Have redundant fiber. Have auxiliary wireless setups.
You'll have to legally and explicitly require all communications companies to provide such redundancies. If it's not a legal requirement, most providers will just choose not to do it: "Why should I spend money on redundancy when I can just cut prices to attract more customers, or use it to pay bonuses and dividends to make my shareholders and employees happy?"
It's best to put these on a tower anyway, so that they're up above all the turbulence created by stuff on the ground. So the blades are going to be a long way from your roof whether they're 2m or 5m long (as long as you care about the machine actually generating some power, that is).
I don't think the EPA has any say in whether most people want to put a windmill on their property or not. I know people that have looked into putting one or more windmills on their farm (it turned out they don't have enough wind to make it worthwhile), and they didn't run into any EPA restrictions.
Neighborhood associations and local (city,county) regulations might be a different story, of course.
Anyone who is convicted of doing so could face up to 10 years in prison, could be fined up to $10,000 or both. Anyone who profits financially by such experimentation, the bill says, would face a civil fine of $1 million or twice the amount of the gross gain realized -- whichever is more.
Why the extra civil penalty based on profit? Is it "more wrong" to do it for money instead of academic interest?
1) 1000g isn't exactly a lot of money any more. 2) The dual spec addition isn't for respec freaks. It's for people that don't like sitting around waiting on a healer or tank for a group, or that want to take their healer or tank out solo to do some dailies and not have it take all damn day to kill something. 3) Some of us aren't total losers, ya know. My GPA for the last two years of grad school is 3.7. I'm not the only person in my classes that plays WoW, either.
By combining these variables with the current ability of people in game to tag players as spamming, it would be fairly easy to turn a character into a killable target if it passes a certain spam score. Let's say three spam tags and at least 2 key words. It then becomes a game to kill the Gold sellers.
Oh dear God, that would be fun. I also want an instant teleport to the location of the guy that spams me from the noob zone while I'm trying to pay attention to my raid or battleground chat.
Once they start taking real money for Gold it becomes "property" and the things you buy become "property" as well.
Yes, and shortly after that the IRS will be wanting me to pay taxes on that epic bind-on-equip drop that will sell for 2000g in the auction house. (C'mon, they already tax barter, why wouldn't they start taxing virtual world gains if they thought they could get away with it?)
You don't know anything about the STASI then. Do you really think, recording who is called and to whom mail is sent would make the STASI green with envy, because after all, they only listened in to phone calls and opened the mail?
I'll admit up front I don't know anything at all about the Stasi.
So they listened to phone calls and opened mail--how much more wonderful would they think it was to be able to go do a full search of people's communication for key words/phrases in mere seconds or minutes? Once you figure out some new item to search for, you can almost instantly go back months (years?) and probably turn up new "troublemakers." That's some serious pre-information age police state wet dream material right there.
This. Most of the US civilian nuclear power industry is, to say the least, heavily influenced by the military nuclear power industry and the cult of personality surrounding Admiral Rickover. If nobody is in control, nobody can be held accountable when the fan hits the shit.
Er, in what way is that "nobody is accountable" attitude reminiscent of the nuclear Navy? They're obsessive when it comes to accountability. Every time I saw any fecal matter hit a rotary device, they were pretty damn rigorous about getting to the bottom of it and finding out who did what.
You're probably right: if the operator had just sat on his hands, things would have been better.
As to inadequate presentation of information, somebody pointed out in the comments on Cringely's site that the oncoming operator figured out what was going on pretty much right away. It would seem the indications available were completely adequate to identify the casualty, but the guy that happened to be on watch when it happened didn't have as much of a clue as he should have.
Commercial pilots are trained to work like a machine. I would be just as happy if they weren't there.
I wouldn't, at least not right now. Any machine^H^H^H^H^Hsoftware doing a job is going to be limited by the imagination of the spec writers and developers, and (for trainable systems) by the situations the trainers thought to put the system through.
I wonder if anybody's built any machines that would have done as well as this guy? Yeah, there's shitty pilots out there, but I'm still a big fan of having a biological "backup" available to override the machines, because (again, right now) they're still better at handling unforeseen situations.
Ah, there's a better description of the incident here, just so people don't have to take my crappy recollection at face value.:P
Re:So, the computer notices things are wrong ...
on
Three Mile Island Memories
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Don't let Cringely convince you that he actually knows anything about nuclear power plants--those guys had a whole room full of alarms, gauges, meters, etc., giving them a lot of info about the whole plant.
Shutting down the reactor could probably have been done by the operator within a couple of seconds by flipping a switch. IIRC, though, the automatic safety system shut it down at the beginning of the incident because it detected a situation that warranted it.
Simple, except the computer noticed 700 things wrong in the first few minutes of the TMI accident, causing the one audible alarm to ring continuously until it was shut off as useless.
... and the humans chose to ignore it? How is that the computers fault?
Yeah I don't quite get that bit either. And they *did* have an entire room full of monitoring equipment, not just a solitary line printer, so I'm not sure the computer's involvement is as big as Cringlely's making it out to be.
If the alarm goes off in a nuclear plant, operating procedure should say: Check briefly if the computer is acting up, and then shut the whole frickin' plant down. Why wasn't it done? Let me guess: It costs a whole bunch of money. So, the accident happened due to greed.
Well, no--the reactor was shut down automatically by the control systems at the outset of the incident. If I recall correctly, they were at near full power when some event caused a main turbine trip and then a reactor shutdown. Because of the sudden removal of steam load, and because the reactor continues to produce a lot of heat even after shutdown, the resulting temperature/pressure rise in the primary coolant system caused a relief valve to open.
This relief valve stuck open (and apparently nobody recognized this for quite some time), so eventually a steam bubble formed in the reactor vessel. As the pressure dropped, the coolant pumps began cavitating, so the operators shut them down to keep them from being damaged, and this removed the last major heat sink for the reactor. Then hot reactor still producing energy + no heat removal == meltdown.
It seems to me to have just been operators not recognizing the state of their plant, either because they weren't familiar enough with it, or because they didn't have the right information available to them. Greed probably had nothing to do with the actual incident itself, unless you count the effect on the operators of non-engineering-knowledgeable management showing up to micromanage the situation (and I haven't ever read anything that made me think that would really have mattered all that much).
U.S. Navy reactor operators, the sort who served under Jimmy Carter in the 1950s, were selected primarily for their temperament.... their Navy job--as at TMI--was to follow the manual. All knowledge was inside the book. So knowing the book was everything. Unfortunately knowing the book isn't the same as knowing the reactor. So knowing the book was everything. Unfortunately knowing the book isn't the same as knowing the reactor.
No. Just fucking no. There's a significant (and necessary) emphasis on following procedures and getting the books out for any planned change to the plant to make sure you're doing things right. But Cringely makes it sound like nuclear operators are just slightly trained mouth-breathers that only know how to look things up in the book and do what it tells them. I can't speak for the civilian training, but the Navy does NOT do things that way.
When something goes wrong, they depend on you having enough internalized knowledge about the plant, its controls, and its indicator systems to work out what's going on and (if necessary) do something about it. Once you've got stuff at least marginally under control, *then* you get the books out to check the applicable procedures to make sure you haven't forgotten something, and to figure out how to recover from whatever happened without causing any more problems.
The Navy puts a lot of effort put into making sure their operators know how and why things work the way they do. They would never have got to the 21st century with the track record they have if all they did was train people to look at the book.
There is no constitutional right to privacy. You can look and look, but there's nothing that says 'you have a right for the government to not look into your shit'...
That's probably because the U.S. Constitution was meant to enumerate the powers delegated to the federal government by the people, not to enumerate the rights held by individuals.
(Yes, I know that's now generally considered an "outdated" way to look at the constitution, individual rights, and the powers of the federal government.)
Slashdot Mirror
Have redundant fiber. Have auxiliary wireless setups.
You'll have to legally and explicitly require all communications companies to provide such redundancies. If it's not a legal requirement, most providers will just choose not to do it: "Why should I spend money on redundancy when I can just cut prices to attract more customers, or use it to pay bonuses and dividends to make my shareholders and employees happy?"
(1) It's supposed to be funny.
(2) I'm not the one making the extraordinary claim that quantum theory is utterly flawed.
(3) There's not enough days left in my life to slog through all the woo-woo sites that I'd get if I googled for claims that QM is wrong.
(4) I'm just fucking lazy, and like to poke fun at people making outrageous claims. This *is* Slashdot, after all.
Where's the revolution when you need one?
In the spirit of flammable open-source retorts: so, where is it? Post a patch or STFU.
...but the evidence is clearly stacking up that quantum theory, and with it string theory & m-theory, are pretty much all wrong and utterly flawed.
[citation needed]
It's best to put these on a tower anyway, so that they're up above all the turbulence created by stuff on the ground. So the blades are going to be a long way from your roof whether they're 2m or 5m long (as long as you care about the machine actually generating some power, that is).
I don't think the EPA has any say in whether most people want to put a windmill on their property or not. I know people that have looked into putting one or more windmills on their farm (it turned out they don't have enough wind to make it worthwhile), and they didn't run into any EPA restrictions.
Neighborhood associations and local (city,county) regulations might be a different story, of course.
If I recall correctly (health class was a long, long time ago), each lung is separated into 2 or 3 lobes. They're supposed to look like that.
From TFA:
Anyone who is convicted of doing so could face up to 10 years in prison, could be fined up to $10,000 or both. Anyone who profits financially by such experimentation, the bill says, would face a civil fine of $1 million or twice the amount of the gross gain realized -- whichever is more.
Why the extra civil penalty based on profit? Is it "more wrong" to do it for money instead of academic interest?
Why yes, quite frequently, in my bed. And yes, she's a real person, and no, I'm not paying for it.
Do I have to turn in my geek card now? ;)
1) 1000g isn't exactly a lot of money any more.
2) The dual spec addition isn't for respec freaks. It's for people that don't like sitting around waiting on a healer or tank for a group, or that want to take their healer or tank out solo to do some dailies and not have it take all damn day to kill something.
3) Some of us aren't total losers, ya know. My GPA for the last two years of grad school is 3.7. I'm not the only person in my classes that plays WoW, either.
By combining these variables with the current ability of people in game to tag players as spamming, it would be fairly easy to turn a character into a killable target if it passes a certain spam score. Let's say three spam tags and at least 2 key words. It then becomes a game to kill the Gold sellers.
Oh dear God, that would be fun. I also want an instant teleport to the location of the guy that spams me from the noob zone while I'm trying to pay attention to my raid or battleground chat.
Once they start taking real money for Gold it becomes "property" and the things you buy become "property" as well.
Yes, and shortly after that the IRS will be wanting me to pay taxes on that epic bind-on-equip drop that will sell for 2000g in the auction house. (C'mon, they already tax barter, why wouldn't they start taxing virtual world gains if they thought they could get away with it?)
I must officially be an old, curmudgeonly luddite now, since I didn't know what the Fail Whale was before today.
Or wait, since we like bashing social networky things here, does that make me cool? I can't tell.
You don't know anything about the STASI then. Do you really think, recording who is called and to whom mail is sent would make the STASI green with envy, because after all, they only listened in to phone calls and opened the mail?
I'll admit up front I don't know anything at all about the Stasi.
So they listened to phone calls and opened mail--how much more wonderful would they think it was to be able to go do a full search of people's communication for key words/phrases in mere seconds or minutes? Once you figure out some new item to search for, you can almost instantly go back months (years?) and probably turn up new "troublemakers." That's some serious pre-information age police state wet dream material right there.
Yes, please--it's the first reference to the malformed summary that doesn't make me want to hang myself.
Is there a "+1, Stop Giving Them Scary Ideas" mod?
Ah, sorry for the misunderstanding--that definitely makes sense!
This. Most of the US civilian nuclear power industry is, to say the least, heavily influenced by the military nuclear power industry and the cult of personality surrounding Admiral Rickover. If nobody is in control, nobody can be held accountable when the fan hits the shit.
Er, in what way is that "nobody is accountable" attitude reminiscent of the nuclear Navy? They're obsessive when it comes to accountability. Every time I saw any fecal matter hit a rotary device, they were pretty damn rigorous about getting to the bottom of it and finding out who did what.
You're probably right: if the operator had just sat on his hands, things would have been better.
As to inadequate presentation of information, somebody pointed out in the comments on Cringely's site that the oncoming operator figured out what was going on pretty much right away. It would seem the indications available were completely adequate to identify the casualty, but the guy that happened to be on watch when it happened didn't have as much of a clue as he should have.
Commercial pilots are trained to work like a machine. I would be just as happy if they weren't there.
I wouldn't, at least not right now. Any machine^H^H^H^H^Hsoftware doing a job is going to be limited by the imagination of the spec writers and developers, and (for trainable systems) by the situations the trainers thought to put the system through.
I wonder if anybody's built any machines that would have done as well as this guy? Yeah, there's shitty pilots out there, but I'm still a big fan of having a biological "backup" available to override the machines, because (again, right now) they're still better at handling unforeseen situations.
Ah, there's a better description of the incident here, just so people don't have to take my crappy recollection at face value. :P
Don't let Cringely convince you that he actually knows anything about nuclear power plants--those guys had a whole room full of alarms, gauges, meters, etc., giving them a lot of info about the whole plant.
Shutting down the reactor could probably have been done by the operator within a couple of seconds by flipping a switch. IIRC, though, the automatic safety system shut it down at the beginning of the incident because it detected a situation that warranted it.
Simple, except the computer noticed 700 things wrong in the first few minutes of the TMI accident, causing the one audible alarm to ring continuously until it was shut off as useless.
Yeah I don't quite get that bit either. And they *did* have an entire room full of monitoring equipment, not just a solitary line printer, so I'm not sure the computer's involvement is as big as Cringlely's making it out to be.
If the alarm goes off in a nuclear plant, operating procedure should say: Check briefly if the computer is acting up, and then shut the whole frickin' plant down. Why wasn't it done? Let me guess: It costs a whole bunch of money. So, the accident happened due to greed.
Well, no--the reactor was shut down automatically by the control systems at the outset of the incident. If I recall correctly, they were at near full power when some event caused a main turbine trip and then a reactor shutdown. Because of the sudden removal of steam load, and because the reactor continues to produce a lot of heat even after shutdown, the resulting temperature/pressure rise in the primary coolant system caused a relief valve to open.
This relief valve stuck open (and apparently nobody recognized this for quite some time), so eventually a steam bubble formed in the reactor vessel. As the pressure dropped, the coolant pumps began cavitating, so the operators shut them down to keep them from being damaged, and this removed the last major heat sink for the reactor. Then hot reactor still producing energy + no heat removal == meltdown.
It seems to me to have just been operators not recognizing the state of their plant, either because they weren't familiar enough with it, or because they didn't have the right information available to them. Greed probably had nothing to do with the actual incident itself, unless you count the effect on the operators of non-engineering-knowledgeable management showing up to micromanage the situation (and I haven't ever read anything that made me think that would really have mattered all that much).
U.S. Navy reactor operators, the sort who served under Jimmy Carter in the 1950s, were selected primarily for their temperament. ... their Navy job--as at TMI--was to follow the manual. All knowledge was inside the book. So knowing the book was everything. Unfortunately knowing the book isn't the same as knowing the reactor. So knowing the book was everything. Unfortunately knowing the book isn't the same as knowing the reactor.
No. Just fucking no. There's a significant (and necessary) emphasis on following procedures and getting the books out for any planned change to the plant to make sure you're doing things right. But Cringely makes it sound like nuclear operators are just slightly trained mouth-breathers that only know how to look things up in the book and do what it tells them. I can't speak for the civilian training, but the Navy does NOT do things that way.
When something goes wrong, they depend on you having enough internalized knowledge about the plant, its controls, and its indicator systems to work out what's going on and (if necessary) do something about it. Once you've got stuff at least marginally under control, *then* you get the books out to check the applicable procedures to make sure you haven't forgotten something, and to figure out how to recover from whatever happened without causing any more problems.
The Navy puts a lot of effort put into making sure their operators know how and why things work the way they do. They would never have got to the 21st century with the track record they have if all they did was train people to look at the book.
There is no constitutional right to privacy. You can look and look, but there's nothing that says 'you have a right for the government to not look into your shit'...
That's probably because the U.S. Constitution was meant to enumerate the powers delegated to the federal government by the people, not to enumerate the rights held by individuals.
(Yes, I know that's now generally considered an "outdated" way to look at the constitution, individual rights, and the powers of the federal government.)