What aspect of coal compares to this? Reactor core materials found almost 500 km from Fukushima plant -- 40,000,000,000,000,000,000 Bq/kg
The first thing that springs to mind is that whoever wrote that was intentionally trying to make the numbers look big and scary. Quoting "Bq/Kg" in a situation where you're talking about nanograms of material seems pretty disingenuous.
As for the "what aspect of coal comparest to this" point - the fact that coal fired power stations are *all* *routinely* chucking toxic particulates and gasses into the atmosphere *all the time*, compared to a whole 2 major radiological disasters relating to nuclear power.
So sure, you can quote big numbers demonstrating that traces of radioactive materials are detectable a few hundred Km from the second biggest nuclear disaster, but its quite another thing to determine that they have more detremental effects than the tons and tons of crap emitted from fossil powerstations globally on a daily basis.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying that nuclear power is all rainbows and unicorns, but I am saying that we have to get our power from somewhere, and all the other feasable power sources seem to be far worse in the long term.
Which one creates waste that will be hazardous to all biota, 20,000 years from now?
How about "both"? The planet could easilly take 20,000 years or more to recover from a runaway greenhouse effect caused by burning fossil fuels. The thing you haven't accounted for is that we routinely reprocess nuclear waste and contain what's left (well, everyone except the US seems to be doing a reasonable job at this anyway), whilst we don't do the same for fossil waste. Sure, in a few thousand years, if someone/something stumbles across a stash of vitrified nuclear waste they're probably going to have a bad day, but at least it isn't all floating around in the atmosphere to affect the whole planet.
I personally love hydro.
Which, as mentioned, isn't feasable everywhere (due to geography) and wipes out vast areas of land. If you're in a good location for it then sure, go for it, but you can't expect everyone on the planet to use something that only works in certain locations.
Incorrect. most manual transmission cars in recent history have an interlock where the clutch must be depressed all the way to engage the ignition circuit.
Not one I've ever driven. Of the vehicles I regularly drive (1998 VW Transporter, 2003 Toyota MR2 Spyder, 2005 Peugeot 207), not one of them has such an interlock, nor have any of the (more modern) courtesy cars I've driven.
FYI, you can still switch it to the position to run the accessories and not start he engine. Just don't step on the brake, then press the button once, and you'll get just the radio.
Why the hell do we have to have these obscure geastures like "turn on the ignition while holding down the brake" and "turn on the ignition while winding down the window" to do various things instead of having a simple multiposition switch (possibly a key switch)?
Car designers seem to be taking cues from computer UI designers - hide away options so they are completely non-discoverable instead of making them obvious (have you noticed that a lot of software no longer tells you the short cuts in the menus? They just expect you do know somehow).
US issues are many. Hanford, Los Alamos, Oak ridge, etc? The job did not get done. It is part of the legacy, fair or not. There is no facility for storing spent NPP fuel. 50, 60 years into the thing, no US place to put the fuel. They did not get it done. SFPs are dangerously full, past their design basis, and vulnerable.
Ok, so the US hasn't got its shit together... but a lot of the rest of the world seems to do ok at this stuff and yet public opinion is frequently against nuclear.
Chernobyl, Fukushima. You folks may never go home. An acceptable risk? These are legit, open questions that have nothing to do with politics/ideology, or unfounded fears.
Again, you're not comparing nuclear against all the other options - you're just citing reasons why nuclear is bad without looking to see how bad the alternatives are. We've got to get our power from somewhere, so instead of saying "this is bad", start saying "this is worse than..." and "this is better than..." - certainly none of the options are perfect.
Chernobyl: very very few casualties, 30Km exclusion zone for a few decades, short term global pollution. Fukushima: practically no casualties, 20Km exclusion zone for a few decades, very little global pollution. Three Mile Island: everything went to shit, but there were basically no casualties and practically no local pollution. Polution from coal power: millions of people affected by lung diseases, greenhouse emissions threatening to put vast swathes of the planet at risk of flooding, drought, famine, damaging winds, large scale extinctions, and the occasional acute environmental disaster. Gas power is a bit better, but the greenhouse emissions are still there and the jury is still out on the environmental effects of fracking. Oil: again, greenhouse emissions and the occasional spill causing untold environmental damage. Hydro is only available in certain areas and floods vast areas of land. Geothermal is great, but not feasible in most areas. Wind and solar can't provide reliable power or baseload production - I think they have their place, but probably for jobs that can vary their capacity to suit the amount of power available, such as producing synthetic hydrocarbon fuels for use in cars, planes, etc.
To my mind, whilst there are certainly drawbacks to nuclear, it seems to be better than most alternatives and a lot of the problems, such as waste management, are largely solvable with suitable investment and regulation. Its also worth noting that Chernobyl was a reactor design that was never considered safe enough to build in the west being operated in a criminally dangerous manor, and Fukushima was an old reactor design with inadiquate tsunami protection - lets stop being scared of nuclear and start building some new, safer plants to replace the old ones that are well past due for decomissioning.
That is not acceptable, it must not happen, period. There is no room for error.
"No room for error" is a fallacy. Errors happen - the trick is to design everything so that when errors happen and the shit hits the fan, everything fails as safely as possible.
Well yes, thanks to the DRM, you do. Pretty much all Bluray players require an HDCP compatible TV, so whilst you might have a perfectly good TV you're going to have to replace it in order to use Bluray. Given that TVs last upwards of 10-15 years, expecting people to replace their TV just to comply with some bogus DRM policy seems a bit much.
Gee, with a PS3 you can even output video to SD and the audio to digital optical.
Ok, I don't have a PS3, have absolutely zero interest in playing PS3 games, and why would I spend money to replace a SD DVD player with an SD Bluray player? No one is going to replace equipment for absolutely no personal benefit - I guess the assumption that people are going to jump through the media industry's hoops for no/little benefit is probably a good reason why Bluray never took off. Also, spending money on something that can be blacklisted at the whims of the content industry isn't exactly something I'm interested in doing.
Yes, because the ability to burn on 100s of CDs for cheap is what people want the most when they want to watch a movie quickly and easily.
Indeed not. And with the proliferation of cheap, large, USB flash drives I would certainly expect to see blank DVDs start to vanish.
You know why Bluray is dying? I don't have to drive to some store, stand in line, and buy something for an outrageous sum of money. If I want to watch a movie with streaming, all I have to do is sit down on my couch and watch it.
That's certainly not why I don't buy Bluray discs... I don't mind driving to some store and standing in line because "some store" is probably either the supermarket where I was already buying my groceries anyway, or somewhere like Amazon where I don't actually have to go anywhere. The reason why I'm not interested in Bluray is basically because I want media to Just Work - that means no jumping through DRM hoops, no having to sit through unskippable crap before the movie, no having to deal with region coding, no having to unduly replace existing equipment and an expectation that in a few years time I can pick up a movie I bought and have it still Just Work.
And FWIW, downloading doesn't really help there either: I still have to wait for the download to happen (in a few years' time this won't be an issue, but for now internet connections too slow for this); I'm stuck with compatibility problems due to the DRM that is employed (no, I'm not going to buy a new computer running some specific software or a new smart TV just to play movies); and I have zero expectation that a movie I buy today is still going to be playable in a few years time.
About the only technology that actually seems sensible is the DVD - it's not HD but frankly, if the movie you're watching has any kind of worthwhile story you probably won't even notice.
I still don't understand how Sony had a format that was better than anything else on the market, existing economies of scale that would have made it possible to sell it for less than anything else on the market, and still failed.
Bad management. It basically comes down to the same thing each time with Sony: they try to retain as much control as possible over a format, rather than just throwing it out to the market and letting people use it how they want. Of course you're not going to do well when you tell a big chunk of your potential customers that you're not interested in their use cases or money.
I suspect the subscription/library model will have a kind of "golden age" as bandwidth gets good enough and there are only a tiny number of different libraries to subscribe to, but in the long run the most likely positions seem to be market fragmentation (you have to subscribe to several libraries, and your favourite shows might jump around between them) or consolidating into a near-monopoly (with the natural tendency to then push prices up). Neither is good for consumers
Or you regulate to prevent exclusivity deals between the content producers and the content distributors/libraries. That way you can watch the same content from several libraries, so you get to choose based on price, quality of service, etc.
These days, I just want to go to the supermarket, buy a movie, watch it, stick it on my book shelf and rewatch it in 15 years' time. The choices seem to be: - DVD: might not be the highest resolution, but it works and if the story is good you don't notice the lack of HD anyway. - BluRay: DRM that would require me to replace perfectly functional equipment (which isn't going to happen - I have better uses for that money), and would subject me to unskippable copyright warnings and trailers. Also, looking up the BD+ specifications, things stick out such as content producers being able to execute "native code" on the player, which falls into the "Just... no, not ever!" category for me. Also the danger that my player's AACS keys would be blacklisted, etc. Also, region restrictions... - Streaming: the quality isn't great, and I'm going to need a reliable internet connection (so no watching it on the train). But more importantly - I don't get to buy content, only rent it for a limited time. In 15 years time I can't go back and watch something I already bought because chances are it won't be available any more in the library (or I would've been required to pay an ongoing subscription in order to access the content I already bought). And again, region restrictions... - Illegal downloading: I don't really subscribe to the idea that you should download illegally if you don't agree with the existing distribution models; although I have some leeway here on downloading content that just plain isn't available in your region (since there can be no economic harm to the content producer in this case).
So basically, all this boils down to me continuing to buy stuff on DVD (and my media player automatically skips over the copyright warnings and unskippable trailers). Make BluRay so that I can buy it and have it Just Work without any DRM hassles and I would probably be buying content in that format instead of DVD, but I simply don't want to have the faff of jumping through their hoops, so I don't.
I could actually play them legally, I might buy BluRay stuff
You can play them legally, on a Blu-Ray player.
Yes, I can play them legally by replacing lots of my A/V kit at a large expense to myself, which, you know, I'm not gonna do (I can buy a whole lot of DVDs for that expense, or more likely just spend the money on something more entertaining than sitting at home watching some rehashed remakes). If you produce content in a format that artificially prevents me from using my existing equipment to watch, you can expect me to not buy your format; *especially* where replacing my equipment would force me to sit through copyright warnings, trailers, etc. on media that I bought.
TL;DR - if I can can buy a movie from the local supermarket for a few pounds then I might do that for some cheap entertainment; if I have to spend hundreds of pounds replacing perfectly good equipment in order to watch a movie then I'm sure I can find something more worthwhile to spend that money on.
I'm sure there are dozens of alternatives other than burying it like a turd in the back yard. Unfortunately it looks like burying it and hoping it solves the problem is the best alternative at this time.
AFAIK the long term plan isn't "bury it" - the new containment is designed to contain dust while work is going on to desconstruct the reactor. There are cranes and things built into the new structure for this purpose.
The problem of popular opinion about nuclear is a symptom of cheap fossil fuels. Give people a little energy scarcity and they'll warm right up to nuclear. Until then they'll indulge the the nuclear hysteria they've been trained with.
Popular opinion is largely due to the disproportionate amount of attention dedicated to radiological pollution. In the nuclear industry, waste is routinely kept out of the environment as much as possible and any leaks are a big media story that makes out that many people are going to die (in actual fact, the health impact of even big nuclear disasters doesn't seem that great). On the other hand, other industries such as coal fired power stations routinely just dump much of their pollution directly into the atmosphere where it is forgotten about - there are no headline stories about a coal power station's pollution killing many people (as it certainly does) because it's routine rather than a big one-off event.
Its basically like comparing the safety of air travel to the safety of driving your car - driving a car is pretty dangerous, and people get killed routinely so there are few big news stories about it. Air travel is relatively safe and accidents happen so infrequently that on the odd occasion it does there's a media circus around it that fuel a lot of peoples' fear of flying.
Are you actually serious? I want to not only live but live to be old and see my kids have kids. I don't want to shave off a bunch of years because I'm inconvenient to some polluter.
However, you need to treat all polluters equally - what's the point of making a relatively clean nuclear power station more expensive than a dirty coal fired power station just because the pollution regulations are far stricter? I'm not saying we should allow the nuclear industry to just pump their waste into the atmosphere like the coal industry does, but there does seem to be a disconnect there that doesn't seem to be in the public's best interest...
Couldn't you just drop a container into the ocean, one with only two openings - one with your membrane for salt water in, the other opening for desalinated water out? The deeper you put it, the more pressure outside the container that pushes the salt water through your membrane. Then you could use a low power pump to slowly remove the clean water through a hose attached to the other opening.
You won't get very far with a "low power pump" - if you sink your container down to, say, 500 metres then you have 500 metres of water pressure surrounding it, but you also have to lift 500 metres of water depth back to the surface.
Nobody mentions ZFS? The only thing that can concievably survive an accidental dd followed by an accidental rm -rf?
And still, you'd be stupid to not have a proper backup since you're screwed if (a) you end up with massive filesystem corruption (software bug, hardware failure, etc. or (b) your server catches fire (or similar failure that physically destroys all your disks).
We have had RAID failure twice now. The idea is that even with things like SMART, the errors in the second disk (or 3rd etc) don't become apparent till you try and recover and thrash the disk properly.
The other reason why RAID isn't a backup is because it doesn't account for software/human failures - good luck recovering your data from a RAID after accidentally running "rm -rf/", whereas time indexed backups will allow you to go back a few days/weeks/months and recover your data after you discover it's not on the disk any more.
RAID is there to keep systems running in the event of a hardware failure - its no substitute for a backup.
Anyway, the errors on the disks should become apparent during their operation because you should be doing regular scrubs to find the errors. Putting the data somewhere, forgetting about it and not actually checking its still there for a few years is a pretty good recipe for disaster no matter how you store it. That said, I've seen a few cases where a drive fails, and the increased load on the other (similar age) disks sends another over the edge soon after, so one disk going bad should probably be an early warning that you're likely to see the other disks start to fail soon too (so don't hang about waiting to replace the dead one!)
Yeah, the upsides of such a tie are obvious, but the real question might be: why is this option so dominant in the US as compared, for example, to Europe?
Probably because in Europe the carriers have been regulated. For example, a carrier is *required* to unlock a customer's phone if that customer asks them to do so, so long as the customer isn't still tied into the contract. This means that other carriers can take advantage of this by offering cheap SIM-only deals and advertise them as "bring your existing phone to our network and save money" - that's something that fundamentally could never happen if it wasn't easy for someone to unlock their phone. SIM-only deals from a few carriers means competition for all carriers, so everyone starts offering SIM-only deals and the focus is taken off subsidised phones a bit because it is now pretty obvious to the public that tied contracts aren't the only way to do things.
If I had to pay the up-front $700 cost of the latest-greatest smartphone, I'd never do it. When it's only $200, I can generally scrape that together.
So basically, you're saying that you don't have any financial management abilities and you would therefore prefer to pay something like $1400 spread over 2 years for a $700 phone, rather than waiting a year before you upgrade, saving up $700 and buying upfront.
Tied plans are hiding the true costs of the smartphones Americans buy, which is encouraging high-end sales. We all essentially have our next phone on layaway.
This seems to be pretty accurate - tied plans are basically a scam to ensure people don't realise how much they are spending, because then sales would slow down as people realise that holding onto their perfectly good old phone for an extra year or two is a pretty good way of saving money.
Now ask yourself this, if you buy the phone outright.... Does your plan go down?
Umm, yes... yes it does - my phone service costs me under £3 a month on a PAYG contract. The phone itself was about £200 up-front. Over 2 years that works out at somewhere around £11/month - on a subsidised tariff I would expect to be paying £25/month or more over 2 years. And of course, I will keep using the phone until I actually have a need to replace it, so the actual cost is far lower. Also, I got the phone I wanted rather than having to choose from the limited selection the MNO offered.
Please tell me, are there still major issues in Europe with roaming fees when crossing borders? The American carriers might suck but on the other hand they serve a way larger area.
The roaming fees are pretty low, and later this year are being abolished entirely across the EU.
Of course, the carriers still charge insane fees for roaming outside the EU (I was in Canada earlier in the year and it would have been £6/MB for data, compared to the £0.01/MB I pay domestically), and as such you'd be insane to pay them (roaming data was turned off on my phone the whole time I was there - far better to just use free public wifi).
It was impossible to do this until the past 2-3 years.
Untrue.
In 2004 I bought my last subsidised phone - a Sony Ericsson P900. And the only reason I did this was because there was a loophole in the Orange contracts that meant I could get it dirt cheap by getting it on an expensive tariff and then change to a cheap tariff after the first month (they closed this loophole shortly after). My next phone was an HTC Dream in 2009, bought used off eBay. On Three's PAYG tariff that worked out pretty cheap. When the HTC Dream died in 2012, I imported a Samsung Captivate Glide and just swapped my Three SIM into it.
So the option to buy a handset and put it on a tariff of your choice has been there for years, if you actually look. But almost no one *advertises* off-contract handsets, so a lot of people don't even realise that you can do this, so they get a standard subsidised handset on, what they seem to think, is a good deal because they pay a low low upfront price and then a fixed monthly fee which gives them way more inclusive minutes/texts/data than they are ever going to use. If they had actually investigated their options, a lot of people would've realised that it was cheaper for them to buy a handset and put a PAYG SIM in it, because they're never *really* going to use those 10,000 minutes per month that they would've got with the subsidised phone.
Then, after 1-2 years, the MNO writes to their customer to say they can get a "free" (or low price) upgrade if they renew their contract, and you'd be stupid to turn down "free", right? Again, people don't investigate their options - if they did they would often realise it would be better to stick with their existing phone and move it onto a cheaper tariff.
And of course, no one in the industry wants to change this - the MNOs are making lots of money through these overpriced contracts, the phone vendors love the fact that everyone chucks away their perfectly good phone every 2 years and gets a replacement, and the customers usually don't know any better.
I guess add to that that for some crazy reason, phones are seen as a status symbol and therefore everyone's always got to have a brand new phone. TBH, from my perspective, the more recent phones don't seem anywhere near as good as the older ones, so I am loath to "upgrade" my phone. The HTC Dream may have been slow, but the form factor was fantastic; the Samsung Captivate Glide that I replaced it with is verging on the "slightly too big" side and the keyboard isn't anywhere near as nice to use; If I had to upgrade now, I'd be hard pressed to find anything to replace it with - none of the current phones have hard keyboards at all and screen sizes seem to have become stupid - everyone seems to be competing to be the first to make a phone that's even less likely to fit in your pocket/hand than their competetor's. Yes, the internals of phones are getting way better, but the form factors are far worse.
=Their experimental task, get the 1st stage to 0 velocity at 0 m so it would softly settle on the ocean was a success.
Most falling objects tend to get to about 0 velocity at 0m:)
Anyway, I can't help but think that it would've been smart to eject a floating lump of flash memory before the rocket sank rather than relying on a live radio link.
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What aspect of coal compares to this? Reactor core materials found almost 500 km from Fukushima plant -- 40,000,000,000,000,000,000 Bq/kg
The first thing that springs to mind is that whoever wrote that was intentionally trying to make the numbers look big and scary. Quoting "Bq/Kg" in a situation where you're talking about nanograms of material seems pretty disingenuous.
As for the "what aspect of coal comparest to this" point - the fact that coal fired power stations are *all* *routinely* chucking toxic particulates and gasses into the atmosphere *all the time*, compared to a whole 2 major radiological disasters relating to nuclear power.
So sure, you can quote big numbers demonstrating that traces of radioactive materials are detectable a few hundred Km from the second biggest nuclear disaster, but its quite another thing to determine that they have more detremental effects than the tons and tons of crap emitted from fossil powerstations globally on a daily basis.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying that nuclear power is all rainbows and unicorns, but I am saying that we have to get our power from somewhere, and all the other feasable power sources seem to be far worse in the long term.
Which one creates waste that will be hazardous to all biota, 20,000 years from now?
How about "both"? The planet could easilly take 20,000 years or more to recover from a runaway greenhouse effect caused by burning fossil fuels. The thing you haven't accounted for is that we routinely reprocess nuclear waste and contain what's left (well, everyone except the US seems to be doing a reasonable job at this anyway), whilst we don't do the same for fossil waste. Sure, in a few thousand years, if someone/something stumbles across a stash of vitrified nuclear waste they're probably going to have a bad day, but at least it isn't all floating around in the atmosphere to affect the whole planet.
I personally love hydro.
Which, as mentioned, isn't feasable everywhere (due to geography) and wipes out vast areas of land. If you're in a good location for it then sure, go for it, but you can't expect everyone on the planet to use something that only works in certain locations.
Incorrect. most manual transmission cars in recent history have an interlock where the clutch must be depressed all the way to engage the ignition circuit.
Not one I've ever driven. Of the vehicles I regularly drive (1998 VW Transporter, 2003 Toyota MR2 Spyder, 2005 Peugeot 207), not one of them has such an interlock, nor have any of the (more modern) courtesy cars I've driven.
You've had to hold down the clutch to start manual transmission cars for years.
Its certainly good practice to do so, but nothing forces you to.
FYI, you can still switch it to the position to run the accessories and not start he engine. Just don't step on the brake, then press the button once, and you'll get just the radio.
Why the hell do we have to have these obscure geastures like "turn on the ignition while holding down the brake" and "turn on the ignition while winding down the window" to do various things instead of having a simple multiposition switch (possibly a key switch)?
Car designers seem to be taking cues from computer UI designers - hide away options so they are completely non-discoverable instead of making them obvious (have you noticed that a lot of software no longer tells you the short cuts in the menus? They just expect you do know somehow).
US issues are many. Hanford, Los Alamos, Oak ridge, etc? The job did not get done. It is part of the legacy, fair or not. There is no facility for storing spent NPP fuel. 50, 60 years into the thing, no US place to put the fuel. They did not get it done. SFPs are dangerously full, past their design basis, and vulnerable.
Ok, so the US hasn't got its shit together... but a lot of the rest of the world seems to do ok at this stuff and yet public opinion is frequently against nuclear.
Chernobyl, Fukushima. You folks may never go home. An acceptable risk? These are legit, open questions that have nothing to do with politics/ideology, or unfounded fears.
Again, you're not comparing nuclear against all the other options - you're just citing reasons why nuclear is bad without looking to see how bad the alternatives are. We've got to get our power from somewhere, so instead of saying "this is bad", start saying "this is worse than..." and "this is better than..." - certainly none of the options are perfect.
Chernobyl: very very few casualties, 30Km exclusion zone for a few decades, short term global pollution.
Fukushima: practically no casualties, 20Km exclusion zone for a few decades, very little global pollution.
Three Mile Island: everything went to shit, but there were basically no casualties and practically no local pollution.
Polution from coal power: millions of people affected by lung diseases, greenhouse emissions threatening to put vast swathes of the planet at risk of flooding, drought, famine, damaging winds, large scale extinctions, and the occasional acute environmental disaster.
Gas power is a bit better, but the greenhouse emissions are still there and the jury is still out on the environmental effects of fracking.
Oil: again, greenhouse emissions and the occasional spill causing untold environmental damage.
Hydro is only available in certain areas and floods vast areas of land.
Geothermal is great, but not feasible in most areas.
Wind and solar can't provide reliable power or baseload production - I think they have their place, but probably for jobs that can vary their capacity to suit the amount of power available, such as producing synthetic hydrocarbon fuels for use in cars, planes, etc.
To my mind, whilst there are certainly drawbacks to nuclear, it seems to be better than most alternatives and a lot of the problems, such as waste management, are largely solvable with suitable investment and regulation. Its also worth noting that Chernobyl was a reactor design that was never considered safe enough to build in the west being operated in a criminally dangerous manor, and Fukushima was an old reactor design with inadiquate tsunami protection - lets stop being scared of nuclear and start building some new, safer plants to replace the old ones that are well past due for decomissioning.
That is not acceptable, it must not happen, period. There is no room for error.
"No room for error" is a fallacy. Errors happen - the trick is to design everything so that when errors happen and the shit hits the fan, everything fails as safely as possible.
A/V kit
You don't have to replace it all at once.
Well yes, thanks to the DRM, you do. Pretty much all Bluray players require an HDCP compatible TV, so whilst you might have a perfectly good TV you're going to have to replace it in order to use Bluray. Given that TVs last upwards of 10-15 years, expecting people to replace their TV just to comply with some bogus DRM policy seems a bit much.
Gee, with a PS3 you can even output video to SD and the audio to digital optical.
Ok, I don't have a PS3, have absolutely zero interest in playing PS3 games, and why would I spend money to replace a SD DVD player with an SD Bluray player? No one is going to replace equipment for absolutely no personal benefit - I guess the assumption that people are going to jump through the media industry's hoops for no/little benefit is probably a good reason why Bluray never took off. Also, spending money on something that can be blacklisted at the whims of the content industry isn't exactly something I'm interested in doing.
Yes, because the ability to burn on 100s of CDs for cheap is what people want the most when they want to watch a movie quickly and easily.
Indeed not. And with the proliferation of cheap, large, USB flash drives I would certainly expect to see blank DVDs start to vanish.
You know why Bluray is dying? I don't have to drive to some store, stand in line, and buy something for an outrageous sum of money. If I want to watch a movie with streaming, all I have to do is sit down on my couch and watch it.
That's certainly not why I don't buy Bluray discs... I don't mind driving to some store and standing in line because "some store" is probably either the supermarket where I was already buying my groceries anyway, or somewhere like Amazon where I don't actually have to go anywhere. The reason why I'm not interested in Bluray is basically because I want media to Just Work - that means no jumping through DRM hoops, no having to sit through unskippable crap before the movie, no having to deal with region coding, no having to unduly replace existing equipment and an expectation that in a few years time I can pick up a movie I bought and have it still Just Work.
And FWIW, downloading doesn't really help there either: I still have to wait for the download to happen (in a few years' time this won't be an issue, but for now internet connections too slow for this); I'm stuck with compatibility problems due to the DRM that is employed (no, I'm not going to buy a new computer running some specific software or a new smart TV just to play movies); and I have zero expectation that a movie I buy today is still going to be playable in a few years time.
About the only technology that actually seems sensible is the DVD - it's not HD but frankly, if the movie you're watching has any kind of worthwhile story you probably won't even notice.
I still don't understand how Sony had a format that was better than anything else on the market, existing economies of scale that would have made it possible to sell it for less than anything else on the market, and still failed.
Bad management. It basically comes down to the same thing each time with Sony: they try to retain as much control as possible over a format, rather than just throwing it out to the market and letting people use it how they want. Of course you're not going to do well when you tell a big chunk of your potential customers that you're not interested in their use cases or money.
I suspect the subscription/library model will have a kind of "golden age" as bandwidth gets good enough and there are only a tiny number of different libraries to subscribe to, but in the long run the most likely positions seem to be market fragmentation (you have to subscribe to several libraries, and your favourite shows might jump around between them) or consolidating into a near-monopoly (with the natural tendency to then push prices up). Neither is good for consumers
Or you regulate to prevent exclusivity deals between the content producers and the content distributors/libraries. That way you can watch the same content from several libraries, so you get to choose based on price, quality of service, etc.
These days, I just want to go to the supermarket, buy a movie, watch it, stick it on my book shelf and rewatch it in 15 years' time. The choices seem to be:
- DVD: might not be the highest resolution, but it works and if the story is good you don't notice the lack of HD anyway.
- BluRay: DRM that would require me to replace perfectly functional equipment (which isn't going to happen - I have better uses for that money), and would subject me to unskippable copyright warnings and trailers. Also, looking up the BD+ specifications, things stick out such as content producers being able to execute "native code" on the player, which falls into the "Just... no, not ever!" category for me. Also the danger that my player's AACS keys would be blacklisted, etc. Also, region restrictions...
- Streaming: the quality isn't great, and I'm going to need a reliable internet connection (so no watching it on the train). But more importantly - I don't get to buy content, only rent it for a limited time. In 15 years time I can't go back and watch something I already bought because chances are it won't be available any more in the library (or I would've been required to pay an ongoing subscription in order to access the content I already bought). And again, region restrictions...
- Illegal downloading: I don't really subscribe to the idea that you should download illegally if you don't agree with the existing distribution models; although I have some leeway here on downloading content that just plain isn't available in your region (since there can be no economic harm to the content producer in this case).
So basically, all this boils down to me continuing to buy stuff on DVD (and my media player automatically skips over the copyright warnings and unskippable trailers). Make BluRay so that I can buy it and have it Just Work without any DRM hassles and I would probably be buying content in that format instead of DVD, but I simply don't want to have the faff of jumping through their hoops, so I don't.
I could actually play them legally, I might buy BluRay stuff
You can play them legally, on a Blu-Ray player.
Yes, I can play them legally by replacing lots of my A/V kit at a large expense to myself, which, you know, I'm not gonna do (I can buy a whole lot of DVDs for that expense, or more likely just spend the money on something more entertaining than sitting at home watching some rehashed remakes). If you produce content in a format that artificially prevents me from using my existing equipment to watch, you can expect me to not buy your format; *especially* where replacing my equipment would force me to sit through copyright warnings, trailers, etc. on media that I bought.
TL;DR - if I can can buy a movie from the local supermarket for a few pounds then I might do that for some cheap entertainment; if I have to spend hundreds of pounds replacing perfectly good equipment in order to watch a movie then I'm sure I can find something more worthwhile to spend that money on.
I'm sure there are dozens of alternatives other than burying it like a turd in the back yard. Unfortunately it looks like burying it and hoping it solves the problem is the best alternative at this time.
AFAIK the long term plan isn't "bury it" - the new containment is designed to contain dust while work is going on to desconstruct the reactor. There are cranes and things built into the new structure for this purpose.
The problem of popular opinion about nuclear is a symptom of cheap fossil fuels. Give people a little energy scarcity and they'll warm right up to nuclear. Until then they'll indulge the the nuclear hysteria they've been trained with.
Popular opinion is largely due to the disproportionate amount of attention dedicated to radiological pollution. In the nuclear industry, waste is routinely kept out of the environment as much as possible and any leaks are a big media story that makes out that many people are going to die (in actual fact, the health impact of even big nuclear disasters doesn't seem that great). On the other hand, other industries such as coal fired power stations routinely just dump much of their pollution directly into the atmosphere where it is forgotten about - there are no headline stories about a coal power station's pollution killing many people (as it certainly does) because it's routine rather than a big one-off event.
Its basically like comparing the safety of air travel to the safety of driving your car - driving a car is pretty dangerous, and people get killed routinely so there are few big news stories about it. Air travel is relatively safe and accidents happen so infrequently that on the odd occasion it does there's a media circus around it that fuel a lot of peoples' fear of flying.
What!?!?!?
Are you actually serious? I want to not only live but live to be old and see my kids have kids. I don't want to shave off a bunch of years because I'm inconvenient to some polluter.
However, you need to treat all polluters equally - what's the point of making a relatively clean nuclear power station more expensive than a dirty coal fired power station just because the pollution regulations are far stricter? I'm not saying we should allow the nuclear industry to just pump their waste into the atmosphere like the coal industry does, but there does seem to be a disconnect there that doesn't seem to be in the public's best interest...
Successful Sony Formats...
+ CD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
+ Blu-ray http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
CDs were invented by Phillips, not Sony. And Blu-Ray owes a large part of its success to Sony bundling players with Play Stations.
Still, if they weren't DRMed to hell and I could actually play them legally, I might buy BluRay stuff... but for now I stick with DVDs.
Couldn't you just drop a container into the ocean, one with only two openings - one with your membrane for salt water in, the other opening for desalinated water out? The deeper you put it, the more pressure outside the container that pushes the salt water through your membrane. Then you could use a low power pump to slowly remove the clean water through a hose attached to the other opening.
You won't get very far with a "low power pump" - if you sink your container down to, say, 500 metres then you have 500 metres of water pressure surrounding it, but you also have to lift 500 metres of water depth back to the surface.
Nobody mentions ZFS? The only thing that can concievably survive an accidental dd followed by an accidental rm -rf?
And still, you'd be stupid to not have a proper backup since you're screwed if (a) you end up with massive filesystem corruption (software bug, hardware failure, etc. or (b) your server catches fire (or similar failure that physically destroys all your disks).
We have had RAID failure twice now. The idea is that even with things like SMART, the errors in the second disk (or 3rd etc) don't become apparent till you try and recover and thrash the disk properly.
The other reason why RAID isn't a backup is because it doesn't account for software/human failures - good luck recovering your data from a RAID after accidentally running "rm -rf /", whereas time indexed backups will allow you to go back a few days/weeks/months and recover your data after you discover it's not on the disk any more.
RAID is there to keep systems running in the event of a hardware failure - its no substitute for a backup.
Anyway, the errors on the disks should become apparent during their operation because you should be doing regular scrubs to find the errors. Putting the data somewhere, forgetting about it and not actually checking its still there for a few years is a pretty good recipe for disaster no matter how you store it. That said, I've seen a few cases where a drive fails, and the increased load on the other (similar age) disks sends another over the edge soon after, so one disk going bad should probably be an early warning that you're likely to see the other disks start to fail soon too (so don't hang about waiting to replace the dead one!)
Yeah, the upsides of such a tie are obvious, but the real question might be: why is this option so dominant in the US as compared, for example, to Europe?
Probably because in Europe the carriers have been regulated. For example, a carrier is *required* to unlock a customer's phone if that customer asks them to do so, so long as the customer isn't still tied into the contract. This means that other carriers can take advantage of this by offering cheap SIM-only deals and advertise them as "bring your existing phone to our network and save money" - that's something that fundamentally could never happen if it wasn't easy for someone to unlock their phone. SIM-only deals from a few carriers means competition for all carriers, so everyone starts offering SIM-only deals and the focus is taken off subsidised phones a bit because it is now pretty obvious to the public that tied contracts aren't the only way to do things.
If I had to pay the up-front $700 cost of the latest-greatest smartphone, I'd never do it. When it's only $200, I can generally scrape that together.
So basically, you're saying that you don't have any financial management abilities and you would therefore prefer to pay something like $1400 spread over 2 years for a $700 phone, rather than waiting a year before you upgrade, saving up $700 and buying upfront.
Tied plans are hiding the true costs of the smartphones Americans buy, which is encouraging high-end sales. We all essentially have our next phone on layaway.
This seems to be pretty accurate - tied plans are basically a scam to ensure people don't realise how much they are spending, because then sales would slow down as people realise that holding onto their perfectly good old phone for an extra year or two is a pretty good way of saving money.
Now ask yourself this, if you buy the phone outright.... Does your plan go down?
Umm, yes... yes it does - my phone service costs me under £3 a month on a PAYG contract. The phone itself was about £200 up-front. Over 2 years that works out at somewhere around £11/month - on a subsidised tariff I would expect to be paying £25/month or more over 2 years. And of course, I will keep using the phone until I actually have a need to replace it, so the actual cost is far lower. Also, I got the phone I wanted rather than having to choose from the limited selection the MNO offered.
Please tell me, are there still major issues in Europe with roaming fees when crossing borders? The American carriers might suck but on the other hand they serve a way larger area.
The roaming fees are pretty low, and later this year are being abolished entirely across the EU.
Of course, the carriers still charge insane fees for roaming outside the EU (I was in Canada earlier in the year and it would have been £6/MB for data, compared to the £0.01/MB I pay domestically), and as such you'd be insane to pay them (roaming data was turned off on my phone the whole time I was there - far better to just use free public wifi).
It was impossible to do this until the past 2-3 years.
Untrue.
In 2004 I bought my last subsidised phone - a Sony Ericsson P900. And the only reason I did this was because there was a loophole in the Orange contracts that meant I could get it dirt cheap by getting it on an expensive tariff and then change to a cheap tariff after the first month (they closed this loophole shortly after). My next phone was an HTC Dream in 2009, bought used off eBay. On Three's PAYG tariff that worked out pretty cheap. When the HTC Dream died in 2012, I imported a Samsung Captivate Glide and just swapped my Three SIM into it.
So the option to buy a handset and put it on a tariff of your choice has been there for years, if you actually look. But almost no one *advertises* off-contract handsets, so a lot of people don't even realise that you can do this, so they get a standard subsidised handset on, what they seem to think, is a good deal because they pay a low low upfront price and then a fixed monthly fee which gives them way more inclusive minutes/texts/data than they are ever going to use. If they had actually investigated their options, a lot of people would've realised that it was cheaper for them to buy a handset and put a PAYG SIM in it, because they're never *really* going to use those 10,000 minutes per month that they would've got with the subsidised phone.
Then, after 1-2 years, the MNO writes to their customer to say they can get a "free" (or low price) upgrade if they renew their contract, and you'd be stupid to turn down "free", right? Again, people don't investigate their options - if they did they would often realise it would be better to stick with their existing phone and move it onto a cheaper tariff.
And of course, no one in the industry wants to change this - the MNOs are making lots of money through these overpriced contracts, the phone vendors love the fact that everyone chucks away their perfectly good phone every 2 years and gets a replacement, and the customers usually don't know any better.
I guess add to that that for some crazy reason, phones are seen as a status symbol and therefore everyone's always got to have a brand new phone. TBH, from my perspective, the more recent phones don't seem anywhere near as good as the older ones, so I am loath to "upgrade" my phone. The HTC Dream may have been slow, but the form factor was fantastic; the Samsung Captivate Glide that I replaced it with is verging on the "slightly too big" side and the keyboard isn't anywhere near as nice to use; If I had to upgrade now, I'd be hard pressed to find anything to replace it with - none of the current phones have hard keyboards at all and screen sizes seem to have become stupid - everyone seems to be competing to be the first to make a phone that's even less likely to fit in your pocket/hand than their competetor's. Yes, the internals of phones are getting way better, but the form factors are far worse.
=Their experimental task, get the 1st stage to 0 velocity at 0 m so it would softly settle on the ocean was a success.
Most falling objects tend to get to about 0 velocity at 0m :)
Anyway, I can't help but think that it would've been smart to eject a floating lump of flash memory before the rocket sank rather than relying on a live radio link.
Maybe they should have transmitted to an airplane instead?
English... learn it some time.
WTF is a chemist? Was this Adams guy a meth head?
English... learn it some time.