A reactor itself is pretty small compared to the overall size of a plant.
Aye! Am I the only one who snickers every time someone in the media wants to talk about a nuclear reactor and so shows a cooling tower? They use those things at coal-fired plants too! Yet ten bucks says if you showed a picture of a cooling tower to most Americans they'd say "that's a nuclear reactor." *sigh*
Most of academia [...] seems to hand out public IP's with almost everything open to the world
The same goes for the schools (one Ivy, one big Tech) I've attended. And I wouldn't have it any other way! The Ivy was especially nice; I loved the fact that, anywhere in the world, I could ping "machine.residentialnetwork.schoolname.edu." Knowing I could ssh into my box from anywhere was really great, as was knowing that I could run an ftp server whenever I wanted to share some large files. Really, it's how the Internet (e.g., pre-NAT) was supposed to work.
Heh! I know, that's probably an abuse of the language too. You reminded me why I put an asterisk next to "Caucasian;" I was actually going to make a footnote kind of like your comment.
You're right, it's pretty superficial in the end; Caucasian really means, "looking white," whatever that means. And the Caucasus as a region is actually a great example. Midway along the Silk Road, you run into real difficulties with racial classification.
Another example of how we twist language to deal with our discomfort with race: "Native American." Literally, "Aboriginal" is the appropriate adjective, not "native." "Native" only worked to differentiate Algonquin from English up until sometime in the 16-1700s!
"any people united by common history, language, cultural traits, etc" [...] Nobody would say "Japanese" or "Korean" wasn't a racial group.
I think that's a bad definition for race. It sounds more like a correct definition for ethnicity. "Japanese" and Korean" are nationalities and, more than that, they are ethnicities, but I wouldn't call them "races" any more than I'd say that Italians and Swedes are of different "races." Italians and Swedes are "Caucasian;" Japanese and Koreans are "Asian," (or "East-Asian" if you want to differentiate from "South-Asian.")
Because by the definition you cited, Kurds are a race, as are Armenians, as are... It just gets absurd. At this rate we'd end up with one-"race"-per-family-group!
Race is biological (but socially-constructed*). Ethnicity is (mostly) cultural. I feel like definitions that do not reflect this difference serve to make our language less accurate.
Do not think for one minute that everything which calls itself academia is actually worthy of the title. Most of it is pure tripe.
True. However, I'm not certain that stigma associated with citing Wikipedia is really much more than an irrational prejudice in many situations. If I am writing the requisite "here are some applications" part of my article, do I the theoretician really need more than an encyclopedia's-article worth of information? The fact is, if I cite another academic paper in another field to prove "It can be applied!!!," I'll really just be grabbing a few tidbits from their abstract. That's really no better, and probably worse.
Hm. I can't find a mainstream source citing this incident. Everything is FIRE or a blog linking to FIRE (or, there is one CNN transcript, but it's from some over-the-top "conservative" commentator.)
That said, I'll grant you that it's plausible. While at school, as I noted in my previous post, I definitely met bigots who I could imagine spouting that sort of thing.
One of the most wonderfully ironic (sad, really) examples was the guy who dated my roommate. My roommate and I were pretty close, so, besides having firsthand conversations with the boyfriend (who I liked at first, actually), I learned more about this after they broke up. Anyway, this boyfriend-of-roommate was an Asian guy who, it slowly became clear, kind of hated white men. The irony was that not only was my roommate white; most of this Asian guy's exes were white too. Funny how that worked.
I'm just glad he didn't give my roommate AIDs. There was a scary time when we found out that Asian-guy's ex had just tested positive. Naturally, my roommate was scared out of his mind; he went into a deep depression for a long time until he could get tested. Thank God neither of them had it. Thank God.
Anyway, I'm getting off topic. The point is, I do know that the type of people who'd say this stuff with a straight face do exist.
I noticed that this website (1) harps on "free speech," and (2) has articles about (a) "anti-God professors," and (b) "Christianity and the American Commonwealth." This marks it to me as a conservative propaganda outlet, with articles written by paranoid people. I suspect that, if the document is real [which may not be true], then it never made it past University sanity-checkers.
The article you linked to quotes the following "from the university's Office of Residence Life Diversity Education Training documents:"
A RACIST: A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. 'The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality. By this definition, people of color cannot be racists, because as peoples within the U.S. system, they do not have the power to back up their prejudices, hostilities, or acts of discrimination
This is so over-the-top that I have a little bit of a hard time believing that anyone truly planned on presenting it as an official university position to students. It's quite simply so absurd as to be laughable.
It is -- ironically -- a completely anglo*-centric view which completely ignores so much of the world's diversity! It's as though the author of this bogus 'definition' was not aware that a world exists outside the United States. Is it not racism when Huttus kill Tutsis for their genealogical lineage? Or when, in India, Brahmans abuse Sudras? What about the treatment of Filipinos in Japan?
The author does later refer specifically to the "U.S. system" but only after making incorrect statements, in her zeal to vilify whites, like "A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system." If she hadn't been in such a hurry to demonize white people, she could have made supportable statements like "A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race," without limiters, but she didn't.
I am also annoyed by the assertion that "[people of color] do not have the power to back up their prejudices, hostilities, or acts of discrimination." Besides reeking of self-victimization, it strikes me as only true in particular classes of situations. While in college, a few white people I knew (and I) naively entered interracial relationships; we saw firsthand, unfortunately, that other classes of situations exist in which "people of color" very much do have that ability. The experience taught me racism I wish I had never learned.
(* I abuse the prefix 'anglo' here in the same way that lesser race theorists commonly do, using it to mean 'white' rather than acknowledging that it refers to a particular ethnic group (the English) which is small in relation to the much larger class of 'Caucasians,' and indeed does not even refer to the majority of people (Scots, Irish, Welsh) traditionally inhabiting the British Isles.)
But look what's happening here. I responded, immediately, with annoyance and elevated blood pressure. Yet this is too pat, too simple. The statement is too absurd, almost as though designed to provoke this response in me. That's what makes me wonder at its authenticity. Because any intelligent person would know that a statement like that could only have such a harmful result, and no university truly interested in improving race relations would make such a statement.
A game, used in an unsupervised setting, without any plan: Is just a leisure pursuit.
False dichotomy. Leisure pursuits can be great for learning. It's the reason I could code circles around my Electrical Engineering classmates as an undergrad.
Out in the depths of the universe I'm sure there's some object somewhere which emits coherent radio frequency radiation because of some physical process
Wouldn't that just be a standard vanilla radio transmitter? If you're putting out a signal of constant frequency and phase, it's coherent. Agree?
One out of four people has an incurable STD -- and you're worrying about sitting on an airplane? Heart disease is one of the top killers in the US -- yet you weigh how much? For Pete's sake, if you're going to take precautions, make them precautions that might actually help you: Eat healthy, get vaccinated when possible, etc. Bombs are just one particularly rare and dramatic way of screwing up a body.
In fact, it is starting to bother the heck out of me that servers rely on filesystem permissions to begin with, and I'm starting to think that it's something Unixes simply do wrong. Isn't it a security risk? Why do we let a user roam free around a drive, and hope that we set our permissions strictly enough everywhere?
Simply, I see no reason why an FTP or SFTP server needs to be tied to the filesystem at all. Why are FTP permissions associated with the files; they should be associated with the FTP server! (In a config file, say). And why does an FTP user need to be a 'nix user, anyway?
Most of the servers I've used on Linux were too big and too tied to the underlying system. I want nice, lightweight things that do a simple job well, and which do not require that I modify other parts of the system.
My all-time favorite FTP server was a little Windows program called SlimFTP. It was lightweight, and used a simple text file for configuration. It looked kind of like this:
<User "bob">
Password "god"
Mount/Upload c:\ftp-upload\
Mount/Software d:\downloads\programs
Mount/Music e:\media\music
Allow / Read List
Allow/Upload Read Write List
</User>
<User "ezekiel">
Mount / c:\home\zeke
Allow / Read List
</User>
It was beautiful! I would love to have an SFTD daemon that took a config file like that.
Alas, the only thing I can do is kludge together a login script per user that sets up a chroot jail, mounts directories outside the jail to directories inside the jail using loopback filesystems, etc. It's (1) a pain, and (2) error-prone. For a supposedly-secure operating system, "The Linux Way" seems to include surprisingly few nice little self-contained services.
If it's not a fast breeder reactor, it's not a solution to the energy problem.
U235 would run out within the next 60 years, IIRC, if we got all of our power from traditional nuclear powerplants like this one!
However, the world has tons of U238, so breeders could provide power for a long time. And if you made the changes necessary to run the breeders on Thorium instead of U238 (Thorium is even more abundant), then you coul provide power nearly indefinitely.
Breeders also solve the waste problem: The reason radioactive waste is so dangerous is that it still has tons of energy in it; the decay is the slow release of that energy. Since breeders extract so much more energy from fuel, their wastes have much shorter half-lives, and decay to the levels of naturally-occurring ores within a few hundred years -- which isn't great, but (1) sure beats the millennia we're talking about with our current wastes, and (2) seems to be a timescale society can handle.
We need breeders. Pebble-beds are wasteful; they (1) don't breed, and (2) generate a lot of pebble-coating waste. Anything but breeder reactors, and solar/wind/geothermal/hydro, is a waste of time. Breeder reactors are the only technology we currently have that can solve the energy problem. We should be building breeders.
So I think the problem is that we're thinking about code as "having" a license. It doesn't. Code is distributed under a license. There is nothing to stop the copyright-holder from distributing his code under the GPL on Monday, the BSD license on Tuesday, and under a closed-source license on Wednesday.
The recipient of the code is bound by the terms of whatever license he received the code under. In the case of programs distributed online, the recipient can, at any time, download the code under whatever distribution he likes.
So long as the recipient meets the terms of the license he receives the code under, everything is fine. He can require whatever he wants of other people so long as he meets those obligations.
So:
You write,
GPL REQUIRES that ALL portions of a program distributed under the GPL are under the GPL.
...and, yes, that's true. But this does not imply:
You CAN'T have a GPL program where portions are under the BSD, unless you own the copyright in the BSD portions.
...because, in fact, you can do whatever you like with code so long as you meet the terms of the license you received it under.
So what does the BSD license require?
You must (1) display the copyright of the original author somewhere, (2) display a message disclaiming the original author of any liability, (3) not use the name of the original author without written permission, and (4) include conditions 1, 2, 3, and 4 in your redistribution.
If you received code under th BSD license, does redistributing it under the GPL meet those terms?
The GPL does #1 above as clause 4 of the GPL Terms and Conditions.
The GPL can do #2 and #3 above as optional sections of clause 7 of the GPL. In Linux distros -- which is what we're talking about -- this is done.
The GPL of course does #4; propagating itself is what the GPL is famous for.
Thus all requirements are fulfilled. So you see? It's perfectly legal to distribute code you received under the BSD license under the GPL.
The only other question is whether it's ethical. And it is: Because, if the general public has access to BSD(Darin) and GPL(Darin+Bob), then, effectively, Darin's code is still BSD-ed and it is only Bob's code which is only available under the more-restrictive GPL.
Make sense?
I think everybody is getting the causal chains backwards: Sure, the GPL has more requirements than the BSD license, but it doesn't undo the original distribution of the software under the BSD license; it's not like people who received the code under the BSD license all of a sudden have to conform to the GPL!
Darin wanted his code on this one utility module to be 100% free.
And it is!
The fact that somebody licensed a derivative work under the GPL in no way changes the license on Darin's code. Darin's code is still BSD and always will be, and from now into perpetuity, anybody can use Darin's code however they want, just like he'd intended.
What people can't do is use the derivative work however they want -- like, in a proprietary piece of software. But that's another issue! Some guy started with Darin's code and made something else out of it; let's call that guy "Bob." It's really just Bob's changes to Darin's code that are GPLed.
You see? Nothing the GPL people can do or have done will change the fact that anybody can get Darin's code under the BSD license.
The problem is this damn word "relicensing" we keep using. It implies that the license is somehow changed. It isn't!
Slashdot Mirror
Aye! Am I the only one who snickers every time someone in the media wants to talk about a nuclear reactor and so shows a cooling tower? They use those things at coal-fired plants too! Yet ten bucks says if you showed a picture of a cooling tower to most Americans they'd say "that's a nuclear reactor." *sigh*
This is... a little strange. I hope the Russians simply have customs I'm not used to... (Thanks.)
This is a reference to something. What?
The same goes for the schools (one Ivy, one big Tech) I've attended. And I wouldn't have it any other way! The Ivy was especially nice; I loved the fact that, anywhere in the world, I could ping "machine.residentialnetwork.schoolname.edu." Knowing I could ssh into my box from anywhere was really great, as was knowing that I could run an ftp server whenever I wanted to share some large files. Really, it's how the Internet (e.g., pre-NAT) was supposed to work.
http://www.asofterworld.com/index.php?id=209
Heh! I know, that's probably an abuse of the language too. You reminded me why I put an asterisk next to "Caucasian;" I was actually going to make a footnote kind of like your comment.
You're right, it's pretty superficial in the end; Caucasian really means, "looking white," whatever that means. And the Caucasus as a region is actually a great example. Midway along the Silk Road, you run into real difficulties with racial classification.
Another example of how we twist language to deal with our discomfort with race: "Native American." Literally, "Aboriginal" is the appropriate adjective, not "native." "Native" only worked to differentiate Algonquin from English up until sometime in the 16-1700s!
Such is life.
I think that's a bad definition for race. It sounds more like a correct definition for ethnicity. "Japanese" and Korean" are nationalities and, more than that, they are ethnicities, but I wouldn't call them "races" any more than I'd say that Italians and Swedes are of different "races." Italians and Swedes are "Caucasian;" Japanese and Koreans are "Asian," (or "East-Asian" if you want to differentiate from "South-Asian.")
Because by the definition you cited, Kurds are a race, as are Armenians, as are... It just gets absurd. At this rate we'd end up with one-"race"-per-family-group!
Race is biological (but socially-constructed*). Ethnicity is (mostly) cultural. I feel like definitions that do not reflect this difference serve to make our language less accurate.
Read the Coda to Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.
True. However, I'm not certain that stigma associated with citing Wikipedia is really much more than an irrational prejudice in many situations. If I am writing the requisite "here are some applications" part of my article, do I the theoretician really need more than an encyclopedia's-article worth of information? The fact is, if I cite another academic paper in another field to prove "It can be applied!!!," I'll really just be grabbing a few tidbits from their abstract. That's really no better, and probably worse.
Hm. I can't find a mainstream source citing this incident. Everything is FIRE or a blog linking to FIRE (or, there is one CNN transcript, but it's from some over-the-top "conservative" commentator.)
That said, I'll grant you that it's plausible. While at school, as I noted in my previous post, I definitely met bigots who I could imagine spouting that sort of thing.
One of the most wonderfully ironic (sad, really) examples was the guy who dated my roommate. My roommate and I were pretty close, so, besides having firsthand conversations with the boyfriend (who I liked at first, actually), I learned more about this after they broke up. Anyway, this boyfriend-of-roommate was an Asian guy who, it slowly became clear, kind of hated white men. The irony was that not only was my roommate white; most of this Asian guy's exes were white too. Funny how that worked.
I'm just glad he didn't give my roommate AIDs. There was a scary time when we found out that Asian-guy's ex had just tested positive. Naturally, my roommate was scared out of his mind; he went into a deep depression for a long time until he could get tested. Thank God neither of them had it. Thank God.
Anyway, I'm getting off topic. The point is, I do know that the type of people who'd say this stuff with a straight face do exist.
I noticed that this website (1) harps on "free speech," and (2) has articles about (a) "anti-God professors," and (b) "Christianity and the American Commonwealth." This marks it to me as a conservative propaganda outlet, with articles written by paranoid people. I suspect that, if the document is real [which may not be true], then it never made it past University sanity-checkers.
We need cool heads to deal with race.
The article you linked to quotes the following "from the university's Office of Residence Life Diversity Education Training documents:"
A RACIST: A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. 'The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality. By this definition, people of color cannot be racists, because as peoples within the U.S. system, they do not have the power to back up their prejudices, hostilities, or acts of discriminationThis is so over-the-top that I have a little bit of a hard time believing that anyone truly planned on presenting it as an official university position to students. It's quite simply so absurd as to be laughable.
It is -- ironically -- a completely anglo*-centric view which completely ignores so much of the world's diversity! It's as though the author of this bogus 'definition' was not aware that a world exists outside the United States. Is it not racism when Huttus kill Tutsis for their genealogical lineage? Or when, in India, Brahmans abuse Sudras? What about the treatment of Filipinos in Japan?
The author does later refer specifically to the "U.S. system" but only after making incorrect statements, in her zeal to vilify whites, like "A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system." If she hadn't been in such a hurry to demonize white people, she could have made supportable statements like "A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race," without limiters, but she didn't.
I am also annoyed by the assertion that "[people of color] do not have the power to back up their prejudices, hostilities, or acts of discrimination." Besides reeking of self-victimization, it strikes me as only true in particular classes of situations. While in college, a few white people I knew (and I) naively entered interracial relationships; we saw firsthand, unfortunately, that other classes of situations exist in which "people of color" very much do have that ability. The experience taught me racism I wish I had never learned.
(* I abuse the prefix 'anglo' here in the same way that lesser race theorists commonly do, using it to mean 'white' rather than acknowledging that it refers to a particular ethnic group (the English) which is small in relation to the much larger class of 'Caucasians,' and indeed does not even refer to the majority of people (Scots, Irish, Welsh) traditionally inhabiting the British Isles.)
But look what's happening here. I responded, immediately, with annoyance and elevated blood pressure. Yet this is too pat, too simple. The statement is too absurd, almost as though designed to provoke this response in me. That's what makes me wonder at its authenticity. Because any intelligent person would know that a statement like that could only have such a harmful result, and no university truly interested in improving race relations would make such a statement.
False dichotomy. Leisure pursuits can be great for learning. It's the reason I could code circles around my Electrical Engineering classmates as an undergrad.
Wouldn't that just be a standard vanilla radio transmitter? If you're putting out a signal of constant frequency and phase, it's coherent. Agree?
Here here.
One out of four people has an incurable STD -- and you're worrying about sitting on an airplane? Heart disease is one of the top killers in the US -- yet you weigh how much? For Pete's sake, if you're going to take precautions, make them precautions that might actually help you: Eat healthy, get vaccinated when possible, etc. Bombs are just one particularly rare and dramatic way of screwing up a body.
I can't tell if that's a reference to Douglas Adams or to masturbation. Hopefully not both.
I too have wanted the exact same thing.
In fact, it is starting to bother the heck out of me that servers rely on filesystem permissions to begin with, and I'm starting to think that it's something Unixes simply do wrong. Isn't it a security risk? Why do we let a user roam free around a drive, and hope that we set our permissions strictly enough everywhere?
Simply, I see no reason why an FTP or SFTP server needs to be tied to the filesystem at all. Why are FTP permissions associated with the files; they should be associated with the FTP server! (In a config file, say). And why does an FTP user need to be a 'nix user, anyway?
Most of the servers I've used on Linux were too big and too tied to the underlying system. I want nice, lightweight things that do a simple job well, and which do not require that I modify other parts of the system.
My all-time favorite FTP server was a little Windows program called SlimFTP. It was lightweight, and used a simple text file for configuration. It looked kind of like this:
<User "bob">
Password "god"
Mount
Mount
Mount
Allow / Read List
Allow
</User>
<User "ezekiel">
Mount / c:\home\zeke
Allow / Read List
</User>
It was beautiful! I would love to have an SFTD daemon that took a config file like that.
Alas, the only thing I can do is kludge together a login script per user that sets up a chroot jail, mounts directories outside the jail to directories inside the jail using loopback filesystems, etc. It's (1) a pain, and (2) error-prone. For a supposedly-secure operating system, "The Linux Way" seems to include surprisingly few nice little self-contained services.
If it's not a fast breeder reactor, it's not a solution to the energy problem.
U235 would run out within the next 60 years, IIRC, if we got all of our power from traditional nuclear powerplants like this one!
However, the world has tons of U238, so breeders could provide power for a long time. And if you made the changes necessary to run the breeders on Thorium instead of U238 (Thorium is even more abundant), then you coul provide power nearly indefinitely.
Breeders also solve the waste problem: The reason radioactive waste is so dangerous is that it still has tons of energy in it; the decay is the slow release of that energy. Since breeders extract so much more energy from fuel, their wastes have much shorter half-lives, and decay to the levels of naturally-occurring ores within a few hundred years -- which isn't great, but (1) sure beats the millennia we're talking about with our current wastes, and (2) seems to be a timescale society can handle.
We need breeders. Pebble-beds are wasteful; they (1) don't breed, and (2) generate a lot of pebble-coating waste. Anything but breeder reactors, and solar/wind/geothermal/hydro, is a waste of time. Breeder reactors are the only technology we currently have that can solve the energy problem. We should be building breeders.
Mess with the best, die like the rest!
"Pool on the roof. Sprung a leak."
"And yes, Mom, I'm still a virgin!"
"Crash 'N Burn"
eof.
I can't wait!
Dude, I'm building a Krogoth.
Surely your boss, in his wisdom, was drawing the plot on log axes? ;-)
(Nice.)
I took them.
:-P
Businesspeople have taken to using the phrases,
The problem is, none of them seem to know what either of the above actually mean...
So I think the problem is that we're thinking about code as "having" a license. It doesn't. Code is distributed under a license. There is nothing to stop the copyright-holder from distributing his code under the GPL on Monday, the BSD license on Tuesday, and under a closed-source license on Wednesday.
The recipient of the code is bound by the terms of whatever license he received the code under. In the case of programs distributed online, the recipient can, at any time, download the code under whatever distribution he likes.
So long as the recipient meets the terms of the license he receives the code under, everything is fine. He can require whatever he wants of other people so long as he meets those obligations.
So:
You write,
GPL REQUIRES that ALL portions of a program distributed under the GPL are under the GPL....and, yes, that's true. But this does not imply:
You CAN'T have a GPL program where portions are under the BSD, unless you own the copyright in the BSD portions....because, in fact, you can do whatever you like with code so long as you meet the terms of the license you received it under.
So what does the BSD license require?
You must (1) display the copyright of the original author somewhere, (2) display a message disclaiming the original author of any liability, (3) not use the name of the original author without written permission, and (4) include conditions 1, 2, 3, and 4 in your redistribution.
If you received code under th BSD license, does redistributing it under the GPL meet those terms?
Thus all requirements are fulfilled. So you see? It's perfectly legal to distribute code you received under the BSD license under the GPL.
The only other question is whether it's ethical. And it is: Because, if the general public has access to BSD(Darin) and GPL(Darin+Bob), then, effectively, Darin's code is still BSD-ed and it is only Bob's code which is only available under the more-restrictive GPL.
Make sense?
I think everybody is getting the causal chains backwards: Sure, the GPL has more requirements than the BSD license, but it doesn't undo the original distribution of the software under the BSD license; it's not like people who received the code under the BSD license all of a sudden have to conform to the GPL!
And it is!
The fact that somebody licensed a derivative work under the GPL in no way changes the license on Darin's code. Darin's code is still BSD and always will be, and from now into perpetuity, anybody can use Darin's code however they want, just like he'd intended.
What people can't do is use the derivative work however they want -- like, in a proprietary piece of software. But that's another issue! Some guy started with Darin's code and made something else out of it; let's call that guy "Bob." It's really just Bob's changes to Darin's code that are GPLed.
You see? Nothing the GPL people can do or have done will change the fact that anybody can get Darin's code under the BSD license.
The problem is this damn word "relicensing" we keep using. It implies that the license is somehow changed. It isn't!