... I wouldn't have known that the article I was reading was even remotely linked to the case I had spent the day watching. It was that far removed from reality.
Try listening to a Congressional hearing on C-SPAN and then read whatever the newspapers write about it the next day. It's like someone condensed War and Peace into Goodnight Moon.
If your audience is highly technical, and knowledgeable in the field then speak the language. If they are not, then bring it down to their level. It's common sense.
Not everything can be dumbed down. And not everything should be dumbed down.
Here's a lengthy rant from Richard Feynman when being asked about magnets (how do they work?) Watch the first minute, then skip to 3m 56s He more or less says that some questions are too complicated to be explained in terms "that you're more familiar with".
Buckyballs and Buckycubes got banned because they're the only company that managed to muscle their way into the lucrative distribution channels that feed brick and mortar stores.
If this product was so wildly dangerous, the Consumer Product Safety Commission would be forcing all the other manufacturers of rare earth magnet toys to shut down as well. Other manufacturers: nanodots, neocube, zen magnets/neoballs, cybercube, and the generics from china.
Why do we operate nuclear reactors for over 40 years?
Because the NRC keeps weakining the regulatory standards so it can continue to extend their operating licenses.
The nuclear power industry does not prioritize safety. Their insurance is ~$860k per year for $375 million in private insurance per reactor. In case of a disaster, they are limited by statute to $111.9 million per reactor. After that, the government covers the rest. Talk about your perverse incentives.
We probably don't have to worry about his however the in-service upgrades and retrofits required to bring a 40 year plant up to modern standards are very likely to require shutting down and de-fueling the reactor, x-raying every possible weld, replacing all of the controls, inspecting and/or replacing thousands of valves, switches, solenoids, etc., some of which are inaccessible. The costs of such a retrofit program is likely to exceed the cost of building a new reactor.
Radioactive tritium has leaked from three-quarters [48 of 65] of U.S. commercial nuclear power sites, often into groundwater from corroded, buried piping, an Associated Press investigation shows.
The number and severity of the leaks has been escalating, even as federal regulators extend the licenses of more and more reactors across the nation.
And if you RTFA, you'll notice that instead of bringing plants up to "modern standards," the NRC just keeps loosening the safety standards so these run down nuclear plants will pass inspection.
The biggest disasters for each, though, are from relatively young plants: Chernobyl, 3 years after completion of the reactor, ~9,000 dead; and Banqiao Dam, 23 years after completion, ~171,000 dead.
Are you trolling or are you serious?
A flawed Chinese dam made out of clay, with inadequate safety features, which had to be repaired immediately after it finished construction, survived for 20 years until it failed during a once-in-2000-years flood (it was designed for a once-in-1000-years flood), because its inadequate number of sluice gates were blocked up with 20 years of sediment and the operators didn't get multiple messages to open the dam and multiple upstream dams failed in short succession sending a huge surge of water downstream. Fuck. That right there is the plot for a disaster movie.
Chernobyl was a broken design from the start and the Soviets blew its top by prodding at the design flaw while trying to fix it. These examples you've provided are not the same and neither supports any claim by you or the GP. A dam is not a nuclear reactor.
It's enough that if I meet anyone out in the real world (not on Slashdot) I can take either side of the debate and crush them with my collection of facts. All I have to do is say, "The oceans have been rising clearly for the last five years" and it will drive a Republican crazy. Or for Democrats, "Al Gore flies a private jet." They go off in a ranty cloud of confusion.
Umm... one of these facts is not like the other. I also like to know enough to argue both sides of a contentious issue, but "Al Gore flies a private jet." is more ad hominem, less scientific fact.
I'm not sure what your point is. I really wonder who thinks the comparison between a huge chunk of steel reinforced concrete and the corrosive environment of a nuclear reactor is somehow insightful.
Ultimately, a dam's lifespan is determined by the build up of silt behind it. The Hoover dam will be put to rest when either the silt builds up high enough or the cost to maintain it is higher than the cost to remove it. Whichever comes first.
People in universities are talking a lot about is the "flipped classroom", which means the lecture is online and clarification and working of problems occur in the classroom.
This assumes students are motivated enough to sit down and do the online portion outside of a structured school environment. My anecdotal experience is that this assumption will be false for the majority of students.
I stopped reading right there. Next time you drive on a public highway, try to remember that the government produces something. Even if it's just the highway infrastructure that lets your online shopping orders get to your home.
I hope your ideology makes you happy, but when it clashes with reality, I'm going to stick with reality.
The hacker community and USG cyber community share some core values: we both see the Internet as an immensely positive force; we both believe information increases in value by sharing; we both respect protection of privacy and civil liberties; we both believe in the need for oversight that fosters innovation, doesnâ(TM)t pick winners and losers, and retains freedom and flexibility; we both oppose malicious and criminal behavior. We should build on this common ground because we have a shared responsibility to secure cyberspace.
Since when does the NSA respect privacy? From MINARET and SHAMROCK to ECHELON, Stellar Wind, and warrantless wiretapping, they've done nothing but disrespect privacy.
Shit. FISA was passed into law specifically because the NSA was spying on Americans. And then Bush came along and did his best to piss all over the minimal protections provided by FISA And Congress helped by giving retroactive immunity to the Telecoms for illegally enabling the NSA's surveillance.
The Director of the NSA is in for a tough time if he's really going to claim that the NSA respects privacy.
Then they predicted another bubble based on housing before it happened, and while it was going-on they predicted it would burst and crash the economy.
The Austrian school pushes laissez faire markets. You know what caused the housing bubble and ensuing credit crisis? Deregulation. Which is what the Austrians keep pushing.
The Austrian school of economics gets some things right. Those things have been absorbed into the other economic schools. Everything that's left over is considered "bad public policy" no matter how hard the Mises Institute pushes it.
I also believe Japan has/had one of the worlds highest saving rates while interest rates there have been zero for decades.
After the tsunami, there were endless stories of people finding massive wads of cash and turning it in to the police. Where'd the wads of cash come from? Japanese homes.
The Japanese people have the highest savings rate, but they save it in cash. The zero interest rate and a nationwide distrust of banks means these people store their life savings at home.
Some may call drone strikes terrorism but I do not. In my mind the difference is intent. The intent of a drone strike is to eliminate the training and control structure of a organization whose main goal is to inflict damage on the Western World.
[Citation Needed] There are lots of organizations and only a few of them have the goal of inflicting damage on the Western World. Many of the "terrorist groups" did not exist before 9/11/01 and are resistance forces, with goals limited to either their nation's borders or the broader defense of islamic states.
Failing to use a nuanced view of geopolitics is a recipe for disaster. And your notion of what's going on is amazingly black and white.
The fact that drones sometimes miss and usually kill possibly innocent people does not change the intent. How many terrorist commanders are deliberately staying in civilian areas to try to protect themselves. Should we allow enemy commanders to use human shields? It is well known that the US will take out and al-Qaeda leader they find. It is up to the al-Qaeda leader to decide whose lives are put at risk by being close by. How many of the "innocent civilians" are actually supplying and supporting terrorists or possibly terrorists themselves?
FFS. If this was happening to your country, would you be so dispassionate about the death of your friends and family?
Go watch Rambo III (1988). He's playing buzkashi with the locals in Pakistan, when two Soviet attack helicopters kill almost everyone in the village. Rambo says something 80s like "It's my war now" and then goes into Afghanistan to rescue his old boss and kick the entire Soviet Army's ass. Replace "Soviets" with "USA" and you'll understand why so many in the Middle East are pissed off at having their villages bombed by drones.
I've actually had quite well educated and otherwise intelligent Muslims lay down the 'you cannot understand the Koran except in Arabic' line on me. Its a logical fallacy.
It's really not that far fetched to claim a translation will not do justice to the original language. I'd even argue that reading a really old book without annotations, even in the original language, means you're going to miss out on important context that is assumed, suggested, or implied.
Just as an example: Jewish scholars spend decades studying the Talmud in its original Hebrew and Aramaic. What makes you think a translation will allow for the same kind of understanding?
Can we put a breeder reactor on Mars? That would certainly resolve the issue of refueling and would give Martians long term energy security. And I can't imagine we'd need to worry about nuclear proliferation or dirty bombs on Mars.
If you use rigid cuffs, with hands behind the back, and palms facing away from each other, escaping from handcuffs requires either a contortionist or someone willing/able to dislocate joints.
Rigid cuffs make life a lot harder for anyone trying to get out of cuffs.
The entire OS would reside in ROM and when it was time for an upgrade I'd burn a new chip. Expensive? Not as expensive as having 1.5 billion dollars worth of research hacked. I don't think network security is nearly paranoid enough.
What makes you think you're going to write an OS without a single security flaw that could be exploited? Burning it to ROM is just ensuring the exploit lingers in the wild longer than it should.
Saying that corporations are dangerous is incorrect. Corporations are only dangerous with government power, reduce government power and you reduce any damage that corporations can do to nothing.
I'm sorry Darkness404, but you hold an extremely flawed view of the world.
So explain to me the harm that a corporation has in a free market.
That's easy, just look at a time in history when the USA had a truly free market, with barely any government interference. Corporations were polluting, abusing their employees, hiring children to work 12 hour shifts, not providing a safe working environment, etc etc etc. None of this should be news to you. Hell, black lung disease is making a comeback in coal mining country. Why? Because there's no enforcement of regulation and it's cheaper for the mining corp to not fix their safety equipment.
I suspect the problem with your worldview is that it conflates free markets with competitive markets. History shows us that these are not the same thing.
The problem is not how these laws are being pushed. The problem is the content of these copyright laws.
Lamar Smith (R-TX) obviously thinks that the copyright lobbyists are his constituents and not the masses of citizens which protested and sank PIPA (Patrick Leahy (D-VT)) which in turn lead directly to SOPAs death
that it isn't a guy with a gun or a club doesn't mean there isn't a war, and it wasn't started by the poor and middle class
It was most certainly started by the poor and middle class. Over 100 years ago as a matter of fact! That's when the riff raff started demanding things like: clean drinking water, uncontaminated food, weekends off and a 40 hour work week, safe working conditions, an end to child labor, decent wages, and an endless list of similar profit killing demands.
Slashdot Mirror
... I wouldn't have known that the article I was reading was even remotely linked to the case I had spent the day watching. It was that far removed from reality.
Try listening to a Congressional hearing on C-SPAN and then read whatever the newspapers write about it the next day.
It's like someone condensed War and Peace into Goodnight Moon.
If your audience is highly technical, and knowledgeable in the field then speak the language. If they are not, then bring it down to their level. It's common sense.
Not everything can be dumbed down.
And not everything should be dumbed down.
Here's a lengthy rant from Richard Feynman when being asked about magnets (how do they work?)
Watch the first minute, then skip to 3m 56s
He more or less says that some questions are too complicated to be explained in terms "that you're more familiar with".
Buckyballs and Buckycubes got banned because they're the only company that managed to muscle their way into the lucrative distribution channels that feed brick and mortar stores.
If this product was so wildly dangerous, the Consumer Product Safety Commission would be forcing all the other manufacturers of rare earth magnet toys to shut down as well.
Other manufacturers: nanodots, neocube, zen magnets/neoballs, cybercube, and the generics from china.
Besides if the goal with electric cars is to be green, why waste so much power on transferring it wirelessly?
Because people are lazy and want things to Just Work.
Why do we operate nuclear reactors for over 40 years?
Because the NRC keeps weakining the regulatory standards so it can continue to extend their operating licenses.
The nuclear power industry does not prioritize safety.
Their insurance is ~$860k per year for $375 million in private insurance per reactor.
In case of a disaster, they are limited by statute to $111.9 million per reactor.
After that, the government covers the rest. Talk about your perverse incentives.
We probably don't have to worry about his however the in-service upgrades and retrofits required to bring a 40 year plant up to modern standards are very likely to require shutting down and de-fueling the reactor, x-raying every possible weld, replacing all of the controls, inspecting and/or replacing thousands of valves, switches, solenoids, etc., some of which are inaccessible. The costs of such a retrofit program is likely to exceed the cost of building a new reactor.
You're talking about how things should be, here's how things are:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43475479/ns/us_news-environment/t/radioactive-tritium-leaks-found-us-nuke-sites/
Radioactive tritium has leaked from three-quarters [48 of 65] of U.S. commercial nuclear power sites, often into groundwater from corroded, buried piping, an Associated Press investigation shows.
The number and severity of the leaks has been escalating, even as federal regulators extend the licenses of more and more reactors across the nation.
And if you RTFA, you'll notice that instead of bringing plants up to "modern standards," the NRC just keeps loosening the safety standards so these run down nuclear plants will pass inspection.
The biggest disasters for each, though, are from relatively young plants: Chernobyl, 3 years after completion of the reactor, ~9,000 dead; and Banqiao Dam, 23 years after completion, ~171,000 dead.
Are you trolling or are you serious?
A flawed Chinese dam made out of clay, with inadequate safety features, which had to be repaired immediately after it finished construction, survived for 20 years until it failed during a once-in-2000-years flood (it was designed for a once-in-1000-years flood), because its inadequate number of sluice gates were blocked up with 20 years of sediment and the operators didn't get multiple messages to open the dam and multiple upstream dams failed in short succession sending a huge surge of water downstream.
Fuck. That right there is the plot for a disaster movie.
Chernobyl was a broken design from the start and the Soviets blew its top by prodding at the design flaw while trying to fix it.
These examples you've provided are not the same and neither supports any claim by you or the GP.
A dam is not a nuclear reactor.
It's enough that if I meet anyone out in the real world (not on Slashdot) I can take either side of the debate and crush them with my collection of facts. All I have to do is say, "The oceans have been rising clearly for the last five years" and it will drive a Republican crazy. Or for Democrats, "Al Gore flies a private jet." They go off in a ranty cloud of confusion.
Umm... one of these facts is not like the other.
I also like to know enough to argue both sides of a contentious issue,
but "Al Gore flies a private jet." is more ad hominem, less scientific fact.
I'm not sure what your point is.
I really wonder who thinks the comparison between a huge chunk of steel reinforced concrete and the corrosive environment of a nuclear reactor is somehow insightful.
Ultimately, a dam's lifespan is determined by the build up of silt behind it.
The Hoover dam will be put to rest when either the silt builds up high enough or
the cost to maintain it is higher than the cost to remove it. Whichever comes first.
People in universities are talking a lot about is the "flipped classroom", which means the lecture is online and clarification and working of problems occur in the classroom.
This assumes students are motivated enough to sit down and do the online portion outside of a structured school environment.
My anecdotal experience is that this assumption will be false for the majority of students.
Government produces nothing.
I stopped reading right there.
Next time you drive on a public highway, try to remember that the government produces something.
Even if it's just the highway infrastructure that lets your online shopping orders get to your home.
I hope your ideology makes you happy, but when it clashes with reality, I'm going to stick with reality.
The hacker community and USG cyber community share some core values: we both see the Internet as an immensely positive force; we both believe information increases in value by sharing; we both respect protection of privacy and civil liberties; we both believe in the need for oversight that fosters innovation, doesnâ(TM)t pick winners and losers, and retains freedom and flexibility; we both oppose malicious and criminal behavior. We should build on this common ground because we have a shared responsibility to secure cyberspace.
Since when does the NSA respect privacy?
From MINARET and SHAMROCK to ECHELON, Stellar Wind, and warrantless wiretapping, they've done nothing but disrespect privacy.
Shit. FISA was passed into law specifically because the NSA was spying on Americans.
And then Bush came along and did his best to piss all over the minimal protections provided by FISA
And Congress helped by giving retroactive immunity to the Telecoms for illegally enabling the NSA's surveillance.
The Director of the NSA is in for a tough time if he's really going to claim that the NSA respects privacy.
We've already had a jobless recovery from the recession.
Why did anyone expect anything other than a future of jobless economic growth?
Worker productivity has been going up for so long, the only way to really get more profit/dollar is with robots.
Then they predicted another bubble based on housing before it happened, and while it was going-on they predicted it would burst and crash the economy.
The Austrian school pushes laissez faire markets.
You know what caused the housing bubble and ensuing credit crisis?
Deregulation. Which is what the Austrians keep pushing.
The Austrian school of economics gets some things right.
Those things have been absorbed into the other economic schools.
Everything that's left over is considered "bad public policy" no matter how hard the Mises Institute pushes it.
I also believe Japan has/had one of the worlds highest saving rates while interest rates there have been zero for decades.
After the tsunami, there were endless stories of people finding massive wads of cash and turning it in to the police.
Where'd the wads of cash come from? Japanese homes.
The Japanese people have the highest savings rate, but they save it in cash.
The zero interest rate and a nationwide distrust of banks means these people store their life savings at home.
Some may call drone strikes terrorism but I do not. In my mind the difference is intent. The intent of a drone strike is to eliminate the training and control structure of a organization whose main goal is to inflict damage on the Western World.
[Citation Needed]
There are lots of organizations and only a few of them have the goal of inflicting damage on the Western World.
Many of the "terrorist groups" did not exist before 9/11/01 and are resistance forces,
with goals limited to either their nation's borders or the broader defense of islamic states.
Failing to use a nuanced view of geopolitics is a recipe for disaster.
And your notion of what's going on is amazingly black and white.
The fact that drones sometimes miss and usually kill possibly innocent people does not change the intent. How many terrorist commanders are deliberately staying in civilian areas to try to protect themselves. Should we allow enemy commanders to use human shields? It is well known that the US will take out and al-Qaeda leader they find. It is up to the al-Qaeda leader to decide whose lives are put at risk by being close by. How many of the "innocent civilians" are actually supplying and supporting terrorists or possibly terrorists themselves?
FFS. If this was happening to your country, would you be so dispassionate about the death of your friends and family?
Go watch Rambo III (1988).
He's playing buzkashi with the locals in Pakistan, when two Soviet attack helicopters kill almost everyone in the village.
Rambo says something 80s like "It's my war now" and then goes into Afghanistan to rescue his old boss and kick the entire Soviet Army's ass.
Replace "Soviets" with "USA" and you'll understand why so many in the Middle East are pissed off at having their villages bombed by drones.
I've actually had quite well educated and otherwise intelligent Muslims lay down the 'you cannot understand the Koran except in Arabic' line on me. Its a logical fallacy.
Have you ever put 5 or 6 different translations of the bible side by side and compared them?
http://www.biblestudytools.com/exodus/1-8-compare.html
It's really not that far fetched to claim a translation will not do justice to the original language.
I'd even argue that reading a really old book without annotations, even in the original language,
means you're going to miss out on important context that is assumed, suggested, or implied.
Just as an example: Jewish scholars spend decades studying the Talmud in its original Hebrew and Aramaic.
What makes you think a translation will allow for the same kind of understanding?
Can we put a breeder reactor on Mars?
That would certainly resolve the issue of refueling and would give Martians long term energy security.
And I can't imagine we'd need to worry about nuclear proliferation or dirty bombs on Mars.
I've heard reports that thermal paste isn't normally very important.....
I would have thought [anything] would be better than nothing,
but apparently chocolate makes for a really bad thermal paste
If you use rigid cuffs, with hands behind the back, and palms facing away from each other,
escaping from handcuffs requires either a contortionist or someone willing/able to dislocate joints.
Rigid cuffs make life a lot harder for anyone trying to get out of cuffs.
The entire OS would reside in ROM and when it was time for an upgrade I'd burn a new chip. Expensive? Not as expensive as having 1.5 billion dollars worth of research hacked. I don't think network security is nearly paranoid enough.
What makes you think you're going to write an OS without a single security flaw that could be exploited?
Burning it to ROM is just ensuring the exploit lingers in the wild longer than it should.
Saying that corporations are dangerous is incorrect. Corporations are only dangerous with government power, reduce government power and you reduce any damage that corporations can do to nothing.
I'm sorry Darkness404, but you hold an extremely flawed view of the world.
So explain to me the harm that a corporation has in a free market.
That's easy, just look at a time in history when the USA had a truly free market, with barely any government interference.
Corporations were polluting, abusing their employees, hiring children to work 12 hour shifts, not providing a safe working environment, etc etc etc.
None of this should be news to you. Hell, black lung disease is making a comeback in coal mining country.
Why? Because there's no enforcement of regulation and it's cheaper for the mining corp to not fix their safety equipment.
I suspect the problem with your worldview is that it conflates free markets with competitive markets.
History shows us that these are not the same thing.
The problem is not how these laws are being pushed.
The problem is the content of these copyright laws.
Lamar Smith (R-TX) obviously thinks that the copyright lobbyists are his constituents
and not the masses of citizens which protested and sank PIPA (Patrick Leahy (D-VT))
which in turn lead directly to SOPAs death
Wasn't life + 90 years enough copyright?
The copyrighters already buttered the bread,
that's how the laws were enacted in the first place.
that it isn't a guy with a gun or a club doesn't mean there isn't a war, and it wasn't started by the poor and middle class
It was most certainly started by the poor and middle class.
Over 100 years ago as a matter of fact! That's when the riff raff started demanding things like:
clean drinking water, uncontaminated food, weekends off and a 40 hour work week,
safe working conditions, an end to child labor, decent wages, and an endless list of similar profit killing demands.
The nerve of "those people"