Hey, once I was on a boiled veggie diet. Nothing but boiled begetables for thrity years! And during that time, I didn't gain a single white hair! It's obvious that the boiled vegetable diet extends your lifespan.
Hold on a sec, my wife tells me that the diet didn't last thirty years but a mere week. Well, it feltlike thirty years. Does that count?
Nope, it wasn't France. In France, they are going to increase the highway speed limit from 130 to 150 km/h (95 mph) in a general push to decrease road fatalities.
Unfortunately, it's very hard to measure success in that respect because the French gummint also changed the way they count road fatalities. They claim they decreased road fatalities by 25% in two short years, but they also changed the period during which a death after an accident is credited to that accident.
In clear English: Before the change, if you died within a month of a car crash, they incremented the road fatality counter. Now they wait only 2 weeks. Naturally, a percentage of the car-crash-induced deaths are now slipping outside the count window. Mission accomplished.
That's called statistical remedies, and that's a favorite among politicians.
The Germans think that what kills you is fatigue and that the sooner you're there, the less time you're on the road and hence the less time you are exposed to danger. Hence there is no speed limit on their highway (or if there is, it's very high). Then again, when they see a driver passing on the right, they put his license in a shredder.
I read a funny story in a New York paper: the Mid Hudson Valley bridge has installed EZPass tolls. The plan was to finance the installation with...
... get this...
...fines from drivers who used the EZ Pass lanes and did not have an EZ Pass tag.
Initially, a whole bunch of drivers did go through the nice new lane with no line even though they had not ever heard of EZ Pass. So this seemed like a good plan...
...Until the cops complained they couldn't catch all the perps. So of course, what did the Bridge Authority do? Yep, they installed barriers.
The number of perps instantly crashed to essentially zero, and so did the expected revenue from fines. Now the Bridge Authority has a DEFICIT after tooting EZ Pass as a cost saving measure!
This kind of nonsense does soooo much to warm my faith in the States' wisdom. NOT.
Wow. I was wondering why the heck they'd do that when they already have a working radio-tag toll system in France (similar to the US EZPass, except that you don't need to slow down too much when you pass under the toll booth).
Then I read your post and I remember the Galileo system.
Thank you for oiling our thought process, John Murdoch. Where are mod points when you need them?
Thanks! I'm going to buy Dying Earth from amazon right after I hit "submit" on this post.
A good choice. As an added bonus, if you are a roleplayer, you'll recognize a peculiar characteristic of the magic spells in Dying Earth. They vanish from the caster's memory when they are cast, so he has to relearn them every time.
Which is of course where Gary Gygax swiped it from when he created D&D.
Thank you for this long, elaborate answer.
Top that up with Wind power, Tidal power, Hydro-electric, then make sure houses use energy saving lightbulbs, are well insulated, etc, and you can have a national energy system wihich needs little or no coal/oil/nuclear.
Actually, hydro-electricity is used as much as it can now. Every new dam implementation is an environmentally dangerous project, especially in Europe.
As for alternate source of productions, let's see. France generated 517 TWh in 2000, 76% of this nuclear. I don't have more recent figure. For the UK, the figure is probably similar since the UK has a larger GNP than France. The country has an area of 500,000 km^2. That's 517*10^12/365/(500000*10^6) = 2.84 W/m2. Now, if you factor by the usual availablity factor (70% efficiency, 8h/day, 120 day/year), you find that a solar generation density would have to be an average of 37W/m^2. How much solar panels would that mean? Well, the best solar panels out there generate about 200W/m^2. Some say 400 W/m^2 is reachable in the desert, provided you use arsenide panels, but these panels release arsenic. Let's retain 300 W/m^2. 37/300 is 12%. So you'd have to cover 12% of the territory with the best available solar panels in the world to reach that kind of power generation.
It is theoretically feasible, but the inhabitant of this one eight of the land would be pretty pissed off. The cost would be staggering. To give you an idea, the total area of all semiconductors manufactured in the world in 2000 is a couple of square kilometers (look up silicon wafer production stats).
Solar energy production is only viable in space. Once we have cheap access to space, it becomes feasable to deploy very large solar arrays in space that can operate 24 hr/day and beam their current production as microwave to receivers on Earth. That's the cleanest energy. But that's still far away, alas.
Regarding MOX: The technique you describe sounds good in theory, but in practice reprocessing still generates unacceptable levels radioactive pollution and waste that is still very difficult to deal in practice
Yet something has to be done to consume the stockpile of plutonium. Even if tomorrow, little green men pop up and give us a solar energy-generating space station, we'll still have the plutonium stockpile problem. Now some people say we have to bury it. This is a cop-out. Who knows where it will leak? Moreover, future scientific breakthroughs might find a solution that elude us today to turn plutonium into something less toxic -- provided their crazy ancestors didn't dump it in a geological fault. Right now, MOX is the only existing process to reduce the plutonium stockpile. A sad and imperfect reality, as often.
And the point is - why bother with nuclear, why take the risk?
Because I prefer to be downwind of a nuclear power plant than from a coal power plant. Or a heavy fuel power plant. Both pollute enormously, directly or indirectly. See the Prestige tanker still barfing heavy fuel pellets on French beaches? It was loaded with heavy fuel for a power plant. As for coal, by burning millions of tons of it, we release more naturally-occuring uranium every year than Chernobyl ever spilled, as you probably know. And look at the pollution
by coal mine fires.
It's an imperfect world. Until we have clean power, we have to find a way to generate it. Nuclear is the less polluting alternative. Yeah, I know, Chernobyl yada yada, but in July, 58 people died in China in a coal mine accident, as an example off the top of my head. Civil nuclear energy still has to kill as many people as the oil and coal power plants do.
Ok, I will get off by soap box now..:-)
I appreciate that you took the time to present your arguments. Thank you.
Thank you for responding. However, there are quite a number of misconceptions in your post.
It depends *how* small you make the generators, of course
Didn't you read? I just showed you that by covering half my roof with the best solar cells available on the market, I cannot even cover my own electricity needs. What do you suggest, covering the countryside with panels?
Where that sort of system can really pay off is in new build estates - where all the houses have solar built into the roofs feeding a local power-management system
New or old estate is not the matter. The problem is area. Even covering a whole roof would not yield enough output to make a difference. Also keep in mind that for fabricating a cell that will generate 1000 Wh during its useful life, you need to use about 2500 Wh just to melt the silicon and go through the process.
Such projects are up and running around Europe now, and pay back for themselves in a few years, even comparing to cheap "dig it up and burn" electricity.
Where, pray tell? Publications to defend your assertions?
France is not yet paying fully to *get rid* of the nuclear waste - its shipping the stuff to the UK to reprocess.
Completely wrong. France has a reprocessing plant in La Hague which actually also reprocesses other countries' used fuel. You are mixing it up with the British Sellafield reprocessing plant, which is indeed closing down.
People are scratching their heads and saying "hang on, what do you *do* with plutonium that is going to be radioactive for centuries, and has to be guarded in case some terrorist digs it up to make a dirty bomb.."
The solution is well known and widely used: you get your plutonium and you mix it with regular fissible U235 to make a combustible called MOX. Then you feed MOX into nuclear reactors for energy production. The plutonium is degraded into shorter-life elements (mostly Americanium 241) which are less toxic and need to be stored for a few years instead of a few millenia. That's what the French and other Europeans are doing since the 80s. Big bonus: You can also use plutonium coming from disarmed nuclear warheard.
That's right, the MOX technology allows you to make the deadly plutonium stockpile disappear. Neat, huh? There are 250 tons of military plutonium stored in the world, which makes the MOX technique very necessary. Even if we had other sources of cheap power, we'd need to keep running nuclear plant just to get rid of the plutonium stockpile. Unless you want to bury the stuff and pray it doesn't leak, which is an environmental Russian roulette.
So we are a tad further than the "head-scratching" stage I suggest you read about current technology, you might be pleasantly surprised.
As for your wind power argument, wind turbines are useful if noisy, but again, we are talking a few megawatts here, not the gigawatts that are currently produced by thermal plants. Wind power can not scale a thousand-fold.
I'm not trying to be mean and arrogant here. I'm sorry if I sounded that way. I want to emphasize that laws of physics cannot be wished away and that you have to deal with an imperfect world.
Thanks,
I know that for enviro-dreamers, math is a dirty word because it always derail their gravy train. But humor me.
I'm in a place where I get 120 sunny days a year average. I have 50 square meter (500 sq ft) of root at my disposal Assume I can use half of it and buy a 25 m^2 solar cell panel, at a great cost. With good cells and orientable panels (an eye sore but you don't care), I can get a 20% efficiency, for a glorious 150 W/m^2 peak. Assume a 70% efficiency in power conversion (widly optimistic). So far, I have 25 * 150 * 0.70 = 2625 W peak. With an average of 8 hours a day useable, 120 days a year, I get 2625 *8 *120/365 = 6.9 kWh avg a day, call it 7. Never mind the 15 car batteries I need to store that.
Well, the problem is, my 2 computers alone (400 watt power supply each), and my fridge use about 10 kWh a day. And they don't run 24h a day. So I'm afraid that after this use investment, I still need the grid.
And did I mention the snow storms that will put the contraption out of use for days?
Did I also mention that solar cells need to be replaced every 10 years at least, when they degrade? And that manufacturing a solar cell costs actually more power than the thing will ever generate?
Aaaah, so that is why there aren't solar cells on every roof. It's not a conspiracy by Exxon and the Bush family.
It's because when you do the math, you see it is not worth the trouble.
Of course, the solution is simple: don't do the math and keep pushing solutions that don't work, then blame the oil companies.
Alternately, you might want to wonder why France is generating 75% of its energy with nuclear plants licensed from Westinghouse and still doesn't glow in the dark. Naaah, wouldn't work elsewhere.
550 tons is the weight of all the electrons that have been inconvenienced, although momentarily, by people who read this stupid article online, and then couldn't keep from posting on/. about how asinine it was. (Oops).
For that many electrons, we could have downloaded ourselves a few Libraries of Congress. Too late now, they're all wasted. We'll have to get the
20,000 CD-ROM worth of data delivered to our door by an elephant.
Covener, you're right. zSeries suck as number crunchers. They are great at intensive I/O jobs. They are great at consolidating servers that aren't all busy at the same time. But "brute-force an RSA key" is exactly what you don't want to spend your expensive MIPS for.
BTW, I found that on a web server mettle test, large file transfer performance was better on zSeries than on RISC boxes. The larger the files, the more advantage to the mainframe. This is an interesting side-effect of having processors dedicated to I/O and freaking huge I/O bandwidth.
Dalslad, sorry, but the AC is right. If you read the context, you'll see that the goal here is to do some server consolidation. I doubt that the post author is interested in running SuSE on an LPAR. He obviously wants to run multiple guests under VM. I have yet to meet people who run Linux directly on their IFLs. Each installation I see uses VM. So what you say is true, but irrelevant.
The zSeries has a processor for I/O and the CP runs without having to manage a lot of the hardware.
Typical NYT drivel. A problem pops up? The Times clamor for government regulation. Astonishingly, when faced with a dramatic, err, bug in its own journalist monitoring activity, the NYT doesn't call for the gummint to create a Journalism Ethic Control Board. But these programmers guys? Yeah, they need to be kept under control.
The gummint will be only too happy to oblige and produce several layers of ineficient, costly, slow, slightly corrupt bureaucracy that will not solve the problem but will never disappear. As usual.
Let us put on our bureaucrat hat and see what can be done, in the immortal tradition of public service that gave us the Transportation Safely Authority. Let's see. Strip search programmers when they come to work in case they bring a copy of 2600? Have them remove their shoes? A nice start, but not enough.
See, the problem is that scumbags are writing programs that are up to no good. No scumbag coding, no worm and virus, eh? So let's put all compilers under lock. Let's make sure that scripting languages only accept input scripts that have been digitally signed by a new Programming Safety Authority. Let's make it a crime to use a computer without PSA-approved tools. Each program has to be certified by the PSA. Use the TCPA and Palladium chips to lock out all the bastards using non-PSA software and operating systems. Ban all non-Palladium computers and electronics. Do an FBI criminal check on each person entrusted with a compiler. And of course, recruits thousands of new civil servants to enforce all these new rules, at a low, low cost of [#insert eye-popping budget that will be overrun anyway].There you have, secure computing. A bit harsh, but it's for our safety, isn't it?
If you think the above is funny, I am sorry. I meant it to be ironic in a chilling way. Because when you start involving the government into a human activity, you never know how the bureaucrats are going to warp it.
So I'm gonna speak slowly so that even New York Times journalists can understand: KEEP GOVERNMENT OUT OF COMPUTING. Got it?
Well, that's a common complain among helpdesk people. For the longest time, the internal travel reservation web site at a Large Computer Manufacturer had a list of dos and don'ts containing this little gem:
Don't call us while performing bodily functions. We can hear you flush.
It lasted until a higher management type made a reservation himself instead of bugging his secretary. The "unprofessional wording" was then quickly removed.
You know this web thing is not a geek-only affair anymore when management uses it. And then you wonder, is it really a victory?
Every MS virus, worm, and what not does not cause BILLIONS in lost dollars. There are I am sure some cases of actual lost real money, but if they totalled billions I'd be surprised.
Like you, I find the $14B figure highly suspicious. However, I cannot help but notice how much things add up. My company's cost for the last few virus/worms is tens of millions in helpdesk time (all metered, hence easy to count), plus lost productivity. Take a high-level engineer whose lab time, including salary, equipment, real estate and benefits come to $250/hour. Have him spent the morning fiddle with his Windows machine that has to be brought up to the last service pack, then rebooted 3 times, then he has to download and install three patches from saturated servers... (even if the guy actually never caught a worm and wasn't dumb enough to open an attachment titled "Free XXX Pics!", Networking won't let him reconnect before he patches his machine). And even on machines that said engineer has carefully kept patched, Networking insist that he downloads and runs an update verification program that will certify this machine is indeed patched. Oh, and the verifier is a bit buggy so on some machines, you need to tweak it before it runs correctly.
And soon your cost is a cool grand. Multiply by many, many instances all over the world for every outburst. It adds up quickly.
Meanwhile, of course, the Linux machines in the lab are perfectly happy. It's just that the engineer needs Windows to access his email because of the boneheaded all-Windows desktop strategy that the higher-up morons barfed on unsuspecting cubicle dwellers. But that's a different problem.
Don't tell me that these procedure are wasteful and inflexible. I know it. Unfortunately, that's still better than sending helpdesk technicians to each machine, which is even more costly.
So the total figure can easily come to billions because of the huge mandatory waste of time to update and run the verification program on each machine.
Right now, this weekend, in many colleges and universities, thousands of IT depts and student/faculty helpdesk techs are running around like crazy patching machines of students coming back to school. The cost for our local college alone (5000 students) is estimated at $15-30 per student. Do the math.
Conclusion: The $14B might well be optimistic after all.
There is no incentive for long-term research right now, everything is focused on short-term profit.
While this is generally true of dying companies that have been overrun by clueless MBA types, it is not the case for serious tech companies. Research is a huge part of the expenses at IBM, Airbus, Corning, DuPont and many more. Where do you think all these new products are coming from? Even the dumbest MBAs understand that when half your revenue comes from products less than 3 years old, you have to invest in R&D or die. Shareholders in these companies hate the kill-research-and-jump-ship roaming execs and keep them at bay.
Now, you have to distinguish between pure research and applied research. No private company is going to fund a probe to Jupiter unless there is a profit to make, so such pure science missions will be the apanage of NASA and other tax-funded agencies. The state agencies also fund a space branch of their defense, and these should probably not be privatized for national security reasons.
But ask yourself: What valuable research do you do when you launch a telecom satellite? Answer: None. This is old stuff. It's operation-driven engineering, not research. The only thing you can learn is to cut costs for making future launches cheaper.
Then ask yourself: Since the telecom business is a commercial venture, while should the taxpayer subsidize their launches?
NASA is currently doing many commercial launches that should all be private. Moreover, it is risking human lives and wasting money by relying entirely on the Shuttle system. Why do some commercial operators put satellites on board of the Shuttle, hereby turning astronauts into glorified delivery people, when they could buy the services of Boeing, Lockheed, Arianespace, etc.? Because NASA subsidizes its launches heavily and makes them competitive with private launches, thereby harming commercial launch companies. Is it a good use of taxpayers' money? And remember, the only reason NASA does that is because they need to justify the budget of their Shuttle system, which is so expensive they cannot justify it just for the science missions. (Keep in mind that NASA stopped producing its cheaper unmanned launchers such as Saturn V to free budgets for the Shuttle).
NASA should keep launching the Mars probes and other research. It should not subsidize mundane commercial missions to the detriment of the US aerospace industry. Launching a private satellite should be done by private funds and private launchers. Otherwise the US will never get off the ground.
If you ever want to see humanity get off this wretched rock, we need to increase NASA's budget
NASA was a science outfit in the 60s. Now it's an administration. Its goal is to employ more people next year, not to deliver cheap access to space. Increase its budget and you'll get more expensive systems, not cheaper access to space. If you really want to enter the space age, you want to lower the cost of orbit per kilogram. NASA has no incentive to do that. Only private companies have an incentive to reduce costs. An administration's incentive is to raise them. The metrics for getting promoted are unfortunately rigged that way.
You want a moon base? Set an X-Prize kind of competition for, say, $10 billion, and it will be done. Jerry Pournelle has suggested to pass a law saying this:
Be it enacted by the Congress of the United States:
The Treasurer of the United States is directed to pay to the first American owned company (if corporate at least 60% of the shares must be held by American citizens) the following sums for the following accomplishments. No monies shall be paid until the goals specified are accomplished and certified by suitable experts from the National Science Foundation or the National Academy of Science:
1. The sum of $2 billion to be paid for construction of 3 operational spacecraft which have achieved low earth orbit, returne
Design flaws in Microsoft's products have recently been responsible for temporary closure of Maryland's Department of Motor Vehicles offices, failure of the passenger check-in system at Air Canada, an intrusion on the Navy-Marine intranet, and cancellations and suspensions of service on the CSX railroad. Additionally, a Microsoft exploit managed to disable a safety monitoring system at an off-line nuclear power plant.
And the best thing is, all the above is absolutely true.
You know a product is seriously flawed when an enumeration of its most recent flaws and disruptions sounds like the scenario of one of these movies where a computer takes over the world, but it turns out it's evil, oops.
I dunno about the robustness of MS products. But kudos to the thickness of their skin. I, as a developer, would have died of embarassment and remorse long ago. But do I see an epidemic of seppuku in Redmond? Nope.
Anyway, thanks to Bill Gates for providing thousands of $10/hr helpdesk jobs to students who are right now scrambling in dorms and labs and applying patches to infected machines.
I came accross a very interesting article that refers to a 1999 NASA press release that was mysteriously pulled out of the web but survives thanks to Google.
Basically, it proves that NASA was aware of the problems generated by foam insulation particles flying off the main tank, but the agency dismissed them.
Interestingly, foam problems started when the foam was modified to comply with new EPA regulations without adequate testing.
I heard a lot of grumpy engineers complain that they when they work on a government project, they cannot change the color of a button without having to go through layers of red tape. So how come that the EPA can get NASA to pull such a major change without any control? Is that because administrations feel nothing wrong can come out of measures that increase their costs, hence their budgets?
I am afraid that NASA has outlasted its usefulness. It should be sized down and concentrate on science missions, while leaving commercial launches to commercial enterprises. The US public should clamor for it while it's still time.
Then again, there is nothing intrinsecally wrong with having a Chinese moonbase and an Indian space station.
Communist hippies go misty-eyed whenever a suit is giving them a hand instead of shooting them on sight. Whereas crusty old dyed-in-the-wool IBMers are pretty hard to make cry. "Hey, Ed, you missed the MVS training." "Well, I totalled my car by hitting my grandma." "Man, that's a bummer. Oh, are these tears I see?" "Naah, it's the water cooling of the old mainframe upstairs that's leaking into my office. I'll buy a Volvo with the inheritance."
So my misty eyes beat your misty eyes!:-)
Seriously, you're right. The old anti-IBM flames on old geek humor sites sound so weird now that IBM is the geek's best friend.
I'd like to see some the guys involved with SMP or JFS or NUMA get together and *sue SCO*
Well, we're there already, aren't we? JFS is an IBM code donated to the Open Source community, and NUMA was developed by Sequent, which was bought by IBM.
And Big Blue is countersuing SCO. And there was much rejoicing.
Old IBMers all over the world are all misty-eyed at the sight of all these Linux-loving Communist hippies siding with the Company instead of deriding and hating it. Man, the 70's are sooo dead (deservedly so, I might add).
Actually, I am one of these low-life dime-a-day Europeans working in the US and taking the job of a decent red-blooded American, being grateful not to be quicked out of the country and accepting a petty pay that no Yankee with my seniority and experience would even consider.
Referring to my own group in a derogatory way is called self-deprecating humor. I don't think an apology is in order since I just insulted myself and my family, but let me know if you think otherwise!
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Hold on a sec, my wife tells me that the diet didn't last thirty years but a mere week. Well, it feltlike thirty years. Does that count?
Unfortunately, it's very hard to measure success in that respect because the French gummint also changed the way they count road fatalities. They claim they decreased road fatalities by 25% in two short years, but they also changed the period during which a death after an accident is credited to that accident.
In clear English: Before the change, if you died within a month of a car crash, they incremented the road fatality counter. Now they wait only 2 weeks. Naturally, a percentage of the car-crash-induced deaths are now slipping outside the count window. Mission accomplished.
That's called statistical remedies, and that's a favorite among politicians.
The Germans think that what kills you is fatigue and that the sooner you're there, the less time you're on the road and hence the less time you are exposed to danger. Hence there is no speed limit on their highway (or if there is, it's very high). Then again, when they see a driver passing on the right, they put his license in a shredder.
... get this...
...fines from drivers who used the EZ Pass lanes and did not have an EZ Pass tag.
Initially, a whole bunch of drivers did go through the nice new lane with no line even though they had not ever heard of EZ Pass. So this seemed like a good plan...
...Until the cops complained they couldn't catch all the perps. So of course, what did the Bridge Authority do? Yep, they installed barriers.
The number of perps instantly crashed to essentially zero, and so did the expected revenue from fines. Now the Bridge Authority has a DEFICIT after tooting EZ Pass as a cost saving measure!
This kind of nonsense does soooo much to warm my faith in the States' wisdom. NOT.
Very interesting. I'd gladly avoid slowing down at my local EZ Pass toll booth, but this one has an automatic barrier made of metal...
Then I read your post and I remember the Galileo system.
Thank you for oiling our thought process, John Murdoch. Where are mod points when you need them?
Please mod the parent up.
A good choice. As an added bonus, if you are a roleplayer, you'll recognize a peculiar characteristic of the magic spells in Dying Earth. They vanish from the caster's memory when they are cast, so he has to relearn them every time.
Which is of course where Gary Gygax swiped it from when he created D&D.
Thank you for this long, elaborate answer. Top that up with Wind power, Tidal power, Hydro-electric, then make sure houses use energy saving lightbulbs, are well insulated, etc, and you can have a national energy system wihich needs little or no coal/oil/nuclear.
Actually, hydro-electricity is used as much as it can now. Every new dam implementation is an environmentally dangerous project, especially in Europe.
As for alternate source of productions, let's see. France generated 517 TWh in 2000, 76% of this nuclear. I don't have more recent figure. For the UK, the figure is probably similar since the UK has a larger GNP than France. The country has an area of 500,000 km^2. That's 517*10^12/365/(500000*10^6) = 2.84 W/m2. Now, if you factor by the usual availablity factor (70% efficiency, 8h/day, 120 day/year), you find that a solar generation density would have to be an average of 37W/m^2. How much solar panels would that mean? Well, the best solar panels out there generate about 200W/m^2. Some say 400 W/m^2 is reachable in the desert, provided you use arsenide panels, but these panels release arsenic. Let's retain 300 W/m^2. 37/300 is 12%. So you'd have to cover 12% of the territory with the best available solar panels in the world to reach that kind of power generation.
It is theoretically feasible, but the inhabitant of this one eight of the land would be pretty pissed off. The cost would be staggering. To give you an idea, the total area of all semiconductors manufactured in the world in 2000 is a couple of square kilometers (look up silicon wafer production stats).
Solar energy production is only viable in space. Once we have cheap access to space, it becomes feasable to deploy very large solar arrays in space that can operate 24 hr/day and beam their current production as microwave to receivers on Earth. That's the cleanest energy. But that's still far away, alas.
Regarding MOX: The technique you describe sounds good in theory, but in practice reprocessing still generates unacceptable levels radioactive pollution and waste that is still very difficult to deal in practice
Yet something has to be done to consume the stockpile of plutonium. Even if tomorrow, little green men pop up and give us a solar energy-generating space station, we'll still have the plutonium stockpile problem. Now some people say we have to bury it. This is a cop-out. Who knows where it will leak? Moreover, future scientific breakthroughs might find a solution that elude us today to turn plutonium into something less toxic -- provided their crazy ancestors didn't dump it in a geological fault. Right now, MOX is the only existing process to reduce the plutonium stockpile. A sad and imperfect reality, as often.
And the point is - why bother with nuclear, why take the risk?
Because I prefer to be downwind of a nuclear power plant than from a coal power plant. Or a heavy fuel power plant. Both pollute enormously, directly or indirectly. See the Prestige tanker still barfing heavy fuel pellets on French beaches? It was loaded with heavy fuel for a power plant. As for coal, by burning millions of tons of it, we release more naturally-occuring uranium every year than Chernobyl ever spilled, as you probably know. And look at the pollution by coal mine fires.
It's an imperfect world. Until we have clean power, we have to find a way to generate it. Nuclear is the less polluting alternative. Yeah, I know, Chernobyl yada yada, but in July, 58 people died in China in a coal mine accident, as an example off the top of my head. Civil nuclear energy still has to kill as many people as the oil and coal power plants do.
Ok, I will get off by soap box now.. :-)
I appreciate that you took the time to present your arguments. Thank you.
This is a very good information. Where are mod points when you need them?
It depends *how* small you make the generators, of course
Didn't you read? I just showed you that by covering half my roof with the best solar cells available on the market, I cannot even cover my own electricity needs. What do you suggest, covering the countryside with panels?
Where that sort of system can really pay off is in new build estates - where all the houses have solar built into the roofs feeding a local power-management system
New or old estate is not the matter. The problem is area. Even covering a whole roof would not yield enough output to make a difference. Also keep in mind that for fabricating a cell that will generate 1000 Wh during its useful life, you need to use about 2500 Wh just to melt the silicon and go through the process.
Such projects are up and running around Europe now, and pay back for themselves in a few years, even comparing to cheap "dig it up and burn" electricity.
Where, pray tell? Publications to defend your assertions?
France is not yet paying fully to *get rid* of the nuclear waste - its shipping the stuff to the UK to reprocess.
Completely wrong. France has a reprocessing plant in La Hague which actually also reprocesses other countries' used fuel. You are mixing it up with the British Sellafield reprocessing plant, which is indeed closing down.
People are scratching their heads and saying "hang on, what do you *do* with plutonium that is going to be radioactive for centuries, and has to be guarded in case some terrorist digs it up to make a dirty bomb.."
The solution is well known and widely used: you get your plutonium and you mix it with regular fissible U235 to make a combustible called MOX. Then you feed MOX into nuclear reactors for energy production. The plutonium is degraded into shorter-life elements (mostly Americanium 241) which are less toxic and need to be stored for a few years instead of a few millenia. That's what the French and other Europeans are doing since the 80s. Big bonus: You can also use plutonium coming from disarmed nuclear warheard.
That's right, the MOX technology allows you to make the deadly plutonium stockpile disappear. Neat, huh? There are 250 tons of military plutonium stored in the world, which makes the MOX technique very necessary. Even if we had other sources of cheap power, we'd need to keep running nuclear plant just to get rid of the plutonium stockpile. Unless you want to bury the stuff and pray it doesn't leak, which is an environmental Russian roulette.
So we are a tad further than the "head-scratching" stage I suggest you read about current technology, you might be pleasantly surprised.
As for your wind power argument, wind turbines are useful if noisy, but again, we are talking a few megawatts here, not the gigawatts that are currently produced by thermal plants. Wind power can not scale a thousand-fold.
I'm not trying to be mean and arrogant here. I'm sorry if I sounded that way. I want to emphasize that laws of physics cannot be wished away and that you have to deal with an imperfect world. Thanks,
:-) Yeah, I got it messed up somewhere.
Well, the problem is, my 2 computers alone (400 watt power supply each), and my fridge use about 10 kWh a day. And they don't run 24h a day. So I'm afraid that after this use investment, I still need the grid.
And did I mention the snow storms that will put the contraption out of use for days?
Did I also mention that solar cells need to be replaced every 10 years at least, when they degrade? And that manufacturing a solar cell costs actually more power than the thing will ever generate?
Aaaah, so that is why there aren't solar cells on every roof. It's not a conspiracy by Exxon and the Bush family.
It's because when you do the math, you see it is not worth the trouble.
Of course, the solution is simple: don't do the math and keep pushing solutions that don't work, then blame the oil companies.
Alternately, you might want to wonder why France is generating 75% of its energy with nuclear plants licensed from Westinghouse and still doesn't glow in the dark. Naaah, wouldn't work elsewhere.
You might be right, my physics is rusty. Just curious. Thanks.
550 tons is the weight of all the electrons that have been inconvenienced, although momentarily, by people who read this stupid article online, and then couldn't keep from posting on /. about how asinine it was. (Oops).
For that many electrons, we could have downloaded ourselves a few Libraries of Congress. Too late now, they're all wasted. We'll have to get the 20,000 CD-ROM worth of data delivered to our door by an elephant.
Covener, you're right. zSeries suck as number crunchers. They are great at intensive I/O jobs. They are great at consolidating servers that aren't all busy at the same time. But "brute-force an RSA key" is exactly what you don't want to spend your expensive MIPS for.
BTW, I found that on a web server mettle test, large file transfer performance was better on zSeries than on RISC boxes. The larger the files, the more advantage to the mainframe. This is an interesting side-effect of having processors dedicated to I/O and freaking huge I/O bandwidth.
Nobody said the contrary.
The gummint will be only too happy to oblige and produce several layers of ineficient, costly, slow, slightly corrupt bureaucracy that will not solve the problem but will never disappear. As usual.
Let us put on our bureaucrat hat and see what can be done, in the immortal tradition of public service that gave us the Transportation Safely Authority. Let's see. Strip search programmers when they come to work in case they bring a copy of 2600? Have them remove their shoes? A nice start, but not enough.
See, the problem is that scumbags are writing programs that are up to no good. No scumbag coding, no worm and virus, eh? So let's put all compilers under lock. Let's make sure that scripting languages only accept input scripts that have been digitally signed by a new Programming Safety Authority. Let's make it a crime to use a computer without PSA-approved tools. Each program has to be certified by the PSA. Use the TCPA and Palladium chips to lock out all the bastards using non-PSA software and operating systems. Ban all non-Palladium computers and electronics. Do an FBI criminal check on each person entrusted with a compiler. And of course, recruits thousands of new civil servants to enforce all these new rules, at a low, low cost of [#insert eye-popping budget that will be overrun anyway].There you have, secure computing. A bit harsh, but it's for our safety, isn't it?
If you think the above is funny, I am sorry. I meant it to be ironic in a chilling way. Because when you start involving the government into a human activity, you never know how the bureaucrats are going to warp it.
So I'm gonna speak slowly so that even New York Times journalists can understand: KEEP GOVERNMENT OUT OF COMPUTING. Got it?
Well, that's a common complain among helpdesk people. For the longest time, the internal travel reservation web site at a Large Computer Manufacturer had a list of dos and don'ts containing this little gem:
Don't call us while performing bodily functions. We can hear you flush.
It lasted until a higher management type made a reservation himself instead of bugging his secretary. The "unprofessional wording" was then quickly removed.
You know this web thing is not a geek-only affair anymore when management uses it. And then you wonder, is it really a victory?
Like you, I find the $14B figure highly suspicious. However, I cannot help but notice how much things add up. My company's cost for the last few virus/worms is tens of millions in helpdesk time (all metered, hence easy to count), plus lost productivity. Take a high-level engineer whose lab time, including salary, equipment, real estate and benefits come to $250/hour. Have him spent the morning fiddle with his Windows machine that has to be brought up to the last service pack, then rebooted 3 times, then he has to download and install three patches from saturated servers... (even if the guy actually never caught a worm and wasn't dumb enough to open an attachment titled "Free XXX Pics!", Networking won't let him reconnect before he patches his machine). And even on machines that said engineer has carefully kept patched, Networking insist that he downloads and runs an update verification program that will certify this machine is indeed patched. Oh, and the verifier is a bit buggy so on some machines, you need to tweak it before it runs correctly.
And soon your cost is a cool grand. Multiply by many, many instances all over the world for every outburst. It adds up quickly.
Meanwhile, of course, the Linux machines in the lab are perfectly happy. It's just that the engineer needs Windows to access his email because of the boneheaded all-Windows desktop strategy that the higher-up morons barfed on unsuspecting cubicle dwellers. But that's a different problem.
Don't tell me that these procedure are wasteful and inflexible. I know it. Unfortunately, that's still better than sending helpdesk technicians to each machine, which is even more costly.
So the total figure can easily come to billions because of the huge mandatory waste of time to update and run the verification program on each machine.
Right now, this weekend, in many colleges and universities, thousands of IT depts and student/faculty helpdesk techs are running around like crazy patching machines of students coming back to school. The cost for our local college alone (5000 students) is estimated at $15-30 per student. Do the math.
Conclusion: The $14B might well be optimistic after all.
There is no incentive for long-term research right now, everything is focused on short-term profit.
While this is generally true of dying companies that have been overrun by clueless MBA types, it is not the case for serious tech companies. Research is a huge part of the expenses at IBM, Airbus, Corning, DuPont and many more. Where do you think all these new products are coming from? Even the dumbest MBAs understand that when half your revenue comes from products less than 3 years old, you have to invest in R&D or die. Shareholders in these companies hate the kill-research-and-jump-ship roaming execs and keep them at bay.
Now, you have to distinguish between pure research and applied research. No private company is going to fund a probe to Jupiter unless there is a profit to make, so such pure science missions will be the apanage of NASA and other tax-funded agencies. The state agencies also fund a space branch of their defense, and these should probably not be privatized for national security reasons.
But ask yourself: What valuable research do you do when you launch a telecom satellite? Answer: None. This is old stuff. It's operation-driven engineering, not research. The only thing you can learn is to cut costs for making future launches cheaper.
Then ask yourself: Since the telecom business is a commercial venture, while should the taxpayer subsidize their launches?
NASA is currently doing many commercial launches that should all be private. Moreover, it is risking human lives and wasting money by relying entirely on the Shuttle system. Why do some commercial operators put satellites on board of the Shuttle, hereby turning astronauts into glorified delivery people, when they could buy the services of Boeing, Lockheed, Arianespace, etc.? Because NASA subsidizes its launches heavily and makes them competitive with private launches, thereby harming commercial launch companies. Is it a good use of taxpayers' money? And remember, the only reason NASA does that is because they need to justify the budget of their Shuttle system, which is so expensive they cannot justify it just for the science missions. (Keep in mind that NASA stopped producing its cheaper unmanned launchers such as Saturn V to free budgets for the Shuttle).
NASA should keep launching the Mars probes and other research. It should not subsidize mundane commercial missions to the detriment of the US aerospace industry. Launching a private satellite should be done by private funds and private launchers. Otherwise the US will never get off the ground.
If you ever want to see humanity get off this wretched rock, we need to increase NASA's budget
NASA was a science outfit in the 60s. Now it's an administration. Its goal is to employ more people next year, not to deliver cheap access to space. Increase its budget and you'll get more expensive systems, not cheaper access to space. If you really want to enter the space age, you want to lower the cost of orbit per kilogram. NASA has no incentive to do that. Only private companies have an incentive to reduce costs. An administration's incentive is to raise them. The metrics for getting promoted are unfortunately rigged that way.
You want a moon base? Set an X-Prize kind of competition for, say, $10 billion, and it will be done. Jerry Pournelle has suggested to pass a law saying this:
And the best thing is, all the above is absolutely true.
You know a product is seriously flawed when an enumeration of its most recent flaws and disruptions sounds like the scenario of one of these movies where a computer takes over the world, but it turns out it's evil, oops.
I dunno about the robustness of MS products. But kudos to the thickness of their skin. I, as a developer, would have died of embarassment and remorse long ago. But do I see an epidemic of seppuku in Redmond? Nope.
Anyway, thanks to Bill Gates for providing thousands of $10/hr helpdesk jobs to students who are right now scrambling in dorms and labs and applying patches to infected machines.
Basically, it proves that NASA was aware of the problems generated by foam insulation particles flying off the main tank, but the agency dismissed them.
Interestingly, foam problems started when the foam was modified to comply with new EPA regulations without adequate testing.
I heard a lot of grumpy engineers complain that they when they work on a government project, they cannot change the color of a button without having to go through layers of red tape. So how come that the EPA can get NASA to pull such a major change without any control? Is that because administrations feel nothing wrong can come out of measures that increase their costs, hence their budgets?
I am afraid that NASA has outlasted its usefulness. It should be sized down and concentrate on science missions, while leaving commercial launches to commercial enterprises. The US public should clamor for it while it's still time.
Then again, there is nothing intrinsecally wrong with having a Chinese moonbase and an Indian space station.
So my misty eyes beat your misty eyes! :-)
Seriously, you're right. The old anti-IBM flames on old geek humor sites sound so weird now that IBM is the geek's best friend.
Well, we're there already, aren't we? JFS is an IBM code donated to the Open Source community, and NUMA was developed by Sequent, which was bought by IBM.
And Big Blue is countersuing SCO. And there was much rejoicing.
Old IBMers all over the world are all misty-eyed at the sight of all these Linux-loving Communist hippies siding with the Company instead of deriding and hating it. Man, the 70's are sooo dead (deservedly so, I might add).
That's right. This suggests that the "correct" pronounciation is ex-oo-vair.
Babylonian goddess my ass.
Actually, I am one of these low-life dime-a-day Europeans working in the US and taking the job of a decent red-blooded American, being grateful not to be quicked out of the country and accepting a petty pay that no Yankee with my seniority and experience would even consider.
Referring to my own group in a derogatory way is called self-deprecating humor. I don't think an apology is in order since I just insulted myself and my family, but let me know if you think otherwise!
Thanks,