True, I was astonished by how many people compared Saddam to Hitler when the man himself liked to be compared with Stalin, who was probably worse by most measures.
Change it to "Someone who learns how to design can learn how to design anything" - suddenly it becomes far more realistic and you've probably met a few people that are examples of that. It's nothing like the MBA that comes in and thinks they can run a flugle horn factory without even knowing anything about music or even manufacturing. It's about someone who knows the complexites of one field being fully aware that when they take on another there is going to be a learning curve. I think the problem is just a hole in most CS education versus engineering - where is the equivalent of year long group project (a few hours a week) making an electric motorbike or whatever? A software based project on hardware that's not difficult to assemble means they could still have a physical item that achieves a goal without more than their CS student background provides.
A lot of engineering education is about developing a "systems approach" and also dividing large problems into solvable chunks. I think CS could benefit from that also being part of the degree, since it's also really another branch of applied mathematics. People like me that have shifted from engineering to IT seem to cope better with real software projects than recent CS graduates which is a bit of a worry - they were taught C yet a bunch that were taught FORTRAN can end up with better results in C after a bit of reading and playing about. It shouldn't happen like that. The CS guys should be the ones with the head start. That problem is probably just due to not being informed about how to look at things in terms of systems instead of a pile of parts with complex interactions. A bit more mathematics would be useful too. A CS graduate with less than high school level calculus is likely to be out of their depth as soon as the project has more relationship with physical objects than a photo of something on a web page.
you will forget almost everything important about the field within the first 5 years after leaving college
The other day I was corresponding with a retired EE about the dram rowhammer bug, and he's an EE that didn't get to see a transistor until after he graduated. He worked in power distribution but when minicomputers came out he had to assemble and run a few under adverse conditions, then he kept up with the field from then onwards.
and then just be another faceless middle manager pushing spreadsheets around
That happens in bloated orgs with more money than they know what to do with and a bunch of departmental empire builders on the top rung who measure their worth by headcount. Not so common as it used to be. There's a lot of places that are not run like Enron.
The funny thing is every electrical engineer I know under the age of 80 is now developing software. That's only a sample size of around a dozen, but still that anecdote does seem to be pointing towards a trend.
Anyone who deserves execution does not deserve a quick, painless termination, they deserve to suffer as much as possible.
That's what this is all about - chasing the "revenge" vote where it's more important for justice to be seen to be done instead of actually done. Such folk would be much happier with the Chinese system of a more than a 99% conviction rate. But do we really want to go that way? Letting the state have that much power sets things up for the execution of people who annoy the state instead of commit what we normally see as capital crimes.
I'm so sick of this Idiocracy I'm about ready for a nice benign dictatorship.
Now that's a sign of Idiocracy! It's only benign if you are one of the people the dictator wants to keep happy. Ferdinand Marcos was a "benign dictator" for years until he started treating the right people the same way he was treating the wrong people. Robert Mugabe was seen as that for a long time too. I challenge you to find one dictator of the 20th century who didn't have people killed without trial. Oh, but this time it will be special will it? How? What will rolling back to the days of King John improve?
That's what's the:) was for and the mass production example but it wasn't enough. Nice post on Roman technology though. I'd forgotten about treppaning.
All true, but I wasn't actually asking for examples I was just making a very bad pun based on the Roman use of concrete (with cement based on pozzolanic like some modern cements) and the rediscovery of how to make it (using portland cement) in the 18th century.
It's not missing the point - the "right end of the political spectrum" didn't scream about Reagan setting up a deal with Iran while Carter was still President either. As you are well aware people in politics are very quiet about the faults of their faction unless they can use it to seize leadership of a faction. Like it or not this close to treason shit goes on all the time and slips by while beating a guy Russian at chess when he was told to stay home gets pursued to make an example. I'm well aware of your point that Democrats do it too, but some situations are far more blatant than others on both sides. The current thing with Iran hurts more than usual due to them being on the same side as US forces in Iraq, so undermining the situation in the middle of a fucking shooting war gets more attention. IMHO all you have mentioned should be ashamed of themselves but the recent events are on a completely different level of stupidity.
The issue is your blatant *today* lie instead of admitting that there are issues of logistics and construction. The issue is you treating us all as stupid, which is very insulting. I don't care that you are an ignorant fanboy that appears to know fuck all about what you are advocating, I care that you are trying to trick us all and assuming that we are stupid enough to fall for the very blatant trick.
What about the work force that hung up their boots thirty years ago after building the nuke plants? They are not coming back. To do things by the next decade you'd have to get them back by magic, reality requires a lot longer to train up a workforce. So *today*? What kind of sick joke is that?
Why do people persist in chasing a utopian dream that doesn't exist yet
You don't seem to get that such a comment describes your instant nukes.
What background gives you the delusion that we can instantly build utility scale designs of things that we haven't even done successfully in a lab faster than something that several companies already have designed and proven at scale?
Working in electricity generation for a few years, and watching from afar the progress of the AP1000s in China and the French reactor in Sweden. Your delusion accusation applies more directly to yourself since nuclear has a very large unit size and very long lead time while the alternatives available *today* can be done very quickly a small unit at a time, with a vast amount of capacity possible in a couple of decades without even using something that's "in a lab". If you are not aware of that then you know very little about the issue and probably don't know how insulting your post above is.
Because I'm NOT talking about residential low-temperature
I used the word "industrial" for a reason so you wouldn't just jump to the conclusion that I misunderstand, and to try to get you to consider your statements above without being insulting. I'm not calling you stupid like the above poster, however you are arguing contrary to what is observed. Try to think on the large scale you have mentioned and you'll remember that gas fired turbine a few miles away is pretty damned hot but the heat gets away. That coal fired power station some way along may not have as high an exhaust temperature but it makes up with it for volume. What about a blast furnace? A lot of salt at 800C that comes from solar heating that was going to warm something up anyway doesn't really rate versus a coal fired unit stack does it?
otherwise you wouldn't be trying to talk about urban solar panels
The context there was to show solar is mainstream and no longer a Donkey versus Elephant issue.
What I want to know is, how does this concentration of energy, and the resultant shift in temperatures and location affect local ecology and climate.
From thousands of existing examples of industrial stacks, not a lot really since air is very mobile stuff.
were we generating hot spots in open air
Makes it even easier to spread out doesn't it? Remember what happens with smoke instead of imagining that something you don't understand is happening. You already know the answers to your questions are not what you suggest but are being blinkered by something - hence me suggesting you are taking a political view instead of an evidence based view. It's funny, I've worked with coal and oil for more than twenty years and here I am trying to point out that solar thermal is just another industrial thing and not some evil liberal plot.
That's because "building" is at this point a mere shuffling of paperwork. There's approval but not even anything like foundations for buildings to house turbines and reactors. No earthworks for cooling water dams. Pretty damn quiet.
It will be interesting to see how they work out when they finally come online in a few years.
The plan is for AP1000 reactors, a Westinghouse thing that's a variant of stuff built in the 1970s, and there's one that must be pretty close to running if it's not already in China. So not long to wait and not that much different to the ones already running (or even the distantly related things in Japan that Westinghouse bought the technology from but it could be too soon to mention those).
We can use nuclear as a bridge to get away from coal *today*
This again? Why do people persist with this *today* bullshit when it would be a huge task spanning a couple of decades to build a couple of dozen reactors? Do you think the workforce is just sitting there waiting? Do you think the manufacturers are just sitting there waiting to fabricate everything? If the answer is yes to those, what background gives you such delusions? I'm sorry, but I find this assumption that we are naive enough to swallow this *today* bullshit incredibly insulting. What do you have against engineers and scientists that makes you want to insult the intelligence of all of them on this site?
Not as such, but it's convenient and can use unused base load power at night to do the pumping. Ditch the invented 80%. It's counterproductive and will get you called out over a situation where it's useful despite being lossy.
Thanks to the industrial revolution we already have a shitload of "hot spots". I really don't know why you decided to run with that idea before thinking it out, but I suppose an office worker perspective versus someone who has also worked in heavy industry and power generation has a bit to do with it.
I suggest considering this issue in physical terms instead of wrapping it up in politics. Solar is mainstream these days in the residential sector where practicality has trumped politics.
Except you don't want to load follow with nuclear because that seriously reduces the life of the turbines and a pile of pipework. Thus they are base load instead of doing what they could do in theory.
Does it bother anybody else that nuclear isn't even mentioned in passing in the linked article?
The US nuclear lobby ate it's own children back in Clinton's day by campaigning against research into thorium reactors which snowballed into an effective halt of all civilian nuclear reactor research in the US. Nuclear is no longer relevant as an option for the US power industry to construct and will remain so unless India, China or Russia develop something that's economically impressive and offer to built some in the USA. Some late 1970s tech from Westinghouse painted green is not enough to get a bank or a government to offer a loan and no US utility has enough cash to consider building a nuke otherwise.
So maybe in 20 years if some effort start now, but currently it's not worth mentioning.
Or how about Jim McDermott (D-WA), David Bonior (D-MI), and Mike Thompson (D-CA) playing defense for Saddam Hussein and saying that the administration were liars in their diplomatic dealings in front of the UN, regarding the sanctions against Saddam's regime?
If it all could have worked out they could have saved us a few thousand dead soldiers, so pointing the traitor finger at them instead of at the Playboy Prince who wanted to revisit daddy's success is a bit much.
Reagan stitched up a hostage ransom deal with Iran when Carter was still President and paid off the Iranians off as his first act as President. It's hard to match that, and I'll bet Kennedy had that in mind when he went to the USSR (not that it justifies it).
Yes he's comically wrong, but as an aside I used to use email for web browsing back in 1996 when my workplace forbid network access for anything apart from email. The service was called "ftpmail" but could also be scripted to post into forms on web pages. It was probably still around when Slashdot started so someone bloody minded enough could have used work email to put bullshit up on Slashdot.
Slashdot Mirror
True, I was astonished by how many people compared Saddam to Hitler when the man himself liked to be compared with Stalin, who was probably worse by most measures.
Change it to "Someone who learns how to design can learn how to design anything" - suddenly it becomes far more realistic and you've probably met a few people that are examples of that.
It's nothing like the MBA that comes in and thinks they can run a flugle horn factory without even knowing anything about music or even manufacturing. It's about someone who knows the complexites of one field being fully aware that when they take on another there is going to be a learning curve.
I think the problem is just a hole in most CS education versus engineering - where is the equivalent of year long group project (a few hours a week) making an electric motorbike or whatever? A software based project on hardware that's not difficult to assemble means they could still have a physical item that achieves a goal without more than their CS student background provides.
A lot of engineering education is about developing a "systems approach" and also dividing large problems into solvable chunks. I think CS could benefit from that also being part of the degree, since it's also really another branch of applied mathematics. People like me that have shifted from engineering to IT seem to cope better with real software projects than recent CS graduates which is a bit of a worry - they were taught C yet a bunch that were taught FORTRAN can end up with better results in C after a bit of reading and playing about. It shouldn't happen like that. The CS guys should be the ones with the head start. That problem is probably just due to not being informed about how to look at things in terms of systems instead of a pile of parts with complex interactions.
A bit more mathematics would be useful too. A CS graduate with less than high school level calculus is likely to be out of their depth as soon as the project has more relationship with physical objects than a photo of something on a web page.
The other day I was corresponding with a retired EE about the dram rowhammer bug, and he's an EE that didn't get to see a transistor until after he graduated.
He worked in power distribution but when minicomputers came out he had to assemble and run a few under adverse conditions, then he kept up with the field from then onwards.
That happens in bloated orgs with more money than they know what to do with and a bunch of departmental empire builders on the top rung who measure their worth by headcount. Not so common as it used to be. There's a lot of places that are not run like Enron.
The funny thing is every electrical engineer I know under the age of 80 is now developing software. That's only a sample size of around a dozen, but still that anecdote does seem to be pointing towards a trend.
That's what this is all about - chasing the "revenge" vote where it's more important for justice to be seen to be done instead of actually done. Such folk would be much happier with the Chinese system of a more than a 99% conviction rate.
But do we really want to go that way? Letting the state have that much power sets things up for the execution of people who annoy the state instead of commit what we normally see as capital crimes.
Now that's a sign of Idiocracy! It's only benign if you are one of the people the dictator wants to keep happy. Ferdinand Marcos was a "benign dictator" for years until he started treating the right people the same way he was treating the wrong people. Robert Mugabe was seen as that for a long time too.
I challenge you to find one dictator of the 20th century who didn't have people killed without trial.
Oh, but this time it will be special will it? How? What will rolling back to the days of King John improve?
Is nobody else alarmed about what this need for importation says about what happened to the US chemical industry?
That's what's the :) was for and the mass production example but it wasn't enough.
Nice post on Roman technology though. I'd forgotten about treppaning.
All true, but I wasn't actually asking for examples I was just making a very bad pun based on the Roman use of concrete (with cement based on pozzolanic like some modern cements) and the rediscovery of how to make it (using portland cement) in the 18th century.
It's not missing the point - the "right end of the political spectrum" didn't scream about Reagan setting up a deal with Iran while Carter was still President either. As you are well aware people in politics are very quiet about the faults of their faction unless they can use it to seize leadership of a faction.
Like it or not this close to treason shit goes on all the time and slips by while beating a guy Russian at chess when he was told to stay home gets pursued to make an example.
I'm well aware of your point that Democrats do it too, but some situations are far more blatant than others on both sides. The current thing with Iran hurts more than usual due to them being on the same side as US forces in Iraq, so undermining the situation in the middle of a fucking shooting war gets more attention. IMHO all you have mentioned should be ashamed of themselves but the recent events are on a completely different level of stupidity.
The issue is your blatant *today* lie instead of admitting that there are issues of logistics and construction.
The issue is you treating us all as stupid, which is very insulting.
I don't care that you are an ignorant fanboy that appears to know fuck all about what you are advocating, I care that you are trying to trick us all and assuming that we are stupid enough to fall for the very blatant trick.
I stand corrected and had out of date information.
You don't seem to get that such a comment describes your instant nukes.
Working in electricity generation for a few years, and watching from afar the progress of the AP1000s in China and the French reactor in Sweden. Your delusion accusation applies more directly to yourself since nuclear has a very large unit size and very long lead time while the alternatives available *today* can be done very quickly a small unit at a time, with a vast amount of capacity possible in a couple of decades without even using something that's "in a lab".
If you are not aware of that then you know very little about the issue and probably don't know how insulting your post above is.
I used the word "industrial" for a reason so you wouldn't just jump to the conclusion that I misunderstand, and to try to get you to consider your statements above without being insulting. I'm not calling you stupid like the above poster, however you are arguing contrary to what is observed.
Try to think on the large scale you have mentioned and you'll remember that gas fired turbine a few miles away is pretty damned hot but the heat gets away. That coal fired power station some way along may not have as high an exhaust temperature but it makes up with it for volume. What about a blast furnace? A lot of salt at 800C that comes from solar heating that was going to warm something up anyway doesn't really rate versus a coal fired unit stack does it?
The context there was to show solar is mainstream and no longer a Donkey versus Elephant issue.
From thousands of existing examples of industrial stacks, not a lot really since air is very mobile stuff.
Makes it even easier to spread out doesn't it? Remember what happens with smoke instead of imagining that something you don't understand is happening.
You already know the answers to your questions are not what you suggest but are being blinkered by something - hence me suggesting you are taking a political view instead of an evidence based view.
It's funny, I've worked with coal and oil for more than twenty years and here I am trying to point out that solar thermal is just another industrial thing and not some evil liberal plot.
The plan is for AP1000 reactors, a Westinghouse thing that's a variant of stuff built in the 1970s, and there's one that must be pretty close to running if it's not already in China. So not long to wait and not that much different to the ones already running (or even the distantly related things in Japan that Westinghouse bought the technology from but it could be too soon to mention those).
This again? Why do people persist with this *today* bullshit when it would be a huge task spanning a couple of decades to build a couple of dozen reactors? Do you think the workforce is just sitting there waiting? Do you think the manufacturers are just sitting there waiting to fabricate everything? If the answer is yes to those, what background gives you such delusions?
I'm sorry, but I find this assumption that we are naive enough to swallow this *today* bullshit incredibly insulting. What do you have against engineers and scientists that makes you want to insult the intelligence of all of them on this site?
Not as such, but it's convenient and can use unused base load power at night to do the pumping.
Ditch the invented 80%. It's counterproductive and will get you called out over a situation where it's useful despite being lossy.
Thanks to the industrial revolution we already have a shitload of "hot spots".
I really don't know why you decided to run with that idea before thinking it out, but I suppose an office worker perspective versus someone who has also worked in heavy industry and power generation has a bit to do with it.
I suggest considering this issue in physical terms instead of wrapping it up in politics. Solar is mainstream these days in the residential sector where practicality has trumped politics.
Except you don't want to load follow with nuclear because that seriously reduces the life of the turbines and a pile of pipework. Thus they are base load instead of doing what they could do in theory.
The US nuclear lobby ate it's own children back in Clinton's day by campaigning against research into thorium reactors which snowballed into an effective halt of all civilian nuclear reactor research in the US. Nuclear is no longer relevant as an option for the US power industry to construct and will remain so unless India, China or Russia develop something that's economically impressive and offer to built some in the USA. Some late 1970s tech from Westinghouse painted green is not enough to get a bank or a government to offer a loan and no US utility has enough cash to consider building a nuke otherwise.
So maybe in 20 years if some effort start now, but currently it's not worth mentioning.
If it all could have worked out they could have saved us a few thousand dead soldiers, so pointing the traitor finger at them instead of at the Playboy Prince who wanted to revisit daddy's success is a bit much.
Reagan stitched up a hostage ransom deal with Iran when Carter was still President and paid off the Iranians off as his first act as President. It's hard to match that, and I'll bet Kennedy had that in mind when he went to the USSR (not that it justifies it).
She's not an IT professional so what ethics you have are not on her radar.
Yes he's comically wrong, but as an aside I used to use email for web browsing back in 1996 when my workplace forbid network access for anything apart from email.
The service was called "ftpmail" but could also be scripted to post into forms on web pages. It was probably still around when Slashdot started so someone bloody minded enough could have used work email to put bullshit up on Slashdot.