I guess it's a grey arrea, but if you start making it complicated, then people won't do it, and we'll be right back to where we started, with more complexity to boot.
The problem of a "bad" method being loaded doesn't seem so severe. Computers are fast. It turns out that computer performance is growing exponentially, but the size of the critical segments of code isn't really growing at all, maybe it's even shrinking. I think it's well beyond the 90 10 rule in most code now. Probably 1% of the code does more than 99% of the work, if I had to guess. This is what has made VMs competitive, the relative cost of compilation and analysis has been shrinking relative to the cost of actually performing the calculations. Now VMs can just use normal (damn the cost) compilers, it just doesn't really matter anymore. Even a huge app can compile fairly quickly, especially when you're only compiling 10% of the code.
HSQL isn't entirely in memory. It writes a log file, and can have cached tables that are persisted to disk. Even non-cached tables are persisted through the log file. It does however keep all the indices in memory, and is limited to 2 GB of data, those are the real limitations.
It is faster though, primarily due to in memory indices, etc... For JDBC databases, I'm not sure anything is faster on small datasets, it certainly blew postgres out of the water by at least a full order of magnitude last time I used it, but your mileage may vary.
Why would a keyword be necessary for stack allocation. Look up a term called "Escape Analysis". It's not too hard for the VM to do this sort of thing automatically, and it would probably do a better job than a human programmer. Another good tactic is "Object Inlining" that can reduce the number of objects by some small factor (perhaps 2-3), also helping garbage collection.
Basically, escape analysis, is when the compiler (VM) figures out which objects escape from the stack frame and which don't. Any that don't escape are stripped of synchronization (since they are incontestable), and then allocated on the stack so they don't need to be GCed. It's not too hard to do escape analysis, and there are prototype systems that hack it into java already. It's a small step from that to a full feldged implementation.
Object inlining is similar. It detects objects that don't escape from their parent object (lots of strings are like this, completely contained within another object), and then it inlines their data into the parent object rather than a reference. This reduces the number of actual objects to be handled by the GC by 1. In addition, it allows whole new classes of method inlining between the parent and child methods, and elimination of a large number of dead fields within the child if they aren't ever accessed from the parent, it just depends on how much code you want to recompile to allow these advanced optimizations.
Sun should put these in, but it's understandable that they haven't put them in yet. In most (but not all) java programs, GC is not a significant part of the overhead now due to good garbage collectors. I'll be a little upset if they don't start including it in version 1.6 though, as it looks like they cleaned house with 1.5, and these sorts of optimizations should now be pretty much on the top of the list.
High explosives don't store that much. If I remember correctly, TNT for instance has less energy than gasoline. It's not so much about the quantity of energy in an explosive, but rather the rate at which it can be released.
1. Your ideal theoretical candidate. (100%) Click here for info 2. Cobb, David - Green Party (86%) Click here for info 3. Nader, Ralph - Independent (79%) Click here for info 4. Brown, Walt - Socialist Party (76%) Click here for info 5. Sharpton, Reverend Al - Democrat (73%) Click here for info 6. Dean, Gov. Howard, VT - Democrat (70%) Click here for info 7. Clark, Retired General Wesley K., AR - Democrat (67%) Click here for info 8. Kucinich, Rep. Dennis, OH - Democrat (67%) Click here for info 9. Moseley-Braun, Former Senator Carol, IL - Democrat (66%) Click here for info 10. Edwards, Senator John, NC - Democrat (63%) Click here for info 11. Gephardt, Rep. Dick, MO - Democrat (62%) Click here for info 12. Kerry, Senator John, MA - Democrat (61%) Click here for info 13. LaRouche, Lyndon H. Jr. - Democrat (43%) Click here for info 14. Badnarik, Michael - Libertarian (39%) Click here for info 15. Lieberman, Senator Joe, CT - Democrat (34%) Click here for info 16. Peroutka, Michael - Constitution Party (17%) Click here for info 17. Bush, President George W. - Republican (10%)
The socialist party, I can see. I did check the full employment box after all, however the greens and Nader are absolutely disallowed by their bush like "use science when it agrees with me, make stuff up when it doesn't" stance on environmental issues. Though their views are diametrically opposed to Bush's (and closer to my own), their utter disregard for facts and figures is absolutely shocking. Being a physicist, I'll tell you that I've checked their numbers on nuclear issues many times, and it's almost unheard of to see an anti-nuke article without at least half a dozen bold lies about basic scientific facts.
This is NOX only. In the US, the largest contribuitors to NOX are generally industries and coal power plants, which is why the rust belt shows up so readily (so RED-ily, if you'll pardon the pun).
This is exactly why the AGs of several north eastern states have resorted to lawsuits, it turns out that a large fraction of the air pollution in NYC, for instance, comes form factories and power plants in Ohio.
We know this partially because of the great blackout only a few years ago. When all the powerplants and factories were offline for a few days, the air cleared up dramatically, even in New England, despite the fact that the New England power plants (and cars, etc...) were still working. Clearly the primary source of the air pollution was Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, etc..., a fact that the scientists (and lawyers) had claimed all along, but it took a blackout (which shut off all those plants) to conclusively prove it beyond any doubt. During the blackout the levels of NOX, SOX, etc... fell dramatically (like by 90% or so) over large swaths of the country in only a couple days.
Keep in mind that this is NOX measured in the study, not CO2, they are wholly different. The US produces lots of CO2 (benign except for global warming effects), but much less NOX and SOX and such than many other areas. If you don't consider CO2, then the US is downright clean, if you consider only CO2 (as the Europeans try to convince people to do) then the US has a horrible record.
Exactly, another issue is the efficiency of this approach. If you saw gangs of new york you have some concept of the problems inherent in this approach. The real problem is game theory based. If the fire department shows up to find an "unprotected" house burning, then they either have to put out the fire, or accept that it will spread to nearby buildings. In order to really protect their customers, they should put it out anyway, but if they do that then there is no reason to buy insurance as the company will have to put out the fire whether you buy insurance or not because a fire in one home is a threat to all homes. This is exactly the sort of thing for which libertarian ideas don't work. The optimal strategy in this case is for you to not buy fire coverage, and for everyone else to buy fire coverage, as that gives you the same protection as if you bought coverage too. In the opposite case, if you buy coverage and nobody else does, then your coverage gives you almost no protection, so this isn't good either. The nash equilibrium of this system is for nobody to buy coverage, but this is not optimal for the system. The optimal plan is for everyone to get coverage, but this is not the nash equilibrium, and therefore the free market is unable to reach the optimal scenario. This is where the free market fails.
In general, if the optimal scenario (everyone being covered) very different from the nash equilibrium (nobody being covered), then a free market will fail to provide a significantly useful service in this field.
The even better example is police. If police were private then you'd have a scenario much like Columbia does today, where the police literally are the organized crime. It's in their interests to ensure that the environment is as unsafe as possible, especially for people who don't pay enough protection money, and yet they are the law, so who would stop them?
As you pointed out, private fire companies have been tried, and they failed. For instance, london burned to the ground in 1666, and new york and chicago both had several devastating fires themselves. Obviously building codes (and judicious use of concrete) have helped, but no doubt having a fire department that attempts to put out small fires (even in the slums) before they become ragin infernos is very helpful as well.
I have the eye TV tuner for my mac, and I can't complain.
Here's my basic asessment.
1) $200 cost. Cheaper than a decent TV (I think), and certainly takes up less space than a TV.
2) Time shifting, recording, the works. Makes your computer into a TiVo, really slick. It's nice to have the recorded shows on the computer where something useful can be done with them too (burn to DVD?).
3) Turning your computer into a TV/TIVO/DVD player helps to save space and gadget costs, really cool.
4) Unit is powered by USB buss, just two cables for it, one is the cable carrying TV, the other is USB. No power cable.
5) Comes with a remote, pretty nice.
6) The software is good. A tad flaky, but not bad.
7) The signal is encoded into MPEG-2 in the external hardware, so the CPU requirements are really low, almost nothing to just record, very little to play back.
The bad news is that you get MPEG-2 encoded video. That's nice and all, but it takes up lots of space (1 GB/hour roughly) for TV quality. It would be nice to re-encode everything as MPEG-4 somehow to save space. This couldn't be done in real time (probably), and would require a firewire cable to get high quality unencoded video into the computer, but it would be nicer I think.
This is just idiocy. Then why don't people set up independent fire departments? Nothing's stopping them. if they can do a better job than the beurocracy and make money on the side then why not, right? But unfortunately this doesn't happen. Could it actually be that fire departments work well as a public service? What happens if you buy fire coverage, but the guy next to you doesn't? Then if his house burns down it has a good shot of burning down your house too, doesn't that suck.
Also, sidewalks shouldn't be privatized. We could put a toll booth at every driveway, and every sidewalk (run out of money on your sidewalk card and I guess you just have to sleep in the gutter until someone finds you and "tows" you home), but why bother? That would cost way more than building the actual service in the first place. Basically, when it costs more to charge for a service than it does to provide the service, or when the optiimal strategy is to not get the service, even though this screws everyone else, the private sector doesn't do a very good job. Just accept it rather than resorting to extremely contrived allegories. Look at the real world once in awhile, you might like it.
The comission on presidential debates is a private entity. This is your free market at work, aren't you happy with it? What, you think that there should be some sort of "regulation" stating perhaps that any canidate that gets on a few ballots should be allowed to speak over the (privately operated) tv stations, in the (privately run) presidential debate? What are you, some sort of communist?
This is the problem with libertarians. It's all about free market, until the free market doesn't work, and then they blame regulations. Just accept life for what it is, some times free markets don't work. For instance, medicine. If your choice is to pay up or die, what sort of position does that put you in to execute your bargaining rights as a consumer? How would a free market fire department do? They'd arrive as your house was burning down and demand you sign over everything you own in order for them to fetch your daughter out of the burning house. This helps people how?
Timers are pretty useful though. My apartment is small, but my AC is smaller. It's nice to be able to set it to come on at 3:00 in order to have the apartment cool by 7:00 when I get home. Saves power, makes it easier on me, what's not to like.
As for TVs though, I got a TV tuner for my computer and never looked back. It's like a TV/Tivo/CableBox/DvdPlayer/Computer all in one, and it takes up less space than all those gadgets together, and is surely cheaper. My stereo met the same fate, it is now my computer's job to play music.
A lot of simple gadgets will meet their end at the hands of the general purpose computer. There is no need to put a web browser in a TV/Fridge/Toaster. If there is something that needs to be browsed, let the computer do it, if not, save your effort.
Also, the number of working age people increases by a million a year, bush is -4.5 million jobs by any fair reckoning. Everyone else manages to create jobs, through world wars, cold wars, whatever. Only bush failed in the last 70 years, it is his fault. In addition, look at the budget deficit, notice that it always goes down (as a percentage of GDP) during democratic presidencies (since carter at least), and up during republicans, it's not an accident. The jobs record of bush would be even worse if he wasn't propping up the numbers with borrowed money.
Ok, and what of the energy we do need? Shall that come from coal anyway?
The point is, that we do need energy, and it has to come from somwhere. However much energy this is, we could always choose to either use coal or nuclear, so which do you want. Whether we're choosing to use it for one Watt or one million Watts doesn't really matter. Each Watt needs to come from somwhere, and it is absolute retardation to think that using half as much energy will some how make the energy we do use miraculously come from a clean source.
Basically, these are two different problems, and the confusion between the two really just comes from the greens trying to pretend that they give a rat's nether regions about anything but a graps at political limelight.
The biggest thing you can do for your electric bill is get rid of your incandescent bulbs, compared to that, nothing else comes close. Replacing a 60 watter with a 20 watt CF will net you 40 watts each, and you get about 1.5x the brightness.
your average house has something like 10 replaceable bulbs, so that's something like 400 watts, more than even a couple large computers.
Pretty much any nuke plant in this environment is a gold mine. Indian point makes money faster than you can even believe. Look online, check out the utilities that have nuke plants, notice that the nuke plants make more money than anything else.
Of course this doesn't necessarily apply to the UK. In the US, nuke plants are coveted by utilities, as they have made huge returns.
This is the largest problem with the greens, and most of the other nuts. We have two real energy sources available, coal and nuclear. Everything else is so expensive (and intermittent, etc...) that it is not an option for baseline power generation. Given the choices we have, choose the best one, which is CLEARLY nuclear by at least 3 orders of magnitude. In terms of people killed, radiation released, environmental damage, you name it, coal is as bad as it comes on all counts, and the lead/mercury/uranium it puts into the atmosphere in its exhaust vastly dwarfs any radiation that could be released by even a serious nuclear accident, let alone normal operation.
The problem with the greens is that they just make things up. What happens if one of those trucks gets hit by a train indeed, that's why the canisters are designed to withstand train impacts.
They won't support nuclear energy, because that would allow people to use energy without causing (much) environmental damage, which goes against the green policy of claiming that energy should not be used because it causes environmental damage.
They won't support genetically modified foods, not because of any of the (very real) problems, but because "genetically modified foods are bad." No explanation, no scenario in which they might be willing to accept such a thing, just like a conservative. Their world is black and white, genetically modified foods are black, end of story.
They won't support a sane means of trash disposal, because that would allow people to dispose of trash without causing (much) environmental damage, which goes against the green policy of not producing trash.
See the pattern? The greens have a policy (trash - bad, energy - bad, organic food - good) and any policy that might change that (make energy not so bad) is heresy, so they don't allow it. This is why our environment is so screwed up, because to clean it up would make some of the "bad" actions "not so bad" which would torpedo whole sections of the green party policy.
breaking a contract is illegal too, but it is the responsibility of the contracting parties to pursue it. So tell me, oh wise sage, the next time a major corporation rips you off (it happens all the time, BTW) do you think the gov will be as gung ho about throwing the CEO who gave bush $5 mil in jail? Do you think that perhaps you'll be SOL, whereas god forbid that sony has to pay to defend its intellectual property, that would be outright communist. Oh, wait. I see how it goes. Sony gets all the profits, we get to pay to maintin and secure their property, and they don't even have to pay taxes. Yeah, that's the future I want.
Everyone uses energy true, but you are holding nuclear power to a standard that no other energy source can meet either. Coal isn't available anywhere, nor is wind, nor is solar, etc... therefore, we can't use any of these, by your logic. Nuclear power is a good solution for the US. If we use it and reduce stress on other energy sources (or better yet, use it to generate portable energy that we make available for a fair price), then the odds of other nations going nuclear because there is no other choice are actually reduced.
Also, you can't prove that india used its research reactor to generate weapons material, but even if they did, a research reactor is hardly a civilian power source of any significance. Nobody notices when a research reactor goes offline twice a week, as that's the normal thing for research reactors, but everyone would notice if their local power plant shut down twice a week.
I don't think we should be helping third world countries to get nuclear energy sources (unlike the fools who want to put PBRs in every back yard), but any scenario for a rogue nation getting nuclear weapons that begins with them stealing plutonium from a nuclear facility in the US, extracting said plutonium from whatever god aweful mixture it's in, and then either enriching it or grappling with the difficulties of making a bomb out of it, is hardly worthy of mention.
Furthermore, even if they did manage to get a bomb out of it, 1 KT is bad, but it's not doomsday bad. Even in a highly populated area like NYC a 1 KT bomb detonated at ground level (or are you proposing that terrorists wold have access to aircraft and missiles as well? They did after all overcome the DOE and build this weapon in secret, why not give them an F-16 or two) would be large but not larger than a significant natural disaster. Maybe 40 thousand. About twice the damage that would have been done had both the twin towers collapsed immediately rather than standing for an hour.
There are so many scenarios that are not only vastly worse, but also vastly more likely. How about N. Korea selling a fully assembled 50 KT device? Much easier to buy it from them than to overpower guards in the US, steal plutonium, evade detection, and assemble a technically challenging bomb with a couple kilotons of yield, assuming you actually succeed, which would not be assured in an endeavor so complicated.
Why drive people to desperation by denying them energy based on that whispy scenario when actual doom (N Korea, Iran, Pakistan) is staring you in the face.
PBRs aren't really well suited to anything. Give me 17 reactors at 5 sites rather than 100 reactors at 100 sites anyday. Small reactors are just an invitation for problems, and I'm a nuclear power supporter. Reactors should be clustered in easily defended places, and there should be as few places to protect as possible. Spreading them all over Africa is so stupid as to almost defy description.
First of all, Uranium is not a compound at all, it's a chemical element. Secondly, Uranium is unusually common, more common than tin, a true anomaly among the Actinides. Thorium is too, and that can also be used as reactor fuel.
The reason these two are so common is (perhaps, i'm kindof guessing here) because they are the highest semi-stable elements around, so anything that started out heavier ended up as Uranium and Thorium very quickly. Consequently, the amount of Uranium we have now is really (approximately) the mass of everything heavier than Uranium that was generated by the supernovas that gave us heavy elements. Think of it as the cosmic "other" category where every element that is too stable to last long ended up.
1) Nobody has ever successfully managed to create a weapon from reactor grade plutonium. Commercial reactors (that don't get shutdown every month or two) create reactor grade, not weapons grade plutonium. This is useless for weapons. Weapons grade plutonium is upwards of 95% Pu-239, the stuff that comes out of commercial reactors is about 60% Pu-239, and is useless for weapons.
2) Dirty bombs. Plutonium is a fairly sucky material for dirty bombs. Much more effective would be something like Cs-137, Co-60, or a REALLY strong alpha emitter like one of the 240+ elements.
Basically, the truth is this. Breeders don't make anything of significant value as a weapon. The claim that they do has been repeated so many times by the ignorant anti-nukes that everyone accepts it as reality now.
In any case, nobody proposes allowing Pakistan to build breeder reactors. Reactors constructed in the US pose zero proliferation risk, or weren't you aware that the US is already a nuclear power?
1) Is this better than HSQL? In particular, I found HSQL to be very solid except for their 1 GB data limit, which is always a problem. How does cloudscape handle large files?
2) Does anyone plan to finally get a database that rewrites its SQL into java code and then compiles it? Somebody was crazy enough to attempt this with C awhile ago, but for java it should be a no-brainer. Rewrite all the table objects to be specific classes with packed data, rewrite the rows to have packed data, accessor functions, and constraints built in. Rewrite the stored procs to be java code operating on the table objects, the list goes on. If you could do this (and granted, it's not easy) then you can javac up the source code, and let the JVM optimize the hell out of it.
You'd still need to do the query optimization yourself (the JVM isn't going to choose the proper join for you), but a dramatic increase in the constant time and space requirements would be available. No more casting Boolean and Double objects, just fast native and packed datatypes.
By the way, this is also the logical way to handle EJBs. Use reflection to analyze the.class objects, and write the proper.java files to implement the interface and implement whatever functionality your.xml descriptors require. Then you javac up the source code and load it up. Now all your EJBs would be pure native (no reflection) code, and the JVM could optimize away most of the work. Things would be much (probably more than 2x) faster that way.
When we were shown the videotape of the police beating rodney king, that was also skewed. It hardly showed the LAPD at their best, nor was it representative of the vast majority of LAPD officers, however... it was the truth. A single "mishap" of that magnitude is enough for a criminal case, and the fact that it might not happen all the time is irrelevant.
The vast majority of serial killers spend the vast majority of their time not killing, does that make it OK? Could you walk into a court of law and say "well, you do have my client on film killing someone, but he doesn't do that all the time, certainly less than one hour a month, how about we just let it slide".
The facts are the facts. Biased or not, what was shown in that movie should be enough to get bush nailed to the cross, even if it is a selection of his worst deeds.
I'm a Mac user, I care. Too often Mac games come out years late and with dozens of bugs added in just for the fun of it. If the development houses would either do as blizzard does, and develop quality software, or at least write in java so I get the same bugs as everyone else, I'll be happy.
This is after all the bottom line. I don't want to wait 4 years for a buggy Mac port to come out, and I don't want to use windows at home just so I can run the latest games. If more people went this route then it's likely that there would be more high quality games for everyone. Just write it once, release the java for OS X, Linux, BSD, Windows, whatever, and then use something like GCJ to turn your java code into a good executable for XBox or PS2. Of course I'll hear the C coders say "But C can be portable." and it can, but only if you know what you're doing and actually put in the effort. History has shown that very few people fall into this category, so we need java.
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I guess it's a grey arrea, but if you start making it complicated, then people won't do it, and we'll be right back to where we started, with more complexity to boot.
The problem of a "bad" method being loaded doesn't seem so severe. Computers are fast. It turns out that computer performance is growing exponentially, but the size of the critical segments of code isn't really growing at all, maybe it's even shrinking. I think it's well beyond the 90 10 rule in most code now. Probably 1% of the code does more than 99% of the work, if I had to guess. This is what has made VMs competitive, the relative cost of compilation and analysis has been shrinking relative to the cost of actually performing the calculations. Now VMs can just use normal (damn the cost) compilers, it just doesn't really matter anymore. Even a huge app can compile fairly quickly, especially when you're only compiling 10% of the code.
HSQL isn't entirely in memory. It writes a log file, and can have cached tables that are persisted to disk. Even non-cached tables are persisted through the log file. It does however keep all the indices in memory, and is limited to 2 GB of data, those are the real limitations.
It is faster though, primarily due to in memory indices, etc... For JDBC databases, I'm not sure anything is faster on small datasets, it certainly blew postgres out of the water by at least a full order of magnitude last time I used it, but your mileage may vary.
Why would a keyword be necessary for stack allocation. Look up a term called "Escape Analysis". It's not too hard for the VM to do this sort of thing automatically, and it would probably do a better job than a human programmer. Another good tactic is "Object Inlining" that can reduce the number of objects by some small factor (perhaps 2-3), also helping garbage collection.
Basically, escape analysis, is when the compiler (VM) figures out which objects escape from the stack frame and which don't. Any that don't escape are stripped of synchronization (since they are incontestable), and then allocated on the stack so they don't need to be GCed. It's not too hard to do escape analysis, and there are prototype systems that hack it into java already. It's a small step from that to a full feldged implementation.
Object inlining is similar. It detects objects that don't escape from their parent object (lots of strings are like this, completely contained within another object), and then it inlines their data into the parent object rather than a reference. This reduces the number of actual objects to be handled by the GC by 1. In addition, it allows whole new classes of method inlining between the parent and child methods, and elimination of a large number of dead fields within the child if they aren't ever accessed from the parent, it just depends on how much code you want to recompile to allow these advanced optimizations.
Sun should put these in, but it's understandable that they haven't put them in yet. In most (but not all) java programs, GC is not a significant part of the overhead now due to good garbage collectors. I'll be a little upset if they don't start including it in version 1.6 though, as it looks like they cleaned house with 1.5, and these sorts of optimizations should now be pretty much on the top of the list.
High explosives don't store that much. If I remember correctly, TNT for instance has less energy than gasoline. It's not so much about the quantity of energy in an explosive, but rather the rate at which it can be released.
1. Your ideal theoretical candidate. (100%) Click here for info
2. Cobb, David - Green Party (86%) Click here for info
3. Nader, Ralph - Independent (79%) Click here for info
4. Brown, Walt - Socialist Party (76%) Click here for info
5. Sharpton, Reverend Al - Democrat (73%) Click here for info
6. Dean, Gov. Howard, VT - Democrat (70%) Click here for info
7. Clark, Retired General Wesley K., AR - Democrat (67%) Click here for info
8. Kucinich, Rep. Dennis, OH - Democrat (67%) Click here for info
9. Moseley-Braun, Former Senator Carol, IL - Democrat (66%) Click here for info
10. Edwards, Senator John, NC - Democrat (63%) Click here for info
11. Gephardt, Rep. Dick, MO - Democrat (62%) Click here for info
12. Kerry, Senator John, MA - Democrat (61%) Click here for info
13. LaRouche, Lyndon H. Jr. - Democrat (43%) Click here for info
14. Badnarik, Michael - Libertarian (39%) Click here for info
15. Lieberman, Senator Joe, CT - Democrat (34%) Click here for info
16. Peroutka, Michael - Constitution Party (17%) Click here for info
17. Bush, President George W. - Republican (10%)
The socialist party, I can see. I did check the full employment box after all, however the greens and Nader are absolutely disallowed by their bush like "use science when it agrees with me, make stuff up when it doesn't" stance on environmental issues. Though their views are diametrically opposed to Bush's (and closer to my own), their utter disregard for facts and figures is absolutely shocking. Being a physicist, I'll tell you that I've checked their numbers on nuclear issues many times, and it's almost unheard of to see an anti-nuke article without at least half a dozen bold lies about basic scientific facts.
This is NOX only. In the US, the largest contribuitors to NOX are generally industries and coal power plants, which is why the rust belt shows up so readily (so RED-ily, if you'll pardon the pun).
This is exactly why the AGs of several north eastern states have resorted to lawsuits, it turns out that a large fraction of the air pollution in NYC, for instance, comes form factories and power plants in Ohio.
We know this partially because of the great blackout only a few years ago. When all the powerplants and factories were offline for a few days, the air cleared up dramatically, even in New England, despite the fact that the New England power plants (and cars, etc...) were still working. Clearly the primary source of the air pollution was Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, etc..., a fact that the scientists (and lawyers) had claimed all along, but it took a blackout (which shut off all those plants) to conclusively prove it beyond any doubt. During the blackout the levels of NOX, SOX, etc... fell dramatically (like by 90% or so) over large swaths of the country in only a couple days.
Keep in mind that this is NOX measured in the study, not CO2, they are wholly different. The US produces lots of CO2 (benign except for global warming effects), but much less NOX and SOX and such than many other areas. If you don't consider CO2, then the US is downright clean, if you consider only CO2 (as the Europeans try to convince people to do) then the US has a horrible record.
Exactly, another issue is the efficiency of this approach. If you saw gangs of new york you have some concept of the problems inherent in this approach. The real problem is game theory based. If the fire department shows up to find an "unprotected" house burning, then they either have to put out the fire, or accept that it will spread to nearby buildings. In order to really protect their customers, they should put it out anyway, but if they do that then there is no reason to buy insurance as the company will have to put out the fire whether you buy insurance or not because a fire in one home is a threat to all homes. This is exactly the sort of thing for which libertarian ideas don't work. The optimal strategy in this case is for you to not buy fire coverage, and for everyone else to buy fire coverage, as that gives you the same protection as if you bought coverage too. In the opposite case, if you buy coverage and nobody else does, then your coverage gives you almost no protection, so this isn't good either. The nash equilibrium of this system is for nobody to buy coverage, but this is not optimal for the system. The optimal plan is for everyone to get coverage, but this is not the nash equilibrium, and therefore the free market is unable to reach the optimal scenario. This is where the free market fails.
In general, if the optimal scenario (everyone being covered) very different from the nash equilibrium (nobody being covered), then a free market will fail to provide a significantly useful service in this field.
The even better example is police. If police were private then you'd have a scenario much like Columbia does today, where the police literally are the organized crime. It's in their interests to ensure that the environment is as unsafe as possible, especially for people who don't pay enough protection money, and yet they are the law, so who would stop them?
As you pointed out, private fire companies have been tried, and they failed. For instance, london burned to the ground in 1666, and new york and chicago both had several devastating fires themselves. Obviously building codes (and judicious use of concrete) have helped, but no doubt having a fire department that attempts to put out small fires (even in the slums) before they become ragin infernos is very helpful as well.
I have the eye TV tuner for my mac, and I can't complain.
Here's my basic asessment.
1) $200 cost. Cheaper than a decent TV (I think), and certainly takes up less space than a TV.
2) Time shifting, recording, the works. Makes your computer into a TiVo, really slick. It's nice to have the recorded shows on the computer where something useful can be done with them too (burn to DVD?).
3) Turning your computer into a TV/TIVO/DVD player helps to save space and gadget costs, really cool.
4) Unit is powered by USB buss, just two cables for it, one is the cable carrying TV, the other is USB. No power cable.
5) Comes with a remote, pretty nice.
6) The software is good. A tad flaky, but not bad.
7) The signal is encoded into MPEG-2 in the external hardware, so the CPU requirements are really low, almost nothing to just record, very little to play back.
The bad news is that you get MPEG-2 encoded video. That's nice and all, but it takes up lots of space (1 GB/hour roughly) for TV quality. It would be nice to re-encode everything as MPEG-4 somehow to save space. This couldn't be done in real time (probably), and would require a firewire cable to get high quality unencoded video into the computer, but it would be nicer I think.
This is just idiocy. Then why don't people set up independent fire departments? Nothing's stopping them. if they can do a better job than the beurocracy and make money on the side then why not, right? But unfortunately this doesn't happen. Could it actually be that fire departments work well as a public service? What happens if you buy fire coverage, but the guy next to you doesn't? Then if his house burns down it has a good shot of burning down your house too, doesn't that suck.
Also, sidewalks shouldn't be privatized. We could put a toll booth at every driveway, and every sidewalk (run out of money on your sidewalk card and I guess you just have to sleep in the gutter until someone finds you and "tows" you home), but why bother? That would cost way more than building the actual service in the first place. Basically, when it costs more to charge for a service than it does to provide the service, or when the optiimal strategy is to not get the service, even though this screws everyone else, the private sector doesn't do a very good job. Just accept it rather than resorting to extremely contrived allegories. Look at the real world once in awhile, you might like it.
The comission on presidential debates is a private entity. This is your free market at work, aren't you happy with it? What, you think that there should be some sort of "regulation" stating perhaps that any canidate that gets on a few ballots should be allowed to speak over the (privately operated) tv stations, in the (privately run) presidential debate? What are you, some sort of communist?
This is the problem with libertarians. It's all about free market, until the free market doesn't work, and then they blame regulations. Just accept life for what it is, some times free markets don't work. For instance, medicine. If your choice is to pay up or die, what sort of position does that put you in to execute your bargaining rights as a consumer? How would a free market fire department do? They'd arrive as your house was burning down and demand you sign over everything you own in order for them to fetch your daughter out of the burning house. This helps people how?
Timers are pretty useful though. My apartment is small, but my AC is smaller. It's nice to be able to set it to come on at 3:00 in order to have the apartment cool by 7:00 when I get home. Saves power, makes it easier on me, what's not to like.
As for TVs though, I got a TV tuner for my computer and never looked back. It's like a TV/Tivo/CableBox/DvdPlayer/Computer all in one, and it takes up less space than all those gadgets together, and is surely cheaper. My stereo met the same fate, it is now my computer's job to play music.
A lot of simple gadgets will meet their end at the hands of the general purpose computer. There is no need to put a web browser in a TV/Fridge/Toaster. If there is something that needs to be browsed, let the computer do it, if not, save your effort.
exactly.
Also, the number of working age people increases by a million a year, bush is -4.5 million jobs by any fair reckoning. Everyone else manages to create jobs, through world wars, cold wars, whatever. Only bush failed in the last 70 years, it is his fault. In addition, look at the budget deficit, notice that it always goes down (as a percentage of GDP) during democratic presidencies (since carter at least), and up during republicans, it's not an accident. The jobs record of bush would be even worse if he wasn't propping up the numbers with borrowed money.
Ok, and what of the energy we do need? Shall that come from coal anyway?
The point is, that we do need energy, and it has to come from somwhere. However much energy this is, we could always choose to either use coal or nuclear, so which do you want. Whether we're choosing to use it for one Watt or one million Watts doesn't really matter. Each Watt needs to come from somwhere, and it is absolute retardation to think that using half as much energy will some how make the energy we do use miraculously come from a clean source.
Basically, these are two different problems, and the confusion between the two really just comes from the greens trying to pretend that they give a rat's nether regions about anything but a graps at political limelight.
The biggest thing you can do for your electric bill is get rid of your incandescent bulbs, compared to that, nothing else comes close. Replacing a 60 watter with a 20 watt CF will net you 40 watts each, and you get about 1.5x the brightness.
your average house has something like 10 replaceable bulbs, so that's something like 400 watts, more than even a couple large computers.
Pretty much any nuke plant in this environment is a gold mine. Indian point makes money faster than you can even believe. Look online, check out the utilities that have nuke plants, notice that the nuke plants make more money than anything else.
Of course this doesn't necessarily apply to the UK. In the US, nuke plants are coveted by utilities, as they have made huge returns.
mod parent up.
This is the largest problem with the greens, and most of the other nuts. We have two real energy sources available, coal and nuclear. Everything else is so expensive (and intermittent, etc...) that it is not an option for baseline power generation. Given the choices we have, choose the best one, which is CLEARLY nuclear by at least 3 orders of magnitude. In terms of people killed, radiation released, environmental damage, you name it, coal is as bad as it comes on all counts, and the lead/mercury/uranium it puts into the atmosphere in its exhaust vastly dwarfs any radiation that could be released by even a serious nuclear accident, let alone normal operation.
The problem with the greens is that they just make things up. What happens if one of those trucks gets hit by a train indeed, that's why the canisters are designed to withstand train impacts.
They won't support nuclear energy, because that would allow people to use energy without causing (much) environmental damage, which goes against the green policy of claiming that energy should not be used because it causes environmental damage.
They won't support genetically modified foods, not because of any of the (very real) problems, but because "genetically modified foods are bad." No explanation, no scenario in which they might be willing to accept such a thing, just like a conservative. Their world is black and white, genetically modified foods are black, end of story.
They won't support a sane means of trash disposal, because that would allow people to dispose of trash without causing (much) environmental damage, which goes against the green policy of not producing trash.
See the pattern? The greens have a policy (trash - bad, energy - bad, organic food - good) and any policy that might change that (make energy not so bad) is heresy, so they don't allow it. This is why our environment is so screwed up, because to clean it up would make some of the "bad" actions "not so bad" which would torpedo whole sections of the green party policy.
breaking a contract is illegal too, but it is the responsibility of the contracting parties to pursue it. So tell me, oh wise sage, the next time a major corporation rips you off (it happens all the time, BTW) do you think the gov will be as gung ho about throwing the CEO who gave bush $5 mil in jail? Do you think that perhaps you'll be SOL, whereas god forbid that sony has to pay to defend its intellectual property, that would be outright communist. Oh, wait. I see how it goes. Sony gets all the profits, we get to pay to maintin and secure their property, and they don't even have to pay taxes. Yeah, that's the future I want.
Grow a clue.
Everyone uses energy true, but you are holding nuclear power to a standard that no other energy source can meet either. Coal isn't available anywhere, nor is wind, nor is solar, etc... therefore, we can't use any of these, by your logic. Nuclear power is a good solution for the US. If we use it and reduce stress on other energy sources (or better yet, use it to generate portable energy that we make available for a fair price), then the odds of other nations going nuclear because there is no other choice are actually reduced.
Also, you can't prove that india used its research reactor to generate weapons material, but even if they did, a research reactor is hardly a civilian power source of any significance. Nobody notices when a research reactor goes offline twice a week, as that's the normal thing for research reactors, but everyone would notice if their local power plant shut down twice a week.
I don't think we should be helping third world countries to get nuclear energy sources (unlike the fools who want to put PBRs in every back yard), but any scenario for a rogue nation getting nuclear weapons that begins with them stealing plutonium from a nuclear facility in the US, extracting said plutonium from whatever god aweful mixture it's in, and then either enriching it or grappling with the difficulties of making a bomb out of it, is hardly worthy of mention.
Furthermore, even if they did manage to get a bomb out of it, 1 KT is bad, but it's not doomsday bad. Even in a highly populated area like NYC a 1 KT bomb detonated at ground level (or are you proposing that terrorists wold have access to aircraft and missiles as well? They did after all overcome the DOE and build this weapon in secret, why not give them an F-16 or two) would be large but not larger than a significant natural disaster. Maybe 40 thousand. About twice the damage that would have been done had both the twin towers collapsed immediately rather than standing for an hour.
There are so many scenarios that are not only vastly worse, but also vastly more likely. How about N. Korea selling a fully assembled 50 KT device? Much easier to buy it from them than to overpower guards in the US, steal plutonium, evade detection, and assemble a technically challenging bomb with a couple kilotons of yield, assuming you actually succeed, which would not be assured in an endeavor so complicated.
Why drive people to desperation by denying them energy based on that whispy scenario when actual doom (N Korea, Iran, Pakistan) is staring you in the face.
PBRs aren't really well suited to anything. Give me 17 reactors at 5 sites rather than 100 reactors at 100 sites anyday. Small reactors are just an invitation for problems, and I'm a nuclear power supporter. Reactors should be clustered in easily defended places, and there should be as few places to protect as possible. Spreading them all over Africa is so stupid as to almost defy description.
First of all, Uranium is not a compound at all, it's a chemical element. Secondly, Uranium is unusually common, more common than tin, a true anomaly among the Actinides. Thorium is too, and that can also be used as reactor fuel.
The reason these two are so common is (perhaps, i'm kindof guessing here) because they are the highest semi-stable elements around, so anything that started out heavier ended up as Uranium and Thorium very quickly. Consequently, the amount of Uranium we have now is really (approximately) the mass of everything heavier than Uranium that was generated by the supernovas that gave us heavy elements. Think of it as the cosmic "other" category where every element that is too stable to last long ended up.
OK, exhibit A, an anti-nuke above.
Exhibit B, some evidence.
1) Nobody has ever successfully managed to create a weapon from reactor grade plutonium. Commercial reactors (that don't get shutdown every month or two) create reactor grade, not weapons grade plutonium. This is useless for weapons. Weapons grade plutonium is upwards of 95% Pu-239, the stuff that comes out of commercial reactors is about 60% Pu-239, and is useless for weapons.
2) Dirty bombs. Plutonium is a fairly sucky material for dirty bombs. Much more effective would be something like Cs-137, Co-60, or a REALLY strong alpha emitter like one of the 240+ elements.
Basically, the truth is this. Breeders don't make anything of significant value as a weapon. The claim that they do has been repeated so many times by the ignorant anti-nukes that everyone accepts it as reality now.
In any case, nobody proposes allowing Pakistan to build breeder reactors. Reactors constructed in the US pose zero proliferation risk, or weren't you aware that the US is already a nuclear power?
Oh, the compilation should of course be handled internally by your app server / database.
A few questions.
.class objects, and write the proper .java files to implement the interface and implement whatever functionality your .xml descriptors require. Then you javac up the source code and load it up. Now all your EJBs would be pure native (no reflection) code, and the JVM could optimize away most of the work. Things would be much (probably more than 2x) faster that way.
:-)
1) Is this better than HSQL? In particular, I found HSQL to be very solid except for their 1 GB data limit, which is always a problem. How does cloudscape handle large files?
2) Does anyone plan to finally get a database that rewrites its SQL into java code and then compiles it? Somebody was crazy enough to attempt this with C awhile ago, but for java it should be a no-brainer. Rewrite all the table objects to be specific classes with packed data, rewrite the rows to have packed data, accessor functions, and constraints built in. Rewrite the stored procs to be java code operating on the table objects, the list goes on. If you could do this (and granted, it's not easy) then you can javac up the source code, and let the JVM optimize the hell out of it.
You'd still need to do the query optimization yourself (the JVM isn't going to choose the proper join for you), but a dramatic increase in the constant time and space requirements would be available. No more casting Boolean and Double objects, just fast native and packed datatypes.
By the way, this is also the logical way to handle EJBs. Use reflection to analyze the
Let me know when they have that.
When we were shown the videotape of the police beating rodney king, that was also skewed. It hardly showed the LAPD at their best, nor was it representative of the vast majority of LAPD officers, however... it was the truth. A single "mishap" of that magnitude is enough for a criminal case, and the fact that it might not happen all the time is irrelevant.
The vast majority of serial killers spend the vast majority of their time not killing, does that make it OK? Could you walk into a court of law and say "well, you do have my client on film killing someone, but he doesn't do that all the time, certainly less than one hour a month, how about we just let it slide".
The facts are the facts. Biased or not, what was shown in that movie should be enough to get bush nailed to the cross, even if it is a selection of his worst deeds.
I'm a Mac user, I care. Too often Mac games come out years late and with dozens of bugs added in just for the fun of it. If the development houses would either do as blizzard does, and develop quality software, or at least write in java so I get the same bugs as everyone else, I'll be happy.
This is after all the bottom line. I don't want to wait 4 years for a buggy Mac port to come out, and I don't want to use windows at home just so I can run the latest games. If more people went this route then it's likely that there would be more high quality games for everyone. Just write it once, release the java for OS X, Linux, BSD, Windows, whatever, and then use something like GCJ to turn your java code into a good executable for XBox or PS2. Of course I'll hear the C coders say "But C can be portable." and it can, but only if you know what you're doing and actually put in the effort. History has shown that very few people fall into this category, so we need java.
Everybody wins, especially me.