There are few precedents in this area, and really headers that contain just macros/prototypes/etc aren't copyrightable.
Curiously, companies like MicroChip disagree with you on this: they use a gcc-based toolchain for their chips, but claim their copyright interest in their header files allows them to distribute it with a license that forbids you from using their header files with any other compiler, including a modified version of their own compiler.
So there are companies out there basing a significant part of their software revenue on precisely the opposite of the claim you are making. They may be wrong, but the claim is not on the face of it implausible.
The point to me is not that nuclear power is unsafe, but rather that unacceptable risks were taken in this case.
"In this case" is something I'm hearing a lot of lately. The question is: what are the odds of equally unacceptable risks being taken in other cases?
Think about it in these terms: there are maybe 1000 fission reactors running world-wide. In this on there just happened to have been unacceptable risks that were revealed when there just happened to be a 9.0 earthquake. If not for the quake, the unacceptable risks would have continued to exist until some other error triggered a comparable disaster.
From this, I infer that the vast majority of nuclear plants on Earth have comparable unacceptable risks being taken. It unfortunately stands to reason: what are the odds that the one plant that happens to have unacceptable risks being taken also happens to be hit by a huge earthquake and its aftermath?
The only reasonable conclusion is that basically every reactor out there has comparable risks, just waiting for some unfortunate event to reveal them.
At which point people will say, "Oh but that was only in this case!"
Hundreds of square miles of dead sea critters are of no import next to a situation that were it to go out of control could kill thousands of humans.
Huh? How exactly is a nuclear meltdown with fire going to kill thousands of humans? The worst case scenario in Japan is considerably better than Chernobyl, and that killed what? A dozen?
Without an earthquake (one of the biggest in recorded history, I might add) to disrupt the reactors, the Fukushima Daiichi plant could have continued happily along with no major problems.
Sure, if you are allowed to dismiss the cause of every accident as an irrelevant anomaly then nuclear power looks like a good investment. What the plant could have done in your imaginary future is irrelevant: if the idiots at Chernobyl hadn't operated the plant miles out of spec, or if the bozos who built it had included a containment structure, or...
The problem is, we don't live in the world of your imagination. Scientists and engineers have been trying to teach philosophers for 300 years that what you can or cannot imagine has zero ontological significance, but it's apparently a difficult lesson to learn.
In the world we actually live in, relatively small, common, stupid things that people inevitably do result in the total economic loss of billion-dollar nuclear reactors every couple of decades. Even well-designed, well-operated plants like Ontario Hydro's CANDUs have been vastly more expensive than anticipated due to an almost trivial design and construction error. This is the commonplace reality of nuclear power: errors so small as to be inevitable have economic consequences that are wildly out of proportion with their causes, even when we ignore the public health effects and inconvenience involved in evacuations and whatnot.
Conversely, how often do you hear, "Earthquake 10 km from coal-fired plant, thousands evacuated from homes, emergency crews at risk while trying to bring boilers under control"? While a great deal can be said against coal, oil, gas and hydro power, we don't have to imagine a world in which they are forgiving of relatively minor erors, becuase in the real world we actually live in they are forgiving of relatively minor errors. For some reason we even seem to be able to mostly avoid earthquake damage to hydroelectric dams.
Fision power is eoncomically problematic because relatively minor--to the point of being inevitable--human errors will result in a significant risk of total loss of the plant. This is a consequence of the hgih energy density in nuclear fuel, not a consequence of plant design, as even pebble bed reactors have suffered from signficant risk of plastic deformation due to overheating, and once that happens to the highly radioactive components of the plant, it is pretty much a dead loss.
Better to look back on this afterwards as "less serious than we thought" than to show the public that the industry can't be trusted to anticipate, prevent, contain, or even be truthful about its accidents.
On the one hand there is an understandable desire on the part of those of us who know something of nuclear physics and nuclear engineering to put a damper on the more ridiculous speculations and lies that mass media are using to pump up fear and sell eyeballs.
On the other hand, there should be a desire to educate the public about the genuine risks associated with nuclear power, which means breaking out of the ridiculous "OMG we are all going to die!" vs "power too cheap to meter".
For the longest time the anti-nuclear movement was undebatable. There is simply no point in talking to anyone who thinks that Hellen Caldicot, for example, has anything useful or interesting to say about energy policy, enginerring safety or social policy. She and other like her are are simply noise-machines, drowning out all possibility of rational discourse.
So ignoring people like that, what can we say about this accident so far?
1) Core containment appears to be intact. Core containment is a bit like a building falling down. If you are doubtful about it having happened, it probably hasn't.
2) Spent fuel storage adjacent to the reactor, outside the containment structure, is at risk of going critical. This would effectively place an uncontrolled nuclear reactor outside of any containment structure. Given the high tempratures and highly reactive envrironment this would entail, the possibility of the metalic components of such a reactor catching fire is non-zero. At this point the otherwise inflecitous comparisons to Chernobyl become unfortunately apt: the fire-driven radioactive plume from such a reactor would result in wide-spread atmospheric dispersal of actindes and fission products. With any luck, most of this would be washed out into the ocean fairly quickly, but on the islands of Japan itself the degree of surface contamination would almost certainly be quite significant.
3) Errors only become apparent after they occur. Applogists for the nuclear industry will say "we can make sure that this won't happen again", and it may not. But something else will. This is a certainty. The energy density involved in nuclear reactors and nuclear fuel has been demonstrated time and again to be so high that relatively small errors have dreadful consequences, at least economically. We have seen this in carbon-moderated reactors, PWRs, BWRs and CANDUs. e cannot engineer out susceptiblity to the kind of small and apparently inocuous errors that have produced this disaster. I do not agree that with the accessment that "this is a crime": it is just that the sensitivity of nuclear reactors to relatively routine levels of error has been shown multiple times to be high.
Coal-fired plants kill far more people than nuclear plants do, but they don't write themselves off when they do so. Nuclear plants don't kill as many people, but they become extremely expensive when people make the kind of mistakes that coal-fired plants forgive. This is not advocacy for coal, by the way, which is a filthy fuel. It is a reflection that fission power will always result in economic risks that are extremely high.
4) Reprocessing is not risk free, even when spent fuel never leaves the site. It has long been argued by reprocessing advocates that it can be made safe, and one of the means of doing so is keeping everything on site. One can't help but ask, "How's that working out for you?"
Once upon a time I expected to have a career in the nuclear industry. I trained as a nuclear engineer and went on, post-Chernobyl, to become a nuclear physicist. While I still have a fondness for the concept of nuclear power, it has become increasingly clear in the past several decades that even well-run, well-regulated nuclear industries have significant economic issues associated with them, and we should be at last cautious about building new nuclear plants without finding some means of providing genuine public evaluation of risk and oversight of constrution.
Every deviant behavior would be punished, everyone forced to fit into a mold of what the majority thought was "right." I, and most people I know, would be in jail or dead in that world.
While I'm not sure I'd want to live in a fully transparent society, your reaction to it is based on a massive falure of deductive closure.
You're assuming that current notions of "deviant" would persist in a society where every single person could be seen every moment of every day by every other person.
That would mean you'd get to see the minster fucking the choirboy, the judge spanking her studly young clerk, the cop smoking a little weed to take the edge off.
I can't even begin to imagine what a generation or two raised in such a world might come to see as "normal" and "deviant", and I doubt anyone else can either. You can't just increase transparency and assume that everything else will stay exactly the same. We are already seeing this with regard to social networking sites: in another twenty years there won't be a single person running for office anywhere who doesn't have some embarrassing photos of their younger self out someplace on the Web.
While in the next decade a bunch of power-hungry hypocritical assholes will continue to scream bloody murder every time a public figure turns out to have done a few stupid things as a youth, its going to get pretty lame pretty quickly. Even people as stupid as ordinary voters are going to eventually figure out that everyone has done something dumb. The only differnece is that now it gets caught on camera and spread around the world years after the fact.
I think a transparent society would be a very liberal society, once equilibirum was established. The initial transition would be hard, because the hypocrites would try really hard to control things. But if there is genuine transparency, transparency for all, only people with a relaxed, live and let live attitude would stay sane in such a world.
It'll probably be a command line tool or library that nobody will use in its pure form; instead, they'll use a GUI frontend with a completely different name.
No, they'll use 12 different GUIs that depend on a hundred different libs and apps on different platforms. You'll go to the "gnufreecall" website and get a list of links to FTP sites that contain different and incompatible versions of various backend tools and GUIs, with "installation instructions" that start with, "To install from github..."
Of course, Americans are thrown into prison [nytimes.com] for allowing people to see foreign satellite channels, but let's not discuss that.
No, please, let's not. Not here, as it is completely and utterly irrelevant to the topic of this discussion, which is the behaviour of people in the Cuban government. Why you and others insist on bringing up totally unrelated issues of behaviour as bad or worse by people in the American government is beyond me. It is obscurantist and distractings and worse of all it makes it look like you think there is absolutely nothing substantive or interesting to say about Cuba.
It is, with you people, all and always, only about America.
Well, there was this whole incident [wikipedia.org] to provide evidence for chemical weapons
Remind me again how a chemical weapons attack fifteen years ago provides evidence of chemical weapons today, after a decade of ongoing dismantlement and inspection of the defunct Iraqi chemical weapons program?
"Plausibility" is not "evidence".
Going to war based on a plausble but unproven suposition is a crime against humanity.
So while this may be "news" in the sense that it's about such orbits around another star, it's hardly news in the astrophysics sense.
It's news in the sense that it provides more information about the dynamics of planetary formation, at least amongst hot Jupiters. While we know that the orbital dynamics of these bodies creates a stable situation, we did not know that they could actually form this way--the dynamics of early planetary formation is still much debated. There are a lot of things that happen, the initial conditions are not well-understood, the collision dynamics depend on the properties of the colliding bodies, etc. Ergo, there are any number of things that might disrupt the creation of twin worlds of this kind. This observation tells us that it is possible to create them, although I'm sure there will now be a debate as to whether they were created in place or if one of them was somehow captured into a Lagrange point of the other.
Science is nothing but the discipline of publically testing ideas by controlled experiment and systematic observation. It doesn't matter how confident anyone is that an idea is true. It isn't science until it has been publically tested by controlled experiment and/or systematic observation, which of course includes testing it for consistency with the deductive closure of inferences from all other controlled experiments and systematic observations.
Our observations of how the climate has changed have agreed well with what the models predicted.
We don't have any particularly strong predictions yet, so I'm not sure what predictions you are talking about. There was a nice paper a while back comparing a number of long-term temperature records from half a dozen land stations for which models predicted warming in the past fifty or sixty years and all but one of them showed down-trends, even without corrections for urban heat island effects.
Models can be made to fit the past, but that is completely different from prediction because they are highly parameterized. As von Neumann famously said, "Give me four parameters and I can fit an elephant. Give me five and I can make the elephant fly."
What constitutes an ad hoc kludge is not a matter of opinion: one is either solving equations that have a fundamental physical justification or one is not. Mostly climate models are not, and if you look in the comments in the code and the documentation you will see all kinds of things that will make your hair stand on end. Trivial-seeming approximations can send computational models off into non-physical territory when integrating systems much simpler than the Earth's climate.
Being able to fit the past is no assurance of accurate predictions of the future in highly parameterized, non-physical models. Believing otherwise is simply a declaration of ignorance regarding computational physics.
They why is it every time a physicist makes a comment about it we are dismissed because we are "not climatologists"?
And yet as someone whose primary scientific work of late is in cancer genetics, no one in biology every dismisses my opinions because I'm "not a biologist"? They may dismiss my opinion because I'm wrong, which happens not infrequently, but that's the way science works. Authority counts for less than accuracy.
So we are left with this problem: climatologists, who are not computational physicists, are trying to solve a very difficult computational physics problem and trusting their models much further than any computational physicist ever would. Computational physicists know how easy it is to get it wrong and how trivial corrections can produce grossly unphysical behaviour over long-term integrations. From the work I have seen published, no climatologist has ever done a serious robustness or physicality test on any GCM, but they are more than ready to proclaim that the results of these unphysical models integrated over very long times are broadly correct. That simply isn't justified, and they are misleading the public when they claim it is.
For the record, I think the most compelling evidence of increase in global heat content is ocean temperatures, a record that is unfortunately rather short, and I have been on both sides of the anthropogenic question. I'm currently doubtful regarding the anthropogenic claims, but opposed to expansion of non-sustainable energy sources for other reasons. But I don't let my policy views contaminate my scientific views, and I suspect many climatologists are letting that happen.
My problem as a mere computational physicist who has looked at some climate modelling codes, which are nothing but computational physics (being done, for some reason, by climatologists) is that every one I've looked at has significant issues. My very favourite was one that did not conserve energy natively, but had energy conservation imposed upon it by adjusting cell temperatures after every time-step. Why they chose to adjust temperature rather than wettness was not clear, although I guess probably becasuse it was computationally easier as the latter would require an additional adjustment to transport terms lest non-conservation of mass creep in.
Again, as a computational physicist who has modelled a considerable range of systems from the apparently simple to the obviously complex, GCMs look to me like a collection of ad hoc kludges and hopeful parameterizations. They are perfectly good science, but not even close to what is required for policy setting.
And the real problem is that there is no argument for anthropogenic climate change that does not pass through climate models as a critical step.
Ergo, the claim that the human role in climate change is anything like certain is to me just a statement of ignorance about the complex and delicate realities of computational physics, which as I said, is in this case for some reason not being done by computational physicists but by climatologists.
And yet the senior military officer who was given the order saw fit to question it, and was then harrassed by his supperiors through a typically American "the process is the punishment" subversion of the military legal apparatus.
So your claim that the order was neither illegal nor questionable immediately identifies you as a troll. Thanks for playing!
...with as few deaths as possible.... getting your people killed...
One of these things is not like the other. An invading army has a responsbility to act in such a way as to ensure that as few PEOPLE as possible die. Anything else is a violation of Just War Doctrine at best, a war crime at worst.
Even assuming Just War Doctrine is coherent--highly doubtful, but definitely arguable--one of its underpinnings must be to minimize the total number of PEOPLE who die as a result of the war.
*IF* there were true photographic memory, then the prizes at these world memory championships would be scooped up by people that have it. But they're not. They're won by ordinary people with pretty average memories who dedicate their spare time to mastering memory techniques.
This is an excellent point, but it is worth mentioning that there is a different sense in which some people do have a limited kind of "photographic memory", although I don't believe this justifies the use of the term in the ordinary sense, which applies to an empty set of individuals.
The case I'm thinking of was discovered in an experiment dealing with visual persistence. The experiment involved look at two images with a stereoscope. Both images were random black-and-white pixels. The idea was that where the images were identical, the viewer would see them as flat in the stereoscope, but if they had regions that differed there would be a 3D effect. The viewer looked at the images with both eyes and then closed one eye. In most people the 3D effect in the mis-matched part of the images (a square in the center, I think) persisted for a second or two. But in a few people it apparently persisted more-or-less indefinitely, suggesting some kind of visual memory that was pixel-level-accurate and relatively long term.
I haven't read the research in question, so this has all the veracity of "something I heard on the Internet from some guy who heard it from someone else."
Taxation is theft. Ayn Rand received stolen goods.
So your argument is that if someone steals my wallet, and I have a chance to get the same amount of money back from the thief via perfectly legal means, I have received stolen goods?
The money Rand received was her money. Unless you want to argue that she received more in benefits than she paid in taxes? That seems unlikely, given she got $10k and made a couple of million, and her total tax rate was probably more than 0.1%.
Your position requires that on the one hand, taxation is theft, and on the other hand taxation is a legitmate transfer of property to the thief, to the extent that the victim is committing a crime (morally speaking, at least) by getting some of her stolen money back. It lacks even the vague handwave in the general direction of consistency that Rand's own arguments generally used to acknowledge the value of logic.
Accurately stated, your.sig would be: "Between December 1974 and her death in March 1982, Ayn Rand recovered a total of $11,002 of her own money from the government in Social Security payments."
Certainly, without a magnetic field, life on Earth would look a lot different than it does today as it would have adapted to a much different environment
What would the differences in the environment be?
Radiation levels would be about the same. For every particle of any energy that is steared away from the Earth there is another one on the other side steered into the Earth. The poles get a bit more (non-solar) cosmic radiation than the equator because they come in more-or-less along the axis of the Earth's magnetic field. The magnetic pole is currently moving quite quickly somewhere in northern Alaska, and I haven't heard any reports of it leaving a swathe of dead polar bears behind (ok, ok, but you know what I mean,,,)
Solar cosmic ray fluxes away from the poles would be a bit higher, but not a great deal because the solar wind is mostly pretty low energy. The Earth's atmosphere is equivalent to being 10 m underwater, which will pretty effectively stop most charged particles, which is why we never see anything but muons from high-energy proton collisions with the upper atmosphere.
So again, I don't see that the radition fluxes at the Earth's surface would be appreciably different. All magnetic fields do is turn particles, they don't lower their energy, so the net screening effect of the Earth's field, except at very low energies away from the magnetic poles, is minimal.
The claim "life would be impossible if the Earth didn't have a magnetic field" is pretty nearly the same as "life is impossible at the magnetic poles", which just doesn't seem plausible to me.
Of course, things won't be absolutely the same this time as they were in the original boom.
The one thing that will be the same is people saying, "It's different this time!", which I've already seen a couple of times in this thread, mostly to the tune of "These companies have non-zero revenue! That's so different from Netscape!"
There are always superficial differences, and there are always fundamental things that stay the same.
Timing bubbles is enormously difficult. Intelligent people are not notably better at it than stupid people. Intelligent people often get out too early, stupid people often get out too late. Lucky people get in early and get out before the crash, and those statistically certain aberations get hailed as geniuses.
So I'm not willing to say where we are in the bubble, but the valuations of companies like Facebook do not seem to me to be plausibly related to their future revenue potential. This does not mean that Facebook will not go public with a valuation of $50 billion and rise by a factor of ten before crashing. It does mean that it WILL crash.
The thing that Facebook lacks is any means of customer lock-in. The past six or seven years is a measure of how rapidly user populations can migrate between social networking platforms, and at some point Facebook will tweak the user experience one time too many just at the time some new service that's cleaner and easier to use comes online, and there will be a progressive casscade of users away from Facebook and toward something else. The revenue dreams will vanish and the company will crash.
But even if that doesn't happen, there is no way for Facebook to make $100 per pair of eyeballs. For one, most users aren't online that much. Of those 500 million people with Facebook accounts, I would be very surprised if more than 100 million look at it very often. I've got a few dozen friends on Facebook and fewer than ten of them log in with any regularity. So the reality is more like $500 or $1000 per pair of active eyeballs.
Ad revenue won't do it because ads are worth less and less all the time, and for a very simple reason: advertising used to be expensive because access to eyeballs was limited, and therefore magazines and TV stations could charge the Earth for it. Today, access to eyeballs is almost completely unlimited. The Web is has created nearly unlimited bandwidth for ads, so ad prices have plumeted. Facebook is a gold-mine at a time when the world supply of gold has just gone up by orders of magnitude.
This was Beck talking on his own show in 2006. I would be surprised if someone as clearly mentally disabled as he is is able maintain a consistent position on anything. I suggest you listen to what he's actually saying, not merely feel the modulation of emotions he induces.
Sure, because using the tools that could create a prosperous and peaceful world to inflict dead weight losses on ourselves and others is retarded.
The War Model of conflict resolution is moronic: it involves infliciting massive dead weight loss burdens on your own economy so you can try to destroy your enemy's economy. The War Model has dramatically failed to end poverty, drug use and terrorism in the past forty years. Anyone who invokes the War Model today is an idiot who hasn't noticed how massively it has failed every time it has been applied.
The Germans went to war in 1914 to support Austria-Hungary, which failed anyway. They went to war again in 1939 to create a colonial empire in Eastern Europe and ended up with barely one brick still resting on top of another. The Japanese went to war in 1941 to create a Far Eastern economic empire, and ended up not much better off than Germany, with the added bonus of two cities that didn't need streetlights, what the with landscape glowing in the dark and all.
The Tigers of Tamil Elam declared war on the Sri Lankan state, Basque independence fighters declared war on the Spanish state, the IRA declared war on the English in Northern Ireland, the Shining Path declared war on the Peruvian state... the list of failed War Model revolutionary and independence movements goes on and on and on. Observing that the vast majority of War Model approaches fail while peaceful, non-War Model approaches like the Gandhi-ist movement in India, Solidarity in Poland, the recent uprisings in Tunis and Egypt, and so on, anyone with two brain cells to rub together would conclude that the War Model is only promoted by self-interestred profiteers who want to funnel a larger slice of a smaller pie into their own pockets.
Ergo: "cyberwarfare" is a stupid concept. Cyber-policing might make sense, as plain, ordinary police work is generally the highest level of violent intervention ever justified by a rational evaluation of actual (rather than imaginary) problems.
the House bill would seem to significantly tarnish the commitment of Rep. Boehner and his colleagues in the House to spending cuts and the end to earmarking.
When has the party of Big Government Conservatives ever actually reduced spending? They did co-operate with the fiscally-responsible Clinton Administration to reduce the size of the pork barrel at that time, but I can't think of any case in the past generation when the Big Government Conservatives have ever voluntarily worked to reduce the size of government. Reagan grew government dramatically, as did both Bushes, the second even more rapidly than the first, and both with the support of Republican-controlled Congresses.
So why does anyone anywhere think that the Big Government Conservatives have any commitment to spending cuts? Surely not because they SAY SO? No one would be stupid enough to take a politician at their word, would they? That would be like some idiot thinking Obama's ever meant his promise to close the illegal prison camp at Guantaunamo Bay!
Slashdot Mirror
There are few precedents in this area, and really headers that contain just macros/prototypes/etc aren't copyrightable.
Curiously, companies like MicroChip disagree with you on this: they use a gcc-based toolchain for their chips, but claim their copyright interest in their header files allows them to distribute it with a license that forbids you from using their header files with any other compiler, including a modified version of their own compiler.
So there are companies out there basing a significant part of their software revenue on precisely the opposite of the claim you are making. They may be wrong, but the claim is not on the face of it implausible.
The point to me is not that nuclear power is unsafe, but rather that unacceptable risks were taken in this case.
"In this case" is something I'm hearing a lot of lately. The question is: what are the odds of equally unacceptable risks being taken in other cases?
Think about it in these terms: there are maybe 1000 fission reactors running world-wide. In this on there just happened to have been unacceptable risks that were revealed when there just happened to be a 9.0 earthquake. If not for the quake, the unacceptable risks would have continued to exist until some other error triggered a comparable disaster.
From this, I infer that the vast majority of nuclear plants on Earth have comparable unacceptable risks being taken. It unfortunately stands to reason: what are the odds that the one plant that happens to have unacceptable risks being taken also happens to be hit by a huge earthquake and its aftermath?
The only reasonable conclusion is that basically every reactor out there has comparable risks, just waiting for some unfortunate event to reveal them.
At which point people will say, "Oh but that was only in this case!"
Hundreds of square miles of dead sea critters are of no import next to a situation that were it to go out of control could kill thousands of humans.
Huh? How exactly is a nuclear meltdown with fire going to kill thousands of humans? The worst case scenario in Japan is considerably better than Chernobyl, and that killed what? A dozen?
Without an earthquake (one of the biggest in recorded history, I might add) to disrupt the reactors, the Fukushima Daiichi plant could have continued happily along with no major problems.
Sure, if you are allowed to dismiss the cause of every accident as an irrelevant anomaly then nuclear power looks like a good investment. What the plant could have done in your imaginary future is irrelevant: if the idiots at Chernobyl hadn't operated the plant miles out of spec, or if the bozos who built it had included a containment structure, or...
The problem is, we don't live in the world of your imagination. Scientists and engineers have been trying to teach philosophers for 300 years that what you can or cannot imagine has zero ontological significance, but it's apparently a difficult lesson to learn.
In the world we actually live in, relatively small, common, stupid things that people inevitably do result in the total economic loss of billion-dollar nuclear reactors every couple of decades. Even well-designed, well-operated plants like Ontario Hydro's CANDUs have been vastly more expensive than anticipated due to an almost trivial design and construction error. This is the commonplace reality of nuclear power: errors so small as to be inevitable have economic consequences that are wildly out of proportion with their causes, even when we ignore the public health effects and inconvenience involved in evacuations and whatnot.
Conversely, how often do you hear, "Earthquake 10 km from coal-fired plant, thousands evacuated from homes, emergency crews at risk while trying to bring boilers under control"? While a great deal can be said against coal, oil, gas and hydro power, we don't have to imagine a world in which they are forgiving of relatively minor erors, becuase in the real world we actually live in they are forgiving of relatively minor errors. For some reason we even seem to be able to mostly avoid earthquake damage to hydroelectric dams.
Fision power is eoncomically problematic because relatively minor--to the point of being inevitable--human errors will result in a significant risk of total loss of the plant. This is a consequence of the hgih energy density in nuclear fuel, not a consequence of plant design, as even pebble bed reactors have suffered from signficant risk of plastic deformation due to overheating, and once that happens to the highly radioactive components of the plant, it is pretty much a dead loss.
Better to look back on this afterwards as "less serious than we thought" than to show the public that the industry can't be trusted to anticipate, prevent, contain, or even be truthful about its accidents.
On the one hand there is an understandable desire on the part of those of us who know something of nuclear physics and nuclear engineering to put a damper on the more ridiculous speculations and lies that mass media are using to pump up fear and sell eyeballs.
On the other hand, there should be a desire to educate the public about the genuine risks associated with nuclear power, which means breaking out of the ridiculous "OMG we are all going to die!" vs "power too cheap to meter".
For the longest time the anti-nuclear movement was undebatable. There is simply no point in talking to anyone who thinks that Hellen Caldicot, for example, has anything useful or interesting to say about energy policy, enginerring safety or social policy. She and other like her are are simply noise-machines, drowning out all possibility of rational discourse.
So ignoring people like that, what can we say about this accident so far?
1) Core containment appears to be intact. Core containment is a bit like a building falling down. If you are doubtful about it having happened, it probably hasn't.
2) Spent fuel storage adjacent to the reactor, outside the containment structure, is at risk of going critical. This would effectively place an uncontrolled nuclear reactor outside of any containment structure. Given the high tempratures and highly reactive envrironment this would entail, the possibility of the metalic components of such a reactor catching fire is non-zero. At this point the otherwise inflecitous comparisons to Chernobyl become unfortunately apt: the fire-driven radioactive plume from such a reactor would result in wide-spread atmospheric dispersal of actindes and fission products. With any luck, most of this would be washed out into the ocean fairly quickly, but on the islands of Japan itself the degree of surface contamination would almost certainly be quite significant.
3) Errors only become apparent after they occur. Applogists for the nuclear industry will say "we can make sure that this won't happen again", and it may not. But something else will. This is a certainty. The energy density involved in nuclear reactors and nuclear fuel has been demonstrated time and again to be so high that relatively small errors have dreadful consequences, at least economically. We have seen this in carbon-moderated reactors, PWRs, BWRs and CANDUs. e cannot engineer out susceptiblity to the kind of small and apparently inocuous errors that have produced this disaster. I do not agree that with the accessment that "this is a crime": it is just that the sensitivity of nuclear reactors to relatively routine levels of error has been shown multiple times to be high.
Coal-fired plants kill far more people than nuclear plants do, but they don't write themselves off when they do so. Nuclear plants don't kill as many people, but they become extremely expensive when people make the kind of mistakes that coal-fired plants forgive. This is not advocacy for coal, by the way, which is a filthy fuel. It is a reflection that fission power will always result in economic risks that are extremely high.
4) Reprocessing is not risk free, even when spent fuel never leaves the site. It has long been argued by reprocessing advocates that it can be made safe, and one of the means of doing so is keeping everything on site. One can't help but ask, "How's that working out for you?"
Once upon a time I expected to have a career in the nuclear industry. I trained as a nuclear engineer and went on, post-Chernobyl, to become a nuclear physicist. While I still have a fondness for the concept of nuclear power, it has become increasingly clear in the past several decades that even well-run, well-regulated nuclear industries have significant economic issues associated with them, and we should be at last cautious about building new nuclear plants without finding some means of providing genuine public evaluation of risk and oversight of constrution.
Every deviant behavior would be punished, everyone forced to fit into a mold of what the majority thought was "right." I, and most people I know, would be in jail or dead in that world.
While I'm not sure I'd want to live in a fully transparent society, your reaction to it is based on a massive falure of deductive closure.
You're assuming that current notions of "deviant" would persist in a society where every single person could be seen every moment of every day by every other person.
That would mean you'd get to see the minster fucking the choirboy, the judge spanking her studly young clerk, the cop smoking a little weed to take the edge off.
I can't even begin to imagine what a generation or two raised in such a world might come to see as "normal" and "deviant", and I doubt anyone else can either. You can't just increase transparency and assume that everything else will stay exactly the same. We are already seeing this with regard to social networking sites: in another twenty years there won't be a single person running for office anywhere who doesn't have some embarrassing photos of their younger self out someplace on the Web.
While in the next decade a bunch of power-hungry hypocritical assholes will continue to scream bloody murder every time a public figure turns out to have done a few stupid things as a youth, its going to get pretty lame pretty quickly. Even people as stupid as ordinary voters are going to eventually figure out that everyone has done something dumb. The only differnece is that now it gets caught on camera and spread around the world years after the fact.
I think a transparent society would be a very liberal society, once equilibirum was established. The initial transition would be hard, because the hypocrites would try really hard to control things. But if there is genuine transparency, transparency for all, only people with a relaxed, live and let live attitude would stay sane in such a world.
It'll probably be a command line tool or library that nobody will use in its pure form; instead, they'll use a GUI frontend with a completely different name.
No, they'll use 12 different GUIs that depend on a hundred different libs and apps on different platforms. You'll go to the "gnufreecall" website and get a list of links to FTP sites that contain different and incompatible versions of various backend tools and GUIs, with "installation instructions" that start with, "To install from github..."
Of course, Americans are thrown into prison [nytimes.com] for allowing people to see foreign satellite channels, but let's not discuss that.
No, please, let's not. Not here, as it is completely and utterly irrelevant to the topic of this discussion, which is the behaviour of people in the Cuban government. Why you and others insist on bringing up totally unrelated issues of behaviour as bad or worse by people in the American government is beyond me. It is obscurantist and distractings and worse of all it makes it look like you think there is absolutely nothing substantive or interesting to say about Cuba.
It is, with you people, all and always, only about America.
Well, there was this whole incident [wikipedia.org] to provide evidence for chemical weapons
Remind me again how a chemical weapons attack fifteen years ago provides evidence of chemical weapons today, after a decade of ongoing dismantlement and inspection of the defunct Iraqi chemical weapons program?
"Plausibility" is not "evidence".
Going to war based on a plausble but unproven suposition is a crime against humanity.
So while this may be "news" in the sense that it's about such orbits around another star, it's hardly news in the astrophysics sense.
It's news in the sense that it provides more information about the dynamics of planetary formation, at least amongst hot Jupiters. While we know that the orbital dynamics of these bodies creates a stable situation, we did not know that they could actually form this way--the dynamics of early planetary formation is still much debated. There are a lot of things that happen, the initial conditions are not well-understood, the collision dynamics depend on the properties of the colliding bodies, etc. Ergo, there are any number of things that might disrupt the creation of twin worlds of this kind. This observation tells us that it is possible to create them, although I'm sure there will now be a debate as to whether they were created in place or if one of them was somehow captured into a Lagrange point of the other.
Science is nothing but the discipline of publically testing ideas by controlled experiment and systematic observation. It doesn't matter how confident anyone is that an idea is true. It isn't science until it has been publically tested by controlled experiment and/or systematic observation, which of course includes testing it for consistency with the deductive closure of inferences from all other controlled experiments and systematic observations.
Our observations of how the climate has changed have agreed well with what the models predicted.
We don't have any particularly strong predictions yet, so I'm not sure what predictions you are talking about. There was a nice paper a while back comparing a number of long-term temperature records from half a dozen land stations for which models predicted warming in the past fifty or sixty years and all but one of them showed down-trends, even without corrections for urban heat island effects.
Models can be made to fit the past, but that is completely different from prediction because they are highly parameterized. As von Neumann famously said, "Give me four parameters and I can fit an elephant. Give me five and I can make the elephant fly."
What constitutes an ad hoc kludge is not a matter of opinion: one is either solving equations that have a fundamental physical justification or one is not. Mostly climate models are not, and if you look in the comments in the code and the documentation you will see all kinds of things that will make your hair stand on end. Trivial-seeming approximations can send computational models off into non-physical territory when integrating systems much simpler than the Earth's climate.
Being able to fit the past is no assurance of accurate predictions of the future in highly parameterized, non-physical models. Believing otherwise is simply a declaration of ignorance regarding computational physics.
It's certainly an interdisciplinary exercise
They why is it every time a physicist makes a comment about it we are dismissed because we are "not climatologists"?
And yet as someone whose primary scientific work of late is in cancer genetics, no one in biology every dismisses my opinions because I'm "not a biologist"? They may dismiss my opinion because I'm wrong, which happens not infrequently, but that's the way science works. Authority counts for less than accuracy.
So we are left with this problem: climatologists, who are not computational physicists, are trying to solve a very difficult computational physics problem and trusting their models much further than any computational physicist ever would. Computational physicists know how easy it is to get it wrong and how trivial corrections can produce grossly unphysical behaviour over long-term integrations. From the work I have seen published, no climatologist has ever done a serious robustness or physicality test on any GCM, but they are more than ready to proclaim that the results of these unphysical models integrated over very long times are broadly correct. That simply isn't justified, and they are misleading the public when they claim it is.
For the record, I think the most compelling evidence of increase in global heat content is ocean temperatures, a record that is unfortunately rather short, and I have been on both sides of the anthropogenic question. I'm currently doubtful regarding the anthropogenic claims, but opposed to expansion of non-sustainable energy sources for other reasons. But I don't let my policy views contaminate my scientific views, and I suspect many climatologists are letting that happen.
The man-made part has been well established
My problem as a mere computational physicist who has looked at some climate modelling codes, which are nothing but computational physics (being done, for some reason, by climatologists) is that every one I've looked at has significant issues. My very favourite was one that did not conserve energy natively, but had energy conservation imposed upon it by adjusting cell temperatures after every time-step. Why they chose to adjust temperature rather than wettness was not clear, although I guess probably becasuse it was computationally easier as the latter would require an additional adjustment to transport terms lest non-conservation of mass creep in.
Again, as a computational physicist who has modelled a considerable range of systems from the apparently simple to the obviously complex, GCMs look to me like a collection of ad hoc kludges and hopeful parameterizations. They are perfectly good science, but not even close to what is required for policy setting.
And the real problem is that there is no argument for anthropogenic climate change that does not pass through climate models as a critical step.
Ergo, the claim that the human role in climate change is anything like certain is to me just a statement of ignorance about the complex and delicate realities of computational physics, which as I said, is in this case for some reason not being done by computational physicists but by climatologists.
certainly not illegal or even questionable.
And yet the senior military officer who was given the order saw fit to question it, and was then harrassed by his supperiors through a typically American "the process is the punishment" subversion of the military legal apparatus.
So your claim that the order was neither illegal nor questionable immediately identifies you as a troll. Thanks for playing!
...with as few deaths as possible .... getting your people killed...
One of these things is not like the other. An invading army has a responsbility to act in such a way as to ensure that as few PEOPLE as possible die. Anything else is a violation of Just War Doctrine at best, a war crime at worst.
Even assuming Just War Doctrine is coherent--highly doubtful, but definitely arguable--one of its underpinnings must be to minimize the total number of PEOPLE who die as a result of the war.
Having grown up with a guy who had a true photographic memory
So why isn't that guy or others like him winning this kind of contest? It would only take one to enter and they'd win every single prize of this kind.
*IF* there were true photographic memory, then the prizes at these world memory championships would be scooped up by people that have it. But they're not. They're won by ordinary people with pretty average memories who dedicate their spare time to mastering memory techniques.
This is an excellent point, but it is worth mentioning that there is a different sense in which some people do have a limited kind of "photographic memory", although I don't believe this justifies the use of the term in the ordinary sense, which applies to an empty set of individuals.
The case I'm thinking of was discovered in an experiment dealing with visual persistence. The experiment involved look at two images with a stereoscope. Both images were random black-and-white pixels. The idea was that where the images were identical, the viewer would see them as flat in the stereoscope, but if they had regions that differed there would be a 3D effect. The viewer looked at the images with both eyes and then closed one eye. In most people the 3D effect in the mis-matched part of the images (a square in the center, I think) persisted for a second or two. But in a few people it apparently persisted more-or-less indefinitely, suggesting some kind of visual memory that was pixel-level-accurate and relatively long term.
I haven't read the research in question, so this has all the veracity of "something I heard on the Internet from some guy who heard it from someone else."
Taxation is theft. Ayn Rand received stolen goods.
So your argument is that if someone steals my wallet, and I have a chance to get the same amount of money back from the thief via perfectly legal means, I have received stolen goods?
The money Rand received was her money. Unless you want to argue that she received more in benefits than she paid in taxes? That seems unlikely, given she got $10k and made a couple of million, and her total tax rate was probably more than 0.1%.
Your position requires that on the one hand, taxation is theft, and on the other hand taxation is a legitmate transfer of property to the thief, to the extent that the victim is committing a crime (morally speaking, at least) by getting some of her stolen money back. It lacks even the vague handwave in the general direction of consistency that Rand's own arguments generally used to acknowledge the value of logic.
Accurately stated, your .sig would be: "Between December 1974 and her death in March 1982, Ayn Rand recovered a total of $11,002 of her own money from the government in Social Security payments."
Certainly, without a magnetic field, life on Earth would look a lot different than it does today as it would have adapted to a much different environment
What would the differences in the environment be?
Radiation levels would be about the same. For every particle of any energy that is steared away from the Earth there is another one on the other side steered into the Earth. The poles get a bit more (non-solar) cosmic radiation than the equator because they come in more-or-less along the axis of the Earth's magnetic field. The magnetic pole is currently moving quite quickly somewhere in northern Alaska, and I haven't heard any reports of it leaving a swathe of dead polar bears behind (ok, ok, but you know what I mean,,,)
Solar cosmic ray fluxes away from the poles would be a bit higher, but not a great deal because the solar wind is mostly pretty low energy. The Earth's atmosphere is equivalent to being 10 m underwater, which will pretty effectively stop most charged particles, which is why we never see anything but muons from high-energy proton collisions with the upper atmosphere.
So again, I don't see that the radition fluxes at the Earth's surface would be appreciably different. All magnetic fields do is turn particles, they don't lower their energy, so the net screening effect of the Earth's field, except at very low energies away from the magnetic poles, is minimal.
The claim "life would be impossible if the Earth didn't have a magnetic field" is pretty nearly the same as "life is impossible at the magnetic poles", which just doesn't seem plausible to me.
Between December 1974 and her death in March 1982, Ayn Rand collected a total of $11,002 in Social Security payments.
Ever hear the story about Lenin and the rope?
Of course, things won't be absolutely the same this time as they were in the original boom.
The one thing that will be the same is people saying, "It's different this time!", which I've already seen a couple of times in this thread, mostly to the tune of "These companies have non-zero revenue! That's so different from Netscape!"
There are always superficial differences, and there are always fundamental things that stay the same.
Timing bubbles is enormously difficult. Intelligent people are not notably better at it than stupid people. Intelligent people often get out too early, stupid people often get out too late. Lucky people get in early and get out before the crash, and those statistically certain aberations get hailed as geniuses.
So I'm not willing to say where we are in the bubble, but the valuations of companies like Facebook do not seem to me to be plausibly related to their future revenue potential. This does not mean that Facebook will not go public with a valuation of $50 billion and rise by a factor of ten before crashing. It does mean that it WILL crash.
The thing that Facebook lacks is any means of customer lock-in. The past six or seven years is a measure of how rapidly user populations can migrate between social networking platforms, and at some point Facebook will tweak the user experience one time too many just at the time some new service that's cleaner and easier to use comes online, and there will be a progressive casscade of users away from Facebook and toward something else. The revenue dreams will vanish and the company will crash.
But even if that doesn't happen, there is no way for Facebook to make $100 per pair of eyeballs. For one, most users aren't online that much. Of those 500 million people with Facebook accounts, I would be very surprised if more than 100 million look at it very often. I've got a few dozen friends on Facebook and fewer than ten of them log in with any regularity. So the reality is more like $500 or $1000 per pair of active eyeballs.
Ad revenue won't do it because ads are worth less and less all the time, and for a very simple reason: advertising used to be expensive because access to eyeballs was limited, and therefore magazines and TV stations could charge the Earth for it. Today, access to eyeballs is almost completely unlimited. The Web is has created nearly unlimited bandwidth for ads, so ad prices have plumeted. Facebook is a gold-mine at a time when the world supply of gold has just gone up by orders of magnitude.
Fucking music... how does it work?
This was Beck talking on his own show in 2006. I would be surprised if someone as clearly mentally disabled as he is is able maintain a consistent position on anything. I suggest you listen to what he's actually saying, not merely feel the modulation of emotions he induces.
People sneer at "cyberwarfare"
Sure, because using the tools that could create a prosperous and peaceful world to inflict dead weight losses on ourselves and others is retarded.
The War Model of conflict resolution is moronic: it involves infliciting massive dead weight loss burdens on your own economy so you can try to destroy your enemy's economy. The War Model has dramatically failed to end poverty, drug use and terrorism in the past forty years. Anyone who invokes the War Model today is an idiot who hasn't noticed how massively it has failed every time it has been applied.
The Germans went to war in 1914 to support Austria-Hungary, which failed anyway. They went to war again in 1939 to create a colonial empire in Eastern Europe and ended up with barely one brick still resting on top of another. The Japanese went to war in 1941 to create a Far Eastern economic empire, and ended up not much better off than Germany, with the added bonus of two cities that didn't need streetlights, what the with landscape glowing in the dark and all.
The Tigers of Tamil Elam declared war on the Sri Lankan state, Basque independence fighters declared war on the Spanish state, the IRA declared war on the English in Northern Ireland, the Shining Path declared war on the Peruvian state... the list of failed War Model revolutionary and independence movements goes on and on and on. Observing that the vast majority of War Model approaches fail while peaceful, non-War Model approaches like the Gandhi-ist movement in India, Solidarity in Poland, the recent uprisings in Tunis and Egypt, and so on, anyone with two brain cells to rub together would conclude that the War Model is only promoted by self-interestred profiteers who want to funnel a larger slice of a smaller pie into their own pockets.
Ergo: "cyberwarfare" is a stupid concept. Cyber-policing might make sense, as plain, ordinary police work is generally the highest level of violent intervention ever justified by a rational evaluation of actual (rather than imaginary) problems.
From TFA:
the House bill would seem to significantly tarnish the commitment of Rep. Boehner and his colleagues in the House to spending cuts and the end to earmarking.
When has the party of Big Government Conservatives ever actually reduced spending? They did co-operate with the fiscally-responsible Clinton Administration to reduce the size of the pork barrel at that time, but I can't think of any case in the past generation when the Big Government Conservatives have ever voluntarily worked to reduce the size of government. Reagan grew government dramatically, as did both Bushes, the second even more rapidly than the first, and both with the support of Republican-controlled Congresses.
So why does anyone anywhere think that the Big Government Conservatives have any commitment to spending cuts? Surely not because they SAY SO? No one would be stupid enough to take a politician at their word, would they? That would be like some idiot thinking Obama's ever meant his promise to close the illegal prison camp at Guantaunamo Bay!