Wow, delusional and paranoid much? If it were possible to have all this "powerful technology" from space, why didn't the West or Russia do it in the last 40 years? Is it because it's simply not possible?
No, it's because Russia couldn't afford it, and in the West where the Market is God, the market chose not to do it (because there was no competition).
Now there may be some competition, but the West (in the form of the USA) has let itself slip.
I'm British, and I'm extremely ashamed to say that the UK actually had its own space rockets and launched 3 satellites in the early 70s but canceled the programme because there was "no future" in launching things into space. Once again, the ignorant pointy-hairs scuppered our technical achievements... but that's a whole nother rant.
America should have had a semi-permanent moon base by 1980 and should have been on Mars by 1990, in my humble opinion.
If you're perfectly happy only having human presence on this rock, that's fine, that's your blinkered opinion and you're entitled to it. I prefer to look a bit further.
Boldly going where the West and Russia were decades ago.
And since the West and Russia haven't been anywhere else since 1972, it's not inconceivable that the Chinese will be on the Moon before anyone else goes back.
But, hey, the West (USA) went there 40 or so years ago.
Then China will go to Mars and the West won't go, because, hey, what's the point?
Before you know it, the Chinese will have invented and developed a whole load of new and powerful technology that the rest of us don't have and can't afford. But, hey, that's OK, we can provide them with cheap labour and outsource their manufacturing for them...
Dungeness is a (mobile) shingle bank. It was never a great place to build a nuclear powerstation, but they built two anyway (Magnox followed by AGR).
The B station was one of the first AGR sites to begin construction but they had so much trouble getting stable foundations that it was one of the last to be commissioned. I think it took over 20 years from construction starting to commissioning.
Greenpeace don't mention that it in their report linked above.
By the way, I once reviewed the flooding safety case for Bradwell in Essex. They weren't considering melting ice caps at the time, but Greenpeace say the site could become an island. Great! That proves it's high enough not to flood. Well done.
From what they've written, it doesn't sound like the end of the world, more like a bit of an inconvenience, really and the sort of thing that can be engineered around.
I went to Sellafield once for an interview and they had armed police there but we just had a bunch of lethargic security guards. One of them was bored one Saturday afternoon and started a fire in the admin. block so he could be a hero and put it out all by himself.
They send their children to separate schools depending on whether they're Catholic or Protestant, and hurl foul insults at each other as little 5-year-old children toddle past.
No one else in the UK cares what religion anyone has or whether they have none at all.
I don't care whether they want to be part of the UK or not: the decent people of the UK don't want them.
Nuclear powerstations along with gas storage facilities are well guarded by armed guards.
I wasn't aware of any armed guards at my nuclear power station in Essex back in the 90s. However, there were rumours that if you went for a walk out on the marshes, camouflage vehicles would appear from nowhere containing scary-looking people asking you awkward questions about what you were doing.
I was too lazy to go out walking, so I suppose I'll never know.
There were others mainly of the cheap and nasty BWR design like they ones that melted at Fukushima.
Germany has them too. No wonder they want to phase out nuclear power. The trouble is that the public doesn't understand that there have been safer and more powerful designs available for the last 40 years. It's very difficult to get the message across.
By the way, here's a story about how dangerous some nuclear reactors were in the bad old days.
Try scheme. It's simpler than Haskell and there are many interpreters and compilers available for it. Most Linux distributions come with guile which is a scheme interpreter.
If you already know object oriented programming, you might like scala.
we've had hardly any rain in Aberdeen (east coast)
But the temperature rarely gets into double figures (centigrade). Above 5 and it's t-shirt weather, unless it's Hogmanay and then it's t-shirts, a cigarette precariously dangling from the corner of the mouth and a sarcastic expression, whatever the temperature.
I didn't realise we built our nuclear reactors in the sea.
We nearly did. Try reading up on Dungeness B some time.
That's an alarmist flame-bait headline. If they were indeed planning to carry out "stress tests" on nuclear reactors, that would be very foolish and criminal in many countries.
The headline is wrong.
From a quick skim of TFA, what they are actually proposing is much more sensible. They are proposing international peer reviews of the design and operation of nuclear reactors and an international safety standard for everyone to attain.
You just don't perform experiments or tests on nuclear reactors. That's one thing that we learned from Chernobyl. It's the law of the land in the UK and probably many other countries.
I'm afraid it's still to much to hope for accurate and non-sensational reporting of nuclear power matters.
I've never bought a mobile phone outright. I've always had one with a contract. I've hated the closed nature of the platforms. All that computing power and potential locked away from me.
I've had 3 PDAs over the years, all Palms, from an m100 to a Tungsten T3. I write a few small programs for them, but nothing serious. They were open enough that you could hack.
I am going to be buying a smart phone soon. This just swayed me. I will be buying one like this, and I'll be writing code for it which I'll be releasing under the GPL.
Apple, Microsoft (Nokia), Sony et. al. can get stuffed.
If you are writing code the way the Good Lord intended, i.e. using a sensible window manager like Window Maker to multiplex xterms, with your source code no wider that 80 columns, you will know that you only need one monitor.
If you have one of these newfangled LCD screens with 1920 pixels across, you can quite comfortably get 3 xterms side by side and still have room to click on the root window to get the menu.
But you don't need the menu since you can just have an extra xterm open.
You can use the multiple virtual desktop feature to group windows by task.
I usually have one desktop for web and email and many for coding. Each coding desktop has 8 or 9 xterms open.
These fancy monitors are really cheap too now.
Crikey, in my day I had to code on a 1k ZX81 with lo-res graphics, uppercase characters only in black and white on a fuzzy analogue TV set, interlaced at 32x22...
When my 19 inch diamondtron CRT eventually dies, I'll buy and LCD monitor.
The thing is, if someone received MySQL under the GPL, they are perfectly at liberty (in fact they are encouraged) to redistribute it to anyone who wants it along with the source code.
You can charge someone to receive the binary (i.e. a reasonable charge to cover costs and maybe something for your time) but you can not charge them simply to use the software. Obviously, they can't use it if they can't get it in the first place.
Yes, if they own the copyright to MSQL (in its entirety) they can relicense it any way they like.
What are the "business reasons" for paying for Oracle's MySQL vs. a Free one?
The moral of the story is: steer well clear of Oracle.
Have lunch with them, be friendly, but remember that the work world is a shark tank.
There is an element of truth in what you say, but it's far too easy to become paranoid and far too cynical thinking like that.
There is one important person never to become friends with (or to think that you're friends with) and that's your boss, supervisor, line manager, whatever.
I sit next to my line manager frequently at lunch time. He's a stereotypical unfriendly, uncommunicative and selfish computer type. That's OK. I'm under no illusion about what he's like. He's reasonably fair but sees the world through robot eyes. I make a point of having a thick skin and arguing with him (mostly constructively) and standing my ground. I will never be a yes man.
We work in a very egocentric and unfriendly industry. I've noticed over the years that a lot of people are very selfish and unhelpful, but where I am just now, most people are the opposite. I naturally like to help people, but I've learned in the last 5 years to make sure that I look out for myself too.
I've had very bad "shark tank" experiences before from selfish people who want to make themselves look good at any cost and at anyone else's expense. However, not every place is quite that bad. I've found a good one, and the only way I'll leave is if I'm laid off or they carry me out in a wooden box.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought Vesta was a brand of curry.
Wow, delusional and paranoid much? If it were possible to have all this "powerful technology" from space, why didn't the West or Russia do it in the last 40 years? Is it because it's simply not possible?
No, it's because Russia couldn't afford it, and in the West where the Market is God, the market chose not to do it (because there was no competition).
Now there may be some competition, but the West (in the form of the USA) has let itself slip.
I'm British, and I'm extremely ashamed to say that the UK actually had its own space rockets and launched 3 satellites in the early 70s but canceled the programme because there was "no future" in launching things into space. Once again, the ignorant pointy-hairs scuppered our technical achievements... but that's a whole nother rant.
America should have had a semi-permanent moon base by 1980 and should have been on Mars by 1990, in my humble opinion.
If you're perfectly happy only having human presence on this rock, that's fine, that's your blinkered opinion and you're entitled to it. I prefer to look a bit further.
Boldly going where the West and Russia were decades ago.
And since the West and Russia haven't been anywhere else since 1972, it's not inconceivable that the Chinese will be on the Moon before anyone else goes back.
But, hey, the West (USA) went there 40 or so years ago.
Then China will go to Mars and the West won't go, because, hey, what's the point?
Before you know it, the Chinese will have invented and developed a whole load of new and powerful technology that the rest of us don't have and can't afford. But, hey, that's OK, we can provide them with cheap labour and outsource their manufacturing for them...
Dungeness is a (mobile) shingle bank. It was never a great place to build a nuclear powerstation, but they built two anyway (Magnox followed by AGR).
The B station was one of the first AGR sites to begin construction but they had so much trouble getting stable foundations that it was one of the last to be commissioned. I think it took over 20 years from construction starting to commissioning.
Greenpeace don't mention that it in their report linked above.
By the way, I once reviewed the flooding safety case for Bradwell in Essex. They weren't considering melting ice caps at the time, but Greenpeace say the site could become an island. Great! That proves it's high enough not to flood. Well done.
From what they've written, it doesn't sound like the end of the world, more like a bit of an inconvenience, really and the sort of thing that can be engineered around.
I went to Sellafield once for an interview and they had armed police there but we just had a bunch of lethargic security guards. One of them was bored one Saturday afternoon and started a fire in the admin. block so he could be a hero and put it out all by himself.
He got sacked.
They send their children to separate schools depending on whether they're Catholic or Protestant, and hurl foul insults at each other as little 5-year-old children toddle past.
No one else in the UK cares what religion anyone has or whether they have none at all.
I don't care whether they want to be part of the UK or not: the decent people of the UK don't want them.
British withdrawal is probably further away now than it was when the IRA in its present guise got started in 1969.
I say we should wash our hands of the place. There are evil ignorant bigots on both "sides." The latest round of misery was orchestrated by the UVF.
They don't deserve to be British. They're certainly not human beings.
Nuclear powerstations along with gas storage facilities are well guarded by armed guards.
I wasn't aware of any armed guards at my nuclear power station in Essex back in the 90s. However, there were rumours that if you went for a walk out on the marshes, camouflage vehicles would appear from nowhere containing scary-looking people asking you awkward questions about what you were doing.
I was too lazy to go out walking, so I suppose I'll never know.
Now we know David Icke's slashdot ID.
Italy has never had any running nuclear reactors anyway
So what was Latina?
There were others mainly of the cheap and nasty BWR design like they ones that melted at Fukushima.
Germany has them too. No wonder they want to phase out nuclear power. The trouble is that the public doesn't understand that there have been safer and more powerful designs available for the last 40 years. It's very difficult to get the message across.
By the way, here's a story about how dangerous some nuclear reactors were in the bad old days.
Take a coding holiday. Book some time off work and immerse yourself in coding purely for fun for a few days.
Try scheme. It's simpler than Haskell and there are many interpreters and compilers available for it. Most Linux distributions come with guile which is a scheme interpreter.
If you already know object oriented programming, you might like scala.
In 1995 we had 26C out at Ellon and I swam in the sea between Collieston and Slains.
we've had hardly any rain in Aberdeen (east coast)
But the temperature rarely gets into double figures (centigrade). Above 5 and it's t-shirt weather, unless it's Hogmanay and then it's t-shirts, a cigarette precariously dangling from the corner of the mouth and a sarcastic expression, whatever the temperature.
I didn't realise we built our nuclear reactors in the sea.
We nearly did. Try reading up on Dungeness B some time.
That's an alarmist flame-bait headline. If they were indeed planning to carry out "stress tests" on nuclear reactors, that would be very foolish and criminal in many countries.
The headline is wrong.
From a quick skim of TFA, what they are actually proposing is much more sensible. They are proposing international peer reviews of the design and operation of nuclear reactors and an international safety standard for everyone to attain.
You just don't perform experiments or tests on nuclear reactors. That's one thing that we learned from Chernobyl. It's the law of the land in the UK and probably many other countries.
I'm afraid it's still to much to hope for accurate and non-sensational reporting of nuclear power matters.
Also, a spinning flywheel will want to maintain its orientation in the universe
Are you insinuating that there is an Absolute Frame of Reference, young man?
I've never bought a mobile phone outright. I've always had one with a contract. I've hated the closed nature of the platforms. All that computing power and potential locked away from me.
I've had 3 PDAs over the years, all Palms, from an m100 to a Tungsten T3. I write a few small programs for them, but nothing serious. They were open enough that you could hack.
I am going to be buying a smart phone soon. This just swayed me. I will be buying one like this, and I'll be writing code for it which I'll be releasing under the GPL.
Apple, Microsoft (Nokia), Sony et. al. can get stuffed.
If you are writing code the way the Good Lord intended, i.e. using a sensible window manager like Window Maker to multiplex xterms, with your source code no wider that 80 columns, you will know that you only need one monitor.
If you have one of these newfangled LCD screens with 1920 pixels across, you can quite comfortably get 3 xterms side by side and still have room to click on the root window to get the menu.
But you don't need the menu since you can just have an extra xterm open.
You can use the multiple virtual desktop feature to group windows by task.
I usually have one desktop for web and email and many for coding. Each coding desktop has 8 or 9 xterms open.
These fancy monitors are really cheap too now.
Crikey, in my day I had to code on a 1k ZX81 with lo-res graphics, uppercase characters only in black and white on a fuzzy analogue TV set, interlaced at 32x22...
When my 19 inch diamondtron CRT eventually dies, I'll buy and LCD monitor.
Now get of my lawn!
There's no hypocrite like a religious hypocrite.
Aren't those the fools who tried building a city out of rock-and-roll instead of concrete and brick?
Rock and Roll? Wuss-music, more like!
They seem to be doing a good job of alienating their customers and driving away their own engineers.
The thing is, if someone received MySQL under the GPL, they are perfectly at liberty (in fact they are encouraged) to redistribute it to anyone who wants it along with the source code.
You can charge someone to receive the binary (i.e. a reasonable charge to cover costs and maybe something for your time) but you can not charge them simply to use the software. Obviously, they can't use it if they can't get it in the first place.
Yes, if they own the copyright to MSQL (in its entirety) they can relicense it any way they like.
What are the "business reasons" for paying for Oracle's MySQL vs. a Free one?
The moral of the story is: steer well clear of Oracle.
Oracle charges about $2,000 per server each year to use MySQL
I thought MySQL was under the GPL? You can't charge for using GPL'd software.
I think that you confuse friends and acquaintances. Facebook strikes again !
You're right. I only have 2 or 3 real friends and none are at work.
I don't do facebook. Believe it or not, I managed to get a wife nearly 9 years ago so I don't need social networking.
Have lunch with them, be friendly, but remember that the work world is a shark tank.
There is an element of truth in what you say, but it's far too easy to become paranoid and far too cynical thinking like that.
There is one important person never to become friends with (or to think that you're friends with) and that's your boss, supervisor, line manager, whatever.
I sit next to my line manager frequently at lunch time. He's a stereotypical unfriendly, uncommunicative and selfish computer type. That's OK. I'm under no illusion about what he's like. He's reasonably fair but sees the world through robot eyes. I make a point of having a thick skin and arguing with him (mostly constructively) and standing my ground. I will never be a yes man.
We work in a very egocentric and unfriendly industry. I've noticed over the years that a lot of people are very selfish and unhelpful, but where I am just now, most people are the opposite. I naturally like to help people, but I've learned in the last 5 years to make sure that I look out for myself too.
I've had very bad "shark tank" experiences before from selfish people who want to make themselves look good at any cost and at anyone else's expense. However, not every place is quite that bad. I've found a good one, and the only way I'll leave is if I'm laid off or they carry me out in a wooden box.