My SNES is still grey, even though I'm pretty sure it's an early version. The thing that boggles me is, who are these people that are both playing lots of video games and being exposed to sunlight such that the plastic has a chance to fade? Mine never faded because it was either in the basement, or in the living room with the drapes pulled, like any real child-geek should be!
You can't have your cake and eat it too -either the christians are right, or they are wrong- so pick a side. You are committing intellectual dishonesty of the most egregious kind.
No, you are the one committing a terrible logical error known as the "false dichotomy". If you were not completely ignorant of religion as a historical entity, you would understand that there are thousands of different beliefs. You would then realize on your own the folly of grouping them all together based on what one super-conservative fundamentalist sub-group thinks, and declaring that anyone who doesn't agree can't call themselves by the same name. Well, that's what they think too, and the one thing they share with you is that they are also ignorant bigots.
There are extremist idiots of every stripe, every philosophy has its xenophobic hatemongers, every sect has its deliberately ignorant. Again, history shows this as surely as anything. So does your post.
Just an fyi, in case you feel the need at some point to open your mind at which point this may make sense to you, but for many of us Christians there is nothing unusal or contradictory believing in God and the big bang, evolution, and global warming.
All the CISC crowd did was effectively put a backward compatibility frontend onto a RISC processor. In fact, one of the 3 major x86 manufacturers licensed a MIPS core to use for the basis of their design.
Well, yeah, and that was something the RISC guys never anticipated and rendered the majority of their arguments moot, plus I thought we'd agreed that at least initially developing such a thing is difficult. Thus, ingenuity. Also the MIPS-licensing vendor is the one that is not performance competitive (and isn't really trying to be, they're after power and cost, initial design costs being part of that). Which does relate to an actual disadvantage of x86, which is that it is difficult to get into the market because of the complexity of x86 and the secret knowledge the big 2 vendors have.
Well, first, the current state of the art is not "the only thing that matters". That's a very simplistic point of view, especially considering that ISAs must last decades into the future.
That's funny, because it was the then-current state of the art that convinced the RISC guys that they would win and x86 could never catch up. At this point where relevent ISA differences are minimal, future state of the art is simply going to produce greater competition where the RISC guys have their own chance to sign, irrespective of the RISC-y ISA they pick. If you're going to speculate that some future tech will make x86 necessarily slower, though, you'll have to be more specific about what you have in mind, otherwise this is known as 'wishful thinking'.
In spaces where x86 does not have a massive volume advantage, giving it this cost advantage, it's not true that x86 chips have performance parity. For equivalent speed, embedded x86 chips draw more power and take up more space than other architectures. Their main advantage, touted by the marketing people, is you don't need to cross-compile. Also, RISC processors blow x86 chips out of the water in high-end servers. It's just that everything's been getting faster, so fewer people are needing high-end servers.
It's more a matter of x86-based designs only recently trying to compete in these spaces. The huge windfall made in desktops and laptops and low-end servers allows development of the low-power and high-end designs, and x86 is entering in to both areas. Especially servers, which are being eaten from the bottom up by x86, while in the embedded space there are a lot of entrenched players who are themselves enjoying ridiculous economies of scale. Inherent ISA differences are playing a distant second-fiddle to these business environment factors.
Maybe if the Opteron could do away with the chip area wasted by the dedicated x86 decoder, it could increase the cache size. Or maybe if the cache didn't have to deal with the complexity of helping decode x86 (yes, it does), the cache could be a larger size and still take up the same space.
No, it couldn't. The area taken up by the decoders and the pre-decode bits stored in the I-cache, if removed, would not allow a significant increase in cache size, where "significant" means 2x. It's not even close, maybe a 10-20% increase which isn't worth the design effort to make it work. The decoders aren't very big; remember one of the things that happened in the last ten years is that transistors became tiny, almost but not quite free, and interconnect came to dominate.
Also, I'm going to have to disagree with you about branch misprediction not being important in high-end servers.
Compared to cache size, memory bandwidth, and system interconnect? You can disagree, but every bit of research in the area says you're wrong and those are by far the most important things and not in any way ISA-related. It's not that branch misprediction isn't relevent at all, it's that it is definitely a third-order effect behind those first-order effects I mentioned, then branch prediction, and then after that the penalty for a mispredicted branch.
All the CISC crowd did was effectively put a backward compatibility frontend onto a RISC processor. In fact, one of the 3 major x86 manufacturers licensed a MIPS core to use for the basis of their design.
Well, yeah, and that was something the RISC guys never anticipated and rendered the majority of their arguments moot, plus I thought we'd agreed that at least initially developing such a thing is difficult. Thus, ingenuity. Also the MIPS-licensing vendor is the one that is not performance competitive (and isn't really trying to be, they're after power and cost, initial design costs being part of that). Which does relate to an actual disadvantage of x86, which is that it is difficult to get into the market because of the complexity of x86 and the secret knowledge the big 2 vendors have.
Well, first, the current state of the art is not "the only thing that matters". That's a very simplistic point of view, especially considering that ISAs must last decades into the future.
That's funny, because it was the then-current state of the art that convinced the RISC guys that they would win and x86 could never catch up. At this point where relevent ISA differences are minimal, future state of the art is simply going to produce greater competition where the RISC guys have their own chance to sign, irrespective of the RISC-y ISA they pick. If you're going to speculate that some future tech will make x86 necessarily slower, though, you'll have to be more specific about what you have in mind, otherwise this is known as 'wishful thinking'.
In spaces where x86 does not have a massive volume advantage, giving it this cost advantage, it's not true that x86 chips have performance parity. For equivalent speed, embedded x86 chips draw more power and take up more space than other architectures. Their main advantage, touted by the marketing people, is you don't need to cross-compile. Also, RISC processors blow x86 chips out of the water in high-end servers. It's just that everything's been getting faster, so fewer people are needing high-end servers.
It's more a matter of x86-based designs only recently trying to compete in these spaces. The huge windfall made in desktops and laptops and low-end servers allows development of the low-power and high-end designs, and x86 is entering in to both areas. Especially servers, which are being eaten from the bottom up by x86, while in the embedded space there are a lot of entrenched players who are themselves enjoying ridiculous economies of scale. Inherent ISA differences are playing a distant second-fiddle to these business environment factors.
Maybe if the Opteron could do away with the chip area wasted by the dedicated x86 decoder, it could increase the cache size. Or maybe if the cache didn't have to deal with the complexity of helping decode x86 (yes, it does), the cache could be a larger size and still take up the same space.
No, it couldn't. The area taken up by the decoders and the pre-decode bits stored in the I-cache, if removed, would not allow a significant increase in cache size, where "significant" means 2x. It's not even close, maybe a 10-20% increase which isn't worth the design effort to make it work. The decoders aren't very big; remember one of the things that happened in the last ten years is that transistors became tiny, almost but not quite free, and interconnect came to dominate.
Also, I'm going to have to disagree with you about branch misprediction not being important in high-end servers.
Compared to cache size, memory bandwidth, and system interconnect? You can disagree, but every bit of research in the area says you're wrong and those are by far the most important things and not in any way ISA-related. It's not that branch misprediction isn't relevent at all, it's that it is definitely a third-order effect behind those first-order effects I mentioned, then branch prediction, and then after that the penalty for a mispredicted branch.
Hehe, probably not going to happen. I figure all of the television audience (that hasn't read the book) will be convinced that the last episode is actually a huge cliffhanger/teaser for the next season and be dissapointed when it never comes, and if the series was popular enough, SciFi will eventually decide to create a second season, probably without Stephenson involved other than to sign rights in exchange for a pile of money, which will be craptacular and make you hate the first season. Either way, it's going to end with pitchforks and torches outside SciFi headquarters.
But redistribution of unrelated source code is also a distribution of source code. Why stop at applying the license to source code written explicitly to extend the licensed code? You could extend it to source code written by anyone using the licensed code, whether their new code interacts with the licensed code or not. In fact, if you interpret the license literally, you could extend the license to any and all source code everywhere - even if the author never agreed to the license. It doesn't say "any distribution of THIS source code", it says "any distribution of source code".
That code is unrelated, and hence its distribution is not covered by the BSD license no matter what the BSD license says.
Also, the context of the use "Redistributions of source code" makes it clear that it means redistributions of the material covered by the copyright, either in the form of source code or binaries, and the "of source code" part is the clause that covers distribution in that form.
The ambiguity of the phrase "any distribution of source code" is the focal point of his premise, but it's clear to anyone with half a brain that the license applies only to redistribution of the code that already contains it.
Though it is clear to anyone with a whole brain who can read that the whole phrase is "any distribution of source code with or without modification".
The argument isn't as weak as you make it to be, at least not for the reasons you make it out to be.
I'm certainly yet unconvinced, simply because BSD licensed software has clearly not been used in a manner consistant with this interpretation, and no authors of said software have yet to complain vocally enough for me to hear about it on slashdot.
Man, it seems everyone on this thread doesn't walk into a store without first memorizing their current itinerary! Does the quartermaster come out of the back when you all arrive to tell you all that they have X PS 3's, Y Wii's, and Z Xbox's, along with S Plasma Screens, and V copies of Devil May Cry 3 Special Edition? It just seems odd to me that everyone seems to know the full scoop on the in/out flow of all stores in their neighbourhood anecdotally.
That's because you're a brain damaged internet troll who's forgotten what interaction with the physical world is like. "Do you have any Wii?" "No." "Do you have any PS3?" "Yes." That simple. Or: Look at the shelves. No Wii. 12 PS3. If they have any more PS3 in the back room, does that change anything? No, not really.
Contrast to IBM and M$, who let the IBM PC clones freak flags fly, welcoming any and all third party developers and apps.
Uh, not hardly. They had a proprietary BIOS and they wouldn't share it with anyone. Compaq reverse-engineered the BIOS so as to make clone, and IBM sued them for copyright infringement. Seeing as this was pre-DMCA, and Compaq did a good job of clean-room reverse engineering, they won the lawsuit, and were able to start manufacturing IBM-compatible machines.
That wouldn't have been the end of it, except IBM made a strategic error in not signing an exclusive license with Microsoft for MS-DOS. So Microsoft started selling DOS to Compaq and all the other clone makers that cropped up like weeds. Now the thing that made a PC a PC was not IBM, but Microsoft, and overnight control of the market switched to MS. Oh, and the market exploded as the clones became cheap and popular.
Make no mistake about it: IBM "allowed" clones only under duress. It was only after being beaten up badly in the 80s and early 90s that IBM started to learn some lessons about openness.
If marketshare is your metric, Microsoft is in a distant third place in the video game market.
Point taken, but we're clearing discussing next-gen console video game market share, not video game market share in general (which would also include Windows as a game platform with a lot of marketshare, but again not relevent to this discussion).
Contrary to your assessment, not being able to keep up with demand in and of itself is neither good nor bad. It/can/ be bad if consumers are so frustrated that they/exclusively/ turn to substitutes. But so long as the consumers are not frustrated to the point where they never buy the console, that demand is not presently being met is neither here nor there.
And what do you think will happen when over the months the marketshare remains constrained and thus the potential market for game sales is reduced and game developers switch formerly exclusive titles over to other consoles with better sales potential, exclusives that may have been the reason why someone was waiting to buy that console over another? There is a reason why market share numbers are considered important in console gaming -- they help determine what console is most attractive to developers, and thus what console is most attractive to consumers, which then feeds back into developer decisions, and so on. You better believe people will jump ship to another console, anything other belief is just unrealistic.
At most, from a free market perspective, it tells you that Sony and Nintendo aren't pricing the console high enough. Nintendo could have doubled or trebled their profit if they took this into account and announced that it will ship originally for 600, go down to 400 in january and go down to 250 in february where it will remain.
You are combining Sony-brand crack and Super Smack Brothers in dangerous ways if you think Nintendo would have posted anything remotely like their current sales numbers at $600, or even $400. Demand would have dropped much more rapidly than an increase in price, in large part because it is the Wii's low price point that justifies it's weaker graphics and the inherent risk of trying a completely new control style. So much more so if they had actually announced that they intended to drop the price by $350 in just a few months. Companies usually keep price cuts a secret since if known they will impact sales at the current price. Instead of not being able to find any, Wiis would be sitting unmolested on the shelves until February.
Sony might have been able to charge a little more, since anyone able to swallow $600 could probably swallow $650, but even then you would see a drastic drop off in sales had they gone any higher. Sony is in bad enough shape being production-limited at ~700k units; reducing their marketshare even further by raising the price would have been a terrible idea even for Sony.
Also, momentum is less than it's cracked up to be. The Sega Dreamcase sold 300k units on pre-order and an additional 500k within the first two weeks of launch. It continued to build up momentum even after the release of the PS/2 and Gamecube, only starting to drop off once Sony and Nintendo ironed out production issues and could meet demand.
Um, no. The Dreamcast was discontinued six months before the GC was released, and was basically dead well before that as developers were fleeing the console and sales were sluggish, the PS2 launch having taken all the wind out of its sails. Try the WP to catch up on some of your console history.
If your point is that momentum is not determinant then fine, as I said MS is winning, not that they've won. However saying momentum isn't that important by bringing up Sega, I think you should revise your point to say that it is possible to fail despite having excellent momentum if you screw up often enough and badly enough. Saturn, Se
How AMD intends to implement this is beyond me. It seems that is more of a case layout and CPU issue than motherboard
Your case is designed the way it is largely because of the motheboard spec. They all tie together. More importantly, without an appropriate motherboard standard you can't build a case with optimal layout and put anything but a custom-designed mobo inside.
Cases are part of the problem. Intel realized this and that's part of what BTX is about, and I have to say the design really makes sense.
While the design of BTX did make more sense in particular for cooling, for Intel it wasn't just a "better ATX", it was a way to make the increasing power demands of the Pentium 4 acceptable as it was becoming near impossible to sufficiently cool them. Now that Intel has dropped Netburst, the need for BTX isn't there. Not that there's anything wrong with a better ATX, but the industry doesn't want to switch from something that works.
Then it says the DTX will have ONE pcie slot. What is DTX trying to accomplish? A platform trying to capture the Mac Mini market I'm guessing (however big that is).
They're trying to create a larger small form-factor market. Like all those cool Shuttle small form factor cases that cost more than normal sized ones. The idea behind DTX is to provide a standard that can lead to mass-produced, cheap, commodity cases and motherboards just like we enjoy with ATX, and with the minimal amount of retooling of existing manufacturing. There is certainly a demand for smaller, cooler, quieter computers which don't need a lot of expandability (and other than a video card, with networking and sound built in, what do most people need at minimum?), and AMD wants to bring commodity economics into that market (so they can sell more chips to it).
That's the point. Whether it will work, I don't know. The technical details aren't even out yet I don't think, and it remains to be seen if the industry accepts it.
But the Mars evolutionists will insist Sojourner evolved from toasters and staplers instead of having a Creator (JPL).
Ah yes, while the faithful will quietly and solemnly intone the names of the Father (NASA), the Son (JPL), and The Holy Spirit (Aerospace engineering).
Awesome. Reminds me of the story from I, Robot where the robot takes over the power transmission station on Mercury and basically develops a religion around keeping the power beam properly focused.
Measured in each of the three consoles' respective launch windows, the Wii sold more than any of the others, as in they had the best launch. The game spot article titled "Wii tops new console launches" makes this clear.
Of course all of them were production limited initially, so all this by itself really means is that Nintendo had the best pre-launch manufacturing story. Now I guarantee you this wasn't an accident, and manufacturability was a major consideration in the Wii's design. Still it doesn't tell the story of right now, which is that the 360 is way ahead, thanks to the whole year they had to fix their production problems and sell consoles with no next-gen competition.
Speaking of, I am once again boggled at the Sony fanbois who use the PS1 and PS2 as proof that PS3 will dominate Nintendo and MS, but forget about that all-important year lead time PS1 had on N64 and PS2 had on Xbox and GC. Now the shoe is on the other foot and Sony is starting this generation as the marketshare underdog.
Yeah price isn't a big deal for that tiny fraction of people who can be called early adopters. People buying consoles as Christmas gifts for their families do not fit that mold -- again except for a tiny fraction. And they do often budget and plan for Christmas months in advance, but that does not mean that they can afford to budget $600 -- they're budgeting because they have limited funds. A lot of people doing this will plan to buy a cheaper console because $600 is too much.
And as far as the quote about kids telling mom to buy a PS3, I can tell you that may happen but most of the time mom is going to ask how much one of these PS3 gizmos cost, and when the kids say $600 she's going to tell them no way, and the kids will either settle for a cheaper console or go without. I think I know which way most kids would rather go.
I am VERY happy to see NSMB at number 2 (Hey, I am a nintendo fanboy, what can I say). I also am unsurprised (though still disapointed in the general public) to see Madden at #1.
Heh, I don't care since I don't own a DS, but you never know I may get one. Anyway, nothing wrong with Madden, especially if you don't already own a football game. I found it interesting that my friend, who isn't a gamer and is not into football at all, seemed quite interested in Madden after seeing it at a friends house. Personally I agree with him that football is a good basis for a video game. Picking plays and strategizing is rather fun. Not that I intend to buy it.
What I AM surprised about is to see the number of Z:TP copies sold for the NGC vs the number sold for the Wii. And if you add the 2 numbers together you end up with it dominating the december market, and coming into the top 10 for the year, and that is cause for much rejocing to me!
Yeah, I couldn't help but notice that the 'across all platforms for December' didn't include Z:TP which would have been 2nd or 3rd place behind Madden and maybe Call of Duty depending on rounding. I also find it odd that only half the people which bought a Wii bought Z:TP, but that's probably just because to me Nintendo console == the console you buy to play Zelda.
Okay, put down the Sony-brand crack pipe which only smokes Sony-brand proprietary crack.
If what you're after is marketshare, then selling out is irrelevent if the number of units you sold was not enough to get you the marketshare you needed. If I had one Burke-brand computer to sell, and someone bought it, could I claim Dell, who still has ample supplies, was losing to my hot seller?
Microsoft selling 1.1 million units without selling out is a good thing, as it means their production is ample and there is still strong demand for the console. At over 10mil units sold, they have a substantial lead in the console wars, giving them all-important momentum. There is no rational way to say that Microsoft isn't winning right now.
Wii had decent production, but the fact that they sold 1.1 million consoles and were sold out is a bad thing, as it means more people wanted to buy the Wii but couldn't, artificially limiting their market share. Each console they produce now is going to satisfy the backlog -- I have a couple family members whose Christmas present was "the promise of a Wii when we can get one". While this means in the longer term they have decent potential marketshare, they're still stuck way behind Microsoft and they are not going to be able to catch up any time soon as production continues to limit sales. Though at least they sold more than Sony.
Sony had terrible production, and sold fewer consoles than everyone else. Being sold out is a bad thing as they are now in 3rd place. Unless their production suddenly shifts into impossible-mega-drive to make up the extra 500,000 units they didn't have to sell this Christmas, their position in 3rd place is solidified through most of 2007. The worst news for Sony, though, is the reports that they aren't sold out any longer and PS3s are sitting on shelves, meaning there weren't enough "we'll buy one as soon as it becomes available" to take up the new production and help them make up lost ground. There could be a lot of reasons -- though only Sony-brand crack could make you believe that price wasn't a major one -- but if this trend continues and Sony doesn't do something, then you're looking at the loser of this generation. Certainly, as of right now, they are behind.
Oh yeah, I was mistaken, it was Chernobyl where they had a problem when they tried to reinsert the control rods due to the excessive heat warping the channels.
Very small nitpick in an excellent post: Chernobyl didn't blow up, it had a severe fire and meltdown. Between all of the various failures there, the containment was breached, and oodles of icky stuff was released.
Not a nuclear explosion of course, that's pure Hollywood, but it did suffer from a steam explosion which is what destroyed much of the containment infrastructure.
Fortunately, the US neither builds reactors like that, nor would permit that type of crazy-ass testing. Hopefully we'll build lots more modern reactors soon.
Chernobyl was a huge disaster, but also a combination of a ridiculously bad reactor design and a ridiculously stupid "test", basically verything a doom-sayer could ask for to fullfill their prophecies and still it isn't the dooms day scenario. TMI was an intermediate stage of stupidity, and failed to produce a serious health risk. I too hope that we build reactors based on the learning that has been done since these accidents.
Yeah, he could be blind in one eye and have one good eye, and that actually could have been a pretty cool handicap to incorporate into the story. I don't recall any obvious references to it though, despite him going about doing many a thing that a person who had just lost their depth perception would probably find difficult. It's just a nitpick of a decent but not spectacular movie though. If I want to nitpick a Phillip K. Dick film adaptation I'll watch Blade Runner again.:)
Pakistan sends and funds hardcore terrorists, and their intelligence wing, the dreaded ISI (along with their armed forces) completely work hand in hand with the Al Qaeda. They train thousands of terrorists along the border areas and these terrorists camps are well documented and imaged. Most of these terrorists land up in India, and these terrorists kill more people in India every year than the 9/11 attacks.
Unfortunately, the leadership in India has been too weak to take a firm stand on this issue and the USA turns a blind eye on this issue, as these terrorists do not kill americans (yet) and because they need Pakistan to gain access to neighbouring Afghanistan.
I'm not an expert on India-Pakistani relations or their respective histories, but I do know enough that I laughed my freaking ass off when the U.S. asked our "important partner in the War on Terror" to go into the Pushtun-controlled region of Pakistan and bring back high ranking al Qaeda members. As if they could, and as if they'd want to if they could! I mean, I expected that we'd turn a blind eye to what Uzbekistan (or any other dictatorship) was doing as long as we needed them, but this was some hilarious combination of ignorance and wishful thinking. Unsurprisingly, the small group of soldiers they sent in a token gesture came back empty handed.
NASA has got it rough, has since the mid 70s. Their wildest successes are regarded as routine and hardly noticed by the public eye. Their failures, on the other hand, are spun to be the worst disasters in human history. Granted, when shuttles explode and people die, it's reasonable that the public be concerned. But it seems to me that for every 20 great things that NASA accomplishes, the media picks 1 failure (and sometimes blows that failure out of proportion) to rile the masses into a furious frenzy calling for the dissolution of NASA.
Maybe it's just me, maybe it's just people who appreciate some of the engineering difficulties that go into something like a space probe, but I'm constantly astounded by what NASA is able to pull off. I'm as astounded by their near-failures as their flawless successes. When some piece of fairly important hardware fails, a subsequent software glitch causes the main antenna to fail, and they somehow jury-rig their way back into getting in touch with the probe, load new software onto the probe to work around the failed hardware, and then reboot the thing and it all works so the mission can continue as if nothing went wrong, my jaw just drops. The fact that every once in a while something happens that they can't debug from a million miles away and they lose a probe I hardly see as a failing of NASA.
Not that getting your units wrong is smart, I'm just saying they're at the top of the field and throwing tomatoes at them seems misguided.
I also would love to see your reaction when the nuke plant 2 miles from your house melts down and the authorities are rousting you out of your house to clear the area.
It wasn't necessary for TMI, so why do you think it would in a newer, safer design? Things like pebble bed reactors whose very physical design dictates that the chain reaction will slow down if the reactor ever becomes too hot, making meltdown physically impossible.
You're vastly more likely to have to flee your home due to a truck carrying industrial chemicals getting in a wreck -- as in, this has actually happened -- but I don't hear you calling for the end of industrialization.
I live in Illinois, the most nuclearized state in the US, so it's not just an armchair discussion to me.
And how many meltdowns have there been? Right, zero. Gary, Indiana is a bigger source of health risk to Illinois residents than your nuclear plants are. Your coal plants are a bigger health risk. Just like people living around the TMI plant were exposed to more radiation from underground radon gas than by the TMI incident.
Illinois, "the most nuclearized state in the US", gets about 50% of its energy from nuclear. France gets almost 80% of their power from nuclear. How many meltdowns have there been? Right, zero. I guess it isn't hypothetical to them, either, but they come out on the other side of the debate.
By the way, it wasn't theoretical to me, either, as while I was attending the University of Michigan they had an active nuclear reactor on campus. Strangely it too failed to meltdown and explode.
So the "special interests" you are talking about are people like me.
No, you're one of the people who have an irrational fear of the nuclear boogeyman that I'm talking about.
The problem with nuclear power is that the worst case is very bad. If the containment fails in a major accident, you'll get a whole lot of coal plants worth of radiation in a hurry. A coal plant, regardless of the failure mode, is unable to permanently radioactively contaminate an area. Something like Chernobyl in a US metro area would cost hundreds of billions of dollars.
Then don't build reactors like Chernobyl, duh. TMI wasn't built like that, so when it failed it didn't blow up like Chernobyl did. It is possible to design a reactor so badly that it has the potential to pull a Chernobyl. It is also possible to design a reactor so it doesn't. TMI didn't, and it is still considered an archaic design and no new reactor would be built in the same way. So where does this fear of "something like Chernobyl" come from? Hollywood?
Why? Human factors, primarily, because of the complexity of the technology and the risks posed by major failure. People blame "regulation" on the one hand for making the plants expensive, then with the other extoll the failsafe design demanded by these regulations for preventing the Chernobyl-type disaster. You can't have it both ways.
Well the key to preventing a Chernobyl-type disaster is to use a modern design that cannot fail in that manner. The key to avoiding the problem of human factors is to design your reactor such that no matter what the human does the worst case is that the reaction stops and the nuclear fuel is wasted. I'm still all for regulation that ensures safety, but proper reactor design means that safetly regulations needn't by themselves prove prohibitive.
If we had allowed nuclear technology development to continue apace with the rest of the world, our reactors would be better and cheaper and we would have cleaner air and more reliable energy. Instead, the major economic argument against nuclear is that we're so far behind that it would be prohibitively expensive to catch back up. Well that's only going to get worse over time, so I say turn it around now.
Slashdot Mirror
My SNES is still grey, even though I'm pretty sure it's an early version. The thing that boggles me is, who are these people that are both playing lots of video games and being exposed to sunlight such that the plastic has a chance to fade? Mine never faded because it was either in the basement, or in the living room with the drapes pulled, like any real child-geek should be!
You can't have your cake and eat it too -either the christians are right, or they are wrong- so pick a side. You are committing intellectual dishonesty of the most egregious kind.
No, you are the one committing a terrible logical error known as the "false dichotomy". If you were not completely ignorant of religion as a historical entity, you would understand that there are thousands of different beliefs. You would then realize on your own the folly of grouping them all together based on what one super-conservative fundamentalist sub-group thinks, and declaring that anyone who doesn't agree can't call themselves by the same name. Well, that's what they think too, and the one thing they share with you is that they are also ignorant bigots.
There are extremist idiots of every stripe, every philosophy has its xenophobic hatemongers, every sect has its deliberately ignorant. Again, history shows this as surely as anything. So does your post.
Just an fyi, in case you feel the need at some point to open your mind at which point this may make sense to you, but for many of us Christians there is nothing unusal or contradictory believing in God and the big bang, evolution, and global warming.
+1, Witty!
which cannot possibly include the modifications made afterward.
It is well established in copyright law that it can. Distribution of a "derivative work" is subject to the same rules as the unmodified work.
All the CISC crowd did was effectively put a backward compatibility frontend onto a RISC processor. In fact, one of the 3 major x86 manufacturers licensed a MIPS core to use for the basis of their design.
Well, yeah, and that was something the RISC guys never anticipated and rendered the majority of their arguments moot, plus I thought we'd agreed that at least initially developing such a thing is difficult. Thus, ingenuity. Also the MIPS-licensing vendor is the one that is not performance competitive (and isn't really trying to be, they're after power and cost, initial design costs being part of that). Which does relate to an actual disadvantage of x86, which is that it is difficult to get into the market because of the complexity of x86 and the secret knowledge the big 2 vendors have.
Well, first, the current state of the art is not "the only thing that matters". That's a very simplistic point of view, especially considering that ISAs must last decades into the future.
That's funny, because it was the then-current state of the art that convinced the RISC guys that they would win and x86 could never catch up. At this point where relevent ISA differences are minimal, future state of the art is simply going to produce greater competition where the RISC guys have their own chance to sign, irrespective of the RISC-y ISA they pick. If you're going to speculate that some future tech will make x86 necessarily slower, though, you'll have to be more specific about what you have in mind, otherwise this is known as 'wishful thinking'.
In spaces where x86 does not have a massive volume advantage, giving it this cost advantage, it's not true that x86 chips have performance parity. For equivalent speed, embedded x86 chips draw more power and take up more space than other architectures. Their main advantage, touted by the marketing people, is you don't need to cross-compile. Also, RISC processors blow x86 chips out of the water in high-end servers. It's just that everything's been getting faster, so fewer people are needing high-end servers.
It's more a matter of x86-based designs only recently trying to compete in these spaces. The huge windfall made in desktops and laptops and low-end servers allows development of the low-power and high-end designs, and x86 is entering in to both areas. Especially servers, which are being eaten from the bottom up by x86, while in the embedded space there are a lot of entrenched players who are themselves enjoying ridiculous economies of scale. Inherent ISA differences are playing a distant second-fiddle to these business environment factors.
Maybe if the Opteron could do away with the chip area wasted by the dedicated x86 decoder, it could increase the cache size. Or maybe if the cache didn't have to deal with the complexity of helping decode x86 (yes, it does), the cache could be a larger size and still take up the same space.
No, it couldn't. The area taken up by the decoders and the pre-decode bits stored in the I-cache, if removed, would not allow a significant increase in cache size, where "significant" means 2x. It's not even close, maybe a 10-20% increase which isn't worth the design effort to make it work. The decoders aren't very big; remember one of the things that happened in the last ten years is that transistors became tiny, almost but not quite free, and interconnect came to dominate.
Also, I'm going to have to disagree with you about branch misprediction not being important in high-end servers.
Compared to cache size, memory bandwidth, and system interconnect? You can disagree, but every bit of research in the area says you're wrong and those are by far the most important things and not in any way ISA-related. It's not that branch misprediction isn't relevent at all, it's that it is definitely a third-order effect behind those first-order effects I mentioned, then branch prediction, and then after that the penalty for a mispredicted branch.
Also, the
All the CISC crowd did was effectively put a backward compatibility frontend onto a RISC processor. In fact, one of the 3 major x86 manufacturers licensed a MIPS core to use for the basis of their design.
Well, yeah, and that was something the RISC guys never anticipated and rendered the majority of their arguments moot, plus I thought we'd agreed that at least initially developing such a thing is difficult. Thus, ingenuity. Also the MIPS-licensing vendor is the one that is not performance competitive (and isn't really trying to be, they're after power and cost, initial design costs being part of that). Which does relate to an actual disadvantage of x86, which is that it is difficult to get into the market because of the complexity of x86 and the secret knowledge the big 2 vendors have.
Well, first, the current state of the art is not "the only thing that matters". That's a very simplistic point of view, especially considering that ISAs must last decades into the future.
That's funny, because it was the then-current state of the art that convinced the RISC guys that they would win and x86 could never catch up. At this point where relevent ISA differences are minimal, future state of the art is simply going to produce greater competition where the RISC guys have their own chance to sign, irrespective of the RISC-y ISA they pick. If you're going to speculate that some future tech will make x86 necessarily slower, though, you'll have to be more specific about what you have in mind, otherwise this is known as 'wishful thinking'.
In spaces where x86 does not have a massive volume advantage, giving it this cost advantage, it's not true that x86 chips have performance parity. For equivalent speed, embedded x86 chips draw more power and take up more space than other architectures. Their main advantage, touted by the marketing people, is you don't need to cross-compile. Also, RISC processors blow x86 chips out of the water in high-end servers. It's just that everything's been getting faster, so fewer people are needing high-end servers.
It's more a matter of x86-based designs only recently trying to compete in these spaces. The huge windfall made in desktops and laptops and low-end servers allows development of the low-power and high-end designs, and x86 is entering in to both areas. Especially servers, which are being eaten from the bottom up by x86, while in the embedded space there are a lot of entrenched players who are themselves enjoying ridiculous economies of scale. Inherent ISA differences are playing a distant second-fiddle to these business environment factors.
Maybe if the Opteron could do away with the chip area wasted by the dedicated x86 decoder, it could increase the cache size. Or maybe if the cache didn't have to deal with the complexity of helping decode x86 (yes, it does), the cache could be a larger size and still take up the same space.
No, it couldn't. The area taken up by the decoders and the pre-decode bits stored in the I-cache, if removed, would not allow a significant increase in cache size, where "significant" means 2x. It's not even close, maybe a 10-20% increase which isn't worth the design effort to make it work. The decoders aren't very big; remember one of the things that happened in the last ten years is that transistors became tiny, almost but not quite free, and interconnect came to dominate.
Also, I'm going to have to disagree with you about branch misprediction not being important in high-end servers.
Compared to cache size, memory bandwidth, and system interconnect? You can disagree, but every bit of research in the area says you're wrong and those are by far the most important things and not in any way ISA-related. It's not that branch misprediction isn't relevent at all, it's that it is definitely a third-order effect behind those first-order effects I mentioned, then branch prediction, and then after that the penalty for a mispredicted branch.
Also, the ISA s
Hehe, probably not going to happen. I figure all of the television audience (that hasn't read the book) will be convinced that the last episode is actually a huge cliffhanger/teaser for the next season and be dissapointed when it never comes, and if the series was popular enough, SciFi will eventually decide to create a second season, probably without Stephenson involved other than to sign rights in exchange for a pile of money, which will be craptacular and make you hate the first season. Either way, it's going to end with pitchforks and torches outside SciFi headquarters.
But redistribution of unrelated source code is also a distribution of source code. Why stop at applying the license to source code written explicitly to extend the licensed code? You could extend it to source code written by anyone using the licensed code, whether their new code interacts with the licensed code or not. In fact, if you interpret the license literally, you could extend the license to any and all source code everywhere - even if the author never agreed to the license. It doesn't say "any distribution of THIS source code", it says "any distribution of source code".
That code is unrelated, and hence its distribution is not covered by the BSD license no matter what the BSD license says.
Also, the context of the use "Redistributions of source code" makes it clear that it means redistributions of the material covered by the copyright, either in the form of source code or binaries, and the "of source code" part is the clause that covers distribution in that form.
The ambiguity of the phrase "any distribution of source code" is the focal point of his premise, but it's clear to anyone with half a brain that the license applies only to redistribution of the code that already contains it.
Though it is clear to anyone with a whole brain who can read that the whole phrase is "any distribution of source code with or without modification".
The argument isn't as weak as you make it to be, at least not for the reasons you make it out to be.
I'm certainly yet unconvinced, simply because BSD licensed software has clearly not been used in a manner consistant with this interpretation, and no authors of said software have yet to complain vocally enough for me to hear about it on slashdot.
It isn't any different. That's the point of this whole thread.
Right, and a business or property owner is responsible for making sure that visitors don't slip on their icy sidewalks by putting salt down.
So it is the same, and in both cases the radio station would be responsible.
What was your point again?
Man, it seems everyone on this thread doesn't walk into a store without first memorizing their current itinerary! Does the quartermaster come out of the back when you all arrive to tell you all that they have X PS 3's, Y Wii's, and Z Xbox's, along with S Plasma Screens, and V copies of Devil May Cry 3 Special Edition? It just seems odd to me that everyone seems to know the full scoop on the in/out flow of all stores in their neighbourhood anecdotally.
That's because you're a brain damaged internet troll who's forgotten what interaction with the physical world is like. "Do you have any Wii?" "No." "Do you have any PS3?" "Yes." That simple. Or: Look at the shelves. No Wii. 12 PS3. If they have any more PS3 in the back room, does that change anything? No, not really.
Contrast to IBM and M$, who let the IBM PC clones freak flags fly, welcoming any and all third party developers and apps.
Uh, not hardly. They had a proprietary BIOS and they wouldn't share it with anyone. Compaq reverse-engineered the BIOS so as to make clone, and IBM sued them for copyright infringement. Seeing as this was pre-DMCA, and Compaq did a good job of clean-room reverse engineering, they won the lawsuit, and were able to start manufacturing IBM-compatible machines.
That wouldn't have been the end of it, except IBM made a strategic error in not signing an exclusive license with Microsoft for MS-DOS. So Microsoft started selling DOS to Compaq and all the other clone makers that cropped up like weeds. Now the thing that made a PC a PC was not IBM, but Microsoft, and overnight control of the market switched to MS. Oh, and the market exploded as the clones became cheap and popular.
Make no mistake about it: IBM "allowed" clones only under duress. It was only after being beaten up badly in the 80s and early 90s that IBM started to learn some lessons about openness.
If marketshare is your metric, Microsoft is in a distant third place in the video game market.
/can/ be bad if consumers are so frustrated that they /exclusively/ turn to substitutes. But so long as the consumers are not frustrated to the point where they never buy the console, that demand is not presently being met is neither here nor there.
Point taken, but we're clearing discussing next-gen console video game market share, not video game market share in general (which would also include Windows as a game platform with a lot of marketshare, but again not relevent to this discussion).
Contrary to your assessment, not being able to keep up with demand in and of itself is neither good nor bad. It
And what do you think will happen when over the months the marketshare remains constrained and thus the potential market for game sales is reduced and game developers switch formerly exclusive titles over to other consoles with better sales potential, exclusives that may have been the reason why someone was waiting to buy that console over another? There is a reason why market share numbers are considered important in console gaming -- they help determine what console is most attractive to developers, and thus what console is most attractive to consumers, which then feeds back into developer decisions, and so on. You better believe people will jump ship to another console, anything other belief is just unrealistic.
At most, from a free market perspective, it tells you that Sony and Nintendo aren't pricing the console high enough. Nintendo could have doubled or trebled their profit if they took this into account and announced that it will ship originally for 600, go down to 400 in january and go down to 250 in february where it will remain.
You are combining Sony-brand crack and Super Smack Brothers in dangerous ways if you think Nintendo would have posted anything remotely like their current sales numbers at $600, or even $400. Demand would have dropped much more rapidly than an increase in price, in large part because it is the Wii's low price point that justifies it's weaker graphics and the inherent risk of trying a completely new control style. So much more so if they had actually announced that they intended to drop the price by $350 in just a few months. Companies usually keep price cuts a secret since if known they will impact sales at the current price. Instead of not being able to find any, Wiis would be sitting unmolested on the shelves until February.
Sony might have been able to charge a little more, since anyone able to swallow $600 could probably swallow $650, but even then you would see a drastic drop off in sales had they gone any higher. Sony is in bad enough shape being production-limited at ~700k units; reducing their marketshare even further by raising the price would have been a terrible idea even for Sony.
Also, momentum is less than it's cracked up to be. The Sega Dreamcase sold 300k units on pre-order and an additional 500k within the first two weeks of launch. It continued to build up momentum even after the release of the PS/2 and Gamecube, only starting to drop off once Sony and Nintendo ironed out production issues and could meet demand.
Um, no. The Dreamcast was discontinued six months before the GC was released, and was basically dead well before that as developers were fleeing the console and sales were sluggish, the PS2 launch having taken all the wind out of its sails. Try the WP to catch up on some of your console history.
If your point is that momentum is not determinant then fine, as I said MS is winning, not that they've won. However saying momentum isn't that important by bringing up Sega, I think you should revise your point to say that it is possible to fail despite having excellent momentum if you screw up often enough and badly enough. Saturn, Se
How AMD intends to implement this is beyond me. It seems that is more of a case layout and CPU issue than motherboard
Your case is designed the way it is largely because of the motheboard spec. They all tie together. More importantly, without an appropriate motherboard standard you can't build a case with optimal layout and put anything but a custom-designed mobo inside.
Cases are part of the problem. Intel realized this and that's part of what BTX is about, and I have to say the design really makes sense.
While the design of BTX did make more sense in particular for cooling, for Intel it wasn't just a "better ATX", it was a way to make the increasing power demands of the Pentium 4 acceptable as it was becoming near impossible to sufficiently cool them. Now that Intel has dropped Netburst, the need for BTX isn't there. Not that there's anything wrong with a better ATX, but the industry doesn't want to switch from something that works.
Then it says the DTX will have ONE pcie slot. What is DTX trying to accomplish? A platform trying to capture the Mac Mini market I'm guessing (however big that is).
They're trying to create a larger small form-factor market. Like all those cool Shuttle small form factor cases that cost more than normal sized ones. The idea behind DTX is to provide a standard that can lead to mass-produced, cheap, commodity cases and motherboards just like we enjoy with ATX, and with the minimal amount of retooling of existing manufacturing. There is certainly a demand for smaller, cooler, quieter computers which don't need a lot of expandability (and other than a video card, with networking and sound built in, what do most people need at minimum?), and AMD wants to bring commodity economics into that market (so they can sell more chips to it).
That's the point. Whether it will work, I don't know. The technical details aren't even out yet I don't think, and it remains to be seen if the industry accepts it.
But the Mars evolutionists will insist Sojourner evolved from toasters and staplers instead of having a Creator (JPL).
Ah yes, while the faithful will quietly and solemnly intone the names of the Father (NASA), the Son (JPL), and The Holy Spirit (Aerospace engineering).
Awesome. Reminds me of the story from I, Robot where the robot takes over the power transmission station on Mercury and basically develops a religion around keeping the power beam properly focused.
Measured in each of the three consoles' respective launch windows, the Wii sold more than any of the others, as in they had the best launch. The game spot article titled "Wii tops new console launches" makes this clear.
Of course all of them were production limited initially, so all this by itself really means is that Nintendo had the best pre-launch manufacturing story. Now I guarantee you this wasn't an accident, and manufacturability was a major consideration in the Wii's design. Still it doesn't tell the story of right now, which is that the 360 is way ahead, thanks to the whole year they had to fix their production problems and sell consoles with no next-gen competition.
Speaking of, I am once again boggled at the Sony fanbois who use the PS1 and PS2 as proof that PS3 will dominate Nintendo and MS, but forget about that all-important year lead time PS1 had on N64 and PS2 had on Xbox and GC. Now the shoe is on the other foot and Sony is starting this generation as the marketshare underdog.
Yeah price isn't a big deal for that tiny fraction of people who can be called early adopters. People buying consoles as Christmas gifts for their families do not fit that mold -- again except for a tiny fraction. And they do often budget and plan for Christmas months in advance, but that does not mean that they can afford to budget $600 -- they're budgeting because they have limited funds. A lot of people doing this will plan to buy a cheaper console because $600 is too much.
And as far as the quote about kids telling mom to buy a PS3, I can tell you that may happen but most of the time mom is going to ask how much one of these PS3 gizmos cost, and when the kids say $600 she's going to tell them no way, and the kids will either settle for a cheaper console or go without. I think I know which way most kids would rather go.
I am VERY happy to see NSMB at number 2 (Hey, I am a nintendo fanboy, what can I say). I also am unsurprised (though still disapointed in the general public) to see Madden at #1.
Heh, I don't care since I don't own a DS, but you never know I may get one. Anyway, nothing wrong with Madden, especially if you don't already own a football game. I found it interesting that my friend, who isn't a gamer and is not into football at all, seemed quite interested in Madden after seeing it at a friends house. Personally I agree with him that football is a good basis for a video game. Picking plays and strategizing is rather fun. Not that I intend to buy it.
What I AM surprised about is to see the number of Z:TP copies sold for the NGC vs the number sold for the Wii. And if you add the 2 numbers together you end up with it dominating the december market, and coming into the top 10 for the year, and that is cause for much rejocing to me!
Yeah, I couldn't help but notice that the 'across all platforms for December' didn't include Z:TP which would have been 2nd or 3rd place behind Madden and maybe Call of Duty depending on rounding. I also find it odd that only half the people which bought a Wii bought Z:TP, but that's probably just because to me Nintendo console == the console you buy to play Zelda.
Okay, put down the Sony-brand crack pipe which only smokes Sony-brand proprietary crack.
If what you're after is marketshare, then selling out is irrelevent if the number of units you sold was not enough to get you the marketshare you needed. If I had one Burke-brand computer to sell, and someone bought it, could I claim Dell, who still has ample supplies, was losing to my hot seller?
Microsoft selling 1.1 million units without selling out is a good thing, as it means their production is ample and there is still strong demand for the console. At over 10mil units sold, they have a substantial lead in the console wars, giving them all-important momentum. There is no rational way to say that Microsoft isn't winning right now.
Wii had decent production, but the fact that they sold 1.1 million consoles and were sold out is a bad thing, as it means more people wanted to buy the Wii but couldn't, artificially limiting their market share. Each console they produce now is going to satisfy the backlog -- I have a couple family members whose Christmas present was "the promise of a Wii when we can get one". While this means in the longer term they have decent potential marketshare, they're still stuck way behind Microsoft and they are not going to be able to catch up any time soon as production continues to limit sales. Though at least they sold more than Sony.
Sony had terrible production, and sold fewer consoles than everyone else. Being sold out is a bad thing as they are now in 3rd place. Unless their production suddenly shifts into impossible-mega-drive to make up the extra 500,000 units they didn't have to sell this Christmas, their position in 3rd place is solidified through most of 2007. The worst news for Sony, though, is the reports that they aren't sold out any longer and PS3s are sitting on shelves, meaning there weren't enough "we'll buy one as soon as it becomes available" to take up the new production and help them make up lost ground. There could be a lot of reasons -- though only Sony-brand crack could make you believe that price wasn't a major one -- but if this trend continues and Sony doesn't do something, then you're looking at the loser of this generation. Certainly, as of right now, they are behind.
Oh yeah, I was mistaken, it was Chernobyl where they had a problem when they tried to reinsert the control rods due to the excessive heat warping the channels.
Very small nitpick in an excellent post: Chernobyl didn't blow up, it had a severe fire and meltdown. Between all of the various failures there, the containment was breached, and oodles of icky stuff was released.
Not a nuclear explosion of course, that's pure Hollywood, but it did suffer from a steam explosion which is what destroyed much of the containment infrastructure.
Fortunately, the US neither builds reactors like that, nor would permit that type of crazy-ass testing. Hopefully we'll build lots more modern reactors soon.
Chernobyl was a huge disaster, but also a combination of a ridiculously bad reactor design and a ridiculously stupid "test", basically verything a doom-sayer could ask for to fullfill their prophecies and still it isn't the dooms day scenario. TMI was an intermediate stage of stupidity, and failed to produce a serious health risk. I too hope that we build reactors based on the learning that has been done since these accidents.
Yeah, he could be blind in one eye and have one good eye, and that actually could have been a pretty cool handicap to incorporate into the story. I don't recall any obvious references to it though, despite him going about doing many a thing that a person who had just lost their depth perception would probably find difficult. It's just a nitpick of a decent but not spectacular movie though. If I want to nitpick a Phillip K. Dick film adaptation I'll watch Blade Runner again. :)
Pakistan sends and funds hardcore terrorists, and their intelligence wing, the dreaded ISI (along with their armed forces) completely work hand in hand with the Al Qaeda. They train thousands of terrorists along the border areas and these terrorists camps are well documented and imaged. Most of these terrorists land up in India, and these terrorists kill more people in India every year than the 9/11 attacks.
Unfortunately, the leadership in India has been too weak to take a firm stand on this issue and the USA turns a blind eye on this issue, as these terrorists do not kill americans (yet) and because they need Pakistan to gain access to neighbouring Afghanistan.
I'm not an expert on India-Pakistani relations or their respective histories, but I do know enough that I laughed my freaking ass off when the U.S. asked our "important partner in the War on Terror" to go into the Pushtun-controlled region of Pakistan and bring back high ranking al Qaeda members. As if they could, and as if they'd want to if they could! I mean, I expected that we'd turn a blind eye to what Uzbekistan (or any other dictatorship) was doing as long as we needed them, but this was some hilarious combination of ignorance and wishful thinking. Unsurprisingly, the small group of soldiers they sent in a token gesture came back empty handed.
NASA has got it rough, has since the mid 70s. Their wildest successes are regarded as routine and hardly noticed by the public eye. Their failures, on the other hand, are spun to be the worst disasters in human history. Granted, when shuttles explode and people die, it's reasonable that the public be concerned. But it seems to me that for every 20 great things that NASA accomplishes, the media picks 1 failure (and sometimes blows that failure out of proportion) to rile the masses into a furious frenzy calling for the dissolution of NASA.
Maybe it's just me, maybe it's just people who appreciate some of the engineering difficulties that go into something like a space probe, but I'm constantly astounded by what NASA is able to pull off. I'm as astounded by their near-failures as their flawless successes. When some piece of fairly important hardware fails, a subsequent software glitch causes the main antenna to fail, and they somehow jury-rig their way back into getting in touch with the probe, load new software onto the probe to work around the failed hardware, and then reboot the thing and it all works so the mission can continue as if nothing went wrong, my jaw just drops. The fact that every once in a while something happens that they can't debug from a million miles away and they lose a probe I hardly see as a failing of NASA.
Not that getting your units wrong is smart, I'm just saying they're at the top of the field and throwing tomatoes at them seems misguided.
I also would love to see your reaction when the nuke plant 2 miles from your house melts down and the authorities are rousting you out of your house to clear the area.
It wasn't necessary for TMI, so why do you think it would in a newer, safer design? Things like pebble bed reactors whose very physical design dictates that the chain reaction will slow down if the reactor ever becomes too hot, making meltdown physically impossible.
You're vastly more likely to have to flee your home due to a truck carrying industrial chemicals getting in a wreck -- as in, this has actually happened -- but I don't hear you calling for the end of industrialization.
I live in Illinois, the most nuclearized state in the US, so it's not just an armchair discussion to me.
And how many meltdowns have there been? Right, zero. Gary, Indiana is a bigger source of health risk to Illinois residents than your nuclear plants are. Your coal plants are a bigger health risk. Just like people living around the TMI plant were exposed to more radiation from underground radon gas than by the TMI incident.
Illinois, "the most nuclearized state in the US", gets about 50% of its energy from nuclear. France gets almost 80% of their power from nuclear. How many meltdowns have there been? Right, zero. I guess it isn't hypothetical to them, either, but they come out on the other side of the debate.
By the way, it wasn't theoretical to me, either, as while I was attending the University of Michigan they had an active nuclear reactor on campus. Strangely it too failed to meltdown and explode.
So the "special interests" you are talking about are people like me.
No, you're one of the people who have an irrational fear of the nuclear boogeyman that I'm talking about.
The problem with nuclear power is that the worst case is very bad. If the containment fails in a major accident, you'll get a whole lot of coal plants worth of radiation in a hurry. A coal plant, regardless of the failure mode, is unable to permanently radioactively contaminate an area. Something like Chernobyl in a US metro area would cost hundreds of billions of dollars.
Then don't build reactors like Chernobyl, duh. TMI wasn't built like that, so when it failed it didn't blow up like Chernobyl did. It is possible to design a reactor so badly that it has the potential to pull a Chernobyl. It is also possible to design a reactor so it doesn't. TMI didn't, and it is still considered an archaic design and no new reactor would be built in the same way. So where does this fear of "something like Chernobyl" come from? Hollywood?
Why? Human factors, primarily, because of the complexity of the technology and the risks posed by major failure. People blame "regulation" on the one hand for making the plants expensive, then with the other extoll the failsafe design demanded by these regulations for preventing the Chernobyl-type disaster. You can't have it both ways.
Well the key to preventing a Chernobyl-type disaster is to use a modern design that cannot fail in that manner. The key to avoiding the problem of human factors is to design your reactor such that no matter what the human does the worst case is that the reaction stops and the nuclear fuel is wasted. I'm still all for regulation that ensures safety, but proper reactor design means that safetly regulations needn't by themselves prove prohibitive.
If we had allowed nuclear technology development to continue apace with the rest of the world, our reactors would be better and cheaper and we would have cleaner air and more reliable energy. Instead, the major economic argument against nuclear is that we're so far behind that it would be prohibitively expensive to catch back up. Well that's only going to get worse over time, so I say turn it around now.