It could be - that's where things like the Hyperion reactors start to look good, especially the temporarily shelved uranium-hydride reactor design. You design the things to be sealed and self-regulating so that they can be dropped into a secure underground vault to replace the boiler at the power station. After a decade or so (depending on usage patterns) you shut it down, let it cool for a year or two, and send it back to the factory to be refurbished and refueled.
In essence it becomes a big nuclear battery, quite safe to operate and proliferation resistant since opening the reactor to extract the fuel requires heavy shielding and remote-operation equipment that, unlike a traditional refuelable reactor aren't available on-site.
And at $50 million/(70MW(heat)*10years) you're talking $0.008/kWh(heat), it actually compares well to coal at ($30~70/ton) / (6150kWh(heat)/ton) = $0.005~0.01 / kWh(heat), though obviously the fact that you've got to buy 10+ years of fuel up front complicates things a bit.
The real problem is that we only have enough Uranium to supply the world's current energy demands for 40-70 years, so we really need to start doing some serious research on Thorium reactors if we want to go nuclear. (For those that aren't aware, Thorium is about as common as lead, there's plenty to supply the world's energy needs for a few millenia, and it's distributed fairly evenly around the world so it's geopolitically a good choice too)
I addressed that too... Show me a working Hyperion or molten salt Thorium reactor!
All this tech is still in the research stage - do we wait for those, or build other sources that are closer to reality? Even if we started building one, how much time would it take to complete construction? Ten years? That seems about average for nuclear power...
Though China seemed to be able to pull something like it off so maybe there is hope?
China's is a slowing of the growth rate, not a contraction. And it comes with a (very high) price... That may not be a great model for the rest of the world!
Actually, switching to less tail-pipe emissions really would help...
As far as nuclear power's concerned, we can't afford to build the old designs (I mean 1st to 3rd generation stuff like Fukushima) anymore. We would need to use modern designs, which are often either experimental (molten salt, pebble bed,...) or expensive (Gen 3+ or Gen 4 PWRs). They also take years to build correctly! Can we really afford to wait?
My problem with nuclear power in India (yeah, I've got to come back to my country, after all) is that I know how crappy safety procedures can be here. The consequences of a methyl isocyanide leak in Bhopal was a toxic cloud that dissipated, and at least the area is still habitable. The consequences of a blowout in Kalpakkam would be that my city is irradiated.
I know how unlikely a blowout may be, but what about radiation leaks, or leaks of radioactive material? The coast on which that particular plant is situated provides seafood for a vast hinterland. A radiation leak there would work its way up the food chain into any fish-eaters in much of the state!
Not that I'm against nuclear power, but it has to be done correctly and responsibly. And it has to be done along with other methods like solar/wind, efficiency increases in the grid, or at the consumption end and so on.
It's not a turn-key solution. That's something that the nuclear drummers can't seem to wrap their brains around!
Whenever somebody comes up with this argument, the question that comes to mind is: "What do you intend to do though? Nuke China? Kill every child in the developing world?"
Don't forget, the third most populous country is the United States.
Like every other problem, it needs to be addressed correctly - family planning, birth control...
Anyway, both India and China have made quite a bit of progress in terms of birth rate: it's now down to about 2%, and the fertility rate is about 2-3 per woman, which is not too bad.
I don't know if you were around a few years ago when they tried blocking one or two Yahoo groups that were (supposedly) terrorist fronts, but ended up blocking all of Y-groups in a blanket order...
It's no longer a government department, but it's still a PSU, wholly owned by the government; you won't find it listed in a stock market anywhere soon...
I've tried both sites on both BSNL (DSL) and Airtel (mobile) - no blocks!
And recalling that the planet has faced quite a few mass extinctions, wiping out all the "progress" (I use the word guardedly, of course) that evolution had made upto that point, even if another planet started off at exactly the same time as us, its equivalent of the dinosaurs could have become sapient 65 billion years ago...
Actually, that would be true of most of Java's peers too - In C++, you'd be able to do this if you could somehow get the address of the private function (by looking at the binary's layout or whatever), and in C#, I think reflection allows you to do the same...
It's like hanging a curtain and saying "this is private", but someone can come along and rip it off and it's no longer private...
The reason I may be able to pay 40k over time is that I'd be earning, and it wouldn't make such a massive impact on one month's finances. That's the whole point of EMIs...
So it is with nuclear; we can't really afford to lose an area of 30km radius all at once. And even if other sources are more economically expensive over time, the costs can be borne over a longer period, which leaves head-room in the system for other projects.
...the trade minister said two reactors idled after the Fukushima disaster would not be back online before the last one currently operating is shut down
No, they're not going all non-nuclear. They're shutting down and doing an audit of each reactor. The first one to clear the audit and restart won't be able to restart until a few weeks after the last running one is shut down for the audit.
That's ALL! They're not abandoning all nuclear power, or anything like that. As others noted, they really don't have a choice except nuclear, currently, what with Tokyo's ~40000 megawatt requirements, on top of the whole train network. And that's without thinking of industry...
Suffice it to say that Japan can't go no-nuke for a while, even if they wanted to.
So that no commercial interest can benefit from your source code, thereby intentionally pushing the freeware / non-commercial approach, yes?
Yes.
I'm releasing something free - not just free, but giving you the right to play around with its innards, and all the tools to make it dance to your tune. My price for this is that any changes you make to it are made available to the rest of us.
Of course, if someone (RedHat, for example) are able to make a viable commercial business model around those restrictions, more power to them.
And all university research should always be permissive, so that it can be incorporated into either GPLed, proprietary or whatever else.
Thereby enabling all approaches equally, and may the best approach succeed. Well, that seems much more even handed, fair, and so forth.
So... if you want to do that with source code that comes from a university, why not with source code that comes from elsewhere, given that you're handing out the source code anyway? Did I miss a philosophical point here, or is your approach as contradictory as it looks?
Research work is not usually targeted to the end-user. The way I see it, the end user may have a choice between proprietary and free. But that option is not necessarily available for the users of libraries or research output. I want to be able to build both free and proprietary applications on top of libraries, but that option rarely exists for straight-up applications.
The best in this case would be LGPL-like licenses - share all modifications to the code itself, but anything built on top of it (merely using rather than modifying the library) is your domain. For applications, the probability of anyone building on top of it is much lower; GPL is better there, so that things don't get closed off.
Isn't it easy enough to see that all the licenses solve different problems?
Well, no, not really. Seems to me that the GPL causes a problem -- it creates a reserve of software that can't make it to the broader marketplace because it can't go commercial (because it can very easily convert what was private IP into public IP.) That's why when I write software that I intend to share, I never use the GPL.
The uptake of the Linux kernel hasn't really been affected by its being GPL (v2, but GPL), nor has the BSDL helped FreeBSD in the market. I think the commercial possibilities are orthogonal to market share.
When I want to write something to share, I intend that the recipient also shares alike, or at least negotiates back with me for the rights to not share (that would at least support me in making modifications to the product). I don't want to enable someone to just leech off my work and give nothing back.
PS: To the idiots who modded the parent flamebait: Flamebait is not short-hand for "I disagree". The two of us have a disagreement, but that's something debatable. Please stop abusing your mod points!
The way I'd do it is, GPL for applications, BSD/MIT/LGPL for libraries, depending on the level of participation, the commercial and legal aspects, etc. And all university research should always be permissive, so that it can be incorporated into either GPLed, proprietary or whatever else.
Generally agree, but I'd also give serious attention to the Apache License (2.0) for libraries. It's also fairly open, but also provides a patent license as well, and that's an important consideration what with all the trolls around. I think this is the only thing missing from the non-GPL licenses in your list.
Fair point. Apache 2.0 is probably even better than BSDL for most use cases where a permissive license is required.
Hmm, I don't think that particular question is relevant when the discussion is about Michael Mann or Gavin Schmidt. Whatever the cutoff is, they're definitely above it.
Similarly, the question doesn't even come into play for most of those who signed that obnoxious article in the WSJ - most of them even had a single paper published in the climate field (Lindzen was the exception).
Don't accept an argument from authority. I wouldn't, either. But the opposite is NOT argument from ignorance.
I wouldn't take Mann's word on something without verifying it, but the verification has to be done by someone who can understand the paper he published in the first place. A particle physicist or a mechanical engineer are not the best people to verify a paper in climate science. Someone with a better understanding of statistics, atmospheric science or similar fields would be a better bet...
I assume that the judge took a technicality because the other option was to allow a truly frivolous suit against Mann for basically doing a good job of being a scientist. They do that all the time.
The fact is that a politician misused his position to harass a climate scientist who produced some inconvenient studies, and the court decided that this wasn't going to stand.
Wow so you're claiming it's false? Really? You're not actually saying he didn't say it and the interview doesn't exist, are you? Surely you can't be that stupid.
He's saying that unless a quote's verifiable as having been said by Turner, claiming that his views on a subject are X or Y might be a tiny bit intellectually dishonest...
So yes, he's asking you to prove - from an independent source, or by a transcript/video/audio of the original utterance, that he actually said that. If you don't have such evidence, please remember that you're accusing a man of holding views close to genocide of 80% of the world population. I hadn't thought to question this myself, but heck, it was late in the night when I responded...
Slashdot Mirror
What's so immoral about it? And what's the "liberty" you enjoy by vandalizing Wikipedia articles?
My posting this is very obviously feeding a self-confessed troll, but I just can't leave this unchallenged...
It's not a turn-key solution
It could be - that's where things like the Hyperion reactors start to look good, especially the temporarily shelved uranium-hydride reactor design. You design the things to be sealed and self-regulating so that they can be dropped into a secure underground vault to replace the boiler at the power station. After a decade or so (depending on usage patterns) you shut it down, let it cool for a year or two, and send it back to the factory to be refurbished and refueled.
In essence it becomes a big nuclear battery, quite safe to operate and proliferation resistant since opening the reactor to extract the fuel requires heavy shielding and remote-operation equipment that, unlike a traditional refuelable reactor aren't available on-site.
And at $50 million/(70MW(heat)*10years) you're talking $0.008/kWh(heat), it actually compares well to coal at ($30~70 /ton) / (6150kWh(heat) /ton) = $0.005~0.01 / kWh(heat), though obviously the fact that you've got to buy 10+ years of fuel up front complicates things a bit.
The real problem is that we only have enough Uranium to supply the world's current energy demands for 40-70 years, so we really need to start doing some serious research on Thorium reactors if we want to go nuclear. (For those that aren't aware, Thorium is about as common as lead, there's plenty to supply the world's energy needs for a few millenia, and it's distributed fairly evenly around the world so it's geopolitically a good choice too)
I addressed that too... Show me a working Hyperion or molten salt Thorium reactor!
All this tech is still in the research stage - do we wait for those, or build other sources that are closer to reality? Even if we started building one, how much time would it take to complete construction? Ten years? That seems about average for nuclear power...
So, you support India's getting rid of the Nuclear Liability Act which caps private liability at 100 million USD?
The trouble is, getting rid of that would make it an incentive to private operators to not invest in the first place because it's too risky!
This is one of the paradoxes of nuclear power.
Good point. Now, stop using resources at four times the rate of a Chinese or Indian.
Resource use is in no way proportional to the population. If the US can bring itself down to Germany or Britain levels, then we'll start talking...
In case you're wondering, it's the same case with net energy usage per person and water withdrawal.
So, it seems like population is hardly the only problem, eh?
With a little help, it's probably quite capable. The only times that capitalism has worked is when it wasn't naked.
A free market implies boundaries and regulation to keep it free!
Though China seemed to be able to pull something like it off so maybe there is hope?
China's is a slowing of the growth rate, not a contraction. And it comes with a (very high) price... That may not be a great model for the rest of the world!
I don't think China's track record on the environment is anything for others to emulate...
Don't forget the mining... The playboys always forget the mining...
Actually, switching to less tail-pipe emissions really would help...
As far as nuclear power's concerned, we can't afford to build the old designs (I mean 1st to 3rd generation stuff like Fukushima) anymore. We would need to use modern designs, which are often either experimental (molten salt, pebble bed,...) or expensive (Gen 3+ or Gen 4 PWRs). They also take years to build correctly! Can we really afford to wait?
My problem with nuclear power in India (yeah, I've got to come back to my country, after all) is that I know how crappy safety procedures can be here. The consequences of a methyl isocyanide leak in Bhopal was a toxic cloud that dissipated, and at least the area is still habitable. The consequences of a blowout in Kalpakkam would be that my city is irradiated.
I know how unlikely a blowout may be, but what about radiation leaks, or leaks of radioactive material? The coast on which that particular plant is situated provides seafood for a vast hinterland. A radiation leak there would work its way up the food chain into any fish-eaters in much of the state!
Not that I'm against nuclear power, but it has to be done correctly and responsibly. And it has to be done along with other methods like solar/wind, efficiency increases in the grid, or at the consumption end and so on.
It's not a turn-key solution. That's something that the nuclear drummers can't seem to wrap their brains around!
Whenever somebody comes up with this argument, the question that comes to mind is: "What do you intend to do though? Nuke China? Kill every child in the developing world?"
Don't forget, the third most populous country is the United States.
Like every other problem, it needs to be addressed correctly - family planning, birth control...
Anyway, both India and China have made quite a bit of progress in terms of birth rate: it's now down to about 2%, and the fertility rate is about 2-3 per woman, which is not too bad.
What more?
I don't know if you were around a few years ago when they tried blocking one or two Yahoo groups that were (supposedly) terrorist fronts, but ended up blocking all of Y-groups in a blanket order...
Eventually, that was lifted too.
It's no longer a government department, but it's still a PSU, wholly owned by the government; you won't find it listed in a stock market anywhere soon...
I've tried both sites on both BSNL (DSL) and Airtel (mobile) - no blocks!
Bad rules should be resisted.
And recalling that the planet has faced quite a few mass extinctions, wiping out all the "progress" (I use the word guardedly, of course) that evolution had made upto that point, even if another planet started off at exactly the same time as us, its equivalent of the dinosaurs could have become sapient 65 billion years ago...
Well, the first machine I ran mysql on was significantly less powerful than the phone that's charging to my right...
Why not? Not necessarily for running an entire enterprise web stack, but...
Actually, that would be true of most of Java's peers too - In C++, you'd be able to do this if you could somehow get the address of the private function (by looking at the binary's layout or whatever), and in C#, I think reflection allows you to do the same...
It's like hanging a curtain and saying "this is private", but someone can come along and rip it off and it's no longer private...
The reason I may be able to pay 40k over time is that I'd be earning, and it wouldn't make such a massive impact on one month's finances. That's the whole point of EMIs...
So it is with nuclear; we can't really afford to lose an area of 30km radius all at once. And even if other sources are more economically expensive over time, the costs can be borne over a longer period, which leaves head-room in the system for other projects.
No, they're not going all non-nuclear. They're shutting down and doing an audit of each reactor. The first one to clear the audit and restart won't be able to restart until a few weeks after the last running one is shut down for the audit.
That's ALL! They're not abandoning all nuclear power, or anything like that. As others noted, they really don't have a choice except nuclear, currently, what with Tokyo's ~40000 megawatt requirements, on top of the whole train network. And that's without thinking of industry...
Suffice it to say that Japan can't go no-nuke for a while, even if they wanted to.
Since that was never actually distributed (just inadvertently made public on a server), there was no infringement there...
Web app?
So that no commercial interest can benefit from your source code, thereby intentionally pushing the freeware / non-commercial approach, yes?
Yes.
I'm releasing something free - not just free, but giving you the right to play around with its innards, and all the tools to make it dance to your tune. My price for this is that any changes you make to it are made available to the rest of us.
Of course, if someone (RedHat, for example) are able to make a viable commercial business model around those restrictions, more power to them.
And all university research should always be permissive, so that it can be incorporated into either GPLed, proprietary or whatever else.
Thereby enabling all approaches equally, and may the best approach succeed. Well, that seems much more even handed, fair, and so forth.
So... if you want to do that with source code that comes from a university, why not with source code that comes from elsewhere, given that you're handing out the source code anyway? Did I miss a philosophical point here, or is your approach as contradictory as it looks?
Research work is not usually targeted to the end-user. The way I see it, the end user may have a choice between proprietary and free. But that option is not necessarily available for the users of libraries or research output. I want to be able to build both free and proprietary applications on top of libraries, but that option rarely exists for straight-up applications.
The best in this case would be LGPL-like licenses - share all modifications to the code itself, but anything built on top of it (merely using rather than modifying the library) is your domain. For applications, the probability of anyone building on top of it is much lower; GPL is better there, so that things don't get closed off.
Well, no, not really. Seems to me that the GPL causes a problem -- it creates a reserve of software that can't make it to the broader marketplace because it can't go commercial (because it can very easily convert what was private IP into public IP.) That's why when I write software that I intend to share, I never use the GPL.
The uptake of the Linux kernel hasn't really been affected by its being GPL (v2, but GPL), nor has the BSDL helped FreeBSD in the market. I think the commercial possibilities are orthogonal to market share.
When I want to write something to share, I intend that the recipient also shares alike, or at least negotiates back with me for the rights to not share (that would at least support me in making modifications to the product). I don't want to enable someone to just leech off my work and give nothing back.
PS: To the idiots who modded the parent flamebait: Flamebait is not short-hand for "I disagree". The two of us have a disagreement, but that's something debatable. Please stop abusing your mod points!
The way I'd do it is, GPL for applications, BSD/MIT/LGPL for libraries, depending on the level of participation, the commercial and legal aspects, etc. And all university research should always be permissive, so that it can be incorporated into either GPLed, proprietary or whatever else.
Generally agree, but I'd also give serious attention to the Apache License (2.0) for libraries. It's also fairly open, but also provides a patent license as well, and that's an important consideration what with all the trolls around. I think this is the only thing missing from the non-GPL licenses in your list.
Fair point. Apache 2.0 is probably even better than BSDL for most use cases where a permissive license is required.
Hmm, I don't think that particular question is relevant when the discussion is about Michael Mann or Gavin Schmidt. Whatever the cutoff is, they're definitely above it.
Similarly, the question doesn't even come into play for most of those who signed that obnoxious article in the WSJ - most of them even had a single paper published in the climate field (Lindzen was the exception).
Don't accept an argument from authority. I wouldn't, either. But the opposite is NOT argument from ignorance.
I wouldn't take Mann's word on something without verifying it, but the verification has to be done by someone who can understand the paper he published in the first place. A particle physicist or a mechanical engineer are not the best people to verify a paper in climate science. Someone with a better understanding of statistics, atmospheric science or similar fields would be a better bet...
I assume that the judge took a technicality because the other option was to allow a truly frivolous suit against Mann for basically doing a good job of being a scientist. They do that all the time.
The fact is that a politician misused his position to harass a climate scientist who produced some inconvenient studies, and the court decided that this wasn't going to stand.
The reference is all over the net. The Audubon Magazine website itself doesn't seem to know about it: http://www.audubonmagazine.org/search/node/ted%20turner [audubonmagazine.org]
Wow so you're claiming it's false? Really? You're not actually saying he didn't say it and the interview doesn't exist, are you? Surely you can't be that stupid.
He's saying that unless a quote's verifiable as having been said by Turner, claiming that his views on a subject are X or Y might be a tiny bit intellectually dishonest...
So yes, he's asking you to prove - from an independent source, or by a transcript/video/audio of the original utterance, that he actually said that. If you don't have such evidence, please remember that you're accusing a man of holding views close to genocide of 80% of the world population. I hadn't thought to question this myself, but heck, it was late in the night when I responded...