Your typical evolutionary biologist would say that these attitudes evolved in hunter-gatherer societies on the African savannah, and evolution just hasn't had time yet to catch up with the comparative lack of need for nastiness in today's world. I'm not sure how plausible I find that, but there you go.
Possibly. Too far in the elegant direction can be too hard to maintain as well, though - if it's a technique that takes a PhD in superstring theory to understand.
Believe it or not, something similar has actually cropped up in AspectJ:
before (): executions (void foo ()) || executions (void goo ()) {
System.out.println ("I just came from foo() or goo()");
if (blah) throw new RuntimeException
("You can't do foo or goo if blah is true!"); // else continue
}
Using other peoples computers and bandwidth (reguardless of how little they will be affected by it) for your own personal gain is just plain evil.
So if I run one quick program on someone else's machine, something that doesn't affect anyone measurably at all, that's evil? Are you a fundamentalist... no wait, you must be.
Why would NASA offer an unreasonable estimate of risk? The political fallout of a large nuclear accident would be quite severe -- NASA would cease to exist as a entity if Cassini irradiated the entire US or world.
I suggest you read Richard Feynman's conclusions on the Challenger disaster, and get a clue.
Okay, this may sound like a troll
It does indeed. The last sentence was a particularly nice touch.
But here goes anyway. Basically, a transistor only allows you to use one signal to switch on and off a current. One transistor isn't enough for computations. There's a certain minimal number, but I'm not into hardware so I don't know what that would be.
Michio Kaku, you mean the guy who talks about little green men on overnight radio with Art Bell??
I don't see the relevance of this statement. He is still a physics professor. Even if he has a crazy belief about one thing - let's say, for the sake of argument - that doesn't mean that when he wrote that paper his arguments weren't sound.
Also, the figures you cite are very misleading... Any estimate that can be off by a factor of 100 is not an estimate, but a blind guess.
According to your logic, if a corporation posts a bogus, made-up environmental impact assessment, and then an environmental group says that their estimates are off by a factor of 1000, the environmental group are automatically offering a "blind guess". You don't even have to look at the evidence. Very convenient.
Maybe, just maybe, NASA's estimate is too low (for political reasons) and Kaku is nearer the truth?
Oh, wait, maybe I am not being direct enough for you. Flip it the other way: by your logic, if I say "the risk of serious environmental damage of a hydroelectric dam is neglible" and you say "the risk is extremely high", you must be automatically offering a "blind guess". We don't even have to look at the evidence.
It's pointless continuing to argue with someone who uses such bizarre illogical rhetoric.
Nuclear waste is a lot less harmless than the naturally occuring uranium in the environment... The industry mines this stuff from the ground, reprocesses it into an inert glass, and buries it again in a more geologically stable location.
I think you meant to say a lot less harmful. Anyway. Does it, in practice? Or does it, in fact, keep it in "temporary storage" which was not designed to last more than a few decades? Or send it to "reprocessing plants" like Sellafield (formerly known as Windscale), condemned by official regulators (who I suppose you think are all commie tree-hugging eco-freaks) several times for appalling safety breaches, such as spreading dangerous levels of pollution over nearby beaches, or chucking nuclear waste into a hole in the ground, which now has to be dug up again because it's unstable at a cost of billions of UK pounds. Or does it manufacture fuel for nuclear weapons - by far the most life-threatening nuclear problem of all?
Oh, that's right, we're never going to actually use nuclear weapons - they're just expensive scarecrows. Ok.
Physicist Bernard Cohen did some studies a while back and determined that if all of the world's power came from fission, and if all the waste over 100 years were dumped into the ocean (which environmentalists would NEVER allow), the amount of radioactivity in the ocean would not increase by more than 1%.
What about localised problems? What about radioactively contamined beaches, such as those near Sellafield - or dangerous levels of radioactive waste building up in the food chain near a dumping ground?
It's a bit like saying "If an oil tanker spills, the amount of oil sitting on the world's oceans will still be only 0.000...1% of the total mass of the oceans, therefore there's no problem."
New Scientist does publish a lot of speculative stories - but that's understandable, science and technology does involve a lot of speculation. Furthermore they don't have the resources to verify all "press release" type stories like this one. Peer-reviewed articles in recognised articles are supposed to be credible, but with ideas being floated around, what can you do? It's certainly in the public interest to hear about these plans at an early stage.
One thing I do like about New Scientist is that it treats its readers as if they had a reasonable amount of intelligence and general scientific knowledge - not quite the same as Scientific American.
New Scientist is a British publication. Draw your own conclusions...
I agree that we need a way off the planet in case of disaster, but I don't agree that nuclear power is necessarily a safe way of powering a rocket. Physicist Michio Kaku had
this
to say about the Cassini mission:
Originally, NASA estimated the number of cancer fatalities from a maximum credible accident over a 50 year period to be 2,300. We detail how this figure of 2,300 deaths could easily be off by a factor of 100, i.e. true casualty figures for a maximum accident might number over 200,000. Furthermore, property damage and lawsuits could be in the tens of billions. In addition, the FEIS has over- estimated the difficulty of using alternate sources of energy, such as solar and fuel cells...
(And besides, I know from personal experience that going through engineering school does not cure stupidity.;)
Most of it was due to it being developed in the Soviet Union where people were more worried about deadlines and looking good than safety of the workers.
By "people" I assume you mean primarily "managers". So, this differs from e.g. hospital managers how, exactly? Don't they mostly care more about deadlines and looking good than patient care?
Or CEOs? Don't they care more about profits and power and looking good than worker safety or public safety?
It might not even be that. If something happens twice, you might think "deja vu". If something happens three times, you might say "deja vu all over again". The thing itself is repeating for the second time, but the deja-vu is only repeating for the first time.
The proposal mentioned by the article does not suggest eliminating chemical fuel entirely:
After lift-off, a chemical rocket would first be used to accelerate the rocket to Mach 2, before the nuclear engine was triggered. "You wouldn't fire this reactor up until we got about 30,000 feet off the ground,"
So there's still a significant possibility of an explosion at or soon after lauch, right?
Apples and oranges. First, what are the chances of the shuttle crashing into Miami? Pretty low, right? Now, think, what are the chances of a nuclear launch going wrong and dispersing nuclear contamination over a wide area (think Chernobyl)?
The Challenger disaster, and other launch failures, don't exactly paint NASA in an infallible light.
My point being that you have to consider the likelihood, as well as the magnitude of effects, when making decisions. Common sense.
"Originally, NASA estimated the number of cancer fatalities from a maximum credible accident over a 50 year period to be 2,300. We detail how this figure of 2,300 deaths could easily be off by a factor of 100, i.e. true casualty figures for a maximum accident might number over 200,000. Furthermore, property damage and lawsuits could be in the tens of billions."
So this is trivial and safe, is it? I'd hate to see what you'd consider a dangerous nuclear project!
each of the sensors is not quite calibrated to work on a holistic sense, that is to say, where the sensor might project a temperature increase or decrease, and a resultant (resultent?) crop change and withering, the problem remains that the prediction is not the final answer.
We're talking about global climate here, fundamentally - not local climate. How much impact do cities have on the global climate? That's the more relevant question here.
The bottom-line principle of the framework is that you can write in whatever language you want, using a single unified class library, and it'll run on any.NET runtime. This is even more ambitious than Java.
Not really. A whole bunch of languages have already been ported to run on the JVM. Just look on directory.google.com.
4. The other coders are beginners compared to the poster. There is a whole world of difference between a beginner programmer who is just about capable of writing a simple console program with one main method and no other methods (yes, they're "barely qualified" at best, but they do exist in the industry), and a Kung-fu expert Java or C or C++ programmer. In the real world, the inability to understand pointers, for instance, cannot easily be remedied with either comments or coding standards.
Slashdot Mirror
Believe it or not, something similar has actually cropped up in AspectJ:
before (): executions (void foo ()) || executions (void goo ()) {
// else continue
System.out.println ("I just came from foo() or goo()");
if (blah) throw new RuntimeException
("You can't do foo or goo if blah is true!");
}
This is bogus. A single dnet client cannot cost 59 cents a second, and neither can a single email. I'm 99% sure it's a troll.
So if I run one quick program on someone else's machine, something that doesn't affect anyone measurably at all, that's evil? Are you a fundamentalist... no wait, you must be.
Would spackers be an acceptable compromise? How about this "Damn spackers! I hate spack!"
Hmmm... doesn't really have the desired effect.
I suggest you read Richard Feynman's conclusions on the Challenger disaster, and get a clue.
But here goes anyway. Basically, a transistor only allows you to use one signal to switch on and off a current. One transistor isn't enough for computations. There's a certain minimal number, but I'm not into hardware so I don't know what that would be.
I don't see the relevance of this statement. He is still a physics professor. Even if he has a crazy belief about one thing - let's say, for the sake of argument - that doesn't mean that when he wrote that paper his arguments weren't sound.
Also, the figures you cite are very misleading... Any estimate that can be off by a factor of 100 is not an estimate, but a blind guess.
According to your logic, if a corporation posts a bogus, made-up environmental impact assessment, and then an environmental group says that their estimates are off by a factor of 1000, the environmental group are automatically offering a "blind guess". You don't even have to look at the evidence. Very convenient.
Maybe, just maybe, NASA's estimate is too low (for political reasons) and Kaku is nearer the truth?
Oh, wait, maybe I am not being direct enough for you. Flip it the other way: by your logic, if I say "the risk of serious environmental damage of a hydroelectric dam is neglible" and you say "the risk is extremely high", you must be automatically offering a "blind guess". We don't even have to look at the evidence.
It's pointless continuing to argue with someone who uses such bizarre illogical rhetoric.
I think you meant to say a lot less harmful. Anyway. Does it, in practice? Or does it, in fact, keep it in "temporary storage" which was not designed to last more than a few decades? Or send it to "reprocessing plants" like Sellafield (formerly known as Windscale), condemned by official regulators (who I suppose you think are all commie tree-hugging eco-freaks) several times for appalling safety breaches, such as spreading dangerous levels of pollution over nearby beaches, or chucking nuclear waste into a hole in the ground, which now has to be dug up again because it's unstable at a cost of billions of UK pounds. Or does it manufacture fuel for nuclear weapons - by far the most life-threatening nuclear problem of all?
Oh, that's right, we're never going to actually use nuclear weapons - they're just expensive scarecrows. Ok.
Physicist Bernard Cohen did some studies a while back and determined that if all of the world's power came from fission, and if all the waste over 100 years were dumped into the ocean (which environmentalists would NEVER allow), the amount of radioactivity in the ocean would not increase by more than 1%.
What about localised problems? What about radioactively contamined beaches, such as those near Sellafield - or dangerous levels of radioactive waste building up in the food chain near a dumping ground?
It's a bit like saying "If an oil tanker spills, the amount of oil sitting on the world's oceans will still be only 0.000...1% of the total mass of the oceans, therefore there's no problem."
One thing I do like about New Scientist is that it treats its readers as if they had a reasonable amount of intelligence and general scientific knowledge - not quite the same as Scientific American.
New Scientist is a British publication. Draw your own conclusions...
Originally, NASA estimated the number of cancer fatalities from a maximum credible accident over a 50 year period to be 2,300. We detail how this figure of 2,300 deaths could easily be off by a factor of 100, i.e. true casualty figures for a maximum accident might number over 200,000. Furthermore, property damage and lawsuits could be in the tens of billions. In addition, the FEIS has over- estimated the difficulty of using alternate sources of energy, such as solar and fuel cells...
(And besides, I know from personal experience that going through engineering school does not cure stupidity. ;)
By "people" I assume you mean primarily "managers". So, this differs from e.g. hospital managers how, exactly? Don't they mostly care more about deadlines and looking good than patient care?
Or CEOs? Don't they care more about profits and power and looking good than worker safety or public safety?
</pedantry>
After lift-off, a chemical rocket would first be used to accelerate the rocket to Mach 2, before the nuclear engine was triggered. "You wouldn't fire this reactor up until we got about 30,000 feet off the ground,"
So there's still a significant possibility of an explosion at or soon after lauch, right?
The Challenger disaster, and other launch failures, don't exactly paint NASA in an infallible light.
My point being that you have to consider the likelihood, as well as the magnitude of effects, when making decisions. Common sense.
Michio Kaku, a renowned physics professor, didn't think Cassini was very safe:
"Originally, NASA estimated the number of cancer fatalities from a maximum credible accident over a 50 year period to be 2,300. We detail how this figure of 2,300 deaths could easily be off by a factor of 100, i.e. true casualty figures for a maximum accident might number over 200,000. Furthermore, property damage and lawsuits could be in the tens of billions."
So this is trivial and safe, is it? I'd hate to see what you'd consider a dangerous nuclear project!
My dear AC. You are talking gibberish.
Not really. A whole bunch of languages have already been ported to run on the JVM. Just look on directory.google.com.
4. The other coders are beginners compared to the poster. There is a whole world of difference between a beginner programmer who is just about capable of writing a simple console program with one main method and no other methods (yes, they're "barely qualified" at best, but they do exist in the industry), and a Kung-fu expert Java or C or C++ programmer. In the real world, the inability to understand pointers, for instance, cannot easily be remedied with either comments or coding standards.