You won't really know until you show some. Once again you've brought up coal - please do not parrot, please tailor your arguments to the discussion.
Please read the discussion. I only bring up coal because it's the only other feasible option to use when all the (economically viable) renewable sites have been used up.
Well, that or orbital solar collectors, but after playing SimCity 2000, I doubt anyone will go for those.
Funny, then, how what the scrubber lets through produces a visible black plume above my local coal-fired generating station. Yet again, you set up a strawman. Even if scrubbers remove the solid particles, and even if the vast majority of them never make it up the flue, and even if the ones that do settle within a small radius of the power plant -- that's still more free radioactivity in the environment (and on the floor of the coal plant) than would be released over the lifetime of a well-managed nuclear plant. I provided a source; the burden of proof is on you to provide a source that debunks mine.
Also, it's clearly very civil of you to label anyone who disagrees with you a troll. You complain about this discussion being off-topic, yet you perpetuate it. I am merely correcting the misconceptions of others who brought nuclear power up in the first place. Furthermore, in a larger sense, energy discussions are on topic for an article discussing a new potential energy source.
Please learn to have a reasonable, civil discussion.
I was under the impression that this was a civil discussion.
Anyway, senseless foaming-from-the-mouth opposition by people like you has raised the price of constructing new nuclear facilities, granted. But the ongoing costs are still in the 2.0-2.5 cent-per-kilowatt-hour range.
Sure, I'll concede that it's cheaper to get wind online right now. But there are only so many spots with strong, consistent wind -- none at all in some regions. When we're talking about satisfying NEW demand, all the good wind sites will get taken up, and then the setup cost for wind will rise, and its cost-per-kwh will as well (since any new wind turbines will have to be set up in subpar areas). This is how it ought to work, but once that's happened, we're back at the old nuclear-or-coal choice, and I'd rather us go nuclear than coal.
Subsidizing nuclear power now is debatable, but that subsidy doesn't change the long-term benefit of the technology. You're setting up a strawman, and missing the point with your silly renewables-will-always-be-enough-how-dare-you-ques tion-us blathering. No "proof" will ever be good enough for the likes of you.
Ah, yes. Industrial accidents are a given, unfortunately. Granted, we have fewer of them with renewables (though they can happpen -- dams can burst, etc.). That's part of the reason we should use renewables where we can -- I'm just not going to pretend we can use them for everything all the time.
As I recall, the problem with Chernobyl was that it had a very high positive void coefficient and a completely manual control system - as the coolant starts to boil off, the speed of the reaction increases, resulting in a positive feedback loop where the reactor power keeps increasing. Reactors these days have negative void coefficients --- in PWRs at least, the coolant is the moderator, so the less coolant you have, the slower the reaction goes (since the neutrons aren't being slowed down by the moderator). CANDU reactors have positive void coefficients too, but the number is much lower. I believe all other Russian RBMK reactors were modified to reduce their void coefficients as well.
In additional, I believe Chernobyl had a slow control rod insertion mechanism, and that the reactor vessel buckled when it shouldn't have.
As for France -- I did some more research, and yes, they've had some minor accidents. No meltdowns or major contamination incidents though, so their accidents have been on the same scale as those in other industries: generator fires, personnel injury, etc.
Yes, using wind, hydroelectric and solar power should be used where appropriate. But they're all variable, especially solar and wind power. Wind power is great, but limited (and some people perceive it as an eyesore.) Solar power requires very large areas of land to work -- it's a good supplement to make use of otherwise-wasted areas like roofs and wastelands, but in many areas, especially at higher latitudes, it's useless.
Solar sails only work heading outbound, away from the sun. Granted, that's not a problem for some applications, but they're not nearly as versatile as a nuclear rocket.
And how much CO2 do we emit when we mine coal? How much do we damage the environment when we remove whole friggin mountaintops to mine the stuff?
Furthermore, there's no fundamental reason that we can't use biodiesel- or electric-powered vehicles to mine uranium. Also, see my other comment for a debunking of the we-only-have-60-years-of-uranium fallacy. It's not true. Please stop repeating it.
You are misinformed, sir. Fusion, if and when it eventually works, can be run using isotypes of hydrogen from seawater. I don't think we're going to be running out of that any time soon.
As for fusion fuel -- it's an oft-repeated fallacy that we only have a tiny bit of that stuff. That view is terribly wrong. See this article. The gist of it is that nuclear fuel is limited only under these flawed assumptions:
The only nuclear fuel mined will be the deposits that have so far been explored, and that are economical to extract at today's prices. Today's prices are ridiculously low, and at higher uranium prices (still much lower per watt than coal), far more uranium will be economical to extract, and it'll be more economical to explore for more. (There's basically been no uranium exploration in the past 30 years due to the insanely low price of uranium.)
We're not going to use breeder reactors to recycle waste. Not using a breeder reactor on nuclear fuel is like buying a box of breakfast cereal, having one bowl of it and throwing the rest away. We can convert normally useless U-238 into fissile plutonium-239. 99.284% of uranium is U-238, which means that using a breeder reactor, we'll increase our fuel supply by about a hundred times.
We discount thorium, which is more common than uranium and is also fissile.
Please, stop repeating the fallacy that we don't have the fuel for nuclear power. We have plenty.
Nuclear power production produces a lot less waste than coal mining alone does, and that's not even counting the radioactive dust that coal power plants spew into the air.
The Russians cut stupid corners in nuclear power. Not only did they use a graphite-moderated reactor at Chernobyl, but according to your linked article, they didn't glassify (or recycle) their nuclear waste. Furthermore, I doubt those rods have a high enough concentration of plutonium to actually explode. The article was a little light on the technical details.
Also, waste is not "just so dangerous." By the very definition of half-life, the most intense radioactive waste is the stuff that breaks down the fastest. That's why we keep it in cooling ponds for a few years before doing something else with it. After the high-radioactive components have decayed, what's left has a very long half-life, which means that it has a low level of radioactivity.
Besides, if at that level of radioactivty, you feel the need to manage waste for 10,000 years, how about managing our copper and gold mine tailings, which are killing our rivers? Or how about managing our toxic chemical waste, repairing underground gasoline tanks, cleaning up rivers that are so toxic that we can't eat fish out of them, and so on? What makes low-level nuclear waste more important than these more pressing problems?
And as for accidents -- all industries have accidents. A chemical plant caught fire a few years ago and poisoned hundreds. But look at it this way: we only have two choices for energy for the next hundred years: coal or nuclear. Even if we do have a nuclear accident or two (which is highly unlikely, given the paranoia surrounding regulation of nuclear facilities), nuclear power would hurt and kill fewer people than coal will.
Also, France uses nuclear power for 90% of its electrical needs. When's the last time you heard of a problem at a French power plant?
Not every one of us nuclear power advocate is a troll, first of all.
Second, a nuclear powered calculator is perfectly plausible. First, power the grid with nuclear power. Then charge a calculator's batteries from the grid; the energy is still coming from nuclear power.
There's a faction of society that's so adamantly anti-nuclear that it ignores all technological developments, and insists that nuclear power is just as reckless as it was back when people first started using it. It's just not true. Look at France, where 90% of the electricity comes from nuclear power. Do you see them having many problems?
Have you considered that part of the high initial cost of a nuclear power plant is the absolutely paranoid regulation that goes into constructing one? How about economies of scale? If we built more than one a decade, the cost would go down as up-front costs would be spread among many plants.
As for advanced designs --- existing reactor designs are perfectly safe. Yes, newer designs, like pebble bed reactors, are better, but PWRs are fine. I'd live next to one. The only really terrible nuclear accident was the famous Chernobyl case, and they used an absolutely brain-damaged design. It's like saying web servers are inherently unsafe and we should never use them because IIS has had a few buffer overflows. Don't use the dangerous designs.
FAT and FAT32 are one thing. Unix systems are another. On the latter, the only way to force ctime would be to either set the clock back and modify the inode or to directly modify the block device the filesysem is sitting on. There is no low-level system call to chagne ctime. Neither of these methods is possible without root privileges, and I assumed the environment was a shared unix machine at a university (as the students were talking about "touch"). Presumably, students wouldn't have root access on that machine.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Please post sources. As far as I know, there has not been one scrap of evidence showing that past disk writes can be examined through microscopy, or any other kind of direct physical examination.
I used to use XFS, but the data corruption gotto me. Is there any way to alter its behavior? I'd rather a file be removed entirely, or moved to/lost+found, or whatever, then zeroed out. Zeroing files produces very, very strange behavior.
Also, hard crashes are unavoidable sometimes. Even if one has constant AC power, what about kernel crashes, accidentally hitting the power button, etc.?
Starcraft was a pretty good game, but nothing beats the old Total Annihilation for sophistication and depth of gameplay. It just seems that people would rather micromanage zerglings than deal with TA, with its unlimited group sizes, multitude of units, creative resource model, and so on.
The thing I like most about TA is the resource model. Unlike in nearly every other RTS on earth, resources are never depleted. I found it absurd that one could deplete an entire forest or mineral deposit in the course of one battle. In TA, one constructs resource-producing buildings which produce a steady stream of resources; thus it's all about the rate of resource production, not the quantity. It gets more interesting than that, though, as one can store resources, salvage wrecks for resources, and so on. It's complex and interesting.
Also, unlike in Starcraft, there's no build order. It's not a game of memorizing openings so that rushes can be executed, but instead of figuring out tactics and strategy as you go along.
Funny, that's how it always is. Somebody comes up with a new idea, and it's successful. Sooner or later, the price is right, the person is sold out, and the idea becomes monetized and censorsed. It seems to be the natural order of things.
Your idea would make most of the spectrum useless. Whoever has the biggest transmitted would win; there would be no reliable way for aircraft to contact the ground, no way to perform radio astronomy, no way to set up a cell phone circuit without carrying an antenna and a small diesel generator with you... what are you smoking?
The hypocracy of "reverse racism" is not excused by the power differential. Any thinking person wants to live in a society that is eventually race- and gender-blind, and by continuing to officially sanction these differences, we perpetuate the problem.
I categorically deny all forms of responsibility but personal responsibility. Nobody who conquered the Indian nations is alive today, and we, as a culture, do not believe the son inherits the guilt of the father. Indian reservations ought to simply be considered a funny kind of municipality, with no more rights than any town or city.
Maturity is a social construct, not a biological one; Joan of Arc was 17 when she led the French to victory against the English. The longer we treat our adolescents as children, the longer they will act like children. It is only when they make decisions for themselves that they will mature into adults. You cannot keep people "innocent" and ignorant forever.
I live in New York, and we've seen more and more pressure to push back the age at which certain activities are allowed. For example, now, one cannot drive alone until age 18! That's insane. A person requires a certain amount of time to learn, regardless of whether that time starts at age 15 or 18.
All this movement to push back adulthood is doing is appealing to an indefensible emotional desire of parents to not see their breed mature. Parents are predisposed to see their children as being more fragile and less capable than they really are, and this is why it's important for society to step in and say "enough is enough, this man is old enough to make his own decisions."
The process of maturing only really begins when someone is free to decide his own actions and learn the consequences on his own.
Fair enough. But why should development with C++ take longer than with PHP, assuming that you're using a decent framework and a solid templating engine with both? Compile time ought to be negligible. You can develop faster with PHP only if you corners and don't adhere to good coding practices.
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Please read the discussion. I only bring up coal because it's the only other feasible option to use when all the (economically viable) renewable sites have been used up.
Well, that or orbital solar collectors, but after playing SimCity 2000, I doubt anyone will go for those.
Funny, then, how what the scrubber lets through produces a visible black plume above my local coal-fired generating station. Yet again, you set up a strawman. Even if scrubbers remove the solid particles, and even if the vast majority of them never make it up the flue, and even if the ones that do settle within a small radius of the power plant -- that's still more free radioactivity in the environment (and on the floor of the coal plant) than would be released over the lifetime of a well-managed nuclear plant. I provided a source; the burden of proof is on you to provide a source that debunks mine.
Also, it's clearly very civil of you to label anyone who disagrees with you a troll. You complain about this discussion being off-topic, yet you perpetuate it. I am merely correcting the misconceptions of others who brought nuclear power up in the first place. Furthermore, in a larger sense, energy discussions are on topic for an article discussing a new potential energy source.
Please learn to have a reasonable, civil discussion.
Sorry to rub salt in
s tion-us blathering. No "proof" will ever be good enough for the likes of you.
I was under the impression that this was a civil discussion.
Anyway, senseless foaming-from-the-mouth opposition by people like you has raised the price of constructing new nuclear facilities, granted. But the ongoing costs are still in the 2.0-2.5 cent-per-kilowatt-hour range.
Sure, I'll concede that it's cheaper to get wind online right now. But there are only so many spots with strong, consistent wind -- none at all in some regions. When we're talking about satisfying NEW demand, all the good wind sites will get taken up, and then the setup cost for wind will rise, and its cost-per-kwh will as well (since any new wind turbines will have to be set up in subpar areas). This is how it ought to work, but once that's happened, we're back at the old nuclear-or-coal choice, and I'd rather us go nuclear than coal.
Subsidizing nuclear power now is debatable, but that subsidy doesn't change the long-term benefit of the technology. You're setting up a strawman, and missing the point with your silly renewables-will-always-be-enough-how-dare-you-que
Ah, yes. Industrial accidents are a given, unfortunately. Granted, we have fewer of them with renewables (though they can happpen -- dams can burst, etc.). That's part of the reason we should use renewables where we can -- I'm just not going to pretend we can use them for everything all the time.
As I recall, the problem with Chernobyl was that it had a very high positive void coefficient and a completely manual control system - as the coolant starts to boil off, the speed of the reaction increases, resulting in a positive feedback loop where the reactor power keeps increasing. Reactors these days have negative void coefficients --- in PWRs at least, the coolant is the moderator, so the less coolant you have, the slower the reaction goes (since the neutrons aren't being slowed down by the moderator). CANDU reactors have positive void coefficients too, but the number is much lower. I believe all other Russian RBMK reactors were modified to reduce their void coefficients as well.
In additional, I believe Chernobyl had a slow control rod insertion mechanism, and that the reactor vessel buckled when it shouldn't have.
As for France -- I did some more research, and yes, they've had some minor accidents. No meltdowns or major contamination incidents though, so their accidents have been on the same scale as those in other industries: generator fires, personnel injury, etc.
Yes, using wind, hydroelectric and solar power should be used where appropriate. But they're all variable, especially solar and wind power. Wind power is great, but limited (and some people perceive it as an eyesore.) Solar power requires very large areas of land to work -- it's a good supplement to make use of otherwise-wasted areas like roofs and wastelands, but in many areas, especially at higher latitudes, it's useless.
Solar sails only work heading outbound, away from the sun. Granted, that's not a problem for some applications, but they're not nearly as versatile as a nuclear rocket.
And how much CO2 do we emit when we mine coal? How much do we damage the environment when we remove whole friggin mountaintops to mine the stuff?
Furthermore, there's no fundamental reason that we can't use biodiesel- or electric-powered vehicles to mine uranium. Also, see my other comment for a debunking of the we-only-have-60-years-of-uranium fallacy. It's not true. Please stop repeating it.
As for fusion fuel -- it's an oft-repeated fallacy that we only have a tiny bit of that stuff. That view is terribly wrong. See this article. The gist of it is that nuclear fuel is limited only under these flawed assumptions:
Please, stop repeating the fallacy that we don't have the fuel for nuclear power. We have plenty.
Nuclear power production produces a lot less waste than coal mining alone does, and that's not even counting the radioactive dust that coal power plants spew into the air.
The Russians cut stupid corners in nuclear power. Not only did they use a graphite-moderated reactor at Chernobyl, but according to your linked article, they didn't glassify (or recycle) their nuclear waste. Furthermore, I doubt those rods have a high enough concentration of plutonium to actually explode. The article was a little light on the technical details.
Also, waste is not "just so dangerous." By the very definition of half-life, the most intense radioactive waste is the stuff that breaks down the fastest. That's why we keep it in cooling ponds for a few years before doing something else with it. After the high-radioactive components have decayed, what's left has a very long half-life, which means that it has a low level of radioactivity.
Besides, if at that level of radioactivty, you feel the need to manage waste for 10,000 years, how about managing our copper and gold mine tailings, which are killing our rivers? Or how about managing our toxic chemical waste, repairing underground gasoline tanks, cleaning up rivers that are so toxic that we can't eat fish out of them, and so on? What makes low-level nuclear waste more important than these more pressing problems?
And as for accidents -- all industries have accidents. A chemical plant caught fire a few years ago and poisoned hundreds. But look at it this way: we only have two choices for energy for the next hundred years: coal or nuclear. Even if we do have a nuclear accident or two (which is highly unlikely, given the paranoia surrounding regulation of nuclear facilities), nuclear power would hurt and kill fewer people than coal will.
Also, France uses nuclear power for 90% of its electrical needs. When's the last time you heard of a problem at a French power plant?
Not every one of us nuclear power advocate is a troll, first of all.
Second, a nuclear powered calculator is perfectly plausible. First, power the grid with nuclear power. Then charge a calculator's batteries from the grid; the energy is still coming from nuclear power.
There's a faction of society that's so adamantly anti-nuclear that it ignores all technological developments, and insists that nuclear power is just as reckless as it was back when people first started using it. It's just not true. Look at France, where 90% of the electricity comes from nuclear power. Do you see them having many problems?
Have you considered that part of the high initial cost of a nuclear power plant is the absolutely paranoid regulation that goes into constructing one? How about economies of scale? If we built more than one a decade, the cost would go down as up-front costs would be spread among many plants.
As for advanced designs --- existing reactor designs are perfectly safe. Yes, newer designs, like pebble bed reactors, are better, but PWRs are fine. I'd live next to one. The only really terrible nuclear accident was the famous Chernobyl case, and they used an absolutely brain-damaged design. It's like saying web servers are inherently unsafe and we should never use them because IIS has had a few buffer overflows. Don't use the dangerous designs.
Of course -- IF he has root. But a student shouldn't have root access to a department machine.
Interesting. Is there a way to identify which files would be overwritten?
FAT and FAT32 are one thing. Unix systems are another. On the latter, the only way to force ctime would be to either set the clock back and modify the inode or to directly modify the block device the filesysem is sitting on. There is no low-level system call to chagne ctime. Neither of these methods is possible without root privileges, and I assumed the environment was a shared unix machine at a university (as the students were talking about "touch"). Presumably, students wouldn't have root access on that machine.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Please post sources. As far as I know, there has not been one scrap of evidence showing that past disk writes can be examined through microscopy, or any other kind of direct physical examination.
Or the instructors could simply have looked at the ctime; there's no way to set the ctime of a file back.
Simple grading policy: the time an assignment was turned in is max(ctime, atime).
I used to use XFS, but the data corruption gotto me. Is there any way to alter its behavior? I'd rather a file be removed entirely, or moved to /lost+found, or whatever, then zeroed out. Zeroing files produces very, very strange behavior.
Also, hard crashes are unavoidable sometimes. Even if one has constant AC power, what about kernel crashes, accidentally hitting the power button, etc.?
Starcraft was a pretty good game, but nothing beats the old Total Annihilation for sophistication and depth of gameplay. It just seems that people would rather micromanage zerglings than deal with TA, with its unlimited group sizes, multitude of units, creative resource model, and so on.
The thing I like most about TA is the resource model. Unlike in nearly every other RTS on earth, resources are never depleted. I found it absurd that one could deplete an entire forest or mineral deposit in the course of one battle. In TA, one constructs resource-producing buildings which produce a steady stream of resources; thus it's all about the rate of resource production, not the quantity. It gets more interesting than that, though, as one can store resources, salvage wrecks for resources, and so on. It's complex and interesting.
Also, unlike in Starcraft, there's no build order. It's not a game of memorizing openings so that rushes can be executed, but instead of figuring out tactics and strategy as you go along.
Funny, that's how it always is. Somebody comes up with a new idea, and it's successful. Sooner or later, the price is right, the person is sold out, and the idea becomes monetized and censorsed. It seems to be the natural order of things.
Your idea would make most of the spectrum useless. Whoever has the biggest transmitted would win; there would be no reliable way for aircraft to contact the ground, no way to perform radio astronomy, no way to set up a cell phone circuit without carrying an antenna and a small diesel generator with you... what are you smoking?
The hypocracy of "reverse racism" is not excused by the power differential. Any thinking person wants to live in a society that is eventually race- and gender-blind, and by continuing to officially sanction these differences, we perpetuate the problem.
I categorically deny all forms of responsibility but personal responsibility. Nobody who conquered the Indian nations is alive today, and we, as a culture, do not believe the son inherits the guilt of the father. Indian reservations ought to simply be considered a funny kind of municipality, with no more rights than any town or city.
Maturity is a social construct, not a biological one; Joan of Arc was 17 when she led the French to victory against the English. The longer we treat our adolescents as children, the longer they will act like children. It is only when they make decisions for themselves that they will mature into adults. You cannot keep people "innocent" and ignorant forever.
I live in New York, and we've seen more and more pressure to push back the age at which certain activities are allowed. For example, now, one cannot drive alone until age 18! That's insane. A person requires a certain amount of time to learn, regardless of whether that time starts at age 15 or 18.
All this movement to push back adulthood is doing is appealing to an indefensible emotional desire of parents to not see their breed mature. Parents are predisposed to see their children as being more fragile and less capable than they really are, and this is why it's important for society to step in and say "enough is enough, this man is old enough to make his own decisions."
The process of maturing only really begins when someone is free to decide his own actions and learn the consequences on his own.
As somebody who's writing a program that might be running under fastcgi, I'm genuinely curious as to why fastcgi sucks and scgi is better.
Fair enough. But why should development with C++ take longer than with PHP, assuming that you're using a decent framework and a solid templating engine with both? Compile time ought to be negligible. You can develop faster with PHP only if you corners and don't adhere to good coding practices.