You're forgetting market pressure. Predict too high - nobody buys the insurance because it is too expensive and your competition is cheaper. If insurance were a monopoly you would be correct, however.
And you seem to have missed the point this gentleman in the article was trying to make. The rainfall in Boulder is a good example, not a bad one. These people mine data for a living. If they're seeing catastrophic weather events trending upwards, that means something. He even said the old traditional averages around 05 have broken down.
That's vitally, fantastically important information.
Most Prostestant churches view the Apocrapha as having some value as a secondary source, but do not consider it to be equal to the Bible. The "Book of Mormon", on the other hand, is considered heresy.
Unless you're a Mormon.
That's the problem with faith. Let's assume I suddenly wanted to be a Christian. I suddenly have a heart full of faith.
Which one do I choose?
Faith is belief without proof. And all religions have no proof. So how do you choose?
Same problem you describe with the bible. These books are in, these ones are out. These guys add this part in and these guys leave it out. Everyone thinks differently and everyone thinks they're correct. That's the "bug" with faith. No proof means you can reach any conclusion you wish, since no proof is required.
'All these years later, we're still feeling the loss of jobs, the economic downturn, and the huge tax increases.'
These are all problems that you would expect any time any sort of industry leaves town. This is nothing specific to nuclear power.
As a side note, it's worth noting that people - when self interest is at stake - will actually miss something that by design makes chemicals that are deadly for thousands of years on end. I would actually call that a problem with our species. We're willing to create eons of poison just for a little immediate benefit. Very short sighted. Especially when "move and get another job" is an option.
I agree 100%. I actually moved to a better town to get my kids into a better school. The local school from my former home town had a crackhead blow his brains out on the playground. The kids found him the next day inside a playground feature. Allison can eat a bag of dicks.
And hey! If you really want to have a better school experience for everyone - take 5% of the defense budget and put it into schools. It would probably be 100 times the money they're used to having.
Garbage in, garbage out. So forgive me if I don't feel like playing. I'd like my kids to wind up better than the baggy pants wearing drug addled dipshits from my previous home town.
And good luck to you. I hope you get your children into the best place they can be.
I did some work for a customer once. They were using Windows CE to make an IV pump. Even though it says right on the label that Windows CE is not mission critical - do not use in medical devices. Terrified yet?
It had two CPU boards. One was ARM/CE for the interface, which communicated to the other board that did the actual work through a serial cable.
My job? Plan for when (not IF!) CE crashes. Write assembly code in the bootloader. If during boot it sees serial traffic down the daughterboard cable, assume CE crashed and complete the currently running infusion in text mode. So that the CE crash doesn't halt the infusion and kill the patient.
No, really. I'm not making this up.
Fortunately the project died and the thing never saw the light of day. Which is a very good thing.
Stop going to the movies. I'm being serious. You have to put up with the manners of strangers, cell phones, 6 dollar popcorn, no pause button for bathroom breaks, curiously uncomfortable seating, and the godawful commercials they force you to sit through before the movie.
Seriously. Screw that. Get a DVD/Blueray player and a big screen TV. Wait for the disc and invite some friends over. And you can have a beer while the movie is on. That's a million times better than the current "sit in a gigantic uncomfortable closet with random bits of humanity" movie model.
Of course there are exceptions. If you can find an actual real theater go to that by all means. Things to look for? Red velvet curtains beside the screen, a balcony, decor from the 50s, one screen only, and an usher. If you can find a movie joint like that, go there. But as for these 20 screen megaplexes? Avoid those like the plague. You shouldn't be surprised that they treat you like crap there. Because they are treating the movie experience in general like crap, so you shouldn't expect anything different for yourself.
They did the same bit to get people to move from XP to 7. And everyone lost their minds then, too. Why would anyone expect things to be different this time?
We should all know by now that this is part of Microsoft's business plan. Get you to keep buying the same product over and over.
Think you own your house? You don't. You are renting. If you don't believe me stop paying your property tax. They can call it a tax all they want, but it's rent.
As for your other possessions, you are subject to forfeiture at any time for pretty much any reason they can dream up. Have a pile of cash? You don't own that either. Anyone carrying a lot of cash is suspicious and the money will be subject to forfeiture as well.
Eminent domain, bankruptcy court...the list goes on and on.
Some people look at things quarter-by-quarter. These types will NEVER see the benefits of any long term projects.
I worked at a company that had a compile process that would take a half an hour to complete. We were running on ancient computers.
So, I made a spreadsheet. I showed the cost of a new computer. And through a study on my home computer, determined that it would cut compile times in half since my home computer wasn't bunk. Then used my salary as an average engineering rate for time. Showed that you compiled 4 times a day (typical) you would save X dollars per week, and the computers would pay for themselves in however many days. Then all the engineering time saved would be pure profit. Multiply that across an engineering team of a few dozen people and it would be like getting a new employee for free, in terms of hours saved.
It was a great idea.
It was completely ignored.
It is painful to work for people with such a total lack of vision. Not only was it painful to work on these slow (but hey! they're already paid for!) computers, but it was painful knowing that a good idea wasn't worth having there. And that not a single bean counter could see the logic in my proposal.
My point is, companies often times see things by quarters. Expense, money in, bottom line. Anything - even something simple and efficient - falls outside those parameters. You might as well be yodeling in Swahili.
'Many continue to claim the Always-On function in SimCity is a DRM scheme. It’s not. People still want to argue about it. We can’t be any clearer – it’s not. Period.... Some people think that free-to-play games and micro-transactions are a pox on gaming. Tens of millions more are playing and loving those games."
Translation: It's not DRM, because we have a number of customers that don't hate it enough to leave!
No, DRM is DRM. It doesn't matter if some people can put up with it or not. It is what it is, popularity contests notwithstanding.
You can't open the paper without some story of a crooked cop, on the take, murdering off the clock, raping a suspect, running over kids because they wanted to drive fast without lights on.
You're missing the point. This happens everywhere, but only in a free society do you have the ability to open a newspaper and read about the ones that get caught. Oppressive regimes like North Korea do not report their failures.
We take it as a matter of faith that the unicorn is pink. And since you can't see him, you cannot prove me wrong.
This is why nobody wants to debate this fellow. People who argue from a faith-based viewpoint have different definitions of logical debate. A scientist trying to debate one of the faithful would be very much like showing up for a game of golf armed with a cricket bat. The two sets of rules are not compatible.
If the US decided right now to nuke NK the bombs would be falling within the hour. Everybody knows that. And NK surely knows that if they somehow lobbed one of their weapons at us the response would be, well...excessive.
All this over sanctions. NK would rather try to make bombs and force the world to feed its citizens than figure out agriculture.
No, really. This is a law professor explaining why you should never, EVER talk to the police. Watch this. It's almost an hour long, but worth every single second.
It's harmless, possibly even beneficial. Here are the reasons why.
1) It doesn't mean they intend to use it. A lot of patents are defensive, a sort of financial mutually-assured-destruction plan. If they say they have no intention of using it, that probably means exactly that. The patent system being as silly as it is results in these types of ploys. Sort of like the man who goes to the dentist and when the dentist grabs the drill, reaches out and lightly grabs the dentist by the balls and says "let's not hurt each other". Patent portfolios are very much like this. It doesn't mean you intent to harm anyone. It just means you can if provoked.
2) This means the Xbox can't block used games without paying a royalty to Sony if they press the matter. So at the very least your next Xbox will play used games. Which would be an unacceptable state of affairs for Sony. If they lied and blocked used games anyways, you would have the Xbox-next playing used games and the PS4 not. Which would you buy? I'm sure Sony has thought of this.
Exactly. Why go through all the trouble to make an automated control system for something that might not even work? Making any control system would almost certainly have taken longer than a week. Why not just have grad students babysit the thing? More efficient use of time.
This was an experiment. The only point was to answer the question "Is this worth pursuing?" Now that we know it's possible a control system would make sense, but certainly not before.
Oh, and this is what grad students do. They are grunts for professors. Coffee and tedium are in the job description.
No other lab has continuously operated a coal-direct chemical looping unit as long as the Ohio State lab did last September. But as doctoral student Elena Chung explained, the experiment could have continued.
“We voluntarily chose to stop the unit. We actually could have run longer, but honestly, it was a mutual decision by Dr. Fan and the students. It was a long and tiring week where we all shared shifts,” she said.
Fan agreed that the nine-day experiment was a success. “In the two years we’ve been running the sub-pilot plants, our CDCL and SCL units have achieved a combined 830 operating hours, which clearly demonstrates the reliability and operability of our design,” he said.
His entire staff of grad students manned the thing and kept feeding it coal for a week and it ran nonstop the whole time, and could have kept going. So this appears to be a solved problem.
Fire up WinUAE on a usb stick. Download some old RPG or strategy games. Bards Tale, Phantasie, Ultima, Civilization, Nuclear War...whatever. Play for 5 or 10 minutes. No need to get back to the inn or some other save spot to stop playing - just use the Save State function (F12 - miscellaneous - state files) to save your spot. Works like a charm and it's just the thing to burn a quick ten minutes.
Remember to use the End-Break key combination to emulate at maximum speed to reduce your load times and skip through intro screens. You've only got 10 minutes, make the most of them.
That's actually a really good point. I never owned a Defender cabinet but I still want one. And I'm still thinking about buying an Amiga 4000, just because of the sheer amount of geek-lust I used to direct at that machine when I was a kid. Damn but I wanted one of those. So yeah, good point.
And my "cool stuff" list is pretty lame, IMO. Nothing you can't get on ebay for a few hundred honestly.
Slashdot Mirror
AC, thank you. You've taught me something new. I never considered this.
You're forgetting market pressure. Predict too high - nobody buys the insurance because it is too expensive and your competition is cheaper. If insurance were a monopoly you would be correct, however.
And you seem to have missed the point this gentleman in the article was trying to make. The rainfall in Boulder is a good example, not a bad one. These people mine data for a living. If they're seeing catastrophic weather events trending upwards, that means something. He even said the old traditional averages around 05 have broken down.
That's vitally, fantastically important information.
Surface 2 and Surface 2 pro? That means we're still missing the Surface 2 Enterprise, Surface 2 Ultimate, and the Surface 2 Home.
Because it's Microsoft. And no product is worthwhile unless it has at least a half a dozen or so pointless variations.
Most Prostestant churches view the Apocrapha as having some value as a secondary source, but do not consider it to be equal to the Bible. The "Book of Mormon", on the other hand, is considered heresy.
Unless you're a Mormon.
That's the problem with faith. Let's assume I suddenly wanted to be a Christian. I suddenly have a heart full of faith.
Which one do I choose?
Faith is belief without proof. And all religions have no proof. So how do you choose?
Same problem you describe with the bible. These books are in, these ones are out. These guys add this part in and these guys leave it out. Everyone thinks differently and everyone thinks they're correct. That's the "bug" with faith. No proof means you can reach any conclusion you wish, since no proof is required.
You'll notice what form the complaints take:
'All these years later, we're still feeling the loss of jobs, the economic downturn, and the huge tax increases.'
These are all problems that you would expect any time any sort of industry leaves town. This is nothing specific to nuclear power.
As a side note, it's worth noting that people - when self interest is at stake - will actually miss something that by design makes chemicals that are deadly for thousands of years on end. I would actually call that a problem with our species. We're willing to create eons of poison just for a little immediate benefit. Very short sighted. Especially when "move and get another job" is an option.
I agree 100%. I actually moved to a better town to get my kids into a better school. The local school from my former home town had a crackhead blow his brains out on the playground. The kids found him the next day inside a playground feature. Allison can eat a bag of dicks.
And hey! If you really want to have a better school experience for everyone - take 5% of the defense budget and put it into schools. It would probably be 100 times the money they're used to having.
Garbage in, garbage out. So forgive me if I don't feel like playing. I'd like my kids to wind up better than the baggy pants wearing drug addled dipshits from my previous home town.
And good luck to you. I hope you get your children into the best place they can be.
I mean really, these people didn't sign up to join the priesthood. They're soldiers.
Why is having sex a problem?
I did some work for a customer once. They were using Windows CE to make an IV pump. Even though it says right on the label that Windows CE is not mission critical - do not use in medical devices. Terrified yet?
It had two CPU boards. One was ARM/CE for the interface, which communicated to the other board that did the actual work through a serial cable.
My job? Plan for when (not IF!) CE crashes. Write assembly code in the bootloader. If during boot it sees serial traffic down the daughterboard cable, assume CE crashed and complete the currently running infusion in text mode. So that the CE crash doesn't halt the infusion and kill the patient.
No, really. I'm not making this up.
Fortunately the project died and the thing never saw the light of day. Which is a very good thing.
Stop going to the movies. I'm being serious. You have to put up with the manners of strangers, cell phones, 6 dollar popcorn, no pause button for bathroom breaks, curiously uncomfortable seating, and the godawful commercials they force you to sit through before the movie.
Seriously. Screw that. Get a DVD/Blueray player and a big screen TV. Wait for the disc and invite some friends over. And you can have a beer while the movie is on. That's a million times better than the current "sit in a gigantic uncomfortable closet with random bits of humanity" movie model.
Of course there are exceptions. If you can find an actual real theater go to that by all means. Things to look for? Red velvet curtains beside the screen, a balcony, decor from the 50s, one screen only, and an usher. If you can find a movie joint like that, go there. But as for these 20 screen megaplexes? Avoid those like the plague. You shouldn't be surprised that they treat you like crap there. Because they are treating the movie experience in general like crap, so you shouldn't expect anything different for yourself.
They did the same bit to get people to move from XP to 7. And everyone lost their minds then, too. Why would anyone expect things to be different this time?
We should all know by now that this is part of Microsoft's business plan. Get you to keep buying the same product over and over.
It's true.
Think you own your house? You don't. You are renting. If you don't believe me stop paying your property tax. They can call it a tax all they want, but it's rent.
As for your other possessions, you are subject to forfeiture at any time for pretty much any reason they can dream up. Have a pile of cash? You don't own that either. Anyone carrying a lot of cash is suspicious and the money will be subject to forfeiture as well.
Eminent domain, bankruptcy court...the list goes on and on.
You don't own anything.
Some people look at things quarter-by-quarter. These types will NEVER see the benefits of any long term projects.
I worked at a company that had a compile process that would take a half an hour to complete. We were running on ancient computers.
So, I made a spreadsheet. I showed the cost of a new computer. And through a study on my home computer, determined that it would cut compile times in half since my home computer wasn't bunk. Then used my salary as an average engineering rate for time. Showed that you compiled 4 times a day (typical) you would save X dollars per week, and the computers would pay for themselves in however many days. Then all the engineering time saved would be pure profit. Multiply that across an engineering team of a few dozen people and it would be like getting a new employee for free, in terms of hours saved.
It was a great idea.
It was completely ignored.
It is painful to work for people with such a total lack of vision. Not only was it painful to work on these slow (but hey! they're already paid for!) computers, but it was painful knowing that a good idea wasn't worth having there. And that not a single bean counter could see the logic in my proposal.
My point is, companies often times see things by quarters. Expense, money in, bottom line. Anything - even something simple and efficient - falls outside those parameters. You might as well be yodeling in Swahili.
Hah! Show me a place without crooked cops. I'll wait here. But I won't be holding my breath.
'Many continue to claim the Always-On function in SimCity is a DRM scheme. It’s not. People still want to argue about it. We can’t be any clearer – it’s not. Period. ... Some people think that free-to-play games and micro-transactions are a pox on gaming. Tens of millions more are playing and loving those games."
Translation: It's not DRM, because we have a number of customers that don't hate it enough to leave!
No, DRM is DRM. It doesn't matter if some people can put up with it or not. It is what it is, popularity contests notwithstanding.
You can't open the paper without some story of a crooked cop, on the take, murdering off the clock, raping a suspect, running over kids because they wanted to drive fast without lights on.
You're missing the point. This happens everywhere, but only in a free society do you have the ability to open a newspaper and read about the ones that get caught. Oppressive regimes like North Korea do not report their failures.
A... robot. May not... InjureA human BEING or... through inaction, ALLOW a... human being to.. ComeToHarm. Mister.
We take it as a matter of faith that the unicorn is pink. And since you can't see him, you cannot prove me wrong.
This is why nobody wants to debate this fellow. People who argue from a faith-based viewpoint have different definitions of logical debate. A scientist trying to debate one of the faithful would be very much like showing up for a game of golf armed with a cricket bat. The two sets of rules are not compatible.
A combination of white noise from a fan and earplugs to dim out the high frequencies works for me.
Oh, and be sure to find a high quality fan. Cheap ones will have a rhythmic noise or squeak or wobble every time, which ruins the effect.
If the US decided right now to nuke NK the bombs would be falling within the hour. Everybody knows that. And NK surely knows that if they somehow lobbed one of their weapons at us the response would be, well...excessive.
All this over sanctions. NK would rather try to make bombs and force the world to feed its citizens than figure out agriculture.
Crazy. North Korea is fascinating.
No, really. This is a law professor explaining why you should never, EVER talk to the police. Watch this. It's almost an hour long, but worth every single second.
Don't Talk to Police
It's harmless, possibly even beneficial. Here are the reasons why.
1) It doesn't mean they intend to use it. A lot of patents are defensive, a sort of financial mutually-assured-destruction plan. If they say they have no intention of using it, that probably means exactly that. The patent system being as silly as it is results in these types of ploys. Sort of like the man who goes to the dentist and when the dentist grabs the drill, reaches out and lightly grabs the dentist by the balls and says "let's not hurt each other". Patent portfolios are very much like this. It doesn't mean you intent to harm anyone. It just means you can if provoked.
2) This means the Xbox can't block used games without paying a royalty to Sony if they press the matter. So at the very least your next Xbox will play used games. Which would be an unacceptable state of affairs for Sony. If they lied and blocked used games anyways, you would have the Xbox-next playing used games and the PS4 not. Which would you buy? I'm sure Sony has thought of this.
Exactly. Why go through all the trouble to make an automated control system for something that might not even work? Making any control system would almost certainly have taken longer than a week. Why not just have grad students babysit the thing? More efficient use of time.
This was an experiment. The only point was to answer the question "Is this worth pursuing?" Now that we know it's possible a control system would make sense, but certainly not before.
Oh, and this is what grad students do. They are grunts for professors. Coffee and tedium are in the job description.
From TFA:
No other lab has continuously operated a coal-direct chemical looping unit as long as the Ohio State lab did last September. But as doctoral student Elena Chung explained, the experiment could have continued.
“We voluntarily chose to stop the unit. We actually could have run longer, but honestly, it was a mutual decision by Dr. Fan and the students. It was a long and tiring week where we all shared shifts,” she said.
Fan agreed that the nine-day experiment was a success. “In the two years we’ve been running the sub-pilot plants, our CDCL and SCL units have achieved a combined 830 operating hours, which clearly demonstrates the reliability and operability of our design,” he said.
His entire staff of grad students manned the thing and kept feeding it coal for a week and it ran nonstop the whole time, and could have kept going. So this appears to be a solved problem.
No, really.
Fire up WinUAE on a usb stick. Download some old RPG or strategy games. Bards Tale, Phantasie, Ultima, Civilization, Nuclear War...whatever. Play for 5 or 10 minutes. No need to get back to the inn or some other save spot to stop playing - just use the Save State function (F12 - miscellaneous - state files) to save your spot. Works like a charm and it's just the thing to burn a quick ten minutes.
Remember to use the End-Break key combination to emulate at maximum speed to reduce your load times and skip through intro screens. You've only got 10 minutes, make the most of them.
That's actually a really good point. I never owned a Defender cabinet but I still want one. And I'm still thinking about buying an Amiga 4000, just because of the sheer amount of geek-lust I used to direct at that machine when I was a kid. Damn but I wanted one of those. So yeah, good point.
And my "cool stuff" list is pretty lame, IMO. Nothing you can't get on ebay for a few hundred honestly.