It's not just the power plant. Animals in a wider area are radio active as well, so are the plants, so is the ground. Even if you wanted to clean it up, it's impossible.
Yes, as I said radiation doesn't magically clean itself up and Chernobyl released a lot of it. Fukushima wasn't Chernobyl so the contamination is much lower. And we get exposed to radiation all the time so low doses don't have any real impact. Still nasty in many places around Fukushima I agree and I suppose various areas will just be closed off rather than bothering to ship off the soil somewhere. But that's the "don't stay here for a few weeks or months" variety of danger rather than the "get help now" variety.
Then again there's a risk in everything we do, plenty of superfund sites in the US from chemicals. The contamination from coal power plants is nasty as well. Doesn't make Fukushima good but I just don't see it as any worse at this point than all the other stuff we don't even bat an eyelash at everyday.
You keep amazing me with the way you marginalize the situation.
I simply don't find panicking or overreacting to be worth it. It's not an impossible situation at this point, just an annoying one in the long term. Everything I've seen shows the situation at Fukushima to be under control although it will take a long time to fully clean up. No one is dying, no is being sickened and in general it's stable. I suppose I lack an irrational fear of radiation.
I have more worry for families of the tens of thousands who died (or are still unaccounted for) from the earthquake and tsunami. And the hundreds of thousands who are homeless.
25 years later the Chernobyl area is still polluted.
Amazing, when you decide explicitly to not clean up an area and just leave everything there (literally, all the contaminated equipment was just left there) it doesn't magically clean itself up. Who would have guessed. That's why you bury it somewhere out of the way.
In the Fukushima area they also found pollution and not inly in the water.
Yes, since radiation was released into the air it would have been very odd if there wasn't radiation spread out. Exactly what that means is a different question. Most of it has short half life and won't matter. Some doesn't. Testing will need to be done. Some looks suspiciously like it was already there before, at safely low concentrations, and simply no one bothered to test for it till now (nuclear bomb testing and Chernobyl put a lot of stuff into the air).
We spend millions the next many years cleaning up this garbage and burying it, hoping it's safe.
More like tens of billions, TMI was well over a billion and that was rather small scale.
You can't bury it and forget about it. We created a pile of waste that requites monitoring and maintenance for years to come.
That's the case with all radiative material. As I've said before, it's nothing new and it's done routinely for radioactively contaminated material. Radiation doesn't go away, eventually you need to store something for a long time even if everything works perfectly.
Most of the stuff at Fukushima is not that radioactive, you don't ant to stand near it for a few weeks but it won't kill you instantly. Beyond the power plant itself it's not even that much. The core and fuel are a concern but they'd have been one even if nothing happened.
You're picking a single example and then claiming it's the definitive example of all accidents and situations. If X and Y and Z and W and Y are the case then the robotic car won't do much better. Oh wait, all those only happen once in a blue moon.
You keep claiming that virtually all accidents involve situation where one driver could do nothing at all to avoid what happens. I find that a downright stupid claim. In my experience, the times I got closest to accidents was when I was distracted by too many things happening to notice what I'm about to hit or be hit by. It wouldn't merge into another car because it's too busy paying attention to the guy merging in from the other side. I might one day. If you talk to really good drivers then they will tell you of all the times their skills, training, awareness and reaction time got them out of accidents.
But, it can only protect you from what you were doing, it cannot keep me or anybody else from being distracted and killing you. That is why there is no real safety increase,
Let's assume for the sake of argument that it only protects you from all the accidents you would have caused yourself by your own failures (distraction, sleepiness, etc, etc). And since someone causes most all accidents the result is that on average you're going to be the cause of half the accidents you're in. So you're claiming that preventing half the accidents you're in had no safety increase for you. Right. *rolls eyes*
Ah, you're an ignorant paranoid fool. That explains a lot.
Chernobyl was explicitly buried in place from the start, lots of downsides to it but they had no choice since it was in full meltdown and all that. Once you cover something in tens of thousands of tons of sand and other material there really isn't much you can do to dismantle it. Especially when you then cover it in over a million tons of concrete. The whole thing is also failing already and will probably need to be covered in another layer. And erecting it probably killed a lot of people with radiation poisoning and meant the area will be a radioactive zone for a long time.
And that is why you dismantle your radiative disasters if you can. Fukushima is pretty much stable at this point so it's just a question of time and money to dismantle the whole thing.
In other words, Chernobyl has no connection to the situation unless you're an ignorant paranoid fool who has no idea what you're talking about.
And then? Store it where?
There's a lot of nuclear material buried in various places, I'm not sure exactly what you're getting it. They'll find some stable out of the way place like they do with all the existing radiative waste and store it there.
They need to get rid of radioactive material every time they decommission anything dealing with nuclear materials (power plants, processing facilities, etc).
As for nuclear reactors that had contamination problems and were buried off site. SL-1. TMI. AVR.
So nothing new except scope. It'll take time but they'll eventually dismantle the whole thing and move it somewhere. They'll probably use custom designed robots for the bulk of the job.
Sorry for not being able to read your mind over the internet, my bad. You said you were bored, I tried to be helpful and say what I found to help relieve my boredom on long drives. You have an appropriate user name I suppose.
A very easy way to reduce highway accidents and fatalities would be to lower speed limits.
And yet, amazingly, when the raised the speed limit from 55 to 65 nationwide there weren't any more fatalities. Probably because all it meant was that people went from driving 67mph to driving 69mph on average.
So basically you're full of shit and have no idea what you're talking about.
Would you allow others to drive AI cars on your route to work?
Have you seen the quality of human drivers on the road? An AI, even a crappy one, would be an improvement over most of those idiots. At least an AI won't decide going 80 on the first rain in 6 months is a good idea. Or that texting while driving is a great plan. Or that being half asleep at the wheel has no potential pitfalls. Or that tail gating at 75 is the perfect way to drive. Or changing lanes without signaling. Or weaving between lanes to save 20 seconds on your commute. Or barreling down the shoulder once you run out of weaving room.
there is no real safety increase unless most drivers are driving the new vehicle.
Because you're off course an ubermensch who never gets distracted, tired or loses concentration while driving. Never, ever. And you have perfect reactions and situational awareness at all times while driving. Plus the training to apply them.
your "new" car doesn't have many options other than to brake.
It can react/brake more quickly than a human and can probably notice the driver changing lanes before a human could (since it's "eyes" aren't limited to one direction at a time). Since it also has perfect situational awareness it can simply changes lanes if there is room and if the driver behind is too close.
But that's just it. You can't go down the street to Walmart for some groceries without a car.
Why not?
This is why no one rides the buses unless they can't afford anything else
No one rides the bus because is 90% of America the bus doesn't go where you want it to go, when you want it or in reasonable time. In places like NYC where it does most everyone is perfectly fine taking public transportation.
But if we surrounded every roadway used by the robot taxi network with fences (including a barrier on top),
And where would you place these magical roadways? In what empty space? Which roads would you block to existing traffic? How would you get with cross traffic?And are you aware of how bloody expensive this would be? And how ugly? NIMBY wouldn't let that get within 500 miles of them. And the first time idiot gets killed by a robotic taxi the lawsuits will kill the whole thing. Not to mention lack of street side parking, street side drop off and so on. Essentially makes the whole street near useless for all the people and businesses already on it.
Seriously, this is about the most idiotic proposal I've heard in a long time.
And when they run their own blog it will get hacked every few weeks, spammed to hell and generally be useless. If you think the average person won't have those problems you're downright delusional.
So, between having nothing and having something with risk, guess which wins?
Why do left wingers always say that "dissent is patriotic". That's literally an oxymoron."
No, it's not. They're simply not as bloody stupid as you. Neither were the founding fathers. They had few illusions about what governments were and how wrong they could go. The government is a tool of the people, not the other way around. As soon as you think like a fascist, that the state is all that matters, then it's all over. Dissent is how you keep the government in check and ensure that the ideals on which the country was founded persist.
That's what other people understand and you don't.
Your point being what exactly? Are you somehow assuming that I don't agree with your view simply because I don't blindly clap for a badly made argument simply because it supports my position?
I merely pointed out that the person I was replying to used about the worst example one can for his point. Likely because of some deeply ingrained hatred of Harvard due to his own failures in life. If you're going to make a generally valid argument, don't fuck it up with your own irrational prejudices.
And people can fail to use abstinence as well which is equivalent to a condom breaking. You are creating a non-existent and unjustifiable distinction.
Intellectually condoms are also 100% effective because they can never break and no on ever uses them wrong. A condom breaking is a practical consideration of the material and person using them. By your own views that has no place in an intellectual consideration.
Well one intellectual argument would be that their recommendation of abstinence is more effective than condoms.
Effectiveness includes how well something works and how often people are able to make it work. Condoms, for example, fail most often because people don't use them right. Data has so far shown that abstinence is useless since even in the US since people don't follow it.
then again condoms don't seem very popular in regions plagued by AIDS either
Amazing what having all the local Christian priests saying they're evil, don't work and cause AIDS for a few decades can do.
If you look at Harvard's endowment, they could easily pay every student's tuition based on extremely conservative returns on their 26 billion investment.
Congratulations on showing you know nothing about modern college education. Harvard does this already, they provide absurdly good financial aid to the point that no student should be kept from going there due to financial issues. Free ride as long as parents make under $60k I think (or was it $100k now?) and it scales nicely above that.
Not to mention that the endowment must pay for all the other operating costs which other sources don't pay for.
And I'm sure if Harvard gave every student a free ride you'd be bitching about why all the millionaires' kids aren't paying tuition to help the less well off who go there. *rolls eyes*
Then there's the fact that colleges like Harvard are minorities and most colleges don't have giant endowments.
If losing the intermittent data is catastrophic then yes they're not compatible. Find a different solution.
That said, database replication is a very old problem and solutions exist to that. Likewise, some applications simply don't suffer too much from losing a bit of data so the cost of that is low. Other applications have no data to lose since they're simply acting as data serving platforms. And that's all for web applications which aren't quite what EC2 was made for, after all it's called "elastic compute cloud" not "elastic web serving cloud."
And who is forcing you to use E2 and EBS? Is there a gun to your head? Why in god's name are you using an infrastructure that is clearly not compatible with your needs?
No, it's only catastrophic if you're an idiot. Then again many website operators seem to be just that given how many need to use google cache to recover data after their web provider's server croaks.
Anyway, having your data in any single unreliable location is a recipe for disaster. And yes, with a 0.5-1% annual failure rate EBS is unreliable and no one claims otherwise. If you want reliable you use S3 and off-site backups.
Except we didn't, I decided to check, per capita the GDP growth rate was higher after the Fed was created than before. Something like 2.1% afterward versus 1.7% before with horribly noise all around. That's adjusted for inflation, etc, etc, etc. From what I can tell, even people who don't like the Fed don't disagree with that one amusingly enough.
So there goes your main argument I suppose, been fun.
You do know the Fed was around during the Great Depression right???
And as I stated it was largely without power to do anything.
in fact, I would argue that they, though increasing credit during the 20s, were the main reason for it!!!
The Panic of 1907 which mirrored the great depression would argue that the great depression was unavoidable if measures were not taken to prevent it. None were.
I would also suggest you learn about the Great Depression of 1920, where the fed did nothing!!
The modern Fed and the early years Fed are two very different entities. Both due to the powers that they posses, which were granted after the great depression and expanded after every crisis since, and also the increased knowledge of how to control the economy.
And you do know that GDP growth before the Fed was been much higher on average than with the Fed right?
And right now the GDP growth in China is higher than the US. Same reason.
You've never been to a tier 1 university, have you? International students are possibly even more numerous at the top schools. Stanford and MIT graduate engineering programs both have over 40% international students.
Do you know why the Fed exists and has actual power? Because last time things were allowed to work on their own we got the Great Depression. That was the second time the market imploded, the first time was the Panic of 1907 which narrowly averted a meltdown. That's not even getting into all the fun currency deflation causes and the amusingly large number of recessions in the 1800s.
Then there's the fact that a free market in practice is simply another word for oligarchies and monopolies. Without some form of outside control those in power will abuse it ruthlessly as they have done in the past.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not just the power plant. Animals in a wider area are radio active as well, so are the plants, so is the ground. Even if you wanted to clean it up, it's impossible.
Yes, as I said radiation doesn't magically clean itself up and Chernobyl released a lot of it. Fukushima wasn't Chernobyl so the contamination is much lower. And we get exposed to radiation all the time so low doses don't have any real impact. Still nasty in many places around Fukushima I agree and I suppose various areas will just be closed off rather than bothering to ship off the soil somewhere. But that's the "don't stay here for a few weeks or months" variety of danger rather than the "get help now" variety.
Then again there's a risk in everything we do, plenty of superfund sites in the US from chemicals. The contamination from coal power plants is nasty as well. Doesn't make Fukushima good but I just don't see it as any worse at this point than all the other stuff we don't even bat an eyelash at everyday.
You keep amazing me with the way you marginalize the situation.
I simply don't find panicking or overreacting to be worth it. It's not an impossible situation at this point, just an annoying one in the long term. Everything I've seen shows the situation at Fukushima to be under control although it will take a long time to fully clean up. No one is dying, no is being sickened and in general it's stable. I suppose I lack an irrational fear of radiation.
I have more worry for families of the tens of thousands who died (or are still unaccounted for) from the earthquake and tsunami. And the hundreds of thousands who are homeless.
25 years later the Chernobyl area is still polluted.
Amazing, when you decide explicitly to not clean up an area and just leave everything there (literally, all the contaminated equipment was just left there) it doesn't magically clean itself up. Who would have guessed. That's why you bury it somewhere out of the way.
In the Fukushima area they also found pollution and not inly in the water.
Yes, since radiation was released into the air it would have been very odd if there wasn't radiation spread out. Exactly what that means is a different question. Most of it has short half life and won't matter. Some doesn't. Testing will need to be done. Some looks suspiciously like it was already there before, at safely low concentrations, and simply no one bothered to test for it till now (nuclear bomb testing and Chernobyl put a lot of stuff into the air).
We spend millions the next many years cleaning up this garbage and burying it, hoping it's safe.
More like tens of billions, TMI was well over a billion and that was rather small scale.
You can't bury it and forget about it. We created a pile of waste that requites monitoring and maintenance for years to come.
That's the case with all radiative material. As I've said before, it's nothing new and it's done routinely for radioactively contaminated material. Radiation doesn't go away, eventually you need to store something for a long time even if everything works perfectly.
Most of the stuff at Fukushima is not that radioactive, you don't ant to stand near it for a few weeks but it won't kill you instantly. Beyond the power plant itself it's not even that much. The core and fuel are a concern but they'd have been one even if nothing happened.
See my reply to the idiot above you who said the same thing:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2149342&threshold=1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=36111716
You're picking a single example and then claiming it's the definitive example of all accidents and situations. If X and Y and Z and W and Y are the case then the robotic car won't do much better. Oh wait, all those only happen once in a blue moon.
You keep claiming that virtually all accidents involve situation where one driver could do nothing at all to avoid what happens. I find that a downright stupid claim. In my experience, the times I got closest to accidents was when I was distracted by too many things happening to notice what I'm about to hit or be hit by. It wouldn't merge into another car because it's too busy paying attention to the guy merging in from the other side. I might one day. If you talk to really good drivers then they will tell you of all the times their skills, training, awareness and reaction time got them out of accidents.
But, it can only protect you from what you were doing, it cannot keep me or anybody else from being distracted and killing you. That is why there is no real safety increase,
Let's assume for the sake of argument that it only protects you from all the accidents you would have caused yourself by your own failures (distraction, sleepiness, etc, etc). And since someone causes most all accidents the result is that on average you're going to be the cause of half the accidents you're in. So you're claiming that preventing half the accidents you're in had no safety increase for you. Right. *rolls eyes*
Like they dismantled Chernobyl?
Ah, you're an ignorant paranoid fool. That explains a lot.
Chernobyl was explicitly buried in place from the start, lots of downsides to it but they had no choice since it was in full meltdown and all that. Once you cover something in tens of thousands of tons of sand and other material there really isn't much you can do to dismantle it. Especially when you then cover it in over a million tons of concrete. The whole thing is also failing already and will probably need to be covered in another layer. And erecting it probably killed a lot of people with radiation poisoning and meant the area will be a radioactive zone for a long time.
And that is why you dismantle your radiative disasters if you can. Fukushima is pretty much stable at this point so it's just a question of time and money to dismantle the whole thing.
In other words, Chernobyl has no connection to the situation unless you're an ignorant paranoid fool who has no idea what you're talking about.
And then? Store it where?
There's a lot of nuclear material buried in various places, I'm not sure exactly what you're getting it. They'll find some stable out of the way place like they do with all the existing radiative waste and store it there.
They need to get rid of radioactive material every time they decommission anything dealing with nuclear materials (power plants, processing facilities, etc).
As for nuclear reactors that had contamination problems and were buried off site. SL-1. TMI. AVR.
So nothing new except scope. It'll take time but they'll eventually dismantle the whole thing and move it somewhere. They'll probably use custom designed robots for the bulk of the job.
Sorry for not being able to read your mind over the internet, my bad. You said you were bored, I tried to be helpful and say what I found to help relieve my boredom on long drives. You have an appropriate user name I suppose.
being able to do something else would be amazing.
Audiobooks.
A very easy way to reduce highway accidents and fatalities would be to lower speed limits.
And yet, amazingly, when the raised the speed limit from 55 to 65 nationwide there weren't any more fatalities. Probably because all it meant was that people went from driving 67mph to driving 69mph on average.
So basically you're full of shit and have no idea what you're talking about.
Would you allow others to drive AI cars on your route to work?
Have you seen the quality of human drivers on the road? An AI, even a crappy one, would be an improvement over most of those idiots. At least an AI won't decide going 80 on the first rain in 6 months is a good idea. Or that texting while driving is a great plan. Or that being half asleep at the wheel has no potential pitfalls. Or that tail gating at 75 is the perfect way to drive. Or changing lanes without signaling. Or weaving between lanes to save 20 seconds on your commute. Or barreling down the shoulder once you run out of weaving room.
there is no real safety increase unless most drivers are driving the new vehicle.
Because you're off course an ubermensch who never gets distracted, tired or loses concentration while driving. Never, ever. And you have perfect reactions and situational awareness at all times while driving. Plus the training to apply them.
your "new" car doesn't have many options other than to brake.
It can react/brake more quickly than a human and can probably notice the driver changing lanes before a human could (since it's "eyes" aren't limited to one direction at a time). Since it also has perfect situational awareness it can simply changes lanes if there is room and if the driver behind is too close.
But that's just it. You can't go down the street to Walmart for some groceries without a car.
Why not?
This is why no one rides the buses unless they can't afford anything else
No one rides the bus because is 90% of America the bus doesn't go where you want it to go, when you want it or in reasonable time. In places like NYC where it does most everyone is perfectly fine taking public transportation.
But if we surrounded every roadway used by the robot taxi network with fences (including a barrier on top),
And where would you place these magical roadways? In what empty space? Which roads would you block to existing traffic? How would you get with cross traffic?And are you aware of how bloody expensive this would be? And how ugly? NIMBY wouldn't let that get within 500 miles of them. And the first time idiot gets killed by a robotic taxi the lawsuits will kill the whole thing. Not to mention lack of street side parking, street side drop off and so on. Essentially makes the whole street near useless for all the people and businesses already on it.
Seriously, this is about the most idiotic proposal I've heard in a long time.
And when they run their own blog it will get hacked every few weeks, spammed to hell and generally be useless. If you think the average person won't have those problems you're downright delusional.
So, between having nothing and having something with risk, guess which wins?
Why do left wingers always say that "dissent is patriotic". That's literally an oxymoron."
No, it's not. They're simply not as bloody stupid as you. Neither were the founding fathers. They had few illusions about what governments were and how wrong they could go. The government is a tool of the people, not the other way around. As soon as you think like a fascist, that the state is all that matters, then it's all over. Dissent is how you keep the government in check and ensure that the ideals on which the country was founded persist.
That's what other people understand and you don't.
Your point being what exactly? Are you somehow assuming that I don't agree with your view simply because I don't blindly clap for a badly made argument simply because it supports my position?
I merely pointed out that the person I was replying to used about the worst example one can for his point. Likely because of some deeply ingrained hatred of Harvard due to his own failures in life. If you're going to make a generally valid argument, don't fuck it up with your own irrational prejudices.
Now if you want to leave the intellectual realm
And people can fail to use abstinence as well which is equivalent to a condom breaking. You are creating a non-existent and unjustifiable distinction.
Intellectually condoms are also 100% effective because they can never break and no on ever uses them wrong. A condom breaking is a practical consideration of the material and person using them. By your own views that has no place in an intellectual consideration.
Well one intellectual argument would be that their recommendation of abstinence is more effective than condoms.
Effectiveness includes how well something works and how often people are able to make it work. Condoms, for example, fail most often because people don't use them right. Data has so far shown that abstinence is useless since even in the US since people don't follow it.
then again condoms don't seem very popular in regions plagued by AIDS either
Amazing what having all the local Christian priests saying they're evil, don't work and cause AIDS for a few decades can do.
If you look at Harvard's endowment, they could easily pay every student's tuition based on extremely conservative returns on their 26 billion investment.
Congratulations on showing you know nothing about modern college education. Harvard does this already, they provide absurdly good financial aid to the point that no student should be kept from going there due to financial issues. Free ride as long as parents make under $60k I think (or was it $100k now?) and it scales nicely above that.
Not to mention that the endowment must pay for all the other operating costs which other sources don't pay for.
And I'm sure if Harvard gave every student a free ride you'd be bitching about why all the millionaires' kids aren't paying tuition to help the less well off who go there. *rolls eyes*
Then there's the fact that colleges like Harvard are minorities and most colleges don't have giant endowments.
Same shit, really.
No it's not.
If losing the intermittent data is catastrophic then yes they're not compatible. Find a different solution.
That said, database replication is a very old problem and solutions exist to that. Likewise, some applications simply don't suffer too much from losing a bit of data so the cost of that is low. Other applications have no data to lose since they're simply acting as data serving platforms. And that's all for web applications which aren't quite what EC2 was made for, after all it's called "elastic compute cloud" not "elastic web serving cloud."
And who is forcing you to use E2 and EBS? Is there a gun to your head? Why in god's name are you using an infrastructure that is clearly not compatible with your needs?
any data loss is catastrophic, if it's your data.
No, it's only catastrophic if you're an idiot. Then again many website operators seem to be just that given how many need to use google cache to recover data after their web provider's server croaks.
Anyway, having your data in any single unreliable location is a recipe for disaster. And yes, with a 0.5-1% annual failure rate EBS is unreliable and no one claims otherwise. If you want reliable you use S3 and off-site backups.
before 1913 where we had higher GPD growth
Except we didn't, I decided to check, per capita the GDP growth rate was higher after the Fed was created than before. Something like 2.1% afterward versus 1.7% before with horribly noise all around. That's adjusted for inflation, etc, etc, etc. From what I can tell, even people who don't like the Fed don't disagree with that one amusingly enough.
So there goes your main argument I suppose, been fun.
You do know the Fed was around during the Great Depression right???
And as I stated it was largely without power to do anything.
in fact, I would argue that they, though increasing credit during the 20s, were the main reason for it!!!
The Panic of 1907 which mirrored the great depression would argue that the great depression was unavoidable if measures were not taken to prevent it. None were.
I would also suggest you learn about the Great Depression of 1920, where the fed did nothing!!
The modern Fed and the early years Fed are two very different entities. Both due to the powers that they posses, which were granted after the great depression and expanded after every crisis since, and also the increased knowledge of how to control the economy.
And you do know that GDP growth before the Fed was been much higher on average than with the Fed right?
And right now the GDP growth in China is higher than the US. Same reason.
You've never been to a tier 1 university, have you? International students are possibly even more numerous at the top schools. Stanford and MIT graduate engineering programs both have over 40% international students.
Do you know why the Fed exists and has actual power? Because last time things were allowed to work on their own we got the Great Depression. That was the second time the market imploded, the first time was the Panic of 1907 which narrowly averted a meltdown. That's not even getting into all the fun currency deflation causes and the amusingly large number of recessions in the 1800s.
Then there's the fact that a free market in practice is simply another word for oligarchies and monopolies. Without some form of outside control those in power will abuse it ruthlessly as they have done in the past.