers fail, the plant automatically shuts down, as long as things like gravity keep working. Now, in the design of the safety systems, the emergency shutdown systems, you start with the ASSUMPTION that not only are the control computers working, but they are hostile and doing the exact opposite of what they are supposed to do, trying to increase power, keeping valves open when they should be shut, trying to shut valves that should be open, etc. The shutdown system has to be able to guarantee that the reactor is shut down safely even in those conditions. Then, there is an additional shutdown system, SDS2. SDS2 is designed by different people than SDS1 (if you've worked on one, you're not allowed to work on the other), uses equipment from different manufacturers, works on different physical principles, is located in a physically different area of the reactor, has its control equipment in a physically different area of the plant. Both systems are designed (as is the regular control system) to shut down the reactor immediately if they should lose power (e.g. power is used to hold UP control rods that shut down the reactor when they drop, power is used to hold CLOSED a valve that injects a neutron poison into the core when it opens). But even so, the equipment is powered by separate power systems. Anybody who does any maintenance on SDS1 is prohibited from doing any maintenance on SDS2, and vice versa. Everything is done to try to eliminate any common mode of failure. And then, of course, if the regular control system fails and both shutdown systems also fail, the reactor is designed with a negative power coefficient and is in a containment structure, which is ALSO designed to keep everything relatively safe even then. Really expensive, but safe. (Actually, even SDS2 is expensive: if it fires, the reactor can't be restarted for about two days, and the utility has lost two days of revenue.)
As far as I remember, the RBMK had only one emergency shutdown system, and it depended on signals it gets from the regular co
The Chalk River reactor does supply energy to the power grid. I have no idea where you got that information.
I worked in the Canadian nuclear power industry in the late 1970's and in the 1980's, and before that I had a summer job at CRNL (Chalk River) in 1977. I'm pretty sure that NRU has *never* supplied energy to the power grid. There is no turbine there. It has been used for *research* into fuels and technologies that were eventually used in CANDU power reactors, but that's not the same thing.
The very first Canadian reactor to supply energy to the power grid was NPD (Nuclear Power Demonstration) at Rolphton, Ontario, about 30 km upstream of Chalk River. NPD was built about 5 years after NRU, and used to demonstrate the feasibility of using a reactor to produce electricity. It was later used as a Nuclear Training Centre by Ontario Hydro, until it was shut down in the late 1980's.
(checks submitter's name) No, it was somebody else. Which is totally weird, because that's EXACTLY the situation that I'm dealing with -- a technologically challenged mother who wants "JUST a cell phone, not a camera, not an MP3 player, just a cell phone."
The solution I'm in the process of trying is to get an old GSM phone. Actually when I explained the situation, TWO of my co-workers came to me, offering to GIVE me old ones of theirs. One of them had previously been on a Rogers pay-as-you-go plan, and the phone was simply no longer in use. I bought that phone from my co-worker for a "nominal sum", but I haven't arranged to get a new SIM for it yet -- maybe I'll do that tonight. The other one is on a Telus monthly plan, and the co-worker would gladly give me the phone if I took over the plan, so he wouldn't have to pay the cancellation charges.
I do wonder, though, whether there is a market for SIMPLE versions of devices (like cell phones), with no fancy features, yet of reasonably good quality. It's not that my mom wants fewer features in order to shave every last penny off of the price. She presumably wants a phone with good audio quality, good battery life, etc., but without the things that have nothing to do with talking on the phone. Well, actually, there obviously IS a market like that, the question is why there are no manufacturers selling to that market. Maybe it isn't a large enough market?
That seems kind of stupid. I assume SS#s are like SINs here. In that case, employers need them because they have to send you a T4, banks need them because they have to send you a T5 for any interest you earn on a savings account, but why would water or power companies need them? Are power or water expenses tax deductible in the States or something?
I don't know about the 4th century, but the current Catholic teaching that I was taught in a course on Christian ethics is that the duty to obey one's conscience is a higher duty than that of obeying orders.
St. Thomas Aquinas (1225 - 1274), taught that one has a DUTY to obey one's conscience, even if the conscience contradicts the law, and EVEN IF the conscience is in fact objectively wrong. Of course, one also has a duty to inform oneself as best one can, so that one's conscience will not lead one astray.
If one disobeys the law in order to follow one's conscience, one has to be prepared for the practical consequences of this, which may include prison or worse. Nevertheless, one has a DUTY to do so.
True, but it's amazing how often one runs into people that one has worked with before, or people who know people that one has worked with before, so one's reputation is also important. But you're right, it doesn't have to be for a selfish reason.
Look at it this way. Your company does not have to give you two weeks notice to fire you, nor would they. Why would you need to give two weeks notice to quit? Neither side is obligated when employment is terminated, and it doesn't matter who is doing the terminating. Huh? Actually, they DO legally have to give you two weeks notice, or two weeks pay in lieu of notice, and you legally have to give them two weeks notice. Or maybe that's just here. Is it different where you are? (Just joking. I know that the laws are different in some primitive places, like where you apparently live.)
In any case, I believe in not burning my bridges. In fact, I gave a month's notice from my previous job, but then I ended up in the hospital for over a week, so I OFFERRED (and was taken up on the offer) to delay my departure until I could finish handing everything over to my successor. My new company was not especially pleased by that, but they certainly supported me in it, knowing that I would do the same for them.
And so I remain on good terms with all of my previous employers. I am welcome to come visit and join my ex-co-workers for lunch, I still get Christmas cards from the president of one of the companies I worked for, I've gone back and done contract work for ex-employers. Only in one case did ex-employer A try to prevent new employer B from getting work from customer C because of me, but they were slapped down with threats of legal action, and in fact A later hired B to do work for THEM, specifically, work performed by me.
I'm really, really rotten at negotiating salary for a new job, but it has happened more than once that a new employer has come back and said "Actually, we can do better than that" and improved the deal AFTER I had already signed the contract (in one case, after I had started working there). And, maybe I'm just kidding myself, but it seems to cause great sadness when I leave a place, in contrast to some other workers where the manager seems almost relieved to get rid of them. But I make a point of NOT leaving any of them in a lurch.
Sometimes I wonder, though. Why do they keep me on, when they could take my salary and use it to hire at least two other engineers? It sure can't be because I'm so productive! Why do I have a window office, when generally only managers have offices, and at least one has to be satisfied with a window cube? I bet HIS sadness at me leaving would be at least somewhat tempered by his change of workstation.:-) I don't know. I don't even know why I'm wasting time writing this post, which is getting more and more off-topic, when the build machine keeps sending me emails to tell me that something I checked in is breaking one of the builds. Maybe I should attend to that...
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Umm, the person I was replying to was saying that copyright should automatically expire as soon as the author dies, because then he or she doesn't need the money any more.
That's not a very good analogy.
Plumbers get paid for fixing the toilets at the time they fix them. And if the plumber dies before you pay your bill, you don't automatically get to forget the charges. Should the plumber have to buy insurance to cover that case? You might have life insurance to cover the fact that you won't be earning any more after you're dead, but do you buy insurance to cover your last paycheck because your employer won't have to pay it after you're dead?
So, yes, it is the "same difference".
Maybe a lot of slashdotters aren't old enough to have kids, but it seems to me that providing for one's widow and/or children is one of the things that an author would likely be concerned about, and probably even consider to be a "need".
Nobody is talking about locking up works "forever". This is about books that were written and published long after Mickey Mouse made his first appearance, and Mickey is still copyrighted (which seems to be stretching it a bit TOO far in my opinion).
Everything I've been reading suggests that ethanol has no advantages, other than for the subsidized corn producers. It takes more energy to grow the corn to be converted to ethanol than what you get out. You get lower mileage from running on a gasoline-ethanol mix than on pure gasoline. You produce less quantity of pollutants per amount of fuel burned, but this is pretty close to offset by the larger amount of fuel that you have to burn to go the same distance.
Maybe I'm wrong. I drive a diesel car that I run on biodiesel made from used restaurant oil, so I'm definitely not against biofuels in principle, but everything I've ever heard or read makes it seem like ethanol does not actually do anybody any good. Its only purpose is to make it SEEM like somebody is doing something, to make us feel good. But it raises the price of corn, and now, it appears, it destroys your car's engine as well.
It seems obvious to me that he was being sarcastic. Did you think he meant it seriously?
Okay, I'm obviously missing something here. How is having an extra parameter for the destination size any safer? I always thought the third parameter to memcpy was the amount of data to copy, and since obviously it should never be set to anything larger than the size of the destination, how will having the destination size explicitly passed in help any?
Or are we just talking about a convenience feature that will make it easier for lazy programmers?
I make my own coffee, I get it from the coffee machine at work, I really like Tim Horton's coffee, I drink coffee from Coffee Time or Starbucks or whatever -- these are all palatable. Pretty much every time I've bought McDonald's coffee, I've had to pour out most of the cup because it was totally undrinkable.
Why, you ask, would I have bought it more than once in such a case? It's because people were telling me that "McDonald's is making GOOD coffee now, you should try it again." I did, and they aren't.
Why don't you read about what happened before you guess about it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald's_Restaurants seems to be a good summary of the case. Basically, a 79-year-old woman suffered third-degree burns on six percent of her skin and lesser burns over sixteen percent. She remained in the hospital for eight days while she underwent skin grafting. Two years of treatment followed. The issue was that McDonald's required franchises to serve coffee at 180-190 F, which (it was claimed) is much hotter than coffee from other places.
Not that I can understand why anybody would want to drink McDonald's coffee anyway -- it's HORRIBLE! But that's just my opinion.
Not sure what you mean here. Blacks already have the right to marry one another. In fact, it's usually not considered to be a "special" right at all.
Yeah, you're right. I see it all the time, too.
But when *I* talk on the phone while driving, it's on roads where I could literally close my eyes for 5 seconds at a time without danger. And if it becomes a law that talking on a phone while driving is illegal, the police will charge someone driving along a road like that just as easily as someone who does it while in traffic.
But this doesn't have anything to do with real driving. Who would talk on the phone when in a situation requiring attention? Who would CONTINUE to talk on a phone if the situation turned into one requiring attention?
And there are several other jobs that I also feel very strongly should NEVER be done by someone who is only doing it for the money. A religious minister, for example.
Or a girlfriend :-)
I'd like to include teaching as something that should only be done by those who are passionate about it, but I can see that there would be practical problems with this. And yet, a good teacher can change a kid's life. I had several great math teachers, and that's how I ended up in this field. I've heard of great English teachers that made a difference to someone who ended up being an author. A great music teacher or art teacher could easily be the deciding factor in someone's further education and eventual career choice.
... there are people that wrote code just because it'll pay the bills. Those people generally like writing code as much as you liked mowing long grass.
Those people should find a different line of work that they DO enjoy.
It probably does cost a lot to find, vet and hire a good coder. But it's well worth the effort.
Let some other company bring the bad coders up to speed.
And also consider that just because someone is a bad coder, they may still be an excellent manager, or sales person, or documentation writer, or tester, or customer relations person, or project scheduler, or whatever. They don't necessarily have to be writing code. If they are a bad coder, and don't care enough, or have the ability, to become better coders, they SHOULD be doing something else.
We have a more informal system where I work. Whenever anybody checks in some code, whoever wants to automatically gets an email to notify them (for example, I am set up to receive notifications for any changes in a few directories where I do most of my work). Anybody who wants to then reviews the change. If there is nothing to comment on, it's completely transparent, and the person who checked in the changes is not even aware that they got reviewed. If there IS something to comment on, most likely someone will talk to the original coder (or send them an email), saying something to the effect of "by the way, did you consider such-and-such?", or maybe even "good idea!"
The system keeps track of who reviewed what change. As a check on the process, if there is any change that has been in the system for x days but has not been reviewed by at least m developers and n testers, the original coder gets an automatic email saying "please arrange for someone to review your code."
This is, of course, in addition to the automatic emails that get sent if a change actually BREAKS something. Those get dealt with right away.
So the review process does no harm to anybody's morale, except in the cases where that person really is producing bad code.
Strangely enough, it seems to work quite well.
As for your other point, about "A developer codes well and gets through a few audits. Now they're trusted, they can afford to let things slip for some time before anything is caught. There's less incentive to keep producing good code": I don't want anybody with that attitude in my group, period. I am not in any kind of supervisory position, but if there is someone on the team who only produces good code because of some "incentive", and the team lead doesn't do anything about that, then I don't want to work for that team lead, either. I will vote with my feet, and I don't think I would be the only one. And then this would become, no doubt, a much more "normal" software department, instead of an amazing one.
Read more carefully. India might have a population of 1.15 billion, but the probe itself does not.
I was recently looking at a cheap computer that had *ONLY* 1 GB (that's GIGAbyte) of RAM, and was told that it only came with Vista, but that Vista doesn't really run in only 1 GB or RAM, so the computer came with some kind of crippled Vista. The salesperson told me that I couldn't get XP for the upgrade price either, because to go from Vista to XP wasn't an upgrade. It was an amusing conversation, which I admit I was only participating in to see just what a fool the salesperson could make of himself.
And at first I thought Windows 95 was such a memory hog, because you needed what, 4 MB, for it to run?
But when you think about it, what do I actually get for all of this "improved" hardware? I spend most of my day editing code, using a plain text editor with non-proportional fonts. (Yes, I do admit that my code builds a lot faster these days :-) When I write documents, I have a choice of many, many fonts that I could use, but I only use 2 on a daily basis (and could happily make do with one), and only EVER use maybe half a dozen. The title bars on my windows shade smoothly from dark on one side to light on the other, but how does that actually improve my productivity, or even my enjoyment? I use accounting programs that have pretty graphics, but I would actually RATHER just get my results in spreadsheet form -- what I really care about is the numbers themselves.
Now get off my lawn! :-)
* I was not at the scene of the crime.
* alternatively, I was at the scene of the crime but was not involved and did not see the crime take place from my vantage point.
* in the further alternative, I was there, saw it happen but was unable to intervene or identify the culprits
It may seem to logically conflict, but each argument stands by itself. You could think of each alternative argument as a root to an individual tree (i.e. you can have multiple starting points for your arguments, they don't all have to start from one premise). Yeah, but I think that, if I was on a jury and heard a lawyer make a set of arguments like that, I would have to assume he or she was lying. Any of the three could be true, but it is impossible for all three to be true simultaneously.
If the facts seem to show that I am guilty, I think the way a truly innocent person would counter that would be to say "No, here is the real story, and here's the explanation for the suspicious facts." To come up with alternate, inconsistent explanations is practically ADMITTING that there IS no "real story" in which I am innocent, just that there COULD have been.
I've worked on the design of CANDU nuclear power plants, and about 15 years ago I did a little bit of work relating to the Ignalina RBMK reactor (just translating a document into English, not any design work). Ignalina is the same design as Chernobyl, only 50% larger.
I was *shocked* by some things I observed there. Yes, to get in for a tour, I had to get all sorts of permissions, go past armed guards who checked my passport, etc. BUT, on the way out, I asked my guide why I didn't have to go through the radiation monitors. He explained that it was because I was a guest, and they didn't want to be disrespectful. I tried to tell him that it had nothing to do with respect or disrespect, and that in Canada, if the Queen herself had visited in the potentially radioactive area of a nuclear power plant, she would have walked through the radiation monitors on the way out. He didn't seem to get it.
I heard a number of stories about Chernobyl as well, from an academic working in the nuclear field there. People were not told ANYTHING about what had happened. The day after the accident was some sort of holiday, and people were gathering in the streets, not knowing anything about the fallout that was even then coming down. This person ordered his own family to stay indoors for their own safety, even over their protests that not joining the crowd would be considered unpatriotic.
He also told of the story he heard about the guard at Chernobyl who was standing right in the direct line of radiation from the plant. This guard was told "Comrade, at least stand behind this wall, you can still guard the doorway from there", and the guard answered "I was ordered to stand right here, so I will stand right here."
But to get back to the question of RBMK design.
One of the principles of CANDU design is redundancy. The control computer should always be able to control the plant safely. The control computers are duplicated, and if one fails, the other one takes over. If both computers fail, the plant automatically shuts down, as long as things like gravity keep working. Now, in the design of the safety systems, the emergency shutdown systems, you start with the ASSUMPTION that not only are the control computers working, but they are hostile and doing the exact opposite of what they are supposed to do, trying to increase power, keeping valves open when they should be shut, trying to shut valves that should be open, etc. The shutdown system has to be able to guarantee that the reactor is shut down safely even in those conditions. Then, there is an additional shutdown system, SDS2. SDS2 is designed by different people than SDS1 (if you've worked on one, you're not allowed to work on the other), uses equipment from different manufacturers, works on different physical principles, is located in a physically different area of the reactor, has its control equipment in a physically different area of the plant. Both systems are designed (as is the regular control system) to shut down the reactor immediately if they should lose power (e.g. power is used to hold UP control rods that shut down the reactor when they drop, power is used to hold CLOSED a valve that injects a neutron poison into the core when it opens). But even so, the equipment is powered by separate power systems. Anybody who does any maintenance on SDS1 is prohibited from doing any maintenance on SDS2, and vice versa. Everything is done to try to eliminate any common mode of failure. And then, of course, if the regular control system fails and both shutdown systems also fail, the reactor is designed with a negative power coefficient and is in a containment structure, which is ALSO designed to keep everything relatively safe even then. Really expensive, but safe. (Actually, even SDS2 is expensive: if it fires, the reactor can't be restarted for about two days, and the utility has lost two days of revenue.)
As far as I remember, the RBMK had only one emergency shutdown system, and it depended on signals it gets from the regular co
I worked in the Canadian nuclear power industry in the late 1970's and in the 1980's, and before that I had a summer job at CRNL (Chalk River) in 1977. I'm pretty sure that NRU has *never* supplied energy to the power grid. There is no turbine there. It has been used for *research* into fuels and technologies that were eventually used in CANDU power reactors, but that's not the same thing.
The very first Canadian reactor to supply energy to the power grid was NPD (Nuclear Power Demonstration) at Rolphton, Ontario, about 30 km upstream of Chalk River. NPD was built about 5 years after NRU, and used to demonstrate the feasibility of using a reactor to produce electricity. It was later used as a Nuclear Training Centre by Ontario Hydro, until it was shut down in the late 1980's.
(checks submitter's name) No, it was somebody else. Which is totally weird, because that's EXACTLY the situation that I'm dealing with -- a technologically challenged mother who wants "JUST a cell phone, not a camera, not an MP3 player, just a cell phone."
The solution I'm in the process of trying is to get an old GSM phone. Actually when I explained the situation, TWO of my co-workers came to me, offering to GIVE me old ones of theirs. One of them had previously been on a Rogers pay-as-you-go plan, and the phone was simply no longer in use. I bought that phone from my co-worker for a "nominal sum", but I haven't arranged to get a new SIM for it yet -- maybe I'll do that tonight. The other one is on a Telus monthly plan, and the co-worker would gladly give me the phone if I took over the plan, so he wouldn't have to pay the cancellation charges.
I do wonder, though, whether there is a market for SIMPLE versions of devices (like cell phones), with no fancy features, yet of reasonably good quality. It's not that my mom wants fewer features in order to shave every last penny off of the price. She presumably wants a phone with good audio quality, good battery life, etc., but without the things that have nothing to do with talking on the phone. Well, actually, there obviously IS a market like that, the question is why there are no manufacturers selling to that market. Maybe it isn't a large enough market?
That seems kind of stupid. I assume SS#s are like SINs here. In that case, employers need them because they have to send you a T4, banks need them because they have to send you a T5 for any interest you earn on a savings account, but why would water or power companies need them? Are power or water expenses tax deductible in the States or something?
I don't know about the 4th century, but the current Catholic teaching that I was taught in a course on Christian ethics is that the duty to obey one's conscience is a higher duty than that of obeying orders.
St. Thomas Aquinas (1225 - 1274), taught that one has a DUTY to obey one's conscience, even if the conscience contradicts the law, and EVEN IF the conscience is in fact objectively wrong. Of course, one also has a duty to inform oneself as best one can, so that one's conscience will not lead one astray.
If one disobeys the law in order to follow one's conscience, one has to be prepared for the practical consequences of this, which may include prison or worse. Nevertheless, one has a DUTY to do so.
True, but it's amazing how often one runs into people that one has worked with before, or people who know people that one has worked with before, so one's reputation is also important. But you're right, it doesn't have to be for a selfish reason.
In any case, I believe in not burning my bridges. In fact, I gave a month's notice from my previous job, but then I ended up in the hospital for over a week, so I OFFERRED (and was taken up on the offer) to delay my departure until I could finish handing everything over to my successor. My new company was not especially pleased by that, but they certainly supported me in it, knowing that I would do the same for them.
And so I remain on good terms with all of my previous employers. I am welcome to come visit and join my ex-co-workers for lunch, I still get Christmas cards from the president of one of the companies I worked for, I've gone back and done contract work for ex-employers. Only in one case did ex-employer A try to prevent new employer B from getting work from customer C because of me, but they were slapped down with threats of legal action, and in fact A later hired B to do work for THEM, specifically, work performed by me.
I'm really, really rotten at negotiating salary for a new job, but it has happened more than once that a new employer has come back and said "Actually, we can do better than that" and improved the deal AFTER I had already signed the contract (in one case, after I had started working there). And, maybe I'm just kidding myself, but it seems to cause great sadness when I leave a place, in contrast to some other workers where the manager seems almost relieved to get rid of them. But I make a point of NOT leaving any of them in a lurch.
Sometimes I wonder, though. Why do they keep me on, when they could take my salary and use it to hire at least two other engineers? It sure can't be because I'm so productive! Why do I have a window office, when generally only managers have offices, and at least one has to be satisfied with a window cube? I bet HIS sadness at me leaving would be at least somewhat tempered by his change of workstation.