Luddites won't be a problem for long. Once accident rates start dropping, insurance premiums will go down as well. Almost everyone will switch to upgraded vehicles to get cheaper insurance. At the same time awards to victims of avoidable accidents due to insufficiently upgraded cars will likely go up, forcing premiums higher for the Luddites.
If you get a spoofed approval to change lane, you still have to wait for the car to actually move to make room. Since the approval was spoofed, that never happens and so the system just fails to change lane. It will likely try the indicator next, which is difficult to spoof.
Obviously you could spoof something more annoying, like faking an obstacle. However, that will just lead to some overly enthusiastic braking and perhaps some fender benders (depending on how much space there is between cars). Since the swarm of cars can be used for signal triangulation, the bad guy will be fairly easy to catch.
What is the advantage of using steel-against-steel instead of rubber-against-concrete in this arrangement? Other than lower rolling resistance and the lousy brakes.
Solar is not a good option as solar cells require rare earth metals. As was recently said at a conference, it is impossible to power even Australia with just solar cells: as soon as you've produced enough cells you have depleted all earth resources of several rare-earth metals. That just leaves the rest of the world without solar power.
This is just completely wrong. Every single sentence. Solar cells do not require rare earth metals. You can use them in the glass to increase UV absorption, but they are by no means critical and most manufacturers AFAIK do without them. Ban their use in solar cells and nothing changes.
It is fairly typical for the why-can't-I-have-free-nuclear-power Slashdot crowd though. The market spoke. Nuclear power is too expensive unless the alternative is hamster wheels. If you think the market is wrong, go invest in nuclear power. There are plenty of places around the world who would like some cheap electricity and look the other way when it comes to regulations.
Wind turbines do not need rare earth materials, and rare earths are not particularly exotic anyway. They were just cheaply provided by China until every competitor was gone.
You can use rare earths for wind turbines if you prefer, it means you can use permanent magnets and slower generators which can make the gear simpler -- you can even do direct drive in some cases. However, if you banned rare earths from being used in wind turbines, most of the wind industry would hardly notice.
Solar panel manufacture does not have to be particularly bad environmentally either. Germany still produces a lot of solar cells, and Germany is not exactly known for being unregulated.
Water is an absolutely horrible conductor. Salt solutions can be pretty good conductors, but pure water is certainly not useful for conducting electricity.
a) the phone cannot really avoid tracking your location; the cell phone network can do it pretty well unaided. b) surely the phone only sends augmented location information (GPS etc.) when a 911 call is ongoing? I haven't owned a phone which kept its GPS on at all times, battery life makes that impractical.
Why should the life of the author even be part of the copyright term at all?
The hope is that the income from the copyright will encourage the author to create more works, which will expand the public domain when the copyright on those works eventually expires. Since it is difficult to encourage dead people to do anything, it makes sense to end the copyright when the author dies. The off-by-70-years error is a bit odd though.
(Yes I know there are a million counterarguments and I disagree with the reasoning. But there you have it.)
Software patents are common in Europe. They may be invalid, but the EPO issues them routinely. If you choose to "infringe" on such invalid patents, you suddenly run the risk of getting sued in some far-off corner of Europe where your product happens to be sold. Will every court in Europe do the right thing and invalidate the patent?
China and India are mostly ignoring all this bullshit and forging ahead while the Western world has lost the ability to innovate. Rent-seeking for old inventions can keep us going for a while, but what happens in 10 or 20 years when that gold mine runs out?
The patented implementation of long file names in FAT is the only implementation that Windows understands. Therefore, licensing is required for interoperability unless you want to, say, store all files in a zip file and store the zip file with a short file name.
I think this is not entirely correct. As I understand it, the patent only applies if you store both the short name and the long name. You can, with a bit of trickery, store only the long name or only the short name, and if you do that in precisely the right way, both Windows and the most common non-Windows VFAT implementations will do something close to the right thing (if there is a right thing on a file system as broken as VFAT). IBM proposed a patch to the Linux kernel to do so back in 2009, but the patch was rejected.
However the discussion is fairly moot because a modern FAT implementation needs exFAT support, and Microsoft has secured multiple patents on that.
We need it because while current packaging systems are great for central control, they are bad for actually letting users contribute.
a) You cannot submit a bug to a developer, get a fixed beta release, and install that in the packaging system (unless you know how to handle spec files) b) You cannot do parallel installations of newer (or older) versions for testing unless the package is built specifically for that c) It is difficult to make distribution-independent packages, so users become dependent on the distribution for all software d) Almost all packages require root, the packaging system cannot track software installed by users themselves
On the other hand, switching to a Mac-style packaging system has at least these problems:
1) Security updates to common code are unlikely to actually get applied to all packages 2) Some libraries will not be shared, costing extra memory and cache footprint 3) Centralized control over what software is installed suddenly becomes difficult 4) Without dependencies you need to define the minimal environment that software can depend on. LSB tried to do that and failed.
Insurance has a cost. The insurance companies are not charities funded by wealthy benefactors. Only pay the cost if you need the service, i.e. if the item you bought is so valuable that you cannot handle the loss.
For most people, that means insuring against the loss or damage to house/apartment and car plus fire/theft coverage for belongings. Raise the voluntary excess as high as you can afford, but make sure that you can still handle multiple things going wrong at once.
Insuring a phone? If you need it for work and you cannot afford to replace it then go ahead, but hopefully few people are in that situation. It is expensive to be poor.
There is another case where it makes sense to take out insurance: If you think the insurance company got the odds wrong. Insurance companies are very good at avoiding that problem. You can obviously also "influence" the odds a bit, but there is no insurance against jail terms...
It's too bad that the Palestinian Arabs rejected the original partition agreement that the British mandate tried to mediate
a) I'll just quote Uberbah: "The "reality of the situation" is that the proposal was to give 56% of the land to 31% of the population. And of that 31%, the vast majority were just off the boat from Europe. Of course the natives rejected such a deal, you would too." b) Why would the Palestinians trust such a deal? What guarantee was there that it would not just happen again, with 56% of the remaining 31%? And again?
They did the only honourable thing and assembled an international coalition force to kick out the invaders. Alas, they failed.
The "reality of the situation" is that the proposal was to give 56% of the land to 31% of the population.
56% does not really tell the whole story either. It is not the American Mid-West, where one plot of land is just about as good as any other plot of land (and now I'll probably get someone from the Mid-West telling me it isn't like that there either. Sorry.)
The 56% awarded to Israel is better land than the 44% given to the Palestinian reservations, and that divide has only increased as Israel has occupied more land.
Mind you, if we can do it cheaper with wind/solar, sure, let's do that. But I'm not at all convinced that this is doable, other than in a few specific areas.
Off-shore wind does not need 0.14GBP per kWh guaranteed. On-shore it is even cheaper. Even solar can do 0.14GBP per kWh in sunny areas. Either way, if industry has to pay 0.14GBP per kWh it will move elsewhere, and then you have a nuclear power station but no market.
Governments don't have to issue bonds, they can just hand over the cash. That's what taxes are for.
There are lots and lots of projects with better payback rates than 1%. You are constantly avoiding the issue: the capital costs make nuclear uneconomical except when there is no other choice.
That's what governments are for, no? Financing long-term projects that are not sufficiently attractive for the private sector. If China can afford that, developed countries certainly can do so, as well.
Why should the governments finance projects that lose money? What would the purpose be, when there are no electricity shortages? Most governments cannot issue 30+ year bonds at 1%.
The problem is that there is a strong grassroots anti-nuclear lobby, and when an outright ban is not politically feasible, it usually goes for restrictive regulation for the sake of making further development uneconomical. And said regulation doesn't have to make any sense at all.
Judging by Sweden, which would be expected to have some of the strictest and best enforced regulations in the world, my view is that the regulations are too lax rather than too strict.
Cheap labor and investment money apply equally to other forms of power generation, do they not?
Sure, but where do you want them to go? Other places can go for solar or geothermal or hydro or wind. China has wind in the wrong place and practically no possibility of expanding hydro. Geothermal is fine where you can get it, and China really tries hard there, but the capacity is limited. Solar production capacity is too low and panels still too expensive to really make a dent.
Cheap labor and investment money apply equally to other forms of power generation, do they not? And "ties to the military" applies a least to all UNSC members, including US.
Other forms of power generation are not as expensive up front. Their cost accrues slowly over the years. So no, cheap investment money does not apply equally to other forms of power generation. Nuclear is unique in that you build the plant at high cost and get 50-60 years of electricity practically for free until you pay a high cost to get rid of the plant again. With wind power and solar you generally plan for at most 20 years out.
If you can get financing at 1%, nuclear power suddenly becomes viable. Good luck with that for 30+ year loans outside China.
So that leaves NIMBYism and regulations. If those are disproportionally high for nuclear compared to other forms of power generation, then isn't the problem there, rather than in the technology itself?
Regulations of nuclear power better be tight. The only other type of power which has equally bad worst case scenarios when things go wrong is hydro -- which is also tightly regulated. That is not a bug, that is a feature.
China is desperate. If they go with coal exclusively, they will be unable to dig it out of the ground quickly enough to feed their power plants. Here is a quote from World Nuclear Organization: "nearly half the country's rail capacity is used in transporting coal." At the same time there is a limit to how much "traditional" pollution even the Chinese will accept.
The Chinese build wind power, but some of it unfortunately takes a long time (years) to actually get grid connected because of poor planning. Wind resources in China are quite poorly placed compared to where the power demand is.
Nuclear in China has a lot of advantages that it does not have in many other places. Lots of cheap investment money, cheap labour, favourable regulations, no problems with NIMBY'ism, probably low insurance costs, probably ties to the military.
You are right, I should have said air-cooled condenser, not cooling tower. If you have enough water available you avoid both and simply do heat exchange with the water directly. Of course then you risk the river running dry in summer so your nuclear power plants shut down right when people are dying from heat stroke, as France demonstrated.
Nuclear is way too expensive. It has no future. Look at Great Britain where the power companies demand a price floor of 0.140 GBP per kWh, guaranteed for 40 years. Or look at Finland where the new power plant has been delayed for years and is way over budget.
As a technology, nuclear is perfectly acceptable. However, just about anything else is cheaper, with the possible exception of hamsters on treadmills.
Besides, nuclear is unviable because it is a constant power source. You can turn it down, but that is stupid because the marginal cost of electricity from a nuclear power plant is approximately zero. Therefore you can only have a few nuclear power plants covering a small amount of the supply, or you will end up paying the nuclear company 0.140 GBP per kWh for power which you then have to pay to get rid of.
And after all that you need a lot of reserve power, because nuclear tends to have sudden several-month downtimes. If you try to be economical by building identical power plants, you get hit extra hard because any design issue will take all of them offline at once until it is fixed. Ask Sweden how it felt to hit the equivalent of 3USD/kWh at peak because multiple reactors had to be taken out for repairs for months.
Wind turbines in cold climates produce most of their power when it is most needed, in the winter months. Solar in warm climates produces most power when it is most needed, during the day.
You cannot cool a nuclear reactor of any significant size with ground water. You need a proper source of water, i.e. large river or the ocean, or you have to use cooling towers. Nuclear reactors are typically less than 1/3 efficient, so for 1GW electrical output you need to get rid of 2GW of heat.
Fukushima was not placed near the ocean just because the engineers loved the view.
As for modern systems, there is a tension between independent Central Bankers who fear inflation verse politicians who like easy money. I can point to issues in recent years, but not in big mature countries.
The silly thing is that right now it is the politicians who fear inflation... And they have stacked the decks at the central banks so that low inflation trumps all other goals.
Slashdot Mirror
Luddites won't be a problem for long. Once accident rates start dropping, insurance premiums will go down as well. Almost everyone will switch to upgraded vehicles to get cheaper insurance. At the same time awards to victims of avoidable accidents due to insufficiently upgraded cars will likely go up, forcing premiums higher for the Luddites.
If you get a spoofed approval to change lane, you still have to wait for the car to actually move to make room. Since the approval was spoofed, that never happens and so the system just fails to change lane. It will likely try the indicator next, which is difficult to spoof.
Obviously you could spoof something more annoying, like faking an obstacle. However, that will just lead to some overly enthusiastic braking and perhaps some fender benders (depending on how much space there is between cars). Since the swarm of cars can be used for signal triangulation, the bad guy will be fairly easy to catch.
What is the advantage of using steel-against-steel instead of rubber-against-concrete in this arrangement? Other than lower rolling resistance and the lousy brakes.
Solar is not a good option as solar cells require rare earth metals. As was recently said at a conference, it is impossible to power even Australia with just solar cells: as soon as you've produced enough cells you have depleted all earth resources of several rare-earth metals. That just leaves the rest of the world without solar power.
This is just completely wrong. Every single sentence. Solar cells do not require rare earth metals. You can use them in the glass to increase UV absorption, but they are by no means critical and most manufacturers AFAIK do without them. Ban their use in solar cells and nothing changes.
It is fairly typical for the why-can't-I-have-free-nuclear-power Slashdot crowd though. The market spoke. Nuclear power is too expensive unless the alternative is hamster wheels. If you think the market is wrong, go invest in nuclear power. There are plenty of places around the world who would like some cheap electricity and look the other way when it comes to regulations.
Wind turbines do not need rare earth materials, and rare earths are not particularly exotic anyway. They were just cheaply provided by China until every competitor was gone.
You can use rare earths for wind turbines if you prefer, it means you can use permanent magnets and slower generators which can make the gear simpler -- you can even do direct drive in some cases. However, if you banned rare earths from being used in wind turbines, most of the wind industry would hardly notice.
Solar panel manufacture does not have to be particularly bad environmentally either. Germany still produces a lot of solar cells, and Germany is not exactly known for being unregulated.
You don't have to convince me. I already wrote that I disagree with the reasoning.
Water is a conductor... a pretty good one.
Water is an absolutely horrible conductor. Salt solutions can be pretty good conductors, but pure water is certainly not useful for conducting electricity.
a) the phone cannot really avoid tracking your location; the cell phone network can do it pretty well unaided.
b) surely the phone only sends augmented location information (GPS etc.) when a 911 call is ongoing? I haven't owned a phone which kept its GPS on at all times, battery life makes that impractical.
Why should the life of the author even be part of the copyright term at all?
The hope is that the income from the copyright will encourage the author to create more works, which will expand the public domain when the copyright on those works eventually expires. Since it is difficult to encourage dead people to do anything, it makes sense to end the copyright when the author dies. The off-by-70-years error is a bit odd though.
(Yes I know there are a million counterarguments and I disagree with the reasoning. But there you have it.)
Software patents are common in Europe. They may be invalid, but the EPO issues them routinely. If you choose to "infringe" on such invalid patents, you suddenly run the risk of getting sued in some far-off corner of Europe where your product happens to be sold. Will every court in Europe do the right thing and invalidate the patent?
China and India are mostly ignoring all this bullshit and forging ahead while the Western world has lost the ability to innovate. Rent-seeking for old inventions can keep us going for a while, but what happens in 10 or 20 years when that gold mine runs out?
The patented implementation of long file names in FAT is the only implementation that Windows understands. Therefore, licensing is required for interoperability unless you want to, say, store all files in a zip file and store the zip file with a short file name.
I think this is not entirely correct. As I understand it, the patent only applies if you store both the short name and the long name. You can, with a bit of trickery, store only the long name or only the short name, and if you do that in precisely the right way, both Windows and the most common non-Windows VFAT implementations will do something close to the right thing (if there is a right thing on a file system as broken as VFAT). IBM proposed a patch to the Linux kernel to do so back in 2009, but the patch was rejected.
However the discussion is fairly moot because a modern FAT implementation needs exFAT support, and Microsoft has secured multiple patents on that.
We need it because while current packaging systems are great for central control, they are bad for actually letting users contribute.
a) You cannot submit a bug to a developer, get a fixed beta release, and install that in the packaging system (unless you know how to handle spec files)
b) You cannot do parallel installations of newer (or older) versions for testing unless the package is built specifically for that
c) It is difficult to make distribution-independent packages, so users become dependent on the distribution for all software
d) Almost all packages require root, the packaging system cannot track software installed by users themselves
On the other hand, switching to a Mac-style packaging system has at least these problems:
1) Security updates to common code are unlikely to actually get applied to all packages
2) Some libraries will not be shared, costing extra memory and cache footprint
3) Centralized control over what software is installed suddenly becomes difficult
4) Without dependencies you need to define the minimal environment that software can depend on. LSB tried to do that and failed.
your *PFC power supply doesnt do that much if the house you live in is already (it should be) doing this to the different plugs about your house
That makes no sense. How would the house cure phase distortion?
So soon Firefox will have everything, except a decent web browser?
Just install the Lynx Addon
Insurance has a cost. The insurance companies are not charities funded by wealthy benefactors. Only pay the cost if you need the service, i.e. if the item you bought is so valuable that you cannot handle the loss.
For most people, that means insuring against the loss or damage to house/apartment and car plus fire/theft coverage for belongings. Raise the voluntary excess as high as you can afford, but make sure that you can still handle multiple things going wrong at once.
Insuring a phone? If you need it for work and you cannot afford to replace it then go ahead, but hopefully few people are in that situation. It is expensive to be poor.
There is another case where it makes sense to take out insurance: If you think the insurance company got the odds wrong. Insurance companies are very good at avoiding that problem. You can obviously also "influence" the odds a bit, but there is no insurance against jail terms...
It's too bad that the Palestinian Arabs rejected the original partition agreement that the British mandate tried to mediate
a) I'll just quote Uberbah: "The "reality of the situation" is that the proposal was to give 56% of the land to 31% of the population. And of that 31%, the vast majority were just off the boat from Europe. Of course the natives rejected such a deal, you would too."
b) Why would the Palestinians trust such a deal? What guarantee was there that it would not just happen again, with 56% of the remaining 31%? And again?
They did the only honourable thing and assembled an international coalition force to kick out the invaders. Alas, they failed.
The "reality of the situation" is that the proposal was to give 56% of the land to 31% of the population.
56% does not really tell the whole story either. It is not the American Mid-West, where one plot of land is just about as good as any other plot of land (and now I'll probably get someone from the Mid-West telling me it isn't like that there either. Sorry.)
The 56% awarded to Israel is better land than the 44% given to the Palestinian reservations, and that divide has only increased as Israel has occupied more land.
Mind you, if we can do it cheaper with wind/solar, sure, let's do that. But I'm not at all convinced that this is doable, other than in a few specific areas.
Off-shore wind does not need 0.14GBP per kWh guaranteed. On-shore it is even cheaper. Even solar can do 0.14GBP per kWh in sunny areas. Either way, if industry has to pay 0.14GBP per kWh it will move elsewhere, and then you have a nuclear power station but no market.
Governments don't have to issue bonds, they can just hand over the cash. That's what taxes are for.
There are lots and lots of projects with better payback rates than 1%. You are constantly avoiding the issue: the capital costs make nuclear uneconomical except when there is no other choice.
That's what governments are for, no? Financing long-term projects that are not sufficiently attractive for the private sector. If China can afford that, developed countries certainly can do so, as well.
Why should the governments finance projects that lose money? What would the purpose be, when there are no electricity shortages? Most governments cannot issue 30+ year bonds at 1%.
The problem is that there is a strong grassroots anti-nuclear lobby, and when an outright ban is not politically feasible, it usually goes for restrictive regulation for the sake of making further development uneconomical. And said regulation doesn't have to make any sense at all.
Judging by Sweden, which would be expected to have some of the strictest and best enforced regulations in the world, my view is that the regulations are too lax rather than too strict.
Cheap labor and investment money apply equally to other forms of power generation, do they not?
Sure, but where do you want them to go? Other places can go for solar or geothermal or hydro or wind. China has wind in the wrong place and practically no possibility of expanding hydro. Geothermal is fine where you can get it, and China really tries hard there, but the capacity is limited. Solar production capacity is too low and panels still too expensive to really make a dent.
Cheap labor and investment money apply equally to other forms of power generation, do they not? And "ties to the military" applies a least to all UNSC members, including US.
Other forms of power generation are not as expensive up front. Their cost accrues slowly over the years. So no, cheap investment money does not apply equally to other forms of power generation. Nuclear is unique in that you build the plant at high cost and get 50-60 years of electricity practically for free until you pay a high cost to get rid of the plant again. With wind power and solar you generally plan for at most 20 years out.
If you can get financing at 1%, nuclear power suddenly becomes viable. Good luck with that for 30+ year loans outside China.
So that leaves NIMBYism and regulations. If those are disproportionally high for nuclear compared to other forms of power generation, then isn't the problem there, rather than in the technology itself?
Regulations of nuclear power better be tight. The only other type of power which has equally bad worst case scenarios when things go wrong is hydro -- which is also tightly regulated. That is not a bug, that is a feature.
China is desperate. If they go with coal exclusively, they will be unable to dig it out of the ground quickly enough to feed their power plants. Here is a quote from World Nuclear Organization: "nearly half the country's rail capacity is used in transporting coal." At the same time there is a limit to how much "traditional" pollution even the Chinese will accept.
The Chinese build wind power, but some of it unfortunately takes a long time (years) to actually get grid connected because of poor planning. Wind resources in China are quite poorly placed compared to where the power demand is.
Nuclear in China has a lot of advantages that it does not have in many other places. Lots of cheap investment money, cheap labour, favourable regulations, no problems with NIMBY'ism, probably low insurance costs, probably ties to the military.
You are right, I should have said air-cooled condenser, not cooling tower. If you have enough water available you avoid both and simply do heat exchange with the water directly. Of course then you risk the river running dry in summer so your nuclear power plants shut down right when people are dying from heat stroke, as France demonstrated.
Nuclear is way too expensive. It has no future. Look at Great Britain where the power companies demand a price floor of 0.140 GBP per kWh, guaranteed for 40 years. Or look at Finland where the new power plant has been delayed for years and is way over budget.
As a technology, nuclear is perfectly acceptable. However, just about anything else is cheaper, with the possible exception of hamsters on treadmills.
Besides, nuclear is unviable because it is a constant power source. You can turn it down, but that is stupid because the marginal cost of electricity from a nuclear power plant is approximately zero. Therefore you can only have a few nuclear power plants covering a small amount of the supply, or you will end up paying the nuclear company 0.140 GBP per kWh for power which you then have to pay to get rid of.
And after all that you need a lot of reserve power, because nuclear tends to have sudden several-month downtimes. If you try to be economical by building identical power plants, you get hit extra hard because any design issue will take all of them offline at once until it is fixed. Ask Sweden how it felt to hit the equivalent of 3USD/kWh at peak because multiple reactors had to be taken out for repairs for months.
Wind turbines in cold climates produce most of their power when it is most needed, in the winter months. Solar in warm climates produces most power when it is most needed, during the day.
The darn thing needs normal ground water to cool.
You cannot cool a nuclear reactor of any significant size with ground water. You need a proper source of water, i.e. large river or the ocean, or you have to use cooling towers. Nuclear reactors are typically less than 1/3 efficient, so for 1GW electrical output you need to get rid of 2GW of heat.
Fukushima was not placed near the ocean just because the engineers loved the view.
As for modern systems, there is a tension between independent Central Bankers who fear inflation verse politicians who like easy money. I can point to issues in recent years, but not in big mature countries.
The silly thing is that right now it is the politicians who fear inflation... And they have stacked the decks at the central banks so that low inflation trumps all other goals.