First observation... Thorium reactor... No such animal... Thorium isn't a neutron source and doesn't fission.
One needs a large amount(1000's of kg) of Pu and/or 2x that amount in U-235, after 6 or 7 years you might produced enough U-233 from Th-232 to sustain the reaction.
What people are talking about is the Thorium fuel cycle, which has been researched since we started with nuclear power. The reason why we haven't used it is it's lack of relevance to nuclear weapons.
While you're technically correct in that natural Thorium doesn't fission (the abundance of fissile Th-231 is really really low), in the Thorium fuel cycle natural Thorium-232 absorbs neutrons to become Uranium-233 which is fissile. You are *way* off on those numbers. The US have apparently run a Thorium reactor back in the '60s at Oak Ridge.
Perhaps some kind and statistical person here would crunch the numbers and show the statistics of liquid metal vs water cooled reactors as far as incidents go? I'm thinking that the 1959 incident at SSFL introduced more rads than the 3 mile island incident of the 70's as an example.
Whooo there cowboy, you're comparing an experimental reactor from 1959 with a commerical one in 1970, and then to cutting-edge research reactors in 2011. In 1959, we were doing a lot of crazy stuff and we can probably assume that nuclear safety has moved forward in the last 52 years.
What install time? If the distro supplies udev rules to map eth0 to the NIC in the lowest PCI slot, they will be available to udevd running during the installation. If your installation image lacks udevd, then throw it in there. All the other distributions does that..
If by "install time" you mean the milliseconds it takes for udev to notice the device and then rename it then, sure, you have a point, but what problems do you have that requires solving that?
But then they can do just that -- fix the issue with that a device name is in no way associated with the physical device location, i.e. the motherboard connector with the lowest something (IRQ, whatever) will always be called eth0. All the required information is available via proc, they can fix this by using udev distribution-wide. Why on Earth would they want to change the naming scheme? That just doesn't make sense!
No, for two reasons: First, many people can't do that. From the looks of it, in the US at least, many people have only one or two providers to choose from. Second, many average Joes won't recognize what's wrong with their Internet -- they will only notice that some sites load very slowly, then they will blame those sites and not their ISP which is actually at fault. If you want competition to work, you need to fix this first, and good luck with that.
Isn't this what would actually happen if they implemented it right now? From what I recall, there is a legal principle called "mere conduit" in the EU that applies to ISPs since they don't inspect or throttle traffic -- if they would start doing that, they would lose their "mere conduit" status and be legally responsible for everything that they carry. I don't understand why this isn't debated?
However, some time around two years ago, the Nvidia drivers started requiring a processor with SSE. This meant throwing out my Pentium 3 which, while outdated, played XviD to my TV just fine using an Nvidia card. The answer from Nvidia was that I was using outdated hardware and there was nothing they could do about it since the old drivers didn't support newer kernels or X.org.
Proprietary drivers always means dropping support for market segments for which it's not financially viable to produce drivers anymore. If I had open source drivers, I could have ported them myself.
It can pretty much be said that any OS other than Windows, comes with the same standard tools.
Well I think that pretty much sums up where the vast majority of your experience comes from. Let's run down a quick list off the top of my head of OS's and let's see if they support these "standard tools":
Of all the operating systems you listed, only two are supported today (while the others could be in use by happy geeks, I hardly think they are in any professional use): Windows and Cisco's IOS (I don't know what you mean by "RealTime OS", any RTOS in particular?
Off the top of my head, I can think of Linux, BSD, Mac OS X and Solaris, which (excluding Windows) combined makes up almost the entire market for server operating systems.
The whole point of a text UI is it's expressivity and, once you pass the learning threshold, the speed in which you can do pretty advanced stuff. The Windows hack with camel-case command names, longer than a whole goddam command line on Unix, isn't really impressive at all; it seems totally unusable in practice. Am I supposed to write a whole novel each nice I'd like to rename all files in a directory using a regexp?
Uhm, no, it's absolutely not, have you ever heard of attenuating circumstances (or at least I think it's called that in the US)? Guessing the answers to security questions to access a state officials e-mail account in order to show that the official in question is using it for illegal purposes should be a helluva lot lighter than hacking an e-mail account in general using any sane interpretation of the law.
it would be akin to ask "Run Linux kernel 2.6 and latest XWindows on a x486 with 16 MB RAM" only because Linux (can't recall the version) used to run quite nicely on such a machine back in 1993-ish.
Slightly off topic, but this is a slightly bad example as the 2.6 linux kernel and latest X11 will actually run on a 4(x)86 with 16 MB of RAM...
Guess what? Windows 7 probably put the nail in the coffin for desktop Linux among mainstream users in the US and much of Europe.
This sounds interesting -- could you source this please? My impression was that the Linux desktop market share is steadily increasing, with Ubuntu way in the lead. Do you have anything that shows that the market share is decreasing?
To be fair, the parent talked about a chiropractor moving a vertebra, thus fixing a spinal problem. While I agree with you generally, it seems that in this case, patient first encountered a bunch of incompetent MDs that missed an obvious problem and the chiropractor fixed the obvious spinal cord problem.
Now chiropractice is of course pseudomedicine, but in this case, moving vertebra could fix problems with a dislocated vertebra.
Whoever modded this up: Shame on you! Of course arguments for mandatory vaccinations can be used for mandatory *everything*, including both positive and negative things as long as they have a net benefit for society, that doesn't mean they have anything in common with each other.
Another poster has pointed out that this has already been tested in Japan (they stopped using the MMR vaccine and vaccinated for each disease separately with some time inbetween), with no effect on the level of autism in children. Other countries (such as mine) have fewer shots than the US (probably because we have a lot fever endemic diseases) but we still have the same levels of autism. Oh, and of course, all credible research (and there has been a lot since the 90s because of this Wakefield scandal) clearly shows that there is no link between autism and the MMR vaccine (or vaccinations in general, for that matter).
You're pulling straws out of your ass here. Vaccination is a proven and cheap way to minimize the risk of dying and/or lifelong handicaps from a bunch of diseases, the other things you list are either a normal part of society (sending kids to school) or things that the parents have less control over.
You don't need to be an open source zealot to appreciate a big problem: Not included in open source products means for example "not included in Firefox" (which is what, around 30% of all browsers out there?).
I've also done this. I had a friend who very honestly believed that vaccinations causes autism so I searched my university's medical databases. I found the exact opposite of what you describe: the few studies that said a link wasn't improbable were either small, strangely executed, not done by medical professionals or linked to the anthroposophy movement. The large ones, such as the ones funded by WHO, found no link. At all. It even got to the point where the World Health Organization actually recommended that no further studies be done as it was just a waste of money.
There are two other problems with your reasoning: The first is that by not vaccination your children, you are endangering your own children *and mine*. Some children can't be vaccinated and some children never develop immunity even though they have got the vaccine.
The second is that, as so many others have pointed out, even if these studies shoving a link were true, you're not thinking rationally when choosing to not vaccinate your own kids. Even if the studies are true, you are putting your children to a greater risk by not vaccinating them since the diseases they prevent are deadly and/or give life-long handicaps.
There is simply no reason at all to not vaccinate your kids. At all.
While most other replies to you have been rude, they are nevertheless true. It is *extremely important* that you do not start believing that your son's vaccinations caused any trouble with him and leave that to rigorously controlled scientific studies.
The reason is that the ones making sure the anti-vaccination crowd always have a saying are not themselves, it's the parents with that small doubt. It's the parents thinking "I don't believe there is a link between vaccinations and autism. Although perhaps the idea shouldn't be thrown out the window, our child/the neighbour's child/that guy at works' child has autism and it became prominent just after the vaccinations. Perhaps there is something small to it after all?". That kind of thinking needs to stop *right now*, or more children will die from preventable diseases.
Of course, that's a risk. However, the two options here are "Google including support for H.264" and "Google dropping support for H.264". With the former, your scenario is very certain. With the latter, there is a chance that Google can push WebM hard enough, given their size and influence.
You know, we complained endlessly when Microsoft fragmented the web user experience for years...why are some of us giving Mozilla and Google a free pass when, however noble the motivation, they are trying to do the same thing?
Because when Microsoft fragmented the web, they reimplemented open and free standards, threw in a bunch of their on stuff in them an then forbade everyone else from using it unless they were using Microsoft products. When Mozilla and Google are fragmenting the web, it's about taking proprietary, patent encumbered, closed standards and opening them up enabling free innovation. That's why.
I'm curious as to what you base that on. The only thing I can find is that they've promised not to pursue any patent claims against people streaming H.264 video for free, however they will still do it for all others (including encoding for free), so I wouldn't say they've really gone out of their way.
Yes, you're right but that doesn't mean that we have to use a codec that is closed and patent encumbered. I'd rather take a shot with Google where we at least have a chance to have a free and open codec.
While both have an obvious bias in this, I'd rather trust the word of Google with its armada of IP lawyers than one x264 developer. Especially since Google will take the possible courtroom fight.
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First observation... Thorium reactor... No such animal... Thorium isn't a neutron source and doesn't fission.
One needs a large amount(1000's of kg) of Pu and/or 2x that amount in U-235, after 6 or 7 years you might produced enough U-233 from Th-232 to sustain the reaction.
What people are talking about is the Thorium fuel cycle, which has been researched since we started with nuclear power. The reason why we haven't used it is it's lack of relevance to nuclear weapons.
While you're technically correct in that natural Thorium doesn't fission (the abundance of fissile Th-231 is really really low), in the Thorium fuel cycle natural Thorium-232 absorbs neutrons to become Uranium-233 which is fissile. You are *way* off on those numbers. The US have apparently run a Thorium reactor back in the '60s at Oak Ridge.
Perhaps some kind and statistical person here would crunch the numbers and show the statistics of liquid metal vs water cooled reactors as far as incidents go? I'm thinking that the 1959 incident at SSFL introduced more rads than the 3 mile island incident of the 70's as an example.
Whooo there cowboy, you're comparing an experimental reactor from 1959 with a commerical one in 1970, and then to cutting-edge research reactors in 2011. In 1959, we were doing a lot of crazy stuff and we can probably assume that nuclear safety has moved forward in the last 52 years.
What install time? If the distro supplies udev rules to map eth0 to the NIC in the lowest PCI slot, they will be available to udevd running during the installation. If your installation image lacks udevd, then throw it in there. All the other distributions does that..
If by "install time" you mean the milliseconds it takes for udev to notice the device and then rename it then, sure, you have a point, but what problems do you have that requires solving that?
Straight forward? I would say assuming that pci0 is a network device is pretty non-straight-forward ...
But then they can do just that -- fix the issue with that a device name is in no way associated with the physical device location, i.e. the motherboard connector with the lowest something (IRQ, whatever) will always be called eth0. All the required information is available via proc, they can fix this by using udev distribution-wide. Why on Earth would they want to change the naming scheme? That just doesn't make sense!
No, for two reasons: First, many people can't do that. From the looks of it, in the US at least, many people have only one or two providers to choose from. Second, many average Joes won't recognize what's wrong with their Internet -- they will only notice that some sites load very slowly, then they will blame those sites and not their ISP which is actually at fault. If you want competition to work, you need to fix this first, and good luck with that.
Isn't this what would actually happen if they implemented it right now? From what I recall, there is a legal principle called "mere conduit" in the EU that applies to ISPs since they don't inspect or throttle traffic -- if they would start doing that, they would lose their "mere conduit" status and be legally responsible for everything that they carry. I don't understand why this isn't debated?
However, some time around two years ago, the Nvidia drivers started requiring a processor with SSE. This meant throwing out my Pentium 3 which, while outdated, played XviD to my TV just fine using an Nvidia card. The answer from Nvidia was that I was using outdated hardware and there was nothing they could do about it since the old drivers didn't support newer kernels or X.org.
Proprietary drivers always means dropping support for market segments for which it's not financially viable to produce drivers anymore. If I had open source drivers, I could have ported them myself.
It can pretty much be said that any OS other than Windows, comes with the same standard tools.
Well I think that pretty much sums up where the vast majority of your experience comes from. Let's run down a quick list off the top of my head of OS's and let's see if they support these "standard tools":
Of all the operating systems you listed, only two are supported today (while the others could be in use by happy geeks, I hardly think they are in any professional use): Windows and Cisco's IOS (I don't know what you mean by "RealTime OS", any RTOS in particular?
Off the top of my head, I can think of Linux, BSD, Mac OS X and Solaris, which (excluding Windows) combined makes up almost the entire market for server operating systems.
The whole point of a text UI is it's expressivity and, once you pass the learning threshold, the speed in which you can do pretty advanced stuff. The Windows hack with camel-case command names, longer than a whole goddam command line on Unix, isn't really impressive at all; it seems totally unusable in practice. Am I supposed to write a whole novel each nice I'd like to rename all files in a directory using a regexp?
Uhm, no, it's absolutely not, have you ever heard of attenuating circumstances (or at least I think it's called that in the US)? Guessing the answers to security questions to access a state officials e-mail account in order to show that the official in question is using it for illegal purposes should be a helluva lot lighter than hacking an e-mail account in general using any sane interpretation of the law.
it would be akin to ask "Run Linux kernel 2.6 and latest XWindows on a x486 with 16 MB RAM" only because Linux (can't recall the version) used to run quite nicely on such a machine back in 1993-ish.
Slightly off topic, but this is a slightly bad example as the 2.6 linux kernel and latest X11 will actually run on a 4(x)86 with 16 MB of RAM ...
Guess what? Windows 7 probably put the nail in the coffin for desktop Linux among mainstream users in the US and much of Europe.
This sounds interesting -- could you source this please? My impression was that the Linux desktop market share is steadily increasing, with Ubuntu way in the lead. Do you have anything that shows that the market share is decreasing?
To be fair, the parent talked about a chiropractor moving a vertebra, thus fixing a spinal problem. While I agree with you generally, it seems that in this case, patient first encountered a bunch of incompetent MDs that missed an obvious problem and the chiropractor fixed the obvious spinal cord problem.
Now chiropractice is of course pseudomedicine, but in this case, moving vertebra could fix problems with a dislocated vertebra.
Whoever modded this up: Shame on you! Of course arguments for mandatory vaccinations can be used for mandatory *everything*, including both positive and negative things as long as they have a net benefit for society, that doesn't mean they have anything in common with each other.
Another poster has pointed out that this has already been tested in Japan (they stopped using the MMR vaccine and vaccinated for each disease separately with some time inbetween), with no effect on the level of autism in children. Other countries (such as mine) have fewer shots than the US (probably because we have a lot fever endemic diseases) but we still have the same levels of autism. Oh, and of course, all credible research (and there has been a lot since the 90s because of this Wakefield scandal) clearly shows that there is no link between autism and the MMR vaccine (or vaccinations in general, for that matter).
You're pulling straws out of your ass here. Vaccination is a proven and cheap way to minimize the risk of dying and/or lifelong handicaps from a bunch of diseases, the other things you list are either a normal part of society (sending kids to school) or things that the parents have less control over.
You don't need to be an open source zealot to appreciate a big problem: Not included in open source products means for example "not included in Firefox" (which is what, around 30% of all browsers out there?).
I've also done this. I had a friend who very honestly believed that vaccinations causes autism so I searched my university's medical databases. I found the exact opposite of what you describe: the few studies that said a link wasn't improbable were either small, strangely executed, not done by medical professionals or linked to the anthroposophy movement. The large ones, such as the ones funded by WHO, found no link. At all. It even got to the point where the World Health Organization actually recommended that no further studies be done as it was just a waste of money.
There are two other problems with your reasoning: The first is that by not vaccination your children, you are endangering your own children *and mine*. Some children can't be vaccinated and some children never develop immunity even though they have got the vaccine.
The second is that, as so many others have pointed out, even if these studies shoving a link were true, you're not thinking rationally when choosing to not vaccinate your own kids. Even if the studies are true, you are putting your children to a greater risk by not vaccinating them since the diseases they prevent are deadly and/or give life-long handicaps.
There is simply no reason at all to not vaccinate your kids. At all.
While most other replies to you have been rude, they are nevertheless true. It is *extremely important* that you do not start believing that your son's vaccinations caused any trouble with him and leave that to rigorously controlled scientific studies.
The reason is that the ones making sure the anti-vaccination crowd always have a saying are not themselves, it's the parents with that small doubt. It's the parents thinking "I don't believe there is a link between vaccinations and autism. Although perhaps the idea shouldn't be thrown out the window, our child/the neighbour's child/that guy at works' child has autism and it became prominent just after the vaccinations. Perhaps there is something small to it after all?". That kind of thinking needs to stop *right now*, or more children will die from preventable diseases.
Of course, that's a risk. However, the two options here are "Google including support for H.264" and "Google dropping support for H.264". With the former, your scenario is very certain. With the latter, there is a chance that Google can push WebM hard enough, given their size and influence.
You know, we complained endlessly when Microsoft fragmented the web user experience for years...why are some of us giving Mozilla and Google a free pass when, however noble the motivation, they are trying to do the same thing?
Because when Microsoft fragmented the web, they reimplemented open and free standards, threw in a bunch of their on stuff in them an then forbade everyone else from using it unless they were using Microsoft products. When Mozilla and Google are fragmenting the web, it's about taking proprietary, patent encumbered, closed standards and opening them up enabling free innovation. That's why.
However, the porn industry have always been the first to adopt new, free and open standards so my guess is that it's 90% of both :)
I'm curious as to what you base that on. The only thing I can find is that they've promised not to pursue any patent claims against people streaming H.264 video for free, however they will still do it for all others (including encoding for free), so I wouldn't say they've really gone out of their way.
Yes, you're right but that doesn't mean that we have to use a codec that is closed and patent encumbered. I'd rather take a shot with Google where we at least have a chance to have a free and open codec.
While both have an obvious bias in this, I'd rather trust the word of Google with its armada of IP lawyers than one x264 developer. Especially since Google will take the possible courtroom fight.