Posted this above as well, but Unit 1 at Fukushima had just been relicensed for another 10 years in February.
The fact of the matter is that a utility will always apply for an extended operating license and will almost certainly get one. The only plant shutdowns I know of in the US, apart from TMI Unit 2, were when something too expensive to repair needed replacement, such as the ComEd Zion plant outside Chicago, which needed a new $460 million steam generator. So since there is so much better in the way of designs available, why aren't utilities rushing to replace these ancient reactors instead of asking for extended licenses, you ask? Economics of course - an existing plant is almost all sunk cost, and the utilities are in business to make money. They will build new reactors only to add capacity, and they will build the cheapest design they are permitted to.
My main objection to nuclear power is that these plants are operated by businesses. Unlike a solar farm or even a coal plant, the worst case failure for a nuclear plant is very, very bad. You have a business trying to maximize profit knowing that the worst case failure costs will be shifted to the taxpayer. This is a recipe for disaster. I have no issues at all with the state of reactor technology, and the US military operates dozens of reactors that *move around* and has for 50 years without a major accident (the Russians haven't had as much success there, though). If these things were being operated by some agency like the military with those levels of discipline, perhaps we could all rest assured. When it's some utility executive who wants a bigger bonus, I am not at all confident.
This misinformation has been bandied about quite a bit, but the fact is that while Reactor 1 had reached the end of its operating license in March, the Japanese government had actually just extended the license for another 10 years in February. The "entire complex" was not by any means scheduled for shutdown, particularly units 5 and 6, which are undamaged and will likely be restarted at some point.
As far as I can see from looking at my usage data it does include the overhead as part of your usage. Kind of like if UPS required you to ship everything in a cast-iron box and then still charged you an overweight shipping fee by total weight.
The meter also lags by 2-3 days and is incorrectly totaled by the cumulative meter, which rounds each day up to the next megabyte, and also is still confused about the billing period, including several lagged days from the previous period.
I'm surprised that nobody typically mentions the fact that Chrome is produced by an insanely profitable company that makes its cash from an effective monopoly on online search. They have hundreds of paid engineers working on Chrome, and it would be an embarrassment if they weren't able to make the kind of progress they have. Mozilla has (I believe) some paid developers, but is still primarily an open source project and has a fraction of the resources of Google (or Microsoft). It amazes me that people beat up Mozilla on its progress compared to products that have huge amounts of money behind them. They also have a huge legacy codebase that they have to deal with it. Progress is always swift when you start the clean-sheet efforts...once you start having to deal with things like backwards compatibility, life begins to suck. Google will quickly get there as well, especially since they have extension support now.
Also, just like Apple with Safari and Microsoft with IE, at some point Google management will declare the battle won and move resources to other projects, and some other browser will become the new hotness. This is all the natural course of events, and I believe competition is good in tech, and all kudos to Chrome for revitalizing the browser space, even if I find some of their "innovations" to be design preferences hailed mostly for being different, not necessarily better.
The point would be for the exact level of damage to the spent fuel pools to be revealed, which would confirm the level of concern that should be given contamination fears. If the pools are all full of water or show undamaged assemblies, then the public would be reassured. That they have chosen not to release this footage, by Occam's Razor, indicates that things are worse than has been definitively confirmed, although likely not worse than has been widely speculated.
I really don't understand the strident desire by some to downplay the severity of this incident. In pure economic terms, this has crippled the Tokyo electric grid, probably for years, which is affecting the lives of tens of millions in the Tokyo area. It will also cost billions of dollars to clean up, by "clean-up" meaning entombing these particular facilities forever.
It's kind of hard to do warm and fuzzy stories about four malfunctioning nuclear reactors.
The media is a business, so of course they are going to make their 'product' stand out to sell advertising. The fact is that 'reactionary and sensationalist people' want to watch the dramatic exposition because BBC is boring to them - calm, rational, thoughtful people are not instantly converted into 'reactionaries' because they flip on the tv and suddenly see a Fox News story one day.
It's ridiculous that this is being quibbled over. It's apparently so dangerously radioactive in the area that people cannot approach to even look in the building. There was an explosion and fire of something that apparently generated intense radioactivity in unit 4. If there's still 100 gallons of boiling water left in the pool or not seems kind of irrelevant at this point.
Best comment. The core issue in all of the major accidents that has happened with nuclear plants has been human error. TMA Unit 2 was a brand new reactor in 1979 and its failure bypassed all of the safety systems due to the operators not understanding what was happening. At Chernobyl, the night shift crew that decided to run the ill-fated experiment that destroyed the reactor ignored numerous warnings from the control system that the power level was rising rapidly until it was too late. The Davis-Besse plant in Ohio was 3/8" of stainless steel cladding from a catastrophic coolant breach that would have vented the core into the containment and probably caused a full meltdown, all because company inspectors failed to inspect the reactor head for corrosion and falsified records.
Until we have Skynet designing, building, operating. and maintaining reactors there is no way to prevent the human element from bypassing the most superb design and construction. The issues that nuclear power advocates tend to gloss over is that even if the probability of design failure is very low, some retard can decide to switch off the cooling pumps because he doesn't understand what's going on, or fail to do maintenance on the emergency backup system, etc. And when the worst case failure is contamination of hundreds of square miles of land at a likely cost of at a minimum tens of billions of dollars, this isn't acceptable.
What amazes me is that even after Chernobyl, the precise example of the worst case disaster, people continue to suggest that nuclear power is a safe form of power generation. And most of the arguments are along the lines of "well, those guys were dumb". Guess what, every reactor in operation potentially has the exact same human beings that can make the exact same kinds of mistakes.
On an engineering level, I actually like the concept of nuclear power generation. It's efficient, and non-greenhouse gas producing. Current generation designs should be very safe. But when you have for-profit companies operating them whose primary goal is monetary return, the potential for a major accident will always be present, especially in countries such as the US where corporate entities are considered sacrosanct and where the costs of a disaster will just be transferred to the taxpayer.
So while your general thesis is fine, the specifics are a bit of a problem. You see, the robot replaced not just Mr. Bucket, but more likely 10 Mr. Buckets, and you only need 1 to fix Mr. Robot. This is the problem. Assuming the market for toothpaste tubes is fixed (likely) you won't be buying 9 more robots.
There is also the general issue of people who do not have the ability to learn robot repair, or as in in the current economy, are "too old" and won't be hired regardless of their skills. Pat answers are fine for simple problems, but this isn't a simple problem.
You don't get it. The next step is Market On A Chip technology. The NASDAQ, NYSE, etc. will be condensed onto an integrated circuit in Lloyd Blankfein's office. But don't be concerned, the Market will still be FULLY FAIR AND TRANSPARENT for all...
Exactly. This is Mozilla laying down the thick smokescreen to attempt to hide the ever-later 4.x release. It's a laughable joke to talk about 4 releases this year, when 4.0 appears no closer to being out the door than it was 2 months ago. They don't have the resources of a Google, so attempting to keep up with the GOOG is just going to make them look pathetic and weak.
>Your ISP is going to scale back or cancel any rollout of faster service or they will lower everyone's speeds or they will charge everyone more money. Hahahahahah...they do this NOW - this will just give them an actual excuse. The fact is that a whole generation was brainwashed into the notion that government = bad, which I think ultimately dovetails with the prevailing general social philosophy of "it's all about ME." Anyone or anything that tries to put any kind of rules on me is bad because it might interfere with what I want to do. These same retarded arguments that "any rules = destruction of the industry" were pushed by the auto industry originally when speed limits were imposed, and when safety laws were passed. I remember how the industry fought air bags to the bitter end...it now is typically a selling point in automobiles, and created a whole industry for the manufacture of the devices. What destroyed the American auto industry wasn't government regulation, it was the greed and stupidity of their management (and union management, it must be said.)
Any system can impose ridiculous bad laws and destroy innovation. It can also impose good laws that foster improvements. This argument that "any laws inevitably will result in NAZIS TAKING OVER AND FINDING THE ARK OF THE COVENANT" is worse than kindergarten logic.
I was going to mod this Funny, assuming it was a joke, but I've decided to post the actual snippet describing Corbyn's scientific methods:
Corbyn's 'method' for making weather predictions: Corbyn 'studies the sun':
He looks at the flow of particles from the Sun, and how they interact with the upper atmosphere, especially air currents such as the jet stream, and he looks at how the Moon and other factors influence those streaming particles.
He takes a snapshot of what the Sun is doing at any given moment, and then he looks back at the record to see when it last did something similar. Then he checks what the weather was like on Earth at the time - and he makes a prophecy.
I also note that the referenced website bills itself "The WORLDWIDE LEADER in WEIRD".
My feeling: don't think this type of input is really more relevant to public policy than Al Gore's movies...
Figure out what the plugin is and stop using it. Fixed.
This is why a lot of app developers hate plugins, etc. because their product gets blamed for some cute "dancing reindeer" add-on that leaks memory and now their product "totally sucks!"
If you think Chrome will solve your problem, you will be sad. The sandboxing is to prevent a plug crash from taking down the whole browser, but it's perfectly fine for it to consume memory. And Chrome, particularly the latest dev build, is a resource monster already. As more plugins accumulate for Chrome, all of these complaints will migrate to Chrome...circle of life, I suppose.
This is old news in pre-paid. On my VM phone, you have to pay 10 cents to use Gmail if you're stupid enough to do that. Navigation is pay per day, etc.
Well credit them for referencing a blog that actually has some timely information in it. It's gotten to the point that I see articles in/. a couple of days after I see them in the Huffington Post...this place seems to be increasingly irrelevant the past year or so, sad to say.
Best comment in the thread. They won't be stupid enough to actually offer a rate based solely on the user agent. In fact, you could use the thesis that they market a rate closer to the actual likely rate you will get to Firefox and Chrome users because they're assumed to be more clever, or at least more likely to be annoyed at obvious marketing;-)
Your bullet point 4 is precisely the strategy. All of these other considerations are, as is typical with engineers, minutae that misses the point. It's no accident that these two announcements happened together. It isn't that Apple, with $40+ billion in cash, can't afford to support Java on the Mac. This is a strategic decisions aimed, I think, primarily at Google, to keep the Java ecosystem from being able to easily leverage the Apple installed base.
What I also find interesting, and hasn't been mentioned, is that Jobs and Ellison are famously buddies...I can't believe that they haven't discussed this move. My guess would be that Oracle, apart from bludgeoning people, which is its favorite business model, hasn't the slightest interest in Java the language. They are a database and ERP software company, and also famously proprietary. If Oracle can't make somebody pay them 18% annual maintenance on it, they don't have any interest in making it.
It makes me sad, but it's clear that Apple will abandon the general "computing platform" model and is moving to a "content delivery" model, where you can read "advertising" for "content". Apple wants to build stylish devices that can deliver content that Apple can then get a cut of the revenue stream for. I think they are probably spot on here, too, most people are baffled by computers and since they *aren't* locked down they are riddled with viruses, etc. Apple can also see how much money is being made with pure gaming consoles, which are also "locked down" platforms. I think at some point, Apple will sell only sell IOS devices...these may have a laptop form factor, but they will essentially be iPhone with a keyboard and large screen. I would guess that 10.8 will also be where Apple announces that OS X will become a "deprecated technology"...
I don't see the problem here. As with IBM, and then Microsoft, once Apple gets too arrogant and thinks it has everything its own way, people will be ready for a change, and some new company or technology will yank the rug out from under them. Don't like what Apple is doing? Buy something else.
I loved the guy's early work, which was snarky and fresh (if somewhat weak on actual concluding), but the 'historical fiction' genre bores me. Also, the "more is more" aesthetic he has pursued the last ~10 years doesn't really work for me, I don't have the time to absorb the sheer volume of his awesomeness that Stephenson insists you ingest along with the novel....
Slashdot Mirror
I know it's late, and I think this may have been intended as humorous, but really, guys? Has it come to this?
Posted this above as well, but Unit 1 at Fukushima had just been relicensed for another 10 years in February.
The fact of the matter is that a utility will always apply for an extended operating license and will almost certainly get one. The only plant shutdowns I know of in the US, apart from TMI Unit 2, were when something too expensive to repair needed replacement, such as the ComEd Zion plant outside Chicago, which needed a new $460 million steam generator. So since there is so much better in the way of designs available, why aren't utilities rushing to replace these ancient reactors instead of asking for extended licenses, you ask? Economics of course - an existing plant is almost all sunk cost, and the utilities are in business to make money. They will build new reactors only to add capacity, and they will build the cheapest design they are permitted to.
My main objection to nuclear power is that these plants are operated by businesses. Unlike a solar farm or even a coal plant, the worst case failure for a nuclear plant is very, very bad. You have a business trying to maximize profit knowing that the worst case failure costs will be shifted to the taxpayer. This is a recipe for disaster. I have no issues at all with the state of reactor technology, and the US military operates dozens of reactors that *move around* and has for 50 years without a major accident (the Russians haven't had as much success there, though). If these things were being operated by some agency like the military with those levels of discipline, perhaps we could all rest assured. When it's some utility executive who wants a bigger bonus, I am not at all confident.
This misinformation has been bandied about quite a bit, but the fact is that while Reactor 1 had reached the end of its operating license in March, the Japanese government had actually just extended the license for another 10 years in February. The "entire complex" was not by any means scheduled for shutdown, particularly units 5 and 6, which are undamaged and will likely be restarted at some point.
As far as I can see from looking at my usage data it does include the overhead as part of your usage. Kind of like if UPS required you to ship everything in a cast-iron box and then still charged you an overweight shipping fee by total weight.
The meter also lags by 2-3 days and is incorrectly totaled by the cumulative meter, which rounds each day up to the next megabyte, and also is still confused about the billing period, including several lagged days from the previous period.
With that attitude, no, it's not worth upgrading. Continue to enjoy using MS-DOS and life in the retirement community...
I'm surprised that nobody typically mentions the fact that Chrome is produced by an insanely profitable company that makes its cash from an effective monopoly on online search. They have hundreds of paid engineers working on Chrome, and it would be an embarrassment if they weren't able to make the kind of progress they have. Mozilla has (I believe) some paid developers, but is still primarily an open source project and has a fraction of the resources of Google (or Microsoft). It amazes me that people beat up Mozilla on its progress compared to products that have huge amounts of money behind them. They also have a huge legacy codebase that they have to deal with it. Progress is always swift when you start the clean-sheet efforts...once you start having to deal with things like backwards compatibility, life begins to suck. Google will quickly get there as well, especially since they have extension support now.
Also, just like Apple with Safari and Microsoft with IE, at some point Google management will declare the battle won and move resources to other projects, and some other browser will become the new hotness. This is all the natural course of events, and I believe competition is good in tech, and all kudos to Chrome for revitalizing the browser space, even if I find some of their "innovations" to be design preferences hailed mostly for being different, not necessarily better.
The point would be for the exact level of damage to the spent fuel pools to be revealed, which would confirm the level of concern that should be given contamination fears. If the pools are all full of water or show undamaged assemblies, then the public would be reassured. That they have chosen not to release this footage, by Occam's Razor, indicates that things are worse than has been definitively confirmed, although likely not worse than has been widely speculated.
I really don't understand the strident desire by some to downplay the severity of this incident. In pure economic terms, this has crippled the Tokyo electric grid, probably for years, which is affecting the lives of tens of millions in the Tokyo area. It will also cost billions of dollars to clean up, by "clean-up" meaning entombing these particular facilities forever.
It's kind of hard to do warm and fuzzy stories about four malfunctioning nuclear reactors.
The media is a business, so of course they are going to make their 'product' stand out to sell advertising. The fact is that 'reactionary and sensationalist people' want to watch the dramatic exposition because BBC is boring to them - calm, rational, thoughtful people are not instantly converted into 'reactionaries' because they flip on the tv and suddenly see a Fox News story one day.
It's ridiculous that this is being quibbled over. It's apparently so dangerously radioactive in the area that people cannot approach to even look in the building. There was an explosion and fire of something that apparently generated intense radioactivity in unit 4. If there's still 100 gallons of boiling water left in the pool or not seems kind of irrelevant at this point.
Best comment. The core issue in all of the major accidents that has happened with nuclear plants has been human error. TMA Unit 2 was a brand new reactor in 1979 and its failure bypassed all of the safety systems due to the operators not understanding what was happening. At Chernobyl, the night shift crew that decided to run the ill-fated experiment that destroyed the reactor ignored numerous warnings from the control system that the power level was rising rapidly until it was too late. The Davis-Besse plant in Ohio was 3/8" of stainless steel cladding from a catastrophic coolant breach that would have vented the core into the containment and probably caused a full meltdown, all because company inspectors failed to inspect the reactor head for corrosion and falsified records.
Until we have Skynet designing, building, operating. and maintaining reactors there is no way to prevent the human element from bypassing the most superb design and construction. The issues that nuclear power advocates tend to gloss over is that even if the probability of design failure is very low, some retard can decide to switch off the cooling pumps because he doesn't understand what's going on, or fail to do maintenance on the emergency backup system, etc. And when the worst case failure is contamination of hundreds of square miles of land at a likely cost of at a minimum tens of billions of dollars, this isn't acceptable.
What amazes me is that even after Chernobyl, the precise example of the worst case disaster, people continue to suggest that nuclear power is a safe form of power generation. And most of the arguments are along the lines of "well, those guys were dumb". Guess what, every reactor in operation potentially has the exact same human beings that can make the exact same kinds of mistakes.
On an engineering level, I actually like the concept of nuclear power generation. It's efficient, and non-greenhouse gas producing. Current generation designs should be very safe. But when you have for-profit companies operating them whose primary goal is monetary return, the potential for a major accident will always be present, especially in countries such as the US where corporate entities are considered sacrosanct and where the costs of a disaster will just be transferred to the taxpayer.
So while your general thesis is fine, the specifics are a bit of a problem. You see, the robot replaced not just Mr. Bucket, but more likely 10 Mr. Buckets, and you only need 1 to fix Mr. Robot. This is the problem. Assuming the market for toothpaste tubes is fixed (likely) you won't be buying 9 more robots.
There is also the general issue of people who do not have the ability to learn robot repair, or as in in the current economy, are "too old" and won't be hired regardless of their skills. Pat answers are fine for simple problems, but this isn't a simple problem.
You don't get it. The next step is Market On A Chip technology. The NASDAQ, NYSE, etc. will be condensed onto an integrated circuit in Lloyd Blankfein's office. But don't be concerned, the Market will still be FULLY FAIR AND TRANSPARENT for all...
Exactly. This is Mozilla laying down the thick smokescreen to attempt to hide the ever-later 4.x release. It's a laughable joke to talk about 4 releases this year, when 4.0 appears no closer to being out the door than it was 2 months ago. They don't have the resources of a Google, so attempting to keep up with the GOOG is just going to make them look pathetic and weak.
>Your ISP is going to scale back or cancel any rollout of faster service or they will lower everyone's speeds or they will charge everyone more money.
Hahahahahah...they do this NOW - this will just give them an actual excuse.
The fact is that a whole generation was brainwashed into the notion that government = bad, which I think ultimately dovetails with the prevailing general social philosophy of "it's all about ME." Anyone or anything that tries to put any kind of rules on me is bad because it might interfere with what I want to do. These same retarded arguments that "any rules = destruction of the industry" were pushed by the auto industry originally when speed limits were imposed, and when safety laws were passed. I remember how the industry fought air bags to the bitter end...it now is typically a selling point in automobiles, and created a whole industry for the manufacture of the devices. What destroyed the American auto industry wasn't government regulation, it was the greed and stupidity of their management (and union management, it must be said.)
Any system can impose ridiculous bad laws and destroy innovation. It can also impose good laws that foster improvements. This argument that "any laws inevitably will result in NAZIS TAKING OVER AND FINDING THE ARK OF THE COVENANT" is worse than kindergarten logic.
I also note that the referenced website bills itself "The WORLDWIDE LEADER in WEIRD". My feeling: don't think this type of input is really more relevant to public policy than Al Gore's movies...
Figure out what the plugin is and stop using it. Fixed.
This is why a lot of app developers hate plugins, etc. because their product gets blamed for some cute "dancing reindeer" add-on that leaks memory and now their product "totally sucks!"
If you think Chrome will solve your problem, you will be sad. The sandboxing is to prevent a plug crash from taking down the whole browser, but it's perfectly fine for it to consume memory. And Chrome, particularly the latest dev build, is a resource monster already. As more plugins accumulate for Chrome, all of these complaints will migrate to Chrome...circle of life, I suppose.
This is old news in pre-paid. On my VM phone, you have to pay 10 cents to use Gmail if you're stupid enough to do that. Navigation is pay per day, etc.
Well credit them for referencing a blog that actually has some timely information in it. It's gotten to the point that I see articles in /. a couple of days after I see them in the Huffington Post...this place seems to be increasingly irrelevant the past year or so, sad to say.
I think what he meant to say about the earlier statement was that Microsoft turned 360 degrees and walked away from it.
Best comment in the thread. They won't be stupid enough to actually offer a rate based solely on the user agent. In fact, you could use the thesis that they market a rate closer to the actual likely rate you will get to Firefox and Chrome users because they're assumed to be more clever, or at least more likely to be annoyed at obvious marketing ;-)
Your bullet point 4 is precisely the strategy. All of these other considerations are, as is typical with engineers, minutae that misses the point. It's no accident that these two announcements
happened together. It isn't that Apple, with $40+ billion in cash, can't afford to support Java on the Mac. This is a strategic decisions aimed, I think, primarily at Google, to keep the Java
ecosystem from being able to easily leverage the Apple installed base.
What I also find interesting, and hasn't been mentioned, is that Jobs and Ellison are famously buddies...I can't believe that they haven't discussed this move. My guess would be that Oracle, apart
from bludgeoning people, which is its favorite business model, hasn't the slightest interest in Java the language. They are a database and ERP software company, and also famously proprietary.
If Oracle can't make somebody pay them 18% annual maintenance on it, they don't have any interest in making it.
It makes me sad, but it's clear that Apple will abandon the general "computing platform" model and is moving to a "content delivery" model, where you can read "advertising" for "content". Apple
wants to build stylish devices that can deliver content that Apple can then get a cut of the revenue stream for. I think they are probably spot on here, too, most people are baffled by computers
and since they *aren't* locked down they are riddled with viruses, etc. Apple can also see how much money is being made with pure gaming consoles, which are also "locked down" platforms.
I think at some point, Apple will sell only sell IOS devices...these may have a laptop form factor, but they will essentially be iPhone with a keyboard and large screen.
I would guess that 10.8 will also be where Apple announces that OS X will become a "deprecated technology"...
I don't see the problem here. As with IBM, and then Microsoft, once Apple gets too arrogant and thinks it has everything its own way, people will be ready for a change, and some new company or technology will yank the rug out from under them. Don't like what Apple is doing? Buy something else.
...to ragequit again.
>but it's an entirely different audience
A bigger audience. This is Stephenson's day job.
I loved the guy's early work, which was snarky and fresh (if somewhat weak on actual concluding), but the 'historical fiction' genre bores me. Also, the "more is more" aesthetic he has pursued the last ~10 years doesn't
really work for me, I don't have the time to absorb the sheer volume of his awesomeness that Stephenson insists you ingest along with the novel....
It's still here?