Apparently, that's due to Norway "exporting" their guarantees of origin - If they didn't do that (which is really a paper game), they would be 100% renewable.
However, saying "Norway is 100% renewable so that must be achievable in the rest of the world" is naive - Norway's geography happens to be very conducive to hydroelectricity, and their population happens to be very low.
For example, in 2008, hydro was around 98% of Norway's electrical production. This was around 4.3% of the total world hydroelectric production, supplying less than 0.1% of the world's population. (Norway has a population of approximately 5 million people.)
Hydro can't scale significantly beyond what is already available - Hydro was one of the first renewable energy resources to be developed, and in fact was developed earlier than many other power generation technologies. As a result - any area that is suitable for hydroelectric generation is already being used for hydro.
Re:Linux security or trust
on
GitHub Hacked
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· Score: 0
What does this have to do with Linux? The vulnerability was in Rails - and I must say, the attitude of the Rails developers of "We don't have to make the defaults restrictive - let the user secure their app" is a poor one.
The way I read the article - the author is claiming that Anonymous are idiots for overinflating the importance of Stratfor because Stratfor is a joke.
The thing is - companies that are jokes but try to pass themselves off to be important are JUST the kind of companies Anonymous loves to go for.
The Stratfor leaks aren't about "Hey look at this juicy intel!", they are about "Hey, this company says they're hot shit. Check these emails out - these guys are actually morons!"
Yeah... Wonderful how the article makes it sounds like this was some horrible loss when, in fact, it was code that is likely nearly worthless to anyone outside of NASA.
The worst impact of a lot of government source code leaks is likely to be embarassment - "That system is THAT primitive?" or "How the hell is this thing actually usable?"
And how many resulted in contamination? Also, your "99 incidents" list includes research and military reactors.
In the civilian reactor arena: 1) TMI had a severe meltdown, but beyond the plant boundary, contamination was very limited because containment did its job. People in the area got on the order of a chest X-ray - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident_health_effects 2) Fukushima was an outdated (originally scheduled for decommissioning prior to the earthquake) reactor design that was hit by a natural disaster that killed 25,000 people in hours regardless of the nuclear involvement.
Chernobyl - My post referenced the track record of nuclear power in North America. In addition to the fact that while Chernobyl was a "civilian" reactor on paper despite having clear military influences in its design (You don't build a graphite moderated water cooled reactor unless you want to make weapons plutonium) - In terms of management culture and the value of safety vs. results - the gas drilling companies engaged in hydrofracturing are disturbingly similar in their attitude to the bozos running Chernobyl. Lots of "That didn't happen, everything is OK" - Did you know staff at Chernobyl continued reporting that the reactor was intact to their superiors for a significant period of time, believing it was still intact? - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individual_involvement_in_the_Chernobyl_disaster#Dyatlov
So what? It's not like copper for phone calls has any disadvantages. Quality will be about the same unless wideband VoIP is deployed (almost no one has done that), and it's better for safety since the copper phone lines are powered by the CO, which usually has multiple redundant backup power supplies. If your home's power goes out - you can call 911 with copper but not with VoIP.
The problem is that most of the proposed merit-based evaluation systems that are going into place are as bad as, if not worse than, the existing system.
Evaluating teachers based on student performance results in: 1) Teachers that "teach the test" - as a result we have mediocre educational performance getting rewarded. 2) Teachers penalized for things not under their control - For example, in a large district like Manhattan, if teachers in the high-crime inner-city schools are evaluated in the same pool as the teachers serving students who live on Park Avenue, those teachers will be at a fundamental disadvantage simply because their job is harder.
However the current seniority-based system is also shit - once a teacher receives tenure there is no incentive to continue performance.
We need to move away from the current system - that much is clear. The problem is that so far, all of the "merit" based proposals don't have any metrics for "merit" that are worth jack shit, and will make our educational system even worse than it already is.
Yup... "native email" as an important update feature is BAD NEWS - because it should have been one of the FIRST features in the initial OS release!
For critical basic features like this to be missing from the initial release, and to take this long (basically, when the hardware is becoming obsolete), is completely inexcusable.
The thing is, aircraft with multiple RF interfaces are specifically designed with co-interference between onboard systems in mind. For example, antenna locations are chosen VERY carefully to avoid one system interfering with another, and in addition, most aircraft have an interference blanker system that allows receivers on the aircraft to know when another system is transmitting. You can't have an IBU for an offboard interference source.
In addition, while fairly high in peak transmit power, IFF has a VERY low duty cycle, and in fact has some very strict duty cycle limitations imposed on it specifically because of interference concerns. Last but not least, 1090 MHz is MUCH farther in frequency from GPS L1 (1575 MHz) than LightSquared is (1526-1536 MHz), meaning that it's going to be attenuated much more by the frontend filters of GPS receivers. Obtaining significant rejection at 1090 MHz is MUCH easier to do without size/weight/inband attenuation penalties than obtaining significant rejection for nearly continuous high-duty-cycle interference at 1536 MHz.
You can't prove conformance without test data. You can't get test data without a limited operational license.
LightSquared was given a provisional operating license to operate a terrestrial network for the purposes of interoperability testing, and proving with that network that they had the capability to expand that network nationwide without causing interference. They WERE given a license to operate at the suggested power levels, and this license was a provisional time-limited one to see if operating at those levels caused problems. Instead of their network proving that it was possible - their network proved that it was IMpossible. The whole point of the limited provisional license was to permit LightSquared to operate a limited test network without deploying a massive nationwide network and getting THAT shut down after only a few months of operation.
As to "trading spectrum with the DoD" - holy crap what morons. Sorry, when you're talking about a complete network of satellites, the costs of throwing away that network and building a new one are astronomical. Let's not forget the large base of installed aviation and military GPS equipment - getting certification for aviation-grade GPS systems is a VERY time consuming and expensive process.
If you read the PDF for one of the first symptoms - it was optimized for baking roti, which sounds like a variant of frybread to me based on the description.
Wrong, not vaporware - Plants with vastly improved safety designs compared to Fukushima have already been built, and plants with major improvements over THOSE are in the process of being built. The ABWR is not vaporware. The AP1000 is not vaporware.
As to Chernobyl - plants with safety designs that poor were never built in the United States, at least not for civilian nuclear power. In fact, Fukushima is the first civilian reactor to release anything more than negligible contamination, that's a pretty good track record considering the units in question were originally scheduled for decommissioning that year (some of the oldest reactors on the planet) and the situation was triggered by a natural disaster that killed 25,000+ people in a matter of hours.
Chernobyl may have been a civilian reactor on paper - but in the Soviet Union, the line between civilian and military was always blurred, and Chernobyl was clearly designed to permit operation of the plant as a weapons plutonium supply - that's the only reason someone builds a graphite moderated water cooled power reactor. (Such a design is fundamentally unstable and dangerous)
We've been drilling wells that only had to deal with the reservoir pressure of the gas/oil they were drilling.
Handling pressures required to FRACTURE ROCK is a bit of a different story. The engineering margins are going to be fundamentally narrower. Combine this with the fact that fracking wells tend to be far more numerous than oil wells, and the operations are being done by companies which now have a clear track record of "who cares if a few wells blow out?" and "no that contamination didn't happen", and you have a fundamental problem.
"proper well casing" - Well, this assumes that the well casing job was done properly, instead of by a company that constantly values profit over everything, forget the environmental consequences.
That's the problem - in an ideal world, fracking can be done safely. However, the companies doing it have been showing a clear and ongoing track record of having an "i-don't-give-a-fuck-if-it-breaks-often" attitude, as long as they get their final product.
Well, they clearly did not tell you the whole truth. I mean, apply some critical thinking skills here - to get these fracturing fluids down to, say, 10k feet, they must somehow PASS THROUGH THE WATER TABLE. Considering that the plumbing required to do this is handling pressures intended to FRACTURE ROCK - If you think there is no chance of this plumbing failing underground and releasing its contents at a depth that wasn't supposed to be affected, you are seriously stupid or deluded. This seems to be the primary contamination mechanism in my opinion - underground blowouts, which the industry seems to be doing a piss-poor job of preventing.
"Fraccing does not damage water tables every single time in every single case, which is what people love to say." - No one has said that. It simply happens WAY TOO OFTEN. Even 1 in 100 wells having a casing rupture is unacceptable, because of the sheer number of wells and the amount of damage a single underground blowout can do.
Even if the technology can be safely applied, the corporate culture of those applying the technology leads to the whole thing being fundamentally unsafe. There is rampant evidence of poor safety practices, frequent accidents with severe environmental effects, and a culture of "nope, didn't happen, nothing went wrong and thus nothing will go wrong" as opposed to "shit, we fucked up, here's the list of things we're going to change so it doesn't happen again".
That is the fundamental problem. We are "here" - accidents are routine and environmental contamination is something to deny and ignore. We need to be "there" - accidents are rare, and when they do, are treated extremely seriously with remedial action taken to prevent it from happening again.
If the industry had a good roadmap for getting from "here" to "there", I'd be OK with fracking. The problem is, the industry is "here", but they insist to the public that they are "there" even though they clearly aren't, and thus have no roadmap.
I believe that fracking can be done in a responsible and safe manner - AT LEAST from a technical standpoint.
However, from a regulatory, financial, and corporate culture standpoint - NONE of the companies that are using hydrofracturing have any reasonable safety track record. Cost-cutting and accidents run rampant throughout the industry. At this point, there is nothing short of a complete corporate overhaul that will make me trust any drilling company.
I'd rather have a nuclear plant a mile away than any hydrofracturing wells upstream from me along the Susquehanna, because at least the nuclear industry has a proven safety track record (The only civilian nuclear plant to release more than negligible contamination did so after a disaster that independently killed 25,000+ people in a matter of hours), and a track record of constantly improving safety designs.
I originally thought this was great - I took it, and almost immediately saw yellow drainage.
Well, after a while I've figured out - the stuff itself is yellow and was not promoting any significant drainage. It turns out I get FAR better results from eating spicy food (like hot salsa and chips) than snorting a special capsaicin preparation like Sinus Buster - no clue why, it is somewhat counterintuitive.
This is how I beat well over half of the sinus infections I get - nasal irrigation works great.
However, sometimes the infection is stubborn and it resists 1-2 weeks of irrigation, staying in a steady state of no improvement. At that point I'll usually give in and start antibiotics, and with one exception (Normally my infections are triggered by normal colds initially, or allergies, in this case one of my peak allergy periods occurred two weeks AFTER the initial infection trigger, which was sewage-laden dust from the September 2011 Susquehanna flooding), they have always cleared up the infection in only a day or so.
I think the problem is that in the article given, the doctors in question are probably starting the antibiotics too early - if it's the first few days of "infection" it's very difficult to separate viral causes (just a cold), allergic causes, and actual bacterial causes. Now if you're at nearly 2 weeks of routine nasal irrigation and you have frequent bright yellow discharge restart 2-3 hours after you irrigate - at that point it's much more likely to be bacterial.
The only reason I can think of is Motorola's tendency towards closed-ness (for example, locked bootloaders on nearly all devices)... But Google is buying Moto, NOT the other way around. The most likely result is the exact opposite of Whitman's claims - Moto devices may finally be reasonable propositions for people who want to ensure that there is some control of their device in their own hands, as hopefully Google will put an end to Moto's bullshit bootloader-locking practices.
What's really annoying is that Moto blames it on the carriers - however the Milestone had a locked bootloader (despite being a generic SIM-unlocked GSM device) and the Samsung Droid Charge has an unlocked bootloader (despite being on Verizon, the carrier Moto blames for pushing locked bootloaders on them.)
Slashdot Mirror
Except that W2K was actually decent... It was ME that sucked.
Apparently, that's due to Norway "exporting" their guarantees of origin - If they didn't do that (which is really a paper game), they would be 100% renewable.
However, saying "Norway is 100% renewable so that must be achievable in the rest of the world" is naive - Norway's geography happens to be very conducive to hydroelectricity, and their population happens to be very low.
For example, in 2008, hydro was around 98% of Norway's electrical production. This was around 4.3% of the total world hydroelectric production, supplying less than 0.1% of the world's population. (Norway has a population of approximately 5 million people.)
Hydro can't scale significantly beyond what is already available - Hydro was one of the first renewable energy resources to be developed, and in fact was developed earlier than many other power generation technologies. As a result - any area that is suitable for hydroelectric generation is already being used for hydro.
What does this have to do with Linux? The vulnerability was in Rails - and I must say, the attitude of the Rails developers of "We don't have to make the defaults restrictive - let the user secure their app" is a poor one.
Oh, the linked commit is not the only funny one - after this guy's initial report was blown off by the Rails team - https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/5239
The way I read the article - the author is claiming that Anonymous are idiots for overinflating the importance of Stratfor because Stratfor is a joke.
The thing is - companies that are jokes but try to pass themselves off to be important are JUST the kind of companies Anonymous loves to go for.
The Stratfor leaks aren't about "Hey look at this juicy intel!", they are about "Hey, this company says they're hot shit. Check these emails out - these guys are actually morons!"
Yeah... Wonderful how the article makes it sounds like this was some horrible loss when, in fact, it was code that is likely nearly worthless to anyone outside of NASA.
The worst impact of a lot of government source code leaks is likely to be embarassment - "That system is THAT primitive?" or "How the hell is this thing actually usable?"
And how many resulted in contamination? Also, your "99 incidents" list includes research and military reactors.
In the civilian reactor arena:
1) TMI had a severe meltdown, but beyond the plant boundary, contamination was very limited because containment did its job. People in the area got on the order of a chest X-ray - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident_health_effects
2) Fukushima was an outdated (originally scheduled for decommissioning prior to the earthquake) reactor design that was hit by a natural disaster that killed 25,000 people in hours regardless of the nuclear involvement.
Chernobyl - My post referenced the track record of nuclear power in North America. In addition to the fact that while Chernobyl was a "civilian" reactor on paper despite having clear military influences in its design (You don't build a graphite moderated water cooled reactor unless you want to make weapons plutonium) - In terms of management culture and the value of safety vs. results - the gas drilling companies engaged in hydrofracturing are disturbingly similar in their attitude to the bozos running Chernobyl. Lots of "That didn't happen, everything is OK" - Did you know staff at Chernobyl continued reporting that the reactor was intact to their superiors for a significant period of time, believing it was still intact? - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individual_involvement_in_the_Chernobyl_disaster#Dyatlov
Better idea - nuke plants. FAR better track record in North America than hydraulic fracturing.
12 hours? Pretty pitiful - I have routinely been in situations with extended power outages (48-72 hours) where the phone line worked the whole time.
This wasn't even in the boonies where I live now - this was in middle-upper class Central Jersey.
So what? It's not like copper for phone calls has any disadvantages. Quality will be about the same unless wideband VoIP is deployed (almost no one has done that), and it's better for safety since the copper phone lines are powered by the CO, which usually has multiple redundant backup power supplies. If your home's power goes out - you can call 911 with copper but not with VoIP.
The problem is that most of the proposed merit-based evaluation systems that are going into place are as bad as, if not worse than, the existing system.
Evaluating teachers based on student performance results in:
1) Teachers that "teach the test" - as a result we have mediocre educational performance getting rewarded.
2) Teachers penalized for things not under their control - For example, in a large district like Manhattan, if teachers in the high-crime inner-city schools are evaluated in the same pool as the teachers serving students who live on Park Avenue, those teachers will be at a fundamental disadvantage simply because their job is harder.
However the current seniority-based system is also shit - once a teacher receives tenure there is no incentive to continue performance.
We need to move away from the current system - that much is clear. The problem is that so far, all of the "merit" based proposals don't have any metrics for "merit" that are worth jack shit, and will make our educational system even worse than it already is.
Yup... "native email" as an important update feature is BAD NEWS - because it should have been one of the FIRST features in the initial OS release!
For critical basic features like this to be missing from the initial release, and to take this long (basically, when the hardware is becoming obsolete), is completely inexcusable.
er, solutions... epic brainfail
The thing is, aircraft with multiple RF interfaces are specifically designed with co-interference between onboard systems in mind. For example, antenna locations are chosen VERY carefully to avoid one system interfering with another, and in addition, most aircraft have an interference blanker system that allows receivers on the aircraft to know when another system is transmitting. You can't have an IBU for an offboard interference source.
In addition, while fairly high in peak transmit power, IFF has a VERY low duty cycle, and in fact has some very strict duty cycle limitations imposed on it specifically because of interference concerns. Last but not least, 1090 MHz is MUCH farther in frequency from GPS L1 (1575 MHz) than LightSquared is (1526-1536 MHz), meaning that it's going to be attenuated much more by the frontend filters of GPS receivers. Obtaining significant rejection at 1090 MHz is MUCH easier to do without size/weight/inband attenuation penalties than obtaining significant rejection for nearly continuous high-duty-cycle interference at 1536 MHz.
You can't prove conformance without test data. You can't get test data without a limited operational license.
LightSquared was given a provisional operating license to operate a terrestrial network for the purposes of interoperability testing, and proving with that network that they had the capability to expand that network nationwide without causing interference. They WERE given a license to operate at the suggested power levels, and this license was a provisional time-limited one to see if operating at those levels caused problems. Instead of their network proving that it was possible - their network proved that it was IMpossible. The whole point of the limited provisional license was to permit LightSquared to operate a limited test network without deploying a massive nationwide network and getting THAT shut down after only a few months of operation.
As to "trading spectrum with the DoD" - holy crap what morons. Sorry, when you're talking about a complete network of satellites, the costs of throwing away that network and building a new one are astronomical. Let's not forget the large base of installed aviation and military GPS equipment - getting certification for aviation-grade GPS systems is a VERY time consuming and expensive process.
If you read the PDF for one of the first symptoms - it was optimized for baking roti, which sounds like a variant of frybread to me based on the description.
Wrong, not vaporware - Plants with vastly improved safety designs compared to Fukushima have already been built, and plants with major improvements over THOSE are in the process of being built. The ABWR is not vaporware. The AP1000 is not vaporware.
As to Chernobyl - plants with safety designs that poor were never built in the United States, at least not for civilian nuclear power. In fact, Fukushima is the first civilian reactor to release anything more than negligible contamination, that's a pretty good track record considering the units in question were originally scheduled for decommissioning that year (some of the oldest reactors on the planet) and the situation was triggered by a natural disaster that killed 25,000+ people in a matter of hours.
Chernobyl may have been a civilian reactor on paper - but in the Soviet Union, the line between civilian and military was always blurred, and Chernobyl was clearly designed to permit operation of the plant as a weapons plutonium supply - that's the only reason someone builds a graphite moderated water cooled power reactor. (Such a design is fundamentally unstable and dangerous)
More than nuclear if you calculate it on a deaths per terawatt-hour basis.
"I am assuming some competency and accountability on the part the operator here."
Given the industry's track record in locations like Dimock, PA, this is an utterly stupid assumption.
We've been drilling wells that only had to deal with the reservoir pressure of the gas/oil they were drilling.
Handling pressures required to FRACTURE ROCK is a bit of a different story. The engineering margins are going to be fundamentally narrower. Combine this with the fact that fracking wells tend to be far more numerous than oil wells, and the operations are being done by companies which now have a clear track record of "who cares if a few wells blow out?" and "no that contamination didn't happen", and you have a fundamental problem.
"proper well casing" - Well, this assumes that the well casing job was done properly, instead of by a company that constantly values profit over everything, forget the environmental consequences.
That's the problem - in an ideal world, fracking can be done safely. However, the companies doing it have been showing a clear and ongoing track record of having an "i-don't-give-a-fuck-if-it-breaks-often" attitude, as long as they get their final product.
Well, they clearly did not tell you the whole truth. I mean, apply some critical thinking skills here - to get these fracturing fluids down to, say, 10k feet, they must somehow PASS THROUGH THE WATER TABLE. Considering that the plumbing required to do this is handling pressures intended to FRACTURE ROCK - If you think there is no chance of this plumbing failing underground and releasing its contents at a depth that wasn't supposed to be affected, you are seriously stupid or deluded. This seems to be the primary contamination mechanism in my opinion - underground blowouts, which the industry seems to be doing a piss-poor job of preventing.
"Fraccing does not damage water tables every single time in every single case, which is what people love to say." - No one has said that. It simply happens WAY TOO OFTEN. Even 1 in 100 wells having a casing rupture is unacceptable, because of the sheer number of wells and the amount of damage a single underground blowout can do.
Even if the technology can be safely applied, the corporate culture of those applying the technology leads to the whole thing being fundamentally unsafe. There is rampant evidence of poor safety practices, frequent accidents with severe environmental effects, and a culture of "nope, didn't happen, nothing went wrong and thus nothing will go wrong" as opposed to "shit, we fucked up, here's the list of things we're going to change so it doesn't happen again".
That is the fundamental problem. We are "here" - accidents are routine and environmental contamination is something to deny and ignore. We need to be "there" - accidents are rare, and when they do, are treated extremely seriously with remedial action taken to prevent it from happening again.
If the industry had a good roadmap for getting from "here" to "there", I'd be OK with fracking. The problem is, the industry is "here", but they insist to the public that they are "there" even though they clearly aren't, and thus have no roadmap.
I believe that fracking can be done in a responsible and safe manner - AT LEAST from a technical standpoint.
However, from a regulatory, financial, and corporate culture standpoint - NONE of the companies that are using hydrofracturing have any reasonable safety track record. Cost-cutting and accidents run rampant throughout the industry. At this point, there is nothing short of a complete corporate overhaul that will make me trust any drilling company.
I'd rather have a nuclear plant a mile away than any hydrofracturing wells upstream from me along the Susquehanna, because at least the nuclear industry has a proven safety track record (The only civilian nuclear plant to release more than negligible contamination did so after a disaster that independently killed 25,000+ people in a matter of hours), and a track record of constantly improving safety designs.
I originally thought this was great - I took it, and almost immediately saw yellow drainage.
Well, after a while I've figured out - the stuff itself is yellow and was not promoting any significant drainage. It turns out I get FAR better results from eating spicy food (like hot salsa and chips) than snorting a special capsaicin preparation like Sinus Buster - no clue why, it is somewhat counterintuitive.
This is how I beat well over half of the sinus infections I get - nasal irrigation works great.
However, sometimes the infection is stubborn and it resists 1-2 weeks of irrigation, staying in a steady state of no improvement. At that point I'll usually give in and start antibiotics, and with one exception (Normally my infections are triggered by normal colds initially, or allergies, in this case one of my peak allergy periods occurred two weeks AFTER the initial infection trigger, which was sewage-laden dust from the September 2011 Susquehanna flooding), they have always cleared up the infection in only a day or so.
I think the problem is that in the article given, the doctors in question are probably starting the antibiotics too early - if it's the first few days of "infection" it's very difficult to separate viral causes (just a cold), allergic causes, and actual bacterial causes. Now if you're at nearly 2 weeks of routine nasal irrigation and you have frequent bright yellow discharge restart 2-3 hours after you irrigate - at that point it's much more likely to be bacterial.
The only reason I can think of is Motorola's tendency towards closed-ness (for example, locked bootloaders on nearly all devices)... But Google is buying Moto, NOT the other way around. The most likely result is the exact opposite of Whitman's claims - Moto devices may finally be reasonable propositions for people who want to ensure that there is some control of their device in their own hands, as hopefully Google will put an end to Moto's bullshit bootloader-locking practices.
What's really annoying is that Moto blames it on the carriers - however the Milestone had a locked bootloader (despite being a generic SIM-unlocked GSM device) and the Samsung Droid Charge has an unlocked bootloader (despite being on Verizon, the carrier Moto blames for pushing locked bootloaders on them.)