You misunderstand the figures - those are deaths per TWh, so they take into account increases in numbers of reactors (or wind farms, or coal plants etc) to create a baseline figure.
Also your assertion that "old plants are not getting shut down" is demonstrably false. Some plants have had life extensions, primarily because what they really want to do is build new, better reactors, but cannot do so due to the various red tape and NIMBY issues the industry faces. Even with this situation, older plants in the UK *have* been retired. As to them becoming "more unsafe" well, given you're clearly biased against nuclear power, what else are you going to say? Other than the Windscale pile, which wasn't really a reactor per se, nuclear power here has been outstanding.
Adding Fukushima will make the number go *down* since there have been no reported deaths from it, yet it counts as another accident to reduce the average if it hasn't already been included.
So, we build new ones - that are even safer than the old ones we currently have (the old "unsafe" ones that are responsible for the 0.04 deaths per kWh in the table above, so with newer, safer plants the number *at worst* is likely to stay constant).
Even if it does "count" those alleged, predicted deaths from a trolling report, it's still not going to change that 0.04 number very much at all. Nuclear energy is remarkably safe, despite all the scare tactics and propaganda that rubs up against it.
Did you even read his post? He spent a considerable part of it discussing the graphite "fire" in Reactor 4. I take it you read the title of the post and maybe the first line before scrabbling for the reply button. Troll skill: low. Please try again.
Yes, "imagination" is all that's needed to extract gravitational potential energy from water that is all pretty much at the same level. 90% of UK power from hydro... yes, in someone's fantasy I suppose - that counts as "imagination".
I'm not "making up silly rules", I'm simply using the same metric that Android users use when talking out how "their" (for those making it personal) mobile OS is winning, and when you point out exactly what you just stated above, you are dismissed as a trolling Apple fanboi who is butthurt that his "toy" smartphone is being outsold by Android. I'm not the one who makes these rules, I just got fed up of fending off Android evangelists who rush out in force at any perceived criticism of the platform and believe everything is some secret conspiracy by Apple to crush open source and enslave everyone - it only took until about post 2 thins time before someone assumed Apple paid for this study.
If Android gets to be a heterogeneous population when it makes it look "good" - ie, to prove it is 'superior ' to Apple's iPhone (when it's erroneous for exactly the reasons you state - not all of the Android handsets are the good ones that are true iPhone competitors), then they have to reap what they sow when the negative is brought up.
Aside from all that, the study itself is flawed, since they don't know the total number of support calls or numbers of handsets shipped to be able to draw effective percentages, so they are pretty meaningless across the board.
Well, like I mentioned earlier (although the study is statistically flawed), Android users love to flaunt their dominant marketshare by lumping all Android handsets together to make the number large, so they can't really complain when that same set of phones is taken as the data set for "so what's the failure rate?".
Well, if you can lump all the android devices together to claim dominance over iPhone marketshare, as is commonly done on here, that includes all the crappy Android handsets as well as the really good ones, then it seems fair to lump them all together when looking at bulk failure rate. You have to take the rough with the smooth.
How about we break down the handsets that are comparable to the iPhone and look at just their marketshare and just their failure rates? I suspect it would be broadly similar on hardware failure (9% ish, just like the iPhone), but no idea on marketshare. I know there are several out there - I've used a couple of them before.
Are you really that insecure about your "own" platform that you think anything that that is less than glowing praise is perceived as a paid-for trashing by shills working for "the man"? In this case, Apple (and again, on slashdot, nothing they ever do is plain and simple, it's all part of some grand illuminati-style plot to steal your freedoms and enslave the masses while simultaneously destroying open source).
The paranoid conspiracy stuff is just tiresome. It's quite obvious, and stated in the summary even, that this sort of issue is purely a result of the way the Android ecosystem is deigned - it runs on all manner of commodity hardware from high end awesome stuff right down to crappy 'EZ Break' models.
I think it holds if the door is closed but unlocked. You have to actually go up to a house that is not your own and try the handle. That is analogous I think, so you don't know ahead of time if the door is unlocked but you know damn sure it's not your house and you have no reason to be doing that, unless you're chancing lax security.
By the nature of the way the internet works, you handshake with the server to initiate any transaction. You are trying to cloud the issue by saying "well the server shouldn't have responded, or said no, that makes it ok!" when my analogy is perfectly valid - the GET request is the same as you trying the door handle. It either responds by ignoring you (it just jiggles and does nothing), by being locked (it does not move) or it replies to you (the door opens). Of course the server should have said "no", and that is the fault of the person managing the security. However, it's no different to a building that is meant to be locked but the security guy messed up and left one door unlocked - not open, but unlocked (so you have to go up to it and test it yourself to see if it is open [ie, sent a GET request to a server you know you shouldn;t be accessing]). It's the security guard's fault, but you're still going to get busted if you steal something.
If you want to access a server by definition you have to say "hey, here's a GET or hello, please ACK", otherwise it doesn't know you're there.
Also be careful when trying people's door handles on their home. Despite some of them possibly being unprotected by any locking mechanism, for example, if the owner is inside, if the door opens be careful what you take from the building since you may still be a criminal.
That is exactly the point. The idea of using magnets to secure a power connector is not new or patented. So you are free to do so. You just can't make it look like (or interoperate with) the Magsafe connector.
Personally, I'd probably make it circular with an inner and outer ring for the hot and ground connections. That way the contacts would naturally slide a little during normal use and help with keeping the metal surface dirt and grease free, for better conductivity.
I'd put the magnet into a small hemispherical dome in the centre, and set back the main metallic part in the socket to weaken the attraction very quickly unless the thing was mated flush, to help eliminate the "my laptop is on a shiny slippery surface and somehow the cord wrapped around my leg without me realising and now I'm going to get up and walk away really slowly" failure mode, where it would be possible to make the laptop fall.
You think this is a crazy setup, but that's seriously a suggested legitimate downside for why the magsafe connector can't be relied on to "save" your laptop from falling, and that you'll get complacent, from slashdot users in this discussion. Best to design out those "29.5 on the Richter scale earthquake" scenarios.
So wait, the "downsides" are problems that regular power connectors also have, except they're much reduced with the magsafe connector...? So I repeat, why hasn't anyone done it before?
You post was a classic "lolz Apple claims they invented everything!" troll. Also note that no one is claiming the magsafe connector is perfect (you are merely claiming that you believe Apple users claim it is perfect). It certainly has some flaws - you can move the laptop on a slippery surface if you pull very slowly, or at a particular angle. It has an issue with spring tension on some of the pins if they become weak or stuck. It has an issue with self-cleaning since the contacts don't slide over each other when the connection is made and broken you can get surface build up that reduces the effectiveness of the connection.
Catching fire though.. well, not really any different to any other laptop power cord if the cable is frayed. Obviously an issue to address (is it user abuse? design flaw? cord and strain relief too weak for a part that is expected to receive heavy use? etc) and Apple has changed the design in response to that.
And, to add to your anecdote, my powerbook (G4 15") fell from my grasp at an airport long ago and landed on the rear corner onto a concrete floor (on the opposite side to the DC board) and got bent up a treat. Still works perfectly to this day, years and years later. Runs Ubuntu now.
1) it's not a strong magnet - that's the point of the design 2) [citation needed] 3) this is a potential problem - you need to check the plug for any magnetic "debris"
Yes, but overtaking and dominating mean different things, I think is the point. If Android had 85%+ share, then it would be dominating. As it is, it might be slightly higher than iPhone, but I hear/. folk call iPhone's market presence "small and insignificant" when compared with the market as a whole, so does that mean Android "dominates" with a few percent more?
Essentially there are three big players with a sizeable piece of the pie each. Neither one of them "dominates", since they all share the market loosely equally, give or take about 10% or so.
They won;t licence out the DRM because they don;t want it to spread, just like the situation with the DRM on iTunes music back in the early days. Everyone hates DRM, yet somehow the fact that Apple wasn't sharing theirs suddenly made them evil, when it was clear from the outset based on what they were saying (and very clear once they actually did it) that they wanted it killed off completely. It was a necessary evil to make the iTunes store start up in the first place (to get the music industry on board) and then killed off totally dead (since no one else ever used it) at the earliest chance.
The only things that have DRM on them still are movies and TV shows (which admittedly is the main focus since this is an article about TVs and media centres), but everywhere else they have endeavoured to make it as easy as possible to interoperate. All the music sold on the store is DRM free, and works flawlessly outside of the "ecosystem" (I listen to stuff I purchased all the time on Ubuntu, for example), and all of their formats are as "friendly" as possible - so while you might not be able to open a Keynote file, for example, if you really wanted to you could write a converter - the specification is all documented. Same with the bulk of their apps. They even provide an open and documented way to interact with iTunes if you want to write software that syncs with it (playlists, contacts, calendars, photos etc)
The only "vendor lock" that exists for media right now is the movies and TV shows, and it is not by their choice - they do not own the content and can only distribute it under contract from the people that do. The renegotiated that on the part of the music to remove all the DRM. We can only hope they also manage to do this for movies and TV. It's for this reason that, while I'm happy to "exist" inside the ecosystem, I do not purchase TV shows and movies from them at this time.
Apple made it as easy as possible for you to go in and out of their proprietary system - they favour open standards, and standards that are well documented. If you want your documents, email, calendars, contacts, files etc out of the system, it is pretty effortless (the calendar and contact list servers are open source, even). If you want your movies out... well, that's a no go for now.
Slashdot Mirror
You misunderstand the figures - those are deaths per TWh, so they take into account increases in numbers of reactors (or wind farms, or coal plants etc) to create a baseline figure.
Also your assertion that "old plants are not getting shut down" is demonstrably false. Some plants have had life extensions, primarily because what they really want to do is build new, better reactors, but cannot do so due to the various red tape and NIMBY issues the industry faces. Even with this situation, older plants in the UK *have* been retired. As to them becoming "more unsafe" well, given you're clearly biased against nuclear power, what else are you going to say? Other than the Windscale pile, which wasn't really a reactor per se, nuclear power here has been outstanding.
Adding Fukushima will make the number go *down* since there have been no reported deaths from it, yet it counts as another accident to reduce the average if it hasn't already been included.
So, we build new ones - that are even safer than the old ones we currently have (the old "unsafe" ones that are responsible for the 0.04 deaths per kWh in the table above, so with newer, safer plants the number *at worst* is likely to stay constant).
Even if it does "count" those alleged, predicted deaths from a trolling report, it's still not going to change that 0.04 number very much at all. Nuclear energy is remarkably safe, despite all the scare tactics and propaganda that rubs up against it.
Did you even read his post? He spent a considerable part of it discussing the graphite "fire" in Reactor 4. I take it you read the title of the post and maybe the first line before scrabbling for the reply button. Troll skill: low. Please try again.
Yes, "imagination" is all that's needed to extract gravitational potential energy from water that is all pretty much at the same level. 90% of UK power from hydro... yes, in someone's fantasy I suppose - that counts as "imagination".
I'm not "making up silly rules", I'm simply using the same metric that Android users use when talking out how "their" (for those making it personal) mobile OS is winning, and when you point out exactly what you just stated above, you are dismissed as a trolling Apple fanboi who is butthurt that his "toy" smartphone is being outsold by Android. I'm not the one who makes these rules, I just got fed up of fending off Android evangelists who rush out in force at any perceived criticism of the platform and believe everything is some secret conspiracy by Apple to crush open source and enslave everyone - it only took until about post 2 thins time before someone assumed Apple paid for this study.
If Android gets to be a heterogeneous population when it makes it look "good" - ie, to prove it is 'superior ' to Apple's iPhone (when it's erroneous for exactly the reasons you state - not all of the Android handsets are the good ones that are true iPhone competitors), then they have to reap what they sow when the negative is brought up.
Aside from all that, the study itself is flawed, since they don't know the total number of support calls or numbers of handsets shipped to be able to draw effective percentages, so they are pretty meaningless across the board.
Well, like I mentioned earlier (although the study is statistically flawed), Android users love to flaunt their dominant marketshare by lumping all Android handsets together to make the number large, so they can't really complain when that same set of phones is taken as the data set for "so what's the failure rate?".
Slashdot shits on everything. If it's not Apple's turn, as it usually is, it seems to be Android.
Well, if you can lump all the android devices together to claim dominance over iPhone marketshare, as is commonly done on here, that includes all the crappy Android handsets as well as the really good ones, then it seems fair to lump them all together when looking at bulk failure rate. You have to take the rough with the smooth.
How about we break down the handsets that are comparable to the iPhone and look at just their marketshare and just their failure rates? I suspect it would be broadly similar on hardware failure (9% ish, just like the iPhone), but no idea on marketshare. I know there are several out there - I've used a couple of them before.
Are you really that insecure about your "own" platform that you think anything that that is less than glowing praise is perceived as a paid-for trashing by shills working for "the man"? In this case, Apple (and again, on slashdot, nothing they ever do is plain and simple, it's all part of some grand illuminati-style plot to steal your freedoms and enslave the masses while simultaneously destroying open source).
The paranoid conspiracy stuff is just tiresome. It's quite obvious, and stated in the summary even, that this sort of issue is purely a result of the way the Android ecosystem is deigned - it runs on all manner of commodity hardware from high end awesome stuff right down to crappy 'EZ Break' models.
I think it holds if the door is closed but unlocked. You have to actually go up to a house that is not your own and try the handle. That is analogous I think, so you don't know ahead of time if the door is unlocked but you know damn sure it's not your house and you have no reason to be doing that, unless you're chancing lax security.
By the nature of the way the internet works, you handshake with the server to initiate any transaction. You are trying to cloud the issue by saying "well the server shouldn't have responded, or said no, that makes it ok!" when my analogy is perfectly valid - the GET request is the same as you trying the door handle. It either responds by ignoring you (it just jiggles and does nothing), by being locked (it does not move) or it replies to you (the door opens). Of course the server should have said "no", and that is the fault of the person managing the security. However, it's no different to a building that is meant to be locked but the security guy messed up and left one door unlocked - not open, but unlocked (so you have to go up to it and test it yourself to see if it is open [ie, sent a GET request to a server you know you shouldn;t be accessing]). It's the security guard's fault, but you're still going to get busted if you steal something.
If you want to access a server by definition you have to say "hey, here's a GET or hello, please ACK", otherwise it doesn't know you're there.
Also be careful when trying people's door handles on their home. Despite some of them possibly being unprotected by any locking mechanism, for example, if the owner is inside, if the door opens be careful what you take from the building since you may still be a criminal.
It can't be fallacious if it's an actual fact. Go and check it.
It's a shame that reality has a bias towards facts, but there it is.
That is exactly the point. The idea of using magnets to secure a power connector is not new or patented. So you are free to do so. You just can't make it look like (or interoperate with) the Magsafe connector.
Personally, I'd probably make it circular with an inner and outer ring for the hot and ground connections. That way the contacts would naturally slide a little during normal use and help with keeping the metal surface dirt and grease free, for better conductivity.
I'd put the magnet into a small hemispherical dome in the centre, and set back the main metallic part in the socket to weaken the attraction very quickly unless the thing was mated flush, to help eliminate the "my laptop is on a shiny slippery surface and somehow the cord wrapped around my leg without me realising and now I'm going to get up and walk away really slowly" failure mode, where it would be possible to make the laptop fall.
You think this is a crazy setup, but that's seriously a suggested legitimate downside for why the magsafe connector can't be relied on to "save" your laptop from falling, and that you'll get complacent, from slashdot users in this discussion. Best to design out those "29.5 on the Richter scale earthquake" scenarios.
So wait, the "downsides" are problems that regular power connectors also have, except they're much reduced with the magsafe connector...? So I repeat, why hasn't anyone done it before?
You post was a classic "lolz Apple claims they invented everything!" troll. Also note that no one is claiming the magsafe connector is perfect (you are merely claiming that you believe Apple users claim it is perfect). It certainly has some flaws - you can move the laptop on a slippery surface if you pull very slowly, or at a particular angle. It has an issue with spring tension on some of the pins if they become weak or stuck. It has an issue with self-cleaning since the contacts don't slide over each other when the connection is made and broken you can get surface build up that reduces the effectiveness of the connection.
Catching fire though.. well, not really any different to any other laptop power cord if the cable is frayed. Obviously an issue to address (is it user abuse? design flaw? cord and strain relief too weak for a part that is expected to receive heavy use? etc) and Apple has changed the design in response to that.
And, to add to your anecdote, my powerbook (G4 15") fell from my grasp at an airport long ago and landed on the rear corner onto a concrete floor (on the opposite side to the DC board) and got bent up a treat. Still works perfectly to this day, years and years later. Runs Ubuntu now.
1) it's not a strong magnet - that's the point of the design
2) [citation needed]
3) this is a potential problem - you need to check the plug for any magnetic "debris"
They did change it - it was still a weakness in the design, which was worse before when it was a physical plug. The new ones are much better.
They have a patent on their implementation of the idea. The idea itself is not patented.
So... why had no one done it before on a laptop? It seems obvious for a device that moves frequently and is very often plugged and unplugged...
Not the first, but come on, it's hardly rocket surgery.
Yes, but overtaking and dominating mean different things, I think is the point. If Android had 85%+ share, then it would be dominating. As it is, it might be slightly higher than iPhone, but I hear /. folk call iPhone's market presence "small and insignificant" when compared with the market as a whole, so does that mean Android "dominates" with a few percent more?
Essentially there are three big players with a sizeable piece of the pie each. Neither one of them "dominates", since they all share the market loosely equally, give or take about 10% or so.
They won;t licence out the DRM because they don;t want it to spread, just like the situation with the DRM on iTunes music back in the early days. Everyone hates DRM, yet somehow the fact that Apple wasn't sharing theirs suddenly made them evil, when it was clear from the outset based on what they were saying (and very clear once they actually did it) that they wanted it killed off completely. It was a necessary evil to make the iTunes store start up in the first place (to get the music industry on board) and then killed off totally dead (since no one else ever used it) at the earliest chance.
The only things that have DRM on them still are movies and TV shows (which admittedly is the main focus since this is an article about TVs and media centres), but everywhere else they have endeavoured to make it as easy as possible to interoperate. All the music sold on the store is DRM free, and works flawlessly outside of the "ecosystem" (I listen to stuff I purchased all the time on Ubuntu, for example), and all of their formats are as "friendly" as possible - so while you might not be able to open a Keynote file, for example, if you really wanted to you could write a converter - the specification is all documented. Same with the bulk of their apps. They even provide an open and documented way to interact with iTunes if you want to write software that syncs with it (playlists, contacts, calendars, photos etc)
The only "vendor lock" that exists for media right now is the movies and TV shows, and it is not by their choice - they do not own the content and can only distribute it under contract from the people that do. The renegotiated that on the part of the music to remove all the DRM. We can only hope they also manage to do this for movies and TV. It's for this reason that, while I'm happy to "exist" inside the ecosystem, I do not purchase TV shows and movies from them at this time.
Apple made it as easy as possible for you to go in and out of their proprietary system - they favour open standards, and standards that are well documented. If you want your documents, email, calendars, contacts, files etc out of the system, it is pretty effortless (the calendar and contact list servers are open source, even). If you want your movies out... well, that's a no go for now.
Hardly "classic vendor lock".
They're really not just skins. Although, I guess Chrome is just a skinned copy of Safari, right?
And the web browser that comes with the stock Android configuration is Safari too, right?