There's looking out for the environment and there's looking out for number one.
Looking out for the environment is looking out for number one, unless you'd rather live in Mordor.
Now we know where they stand.
Firmly in the NIMBY camp, the same as pretty much everyone else. And since windmills require a lot of land - a lot of people's backyards - to produce significant amounts of power, this is yet another reason why renewable energy isn't a viable alternative to nuclear.
It's called AVS (Audio Visual Stimulation), also known as AVE (Audio Visual Entrainment). Basically, they're visual bio-feedback machines that use data from an EEG recorder. You can find many products online. I personally don't use them so I can't vouch for their build quality and/or effectiveness. At the very least, it's just snake-oil. At best, the placebo it provides is therapeutic.
You do realize that flashing lights can actually kill people with epilepsy, right? And make non-epileptic people extremely uncomfortable and disoriented? And sometimes even cause the first seizure in people who didn't have epilepsy before?
Calling these effects "placebo" seems rather odd to me.
Think about it for a while. You installed the graphics program. It's running already. You have to execute regular code before it can be sent to the graphics driver and then the graphics card. Running code sends instructons to the graphics card.
I'm thinking about it. I still don't see how having this regular code execute OpenGL commands as opposed to some other commands has anything to do with security. Especially since the code is already using OpenGl and Direct3D/Direct2D to accelerate drawing the web page.
If you run a video game or a graphics program, you implicitly trust it. By running it, you've lost the security battle.
So by running a web browser, a graphical program, you've already lost the battle. Gotcha.
The expression is closing the barn door after the horse has bolted. With a browser executing random instructions for your video card, well there you have a problem. Your browser might have been installed and running but do you trust what it is accessing? I sure don't.
So how does WebGL change the situation?
Font libraries and image libraries have been exploited many times before. Hell, even the Python interpreter has. What makes you so sure that a video driver, of which there are many, won't get exploited? If anything, it's more expoitable, there is one for every card!
Yes, they have. How does that make being able to call OpenGL functions a security risk?
How? Look up buffer overflows. Driver code is often privileged,
And since a browser has no choice but to call graphics driver code to display anything, your point would be?...
More likely, you have broken hardware. Microsoft's complaint is based on reality, not theory. In theory, the driver would contain no bugs and the hardware would provide enough isolation that multiple applications' command streams and memory accesses would be isolated and would be no more able to interact without operating system mediation than multiple unprivileged processes on the CPU. In practice, the hardware generally makes a half-arsed attempt at providing isolation, with numerous ways of bypassing it, and the drivers are the buggiest code in ring 0 and probably anywhere on your computer.
Well, no. The GPU does not do a half-arsed attempt at providing isolation, because it does no attempt whatsoever. It can't, because it has no way to know what program originated any particular command it's given. It's entirely the drivers responsibility to provide isolation, because it's the only thing that can.
And besides, since all major browsers - including Microsoft's IE9 - are already using GPU acceleration, if the drivers really are that buggy, you're already screwed.
Oh please! Can you and the other fanbois be any more full of shit?
Fanbois of what?
Lets look at the facts, shall we? What is currently the most buggy driver on ANY system by a LARGE margin...hmmm? Why that would be the graphics drivers by a mile. So what does OpenGL do? Why it allows untrusted third party code to run on the buggiest drivers and NOBODY here sees that as a problem?
I have bad news for you: every graphical program - such as the web browser - sends commands to the graphics driver. And both Firefox and IE nowadays use graphics acceleration - but even if they didn't, the Windows and Linux desktops do.
I don't know what you mean by running on the drivers - perhaps you meant running shaders on the graphics card? But then any malice is restrained by the inability to do anything beyond rendering into a buffer. Or perhaps you meant the shader compiler has buffer overflows or something? That might be, but it doesn't match your "no sanity checks" scenario, since shader compilation is done only once and thus doesn't really need to be that fast.
The ONLY reason machines aren't getting pwned by the graphics cards is because currently the ONLY things running on them are legitimate code written by game designers and adding sanity checks or any kind of security to graphics drivers would slow the living shit out of them so that's right out.
It's a good thing a malicious shader program is unable to do anything besides rendering into an on-card buffer, no?
Do you REALLY want the entire web to be able to run any code they want on that nice fast processor with plenty of RAM for loading exploits and with no real security protecting it? Because if you honestly believe that OpenGL wouldn't be a malware writers paradise I have a bridge you might be interested in.
Just out of curiosity, could you provide a simple example of malicious OpenGL code? I accept a series of OpenGL commands rather than insist on actual shader programs.
MSFT has already made developers shit bricks by going HTML V5, which will probably cause the slow death of SL and.Net, at least on the client side, so your theory doesn't hold weight.
.Net is a managed language family to write programs in, and has nothing to do with HTML 5 or any other version.
But after finally getting security right with Windows 7 (only 4 per 1000 infected vs 14 per 1000 infected with XP IIRC) they sure as hell don't want to hand the keys to the kingdom over to the WWW. Hell considering how much JavaScript malware is out there you don't think giving malware writers their own processor and RAM wouldn't be exploited out the ass? Please!
You've yet to explain how it would be exploited. It can't be used to access files on the hard drive. It can't be used to access the Net. The words it can be used for is to display Goatse, and that's something you can do even without OpenGL access.
C++ is the absolute worse. It's the only language I've encountered where an entire other language lives inside it and slowly killing it like a parasitic twin. As a C++ coder I'm not supposed to use the C specific features because "C is not C++", and yet, it is...
C? I thought you were talking about templates.
So, is carrying two parasitic twins twice as bad as just one ?-)
Yes that's even better, let's pour unlimited amounts of taxpayers' money into NP so that nuclear apologists can continue playing with their expensive fancy toys.
No, let's pour unlimited amounts of taxpayer's money into nuclear power so we can keep the lights on and infrastructure working without destroying the environment.
The fact that the public doesn't want that and would prefer this money invested into energy efficiency, energy conservation and renewable energy generation is to be disregarded because basically they're all nothing but bleating luddites joe-six-packs and the enlightened elite is in a better position to tell them what's good for them, amirite?
No, it should be disregarded because such solutions do not exist, so the preference can't be met. Wind and solar lack the energy density and dependability to keep our infrastructure working, hydro is pretty much tapped out, and while biomass is somewhat dependendable it requires huge areas of biologically productive areas, which destroys the environment. Geothermal is only viable in some locations, unless you're talking deep borehold geothermal, in which case we lack the technology.
And frankly, comparing people who insist on making decisions about things they choose to remain ignorant about to luddites is unfair. Luddites had the perfectly reasonable fear that automation would put people out of the jobs being automated. Joe Sixpack wants to make the world a better place (at least for himself, sometimes for others too), but is too lazy to learn how, so he picks something to resist as evil - government, socialism, nuclear power, Jews, whatever - and calls it a day. It has always worked that way, throughout the whole history.
Greenpeace etc would actually love nuclear power if it resembled your dream.
No, they would come up with some absurd excuse or other to oppose it, such as blaming all incidents of cancer on it or something. Greenpeace hates nuclear power because that's part of their core ideology, and its rationalizations of that hate are just that: rationalizations.
Nuclear probably does have a future with small reactors in the tens of MW but the status quo is huge incredibly expensive things that take a decade to build.
Status quo is this because of the damn political hulabaloo involved with trying to do anything with nuclear power, so you need to go with massive projects to mitigate that cost over as many terawatt-hours as you can. If you have to have government approval - subject to change whenever someone needs votes, as happened in Germany - to build a megawatt-range reactor, you say "screw this" and build coal instead.
Go ahead buddy, start your private company and do exactly that. What do you say? That's not exactly the idea? Oh I see, your plan is rather to let the public support the research, development, insurance, risks, waste disposal and decommissioning costs and have your private company make a nice profit on the electricity generation. Well of course, this makes much more sense this way.
Actually, it makes far more sense to have the reactors owned by the public. No reason to let private companeis have anything to do with basic infrastructure.
If one of those applied to civilian nuclear power there would not be an industry at all. Taxpayers money is behind every single nuclear power plant on earth. The high capital cost and very long construction times mean that the short term focused world of commerce is just not interested in financing nuclear power.
And how much of this is because of any inherent difficulty in nuclear power, and how much because a government can simply decide to force-shut your plant to please someone's voters?
If there was a *TRUE* free market for nuclear power, I'd have a reactor in my basement right now, rather than relying on unreliable grid power produced by huge, polluting power plants. Not a gigawatt reactor, not even a megawatt reactor; a simple solid-state reactor producing perhaps 50-100 kilowatts of power, enough to heat and power my house and load my electric car overnight without running any risk of melting in any circumstances due to low power rating. I could even go one step further and condense drinking water from air, and burn all my waste with an electric arc. My household would have pretty much zero impact on the environment, as would those of other people, and the society in general would be far less vulnerable due to having less central points of failure.
The sound you just heard was Greenpeace and their ilk screaming from seeing their worst nightmare.
Because clearly the only possible opposite viewpoint is racism. I'm glad you're here to tell us these things.
Thanks for giving us the 2011 version of "You're either with us, or with the terrorists."
And the thing is, when you repeat such things often enough, people will join the terrorists out of sheer annoyance. That's one of the reasons why nationalists parties are on the rise in Europe - they don't tell people they're evil racists who sould be ashamed of having a national or cultural identity. And any attempt to point out that the nastier far-right parties actually are evil racists meets the fate of the boy who cried wolf, and serves to feed the annoyance. And any attempt to point this out, and ask the self-appointed anti-racists to tone down their rethoric to the point where it doesn't directly contradict most people's experiences gets you called, you guessed it, an evil racist.
All of this would make for a wonderful farce if it didn't have such a huge potential for harm.
Assuming you mean a keyword used for references (variables), that would require the user to remember every time, likely leading to lots & lots of leaks. If you move it to be part of the class, you need to figure out how to handle classes that contains references to (superclasses of) this type of object.
And if you forget to remove an object from a collection when you're done with it, it won't get garbage collected, and you get a memory leak.
Nothing short of a compiler/runtime with superhuman AI can protect programmers from their own stupidity, but there is a difference betweeb walking a tightrope and driving a highway.
I prefer an honest crash to data corruption. So yes, I see it as a point against GC.
As it happens, poor design in Java typically leads to bad performance, which poor design in C leads to memory management mistakes which lead to data corruption.
It's managed code which does a honest crash/clean exit when something goes wrong (and is not handled by the program); with unmanaged programs, you get an undefined state, and pretty much anything could happen, now or five hours later.
Also, you may prefer crashing at the first excuse, but I prefer the programs I use to at least try to keep working (this is especially true for programs like Firefox which insist on running everything in a single instance).
While yes, technically that means it's assembly, not C++, the ability to drop into a low-level language for those 10 lines of high critical code means that you can easily hand optimize better than any interpreted or JIT language could ever dream. Audio decoding + SSE/MMX = Win.
Any real GC system won't do this. You do incremental generational scavenging instead which never scans the entire heap and can actually improve paging performance.
At least some old Java implementations did. I had a program which was okay until it hit swap; once it did, it took minutes for garbage collection to finish.
My mean beaf with GC is that it makes handling all other resources a pain.
Well... No. Java makes handling anything that isn't memory pain, but that's a Java problem, not GC problem. Having GC doesn't prevent you from having a keyword - let's call it "scoped" - which causes the "finalize()" function of an object to be called when you exit the scope it was created in. Java desn't have that, and so you end up writing try-finally -blocks, but it could be added any time Oracle feels like it.
My second-largest beaf is that memory problems often are an indicator of poor design (you are not clear which class has what responsibility), which you loose with GC.
I don't think having subpar programs not crashing, leaking memory, or overloading buffers all the time is exactly a strike against GC.
I've been developing professionally (disclaimer: in C++;-) ) for 10 years now, I've put up with people saying exactly this for 10 years, and for 10 years it hasn't been generally true at all.
And I've been using programs a lot longer than 10 years now, and seen enough buffer overruns, memory leaks and General Protection Faults/Segmentation Violations that yes, it's generally true. Most programmers are about average, and it only takes a single programming mistake to crash a program, or let malware in.
Automatic memory management isn't training wheels, it's a damn seatbelt.
People write video codecs in C/C++ instead of Java because Java is slower.
No, they write video codecs in C/C++ because it makes it easier to interface with video players that are also written in C/C++. And video players are written in C/C++ because it makes it easier to interface with video codecs which are written in C/C++.
Of course they never seem to have a good answer for why if this is the case all performance important apps (like games, audio software, etc) are written in something else
Because Java has random pauses due to garbage collection, which are bad for games or audio software. Also, garbage collection interacts badly with memory-hungry programs which might hit the swap.
Also, most operating systems and their API layers are written in C or C++, so it's easiest to interact with them with those. Use Java, and you need to do things like use "finalize()" to ensure OS resources are properly disposed of, or risk resource leakage. However, finalizers are called by the garbage collectors, which is unpredictable. It's two design philosophies colliding, and becomes a mess really soon as you try to patch over the resulting ill fit to keep your abstractions from leaking.
or why Java linpack pulls like 750Mflops on a system where native compiled (from C) Linpack gets 41Gflops.
According to Wikipedia, Linpack is written in Fortran. And Java can (and in modernJVMs is) compiled to native code. So what are you comparing to what?
The point I was trying to make is that the risks are immeasurable due to the time scales involved, and that makes the potential risks too great (for me at least). By building reactors that generate radioactive waste with lifetimes in the range of 10,000-100,000+you are committing the next 4000+ generations of human beings to managing that risk. I have some moral qualms with making that decision for my ancestors, ancestors who'll be alive 1000s of years after my bones have turned to dust.
And by not building them, you are committing them to dealing with climate change. You'll also deprive them from the last reserves of fossil fuels, which could be used to rebuild civilization should it collapse.
You can't help but make decisions for your descendants, no matter what you do, nor can they help making them for their descendants. Trying to avoid any commitments either way does nothing but prevents long-term planning.
What's more, can you guarantee that economic considerations will not intervene to make management of this waste non-viable, or that our civilisation will continue uninterrupted by war, famine or disease, to such an extent that these waste stockpiles will not be abandoned or forgotten? 100,000+ years is a long time, longer than recorded history itself!
All the more reason to invest more into technology to reduce that to the somewhat more manageable 300 years, no?
Also, geologic disposal is not dependent on maintenance: you simply bury the waste deep.
Then you and I are in agreement, although I still think that renewable energy should receive a bigger slice of the pie (the lack of consistent and sufficient funding has slowed the pace of development for decades; we'd have viable wave power by now were it not for the conservative funding decisions of previous UK governments)
Perhaps. Perhaps not. All we know for sure is that we don't have that now, and we need clean energy now.
Frankly, I suspect renewable will never amount to much; the energy density is just too small.
My understanding however was that the only nation actively perusing breeder reactor designs (in their case based on the thorium cycle) was India, although I do recall reading somewhere that France and Japan were collaborating on research reactor(s). In any case, my understanding is that breeder reactors are off the table for the next generation (currently being tabled) in the UK and the US, and I can't see Frances collaboration with Japan yielding result until the next, next generation of reactors due to be tabled in 20-30 years time.
Perhaps if more countries researched nuclear technology rather than replacing it with coal because a bunch of panicky idiots would rather have tens of thousands of people die every year rather than a few every few decades, it wouldn't take 20-30 years to get those breeders.
Agreed, although I suspect that we want to reduce the current stockpile without adding to it (in quantity of radioactive waste, rather than lifetime), we'd need to implement it on comparatively small scale.
This doesn't really make sense to me. If a single breeder reactor burns more waste than it produces, surely 10,000 reactors burn 10,000 times more?
Note I said that I suspect; I just don't know enough about the fuel/waste economy of breeder reactors to know whether deploying them on the current scale would be a good thing (i.e. would it yield more and ever increasing amounts of nuclear waste, albeit shorter lived?).
The whole problem with nuclear waste is precisely because it's long-lived. It's quantity is pretty much insignificant.
Erm... Yes, because these 'on the horizon' technologies for carbon capture and sequestration are already in the pipeline. They are under active research, are far less complicated and could well
Well said. Putting a stop to nuclear plants means something else will need to rise to take its place, and there will be a lot of money for whoever comes up with new and better solutions, and renewable is unquestionably the way to go.
Except, of course, things don't appear out of thin air just because you happen to need them. It's also entirely possible - likely, even - that nothing appears to take the place of nuclear power, and people will either burn coal or sit in the dark and die.
Nuclear power brings with it the potential for nuclear disasters, makes it possible to build nuclear weapons, and creates nuclear waste which is getting buried all over the place and will take eons to become safe again. Radioactive material poisons our world, and I'd be glad to see an end to its production.
I wonder if you'll still be happy when you get the choice between turning off your computer, freezer and lights, or choking on smog from burning coal? And let's not forget that water pumps also run on electricity, so no drinking water for you. Unless, of course, you happen to be lucky enough to have a well, in which case you get to fight the hordes of desperate refugees instead.
In our modern society, the electric grid going down and staying down is an apocalypse scenario. "Something'll appear if we just turn off the nukes" is not a good enough plan to risk it.
Worst case scenario - energy needs overreach energy production and the cost rises, leading to new generations of low-power electronics, more efficient buildings, and a scramble for more efficient renewable energy technologies. THAT sounds like going in the right direction.
No, worst case scenario - lights flicker out and stay out, after which almost everyone dies.
Low-power electronics don't just magically appear because you happen to need them, especially since there's already plenty of motivation to produce them, with all these mobile devices and heat problems in desktops. More efficient buildings have limits, especially if like to breath mold-free air. And even if renewables were 100% efficient - which violates laws of physics - the energy density is still so low you'd need to devote huge areas to power generation (and pay for their maintenance, and for grid connections).
I don't understand why some people think just wanting a solution to exist means one actually does. I especially don't understand why people who reject a solution think another one must exist, just because they didn't like the first one. Do you think the universe owes you one, or something?
If we do not (stop our population growth, or drastically change lifestyles) - nature will make that choice for us.
Our population growth has already stopped. All industrial countries have a declining population. And our current industrial processes are clean, and could be even cleaner with more energy. Which leaves energy as the only real problem with out current lifestyle - everything else can be recycled, by reducing to atoms and rebuilding from raw elements, if you have the energy to do so.
Which is why it's bitterly ironic that it's been the enviromentalists who have been most against nuclear power, thus preventing us from reaching zero emissions.
Germany's at least committing to trying to do this in a nonpolluting (i.e. non-fossil-fuel) way, and they actually have the infrastructure and engineering acumen to pull it off (maybe).
Germany is building new large coal plants as we speak, so if they made any claims of such commitments, they lied.
And no amount of infrastructure or engineering acumen is going to change the fact that you need to generate the power somehow. With the technology of today or the foreseeable future, that means it's coal or nuclear. Make your pick.
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Looking out for the environment is looking out for number one, unless you'd rather live in Mordor.
Firmly in the NIMBY camp, the same as pretty much everyone else. And since windmills require a lot of land - a lot of people's backyards - to produce significant amounts of power, this is yet another reason why renewable energy isn't a viable alternative to nuclear.
You do realize that flashing lights can actually kill people with epilepsy, right? And make non-epileptic people extremely uncomfortable and disoriented? And sometimes even cause the first seizure in people who didn't have epilepsy before?
Calling these effects "placebo" seems rather odd to me.
I'm thinking about it. I still don't see how having this regular code execute OpenGL commands as opposed to some other commands has anything to do with security. Especially since the code is already using OpenGl and Direct3D/Direct2D to accelerate drawing the web page.
So by running a web browser, a graphical program, you've already lost the battle. Gotcha.
So how does WebGL change the situation?
Yes, they have. How does that make being able to call OpenGL functions a security risk?
And since a browser has no choice but to call graphics driver code to display anything, your point would be?...
Well, no. The GPU does not do a half-arsed attempt at providing isolation, because it does no attempt whatsoever. It can't, because it has no way to know what program originated any particular command it's given. It's entirely the drivers responsibility to provide isolation, because it's the only thing that can.
And besides, since all major browsers - including Microsoft's IE9 - are already using GPU acceleration, if the drivers really are that buggy, you're already screwed.
Fanbois of what?
I have bad news for you: every graphical program - such as the web browser - sends commands to the graphics driver. And both Firefox and IE nowadays use graphics acceleration - but even if they didn't, the Windows and Linux desktops do.
I don't know what you mean by running on the drivers - perhaps you meant running shaders on the graphics card? But then any malice is restrained by the inability to do anything beyond rendering into a buffer. Or perhaps you meant the shader compiler has buffer overflows or something? That might be, but it doesn't match your "no sanity checks" scenario, since shader compilation is done only once and thus doesn't really need to be that fast.
It's a good thing a malicious shader program is unable to do anything besides rendering into an on-card buffer, no?
Just out of curiosity, could you provide a simple example of malicious OpenGL code? I accept a series of OpenGL commands rather than insist on actual shader programs.
.Net is a managed language family to write programs in, and has nothing to do with HTML 5 or any other version.
You've yet to explain how it would be exploited. It can't be used to access files on the hard drive. It can't be used to access the Net. The words it can be used for is to display Goatse, and that's something you can do even without OpenGL access.
C? I thought you were talking about templates.
So, is carrying two parasitic twins twice as bad as just one ?-)
No, let's pour unlimited amounts of taxpayer's money into nuclear power so we can keep the lights on and infrastructure working without destroying the environment.
No, it should be disregarded because such solutions do not exist, so the preference can't be met. Wind and solar lack the energy density and dependability to keep our infrastructure working, hydro is pretty much tapped out, and while biomass is somewhat dependendable it requires huge areas of biologically productive areas, which destroys the environment. Geothermal is only viable in some locations, unless you're talking deep borehold geothermal, in which case we lack the technology.
And frankly, comparing people who insist on making decisions about things they choose to remain ignorant about to luddites is unfair. Luddites had the perfectly reasonable fear that automation would put people out of the jobs being automated. Joe Sixpack wants to make the world a better place (at least for himself, sometimes for others too), but is too lazy to learn how, so he picks something to resist as evil - government, socialism, nuclear power, Jews, whatever - and calls it a day. It has always worked that way, throughout the whole history.
No, they would come up with some absurd excuse or other to oppose it, such as blaming all incidents of cancer on it or something. Greenpeace hates nuclear power because that's part of their core ideology, and its rationalizations of that hate are just that: rationalizations.
Status quo is this because of the damn political hulabaloo involved with trying to do anything with nuclear power, so you need to go with massive projects to mitigate that cost over as many terawatt-hours as you can. If you have to have government approval - subject to change whenever someone needs votes, as happened in Germany - to build a megawatt-range reactor, you say "screw this" and build coal instead.
Actually, it makes far more sense to have the reactors owned by the public. No reason to let private companeis have anything to do with basic infrastructure.
And how much of this is because of any inherent difficulty in nuclear power, and how much because a government can simply decide to force-shut your plant to please someone's voters?
If there was a *TRUE* free market for nuclear power, I'd have a reactor in my basement right now, rather than relying on unreliable grid power produced by huge, polluting power plants. Not a gigawatt reactor, not even a megawatt reactor; a simple solid-state reactor producing perhaps 50-100 kilowatts of power, enough to heat and power my house and load my electric car overnight without running any risk of melting in any circumstances due to low power rating. I could even go one step further and condense drinking water from air, and burn all my waste with an electric arc. My household would have pretty much zero impact on the environment, as would those of other people, and the society in general would be far less vulnerable due to having less central points of failure.
The sound you just heard was Greenpeace and their ilk screaming from seeing their worst nightmare.
And the thing is, when you repeat such things often enough, people will join the terrorists out of sheer annoyance. That's one of the reasons why nationalists parties are on the rise in Europe - they don't tell people they're evil racists who sould be ashamed of having a national or cultural identity. And any attempt to point out that the nastier far-right parties actually are evil racists meets the fate of the boy who cried wolf, and serves to feed the annoyance. And any attempt to point this out, and ask the self-appointed anti-racists to tone down their rethoric to the point where it doesn't directly contradict most people's experiences gets you called, you guessed it, an evil racist.
All of this would make for a wonderful farce if it didn't have such a huge potential for harm.
No, I wish to build lots of nuclear power plants so the grid can be kept powered without tapping my car batteries.
And if you forget to remove an object from a collection when you're done with it, it won't get garbage collected, and you get a memory leak.
Nothing short of a compiler/runtime with superhuman AI can protect programmers from their own stupidity, but there is a difference betweeb walking a tightrope and driving a highway.
As it happens, poor design in Java typically leads to bad performance, which poor design in C leads to memory management mistakes which lead to data corruption.
It's managed code which does a honest crash/clean exit when something goes wrong (and is not handled by the program); with unmanaged programs, you get an undefined state, and pretty much anything could happen, now or five hours later.
Also, you may prefer crashing at the first excuse, but I prefer the programs I use to at least try to keep working (this is especially true for programs like Firefox which insist on running everything in a single instance).
Yes, it can.
Besides, your point would only be valid if mining didn't increase the risk of a coal fire. It does, obviously, by exposing coal seams to air.
J2SE platform version 1.4.2 now uses SSE and SSE2 instruction sets for floating point computations on hardware and software platforms that support this feature.
JITs can't dream, but the people who write them can. And are probably far more experienced with assembly than you are, for most values of "you".
At least some old Java implementations did. I had a program which was okay until it hit swap; once it did, it took minutes for garbage collection to finish.
Well... No. Java makes handling anything that isn't memory pain, but that's a Java problem, not GC problem. Having GC doesn't prevent you from having a keyword - let's call it "scoped" - which causes the "finalize()" function of an object to be called when you exit the scope it was created in. Java desn't have that, and so you end up writing try-finally -blocks, but it could be added any time Oracle feels like it.
I don't think having subpar programs not crashing, leaking memory, or overloading buffers all the time is exactly a strike against GC.
So... comparing two heap allocation routines is deceptive, but comparing stack allocation to heap allocation isn't?
And I've been using programs a lot longer than 10 years now, and seen enough buffer overruns, memory leaks and General Protection Faults/Segmentation Violations that yes, it's generally true. Most programmers are about average, and it only takes a single programming mistake to crash a program, or let malware in.
Automatic memory management isn't training wheels, it's a damn seatbelt.
No, they write video codecs in C/C++ because it makes it easier to interface with video players that are also written in C/C++. And video players are written in C/C++ because it makes it easier to interface with video codecs which are written in C/C++.
With what?
Because Java has random pauses due to garbage collection, which are bad for games or audio software. Also, garbage collection interacts badly with memory-hungry programs which might hit the swap.
Also, most operating systems and their API layers are written in C or C++, so it's easiest to interact with them with those. Use Java, and you need to do things like use "finalize()" to ensure OS resources are properly disposed of, or risk resource leakage. However, finalizers are called by the garbage collectors, which is unpredictable. It's two design philosophies colliding, and becomes a mess really soon as you try to patch over the resulting ill fit to keep your abstractions from leaking.
According to Wikipedia, Linpack is written in Fortran. And Java can (and in modernJVMs is) compiled to native code. So what are you comparing to what?
And by not building them, you are committing them to dealing with climate change. You'll also deprive them from the last reserves of fossil fuels, which could be used to rebuild civilization should it collapse.
You can't help but make decisions for your descendants, no matter what you do, nor can they help making them for their descendants. Trying to avoid any commitments either way does nothing but prevents long-term planning.
All the more reason to invest more into technology to reduce that to the somewhat more manageable 300 years, no?
Also, geologic disposal is not dependent on maintenance: you simply bury the waste deep.
Perhaps. Perhaps not. All we know for sure is that we don't have that now, and we need clean energy now.
Frankly, I suspect renewable will never amount to much; the energy density is just too small.
Perhaps if more countries researched nuclear technology rather than replacing it with coal because a bunch of panicky idiots would rather have tens of thousands of people die every year rather than a few every few decades, it wouldn't take 20-30 years to get those breeders.
This doesn't really make sense to me. If a single breeder reactor burns more waste than it produces, surely 10,000 reactors burn 10,000 times more?
The whole problem with nuclear waste is precisely because it's long-lived. It's quantity is pretty much insignificant.
Except, of course, things don't appear out of thin air just because you happen to need them. It's also entirely possible - likely, even - that nothing appears to take the place of nuclear power, and people will either burn coal or sit in the dark and die.
I wonder if you'll still be happy when you get the choice between turning off your computer, freezer and lights, or choking on smog from burning coal? And let's not forget that water pumps also run on electricity, so no drinking water for you. Unless, of course, you happen to be lucky enough to have a well, in which case you get to fight the hordes of desperate refugees instead.
In our modern society, the electric grid going down and staying down is an apocalypse scenario. "Something'll appear if we just turn off the nukes" is not a good enough plan to risk it.
No, worst case scenario - lights flicker out and stay out, after which almost everyone dies.
Low-power electronics don't just magically appear because you happen to need them, especially since there's already plenty of motivation to produce them, with all these mobile devices and heat problems in desktops. More efficient buildings have limits, especially if like to breath mold-free air. And even if renewables were 100% efficient - which violates laws of physics - the energy density is still so low you'd need to devote huge areas to power generation (and pay for their maintenance, and for grid connections).
I don't understand why some people think just wanting a solution to exist means one actually does. I especially don't understand why people who reject a solution think another one must exist, just because they didn't like the first one. Do you think the universe owes you one, or something?
Our population growth has already stopped. All industrial countries have a declining population. And our current industrial processes are clean, and could be even cleaner with more energy. Which leaves energy as the only real problem with out current lifestyle - everything else can be recycled, by reducing to atoms and rebuilding from raw elements, if you have the energy to do so.
Which is why it's bitterly ironic that it's been the enviromentalists who have been most against nuclear power, thus preventing us from reaching zero emissions.
Germany is building new large coal plants as we speak, so if they made any claims of such commitments, they lied.
And no amount of infrastructure or engineering acumen is going to change the fact that you need to generate the power somehow. With the technology of today or the foreseeable future, that means it's coal or nuclear. Make your pick.