Most of the massively parallel stuff most people might use on a smartphone or tablet would be more efficiently handled by the GPGPU than the CPU in the first place. Four cores for general processing and a beefier IGP to handle the LCD, 3D rendering and GPGPU seem like the more logical way to go for optimal battery life to me.
There is one really funny thing about multi-processor loads: most consumer-grade high-compute loads are DSP and GPGPUs are usually very good at DSP stuff so it would likely be (much) more efficient to do your image and sound processing on the GPGPU than extra cores anyway.
So if your software requires 8 cores, there is a high probability it isn't using the right compute resource.
I actually _do_ sit 1.5' away from my 27" so 300 dpi IS around the target.
Is your eyesight alright? I would feel like the screen is ripping my eyes out at that distance unless I removed my glasses. I can't imagine focusing that close for extended amounts of time being healthy.
The only part of human vision that is capable of relatively high resolution is the "sweet spot" that makes up the middlemost +/- 8 degrees of your field of view. The eye's resolution drops off sharply once you get out of that zone which is part of the reason why if you fixate any word on this page, you likely cannot clearly distinguish words that are more than a few words or lines away in any direction from whichever point you fixated.
There is no need to have retina resolution across the whole field of view when only ~5% of our field of view can make any use of such a high a resolution. They could just as easily have peripheral vision rendered at a much lower resolution as a backdrop to the "sweet spot" and use head-tracking to pick which part of the overall canvas goes in the middle where your eyes will usually rest. Keeping eyes locked way off-center for more than a second or two usually causes people discomfort so most people end up subconsciously using eye movement mainly to keep up with whatever they are tracking during head movements so looking at "off-sweetspot" space should usually be a very short-lived transient condition.
Something like Oculus would not need to go much beyond 20MP total. All they need is a progressive resolution display to match the retina's non-uniform resolution.
You do not need 300dpi on a 24" monitor since you will usually be using a desktop at over twice the distance you would likely use a phone or tablet at. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 150dpi would be fine on the desktop - around twice what most desktop LCDs have today.
What is important is the angular resolution across the field of view; not the screen resolution alone and a 150dpi desktop display at 3' from the observer would have the same angular resolution as a 300dpi screen at 1.5'.
I went to check out the new N7 (again) (hard-locked on me within minutes the first time around) at a local store. While text and graphics look slightly sharper compared to my original N7, the improvement was largely unimpressive: details that remain visible on the v2's 1200p screen are too small for me to really notice or bother with at my typical use distance anyhow so I'm not really losing any details that matter compared to my original N7's screen.
I have a friend who keeps harping about how much sharper things are on his 1080p phone but when I ask him to actually read that "so much sharper" text, he can't because it is much too small for him to actually read comfortably so he has to scale it up to a size that would be perfectly readable on my N7v1's 800p screen before he can easily read it anyway. Not much point in obsessing over extremely high resolutions when you can barely use or appreciate the extra detail under normal use conditions.
His point was that monogamy in humans has several strong non-genetic factors heavily favoring it. I can certainly imagine the non-genetic factors easily overriding whatever genetic predispositions we may have either way.
If polygamy carried no political, religious, social, financial, legal, health, etc. consequences or humans lacked the foresight/intelligence/education to consider them like animals do, it would likely be far more common - just look at how "loose" soldiers often got with women in conquered territories before armies and international treaties got into that... guys certainly don't seem particularly monogamous when risks seem practically zero.
While "only a third" of humans ADMIT cheating, there likely are many more who actually do and even more who would like to but either cannot or dare not.
I have 32GB RAM in my current PC - I always end up maxing out RAM on my PCs so I decided to bite the bullet while DDR3 was still near its all-time low.
I paid $500 to put 512MB in my P3 13 years ago - $300 for the first 256MB, $200 for the next 256MB a year later. I paid $400 to put 3GB RAM in my P4 9 years ago - $250 for the first 1GB, $150 for the next 2GB two years later. I paid $325 to put 8GB RAM in my C2D 5 years ago - $200 for the first 4GB, $125 for the next 4GB two years later. I paid $185 to put 32GB RAM in my current i5 - $90 for the first 16GB, $95 for the next 16GB a few months later.
Disk IO has always bugged the heck out of me so I have always built my PCs around eliminating as much of it as I can. I'm quite happy with how my current PC hardly ever needs to access the HDD once all my programs and their data are loaded.
One of the reasons silicon is great for mass-produced anything: silicon simply happens to be one of the most common and easily refined elements on Earth. For electronics, on top of being much cheaper than exotic materials, silicon's chemical properties (generally inert) makes it much easier to work with at high temperatures and caustic chemicals than most other materials.
Even better: put enough RAM in your PC so all the files get loaded into the OS' disk cache. This won't help the initial load time but once everything is loaded into disk cache, applications and games hardly ever have to touch the HDD/SSD again until you reboot your PC or load some other big game or application.
When gaming sites do computer reviews and evaluate the impact of extra RAM on games, they should benchmark the initial load time separately from reloading times. I bet more RAM would have nice performance benefits even on SSDs in such a scenario.
SSDs may be faster but not as fast as having enough RAM that you can bypass SSD accesses altogether.
I'd strongly suspect that it's possible and pretty cheap by the scale of these things to put a load cell into the relevant parts of a crane. I'd guess that they do measure motor current too for other reasons, but a load cell would be far more accurate determining weight.
While there is no doubt that a load cell would be more accurate for static loads, a dock crane operator does not have time to spare for waiting after containers to fully settle before going on the move again so you would still need to tap position/acceleration sensors and do some vector maths to subtract other forces from cell load to determine the actual container's weight. Also, absolute accuracy is not necessary when the main objective is only to determine whether or not the container is within its acceptable weight range for its declared weight and designated loading position on the ship so precision within a few tons is acceptable there. If you haven't seen how those super cargo ships get (un)loaded, you might want to have a look; the rate at which containers come on/off can be scary and having to wait several seconds for load cells to settle after every lift would kill their schedule.
Voltage, current, speed, torque and other useful sensors to estimate weight under both static and dynamic conditions are certainly already present in any modern computerized crane's instrumentation and control systems so determining weight based on lift acceleration and power requires little more than a lookup table, basic vector math and periodic calibration that can be added to regular maintenance if its performance tracking routine does not already include lifting controlled loads. I would be a little surprised if modern cranes did not approximate loads as a standard feature since they have everything they need to do it for practically free.
The Nexus 7 has a massive bezel, these devices do not & will be smaller than the 0.7 inches you'd expect placed side-by-side with a Nexus 7.
I'm already annoyed with how often I accidentally activate random things by accidentally touching the screen with my holding hand on the N7's bezel, I would probably go nuts on a device with a thinner one. My on-screen keyboard accuracy is already bad enough on the N7, that would probably drive me nuts too on a 6" device. And 6" likely wouldn't comfortably fit in most of my pockets.
For me, 6" seems to provide optimal inconvenience. I would prefer a smaller phone for which I would not need to worry about which pockets it fits into and a larger tablet I can behind when not needed.
As for the N7's bezel, it is indeed pretty wide. They could release a Nexus8 on the same footprint by thinning that out and still have ~3/4" diagonal to spare for the front-facing camera and other gadgetry.
I wouldn't go that far. It's more like the difference between a 24" and a 21" monitor. Both are still "big" compared to what the majority of people use (Which is probably about 19" these days, perhaps 17")
Sub-20" appears to be practically dead to me: if you check online stores, you see 0-10 sub-20" models vs 200+ models for the 20-27" range... and half those sub-20" are MORE EXPENSIVE with much lower resolution than the cheaper 20" 1080p models. At a glance, the majority of displays in the 20-24" range appear to be 21.5" or larger so even 20" seems to be falling out of favor.
With 20" 1080p available for as little to $100 these days, there is very little room even at the low-end for anything less than that.
The risks are privatized as well. The investor can lose what they put in.
And that's it. So they have very little incentive to vote their shares in any way other than that which will maximize financial return.
The way that maximizes financial return also tends to maximize the risks and there usually is a limit to how much risk a company can manage.
A smart investor would optimize the balance between risks and rewards - there is no profit in investing in a company that goes tits-up due to blindly taking too many stupid or unnecessary risks for the sake or profits.
Also, a company usually has multiple investors with various risk tolerances and interests so companies rarely end up playing all-or-nothing.
But the insurance company needs to prove that first.
Until they cross-reference the claims with shipping weight and account for everything that was supposed to be on-ship, the overweight thing is only allegations.
And frankly, if a ship can be sunk by a few dozens or even a few hundred overweight containers, you have a serious structural or stability problem considering the huge margins that need to be built into ships to accommodate the relentless bending stresses from rolling waves. I would not be surprised if metal fatigue turned out to be the root cause and in that case, overweight containers would merely cause the inevitable to occur sooner.
As far as weight goes, cranes should be monitoring their motor torque (force) and container acceleration when pulling up. This would let them estimate weight somewhat accurately which should prevent major abuse. Since most shipping incidents involving overweight trains/containers have overloads exceeding 100%, +/- 20% accuracy at the crane would already go a long way towards preventing overload-related incidents.
The form factors, price points, performance points, replacement frequency, etc. on the other hand will change.
All-in-ones used to be little more than a gimmick because they used to be grossly under-powered and non-upgradable which made them generally undesirable. Today, even entry-level AiO "oversized tablets" are over-powered for most people's needs so I am expecting them to be a fair bit more popular this time around.
I also expect PC-based "transformable" tablets (with keyboard/battery/optical/IO/charger dock) to give ultrabooks, nettops, laptops and low-end desktops a run for their money.
Still technically PCs, just different form factors.
However, I do expect total PC and PC-equivalent sales to continue decreasing over time due to the sheer number of alternate devices (Android-based phones, tablets, smart-TVs, game consoles, PC-on-a-stick, proprietary game consoles, etc.) that can be used for media consumption and menial tasks that account for the bulk of what non-technical non-gamer PC users tend to use their PCs for.
All the first-party IM/mail services are tapped or highly likely to get tapped by governments so if you want some reasonable shot at privacy, you have to use one of the lesser-known privacy-oriented 3rd-party apps and networks. Preferably a decentralized open-source application and network so governments cannot shut it down nor insert backdoors without a high probability of getting caught.
The problem is if you want to buy or sell bitcoins for normal currencies, you need to go through exchanges and many governments are planning to regulate those exchanges to collect income and sales taxes. If companies are going to use bitcoins for trade, governments will likely tell companies trading within their territory to apply taxes to those bitcoin transactions too.
While governments may not control bitcoin directly, they do have control over entities trading using it within their territory.
Bitcoin may sound nice for tax evasion purposes but if governments make a big deal out of it, it may not last for very long.
Considering the near-impossibility of managing copyright infringement, it is extremely doubtful that governments will be any more successful in preventing the proliferation of "illegal 3D patterns" online and preventing people from printing them on their personal 3D printers.
I smell billions of dollars getting wasted on attempting to prevent the inevitable in our future just like billions have been wasted on copyrights to preserve failing business models.
They need to focus more on addressing the root causes.
My point was: even though the stuck formerly-molten salt may be safe in itself, it is in a position to impede flow in the pipe or valve it may now be clogging and cause future use of those pipes or valves to cause complications or emergencies of its own if not discovered and fixed before then - next time you try to drain the tank in an emergency after missing leftover sub-critical non-molten salt stuck in there, it may fail to work because the clogged pipe or valve is not allowing flow.
So, while molten salt may be easier to keep under control, its very nature also opens up a whole gamut of new potential failure modes. Finding pipe/valve/pump materials that can survive the very harsh nature of molten salt for a long time is a big challenge as well.
They pulled the plug and let the molten salt drain out.
Sometimes, pipes get clogged, valves get stuck, servos fail, etc. and "simply draining" becomes far more complicated than it should be. Ex.: you have a pipe that had leftover "molten salt" in it but that leftover was too far below critical mass to keep itself molten and ends up forming a plug.
While there may be more safety "designed-in", failures in possibly frightening and unexpected new ways are always an option.
While graphite displacing water contributed to making a bad situation worse (was there actually anything left that could have been done to save it or at least mitigate damage at that point?), Chernobyl would never have been in that state in the first place if plant engineers simply hadn't ignored the test preparation procedure (smooth power reduction to avoid poisoning) and reactor operating guidelines.
They rushed power-down, poisoned the reactor and then tried to brute-force power-up by removing too many control rods. A British documentary about it said that postmortem examination found evidence of only six control rods accounted for out of a minimum of 26 according to the manufacturer's operating guidelines. If a modern reactor was allowed to operate this far into its danger zone, I doubt it would fare much better.
As someone else said though, modern designs try to make most past mistakes nearly impossible to repeat even deliberately. Can't break the manufacturer's minimum control rod requirement on a whim if the minimum complement for whatever fuel cycle is being used is installed permanently during refueling or its equivalent is mixed directly into the fuel.
What they didn't realize, and their training did not emphasize was the expansion of the high pressure steam to atmospheric would cool it to nearly exactly what the gauge read. In the heat of battle they did not remember some fundamental fluid dynamics nor read a PVT graph.
In an emergency, do you really want to have to go through a PVT graph to figure out the vapor-liquid ratio and that you are losing mass? To me, considering what is at stake, that seems like an unnecessary burden and risk plant designers put on plant operators to avoid using relatively cheap water-level sensor such as a simple tube with a bunch of float-switches in it.
If the people at Davis-Besse had missed PT drifting out of the expected range, would they still have taken the correct action once all the alarms started going off in bulk? Maybe, maybe not; it would likely depend a lot on what distraction(s) caused them to miss it in the first place.
In most industrial incidents, multiple circumstances usually have to line up just right for it to happen. Better training, instrumentation, etc. will decrease the likelihood of that happening but will never eliminate it.
People assume it was a single major design flaw or point of failure, but actually there were several major flaws and several missed opportunities to avert disaster.
I did not say it was caused by a single flaw. I said it was the single biggest, dumbest flaw. Running all the power circuits through the same conduit for convenience caused both primary and backup power distribution between reactors to all fail together, which did not help either.
Total power failure is not supposed to happen and at Fukushima, it happened due to dumb site planning errors.
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If you want to worry about the taste and texture of synthetic meat, try this one on for size:
http://www.infiniteunknown.net/2011/06/15/shit-burger-japanese-researcher-creates-artificial-meat-from-human-feces-video/
That's exactly what I was thinking too.
Most of the massively parallel stuff most people might use on a smartphone or tablet would be more efficiently handled by the GPGPU than the CPU in the first place.
Four cores for general processing and a beefier IGP to handle the LCD, 3D rendering and GPGPU seem like the more logical way to go for optimal battery life to me.
There is one really funny thing about multi-processor loads: most consumer-grade high-compute loads are DSP and GPGPUs are usually very good at DSP stuff so it would likely be (much) more efficient to do your image and sound processing on the GPGPU than extra cores anyway.
So if your software requires 8 cores, there is a high probability it isn't using the right compute resource.
> as a 300 dpi screen at 1.5'.
I actually _do_ sit 1.5' away from my 27" so 300 dpi IS around the target.
Is your eyesight alright? I would feel like the screen is ripping my eyes out at that distance unless I removed my glasses. I can't imagine focusing that close for extended amounts of time being healthy.
The only part of human vision that is capable of relatively high resolution is the "sweet spot" that makes up the middlemost +/- 8 degrees of your field of view. The eye's resolution drops off sharply once you get out of that zone which is part of the reason why if you fixate any word on this page, you likely cannot clearly distinguish words that are more than a few words or lines away in any direction from whichever point you fixated.
There is no need to have retina resolution across the whole field of view when only ~5% of our field of view can make any use of such a high a resolution. They could just as easily have peripheral vision rendered at a much lower resolution as a backdrop to the "sweet spot" and use head-tracking to pick which part of the overall canvas goes in the middle where your eyes will usually rest. Keeping eyes locked way off-center for more than a second or two usually causes people discomfort so most people end up subconsciously using eye movement mainly to keep up with whatever they are tracking during head movements so looking at "off-sweetspot" space should usually be a very short-lived transient condition.
Something like Oculus would not need to go much beyond 20MP total. All they need is a progressive resolution display to match the retina's non-uniform resolution.
You do not need 300dpi on a 24" monitor since you will usually be using a desktop at over twice the distance you would likely use a phone or tablet at. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 150dpi would be fine on the desktop - around twice what most desktop LCDs have today.
What is important is the angular resolution across the field of view; not the screen resolution alone and a 150dpi desktop display at 3' from the observer would have the same angular resolution as a 300dpi screen at 1.5'.
I went to check out the new N7 (again) (hard-locked on me within minutes the first time around) at a local store. While text and graphics look slightly sharper compared to my original N7, the improvement was largely unimpressive: details that remain visible on the v2's 1200p screen are too small for me to really notice or bother with at my typical use distance anyhow so I'm not really losing any details that matter compared to my original N7's screen.
I have a friend who keeps harping about how much sharper things are on his 1080p phone but when I ask him to actually read that "so much sharper" text, he can't because it is much too small for him to actually read comfortably so he has to scale it up to a size that would be perfectly readable on my N7v1's 800p screen before he can easily read it anyway. Not much point in obsessing over extremely high resolutions when you can barely use or appreciate the extra detail under normal use conditions.
His point was that monogamy in humans has several strong non-genetic factors heavily favoring it. I can certainly imagine the non-genetic factors easily overriding whatever genetic predispositions we may have either way.
If polygamy carried no political, religious, social, financial, legal, health, etc. consequences or humans lacked the foresight/intelligence/education to consider them like animals do, it would likely be far more common - just look at how "loose" soldiers often got with women in conquered territories before armies and international treaties got into that... guys certainly don't seem particularly monogamous when risks seem practically zero.
While "only a third" of humans ADMIT cheating, there likely are many more who actually do and even more who would like to but either cannot or dare not.
Or forgo the 32GB SSD and have 32GB RAM instead.
I have 32GB RAM in my current PC - I always end up maxing out RAM on my PCs so I decided to bite the bullet while DDR3 was still near its all-time low.
I paid $500 to put 512MB in my P3 13 years ago - $300 for the first 256MB, $200 for the next 256MB a year later.
I paid $400 to put 3GB RAM in my P4 9 years ago - $250 for the first 1GB, $150 for the next 2GB two years later.
I paid $325 to put 8GB RAM in my C2D 5 years ago - $200 for the first 4GB, $125 for the next 4GB two years later.
I paid $185 to put 32GB RAM in my current i5 - $90 for the first 16GB, $95 for the next 16GB a few months later.
Disk IO has always bugged the heck out of me so I have always built my PCs around eliminating as much of it as I can. I'm quite happy with how my current PC hardly ever needs to access the HDD once all my programs and their data are loaded.
One of the reasons silicon is great for mass-produced anything: silicon simply happens to be one of the most common and easily refined elements on Earth. For electronics, on top of being much cheaper than exotic materials, silicon's chemical properties (generally inert) makes it much easier to work with at high temperatures and caustic chemicals than most other materials.
Even better: put enough RAM in your PC so all the files get loaded into the OS' disk cache. This won't help the initial load time but once everything is loaded into disk cache, applications and games hardly ever have to touch the HDD/SSD again until you reboot your PC or load some other big game or application.
When gaming sites do computer reviews and evaluate the impact of extra RAM on games, they should benchmark the initial load time separately from reloading times. I bet more RAM would have nice performance benefits even on SSDs in such a scenario.
SSDs may be faster but not as fast as having enough RAM that you can bypass SSD accesses altogether.
I'd strongly suspect that it's possible and pretty cheap by the scale of these things to put a load cell into the relevant parts of a crane. I'd guess that they do measure motor current too for other reasons, but a load cell would be far more accurate determining weight.
While there is no doubt that a load cell would be more accurate for static loads, a dock crane operator does not have time to spare for waiting after containers to fully settle before going on the move again so you would still need to tap position/acceleration sensors and do some vector maths to subtract other forces from cell load to determine the actual container's weight. Also, absolute accuracy is not necessary when the main objective is only to determine whether or not the container is within its acceptable weight range for its declared weight and designated loading position on the ship so precision within a few tons is acceptable there. If you haven't seen how those super cargo ships get (un)loaded, you might want to have a look; the rate at which containers come on/off can be scary and having to wait several seconds for load cells to settle after every lift would kill their schedule.
Voltage, current, speed, torque and other useful sensors to estimate weight under both static and dynamic conditions are certainly already present in any modern computerized crane's instrumentation and control systems so determining weight based on lift acceleration and power requires little more than a lookup table, basic vector math and periodic calibration that can be added to regular maintenance if its performance tracking routine does not already include lifting controlled loads. I would be a little surprised if modern cranes did not approximate loads as a standard feature since they have everything they need to do it for practically free.
Even my non-tech-savvy friends and family members who have upgraded their PCs in the past 4-5 years have 20" or bigger LCDs.
Those that don't have "upgraded" to laptops.
The Nexus 7 has a massive bezel, these devices do not & will be smaller than the 0.7 inches you'd expect placed side-by-side with a Nexus 7.
I'm already annoyed with how often I accidentally activate random things by accidentally touching the screen with my holding hand on the N7's bezel, I would probably go nuts on a device with a thinner one. My on-screen keyboard accuracy is already bad enough on the N7, that would probably drive me nuts too on a 6" device. And 6" likely wouldn't comfortably fit in most of my pockets.
For me, 6" seems to provide optimal inconvenience. I would prefer a smaller phone for which I would not need to worry about which pockets it fits into and a larger tablet I can behind when not needed.
As for the N7's bezel, it is indeed pretty wide. They could release a Nexus8 on the same footprint by thinning that out and still have ~3/4" diagonal to spare for the front-facing camera and other gadgetry.
I wouldn't go that far. It's more like the difference between a 24" and a 21" monitor. Both are still "big" compared to what the majority of people use (Which is probably about 19" these days, perhaps 17")
Sub-20" appears to be practically dead to me: if you check online stores, you see 0-10 sub-20" models vs 200+ models for the 20-27" range... and half those sub-20" are MORE EXPENSIVE with much lower resolution than the cheaper 20" 1080p models. At a glance, the majority of displays in the 20-24" range appear to be 21.5" or larger so even 20" seems to be falling out of favor.
With 20" 1080p available for as little to $100 these days, there is very little room even at the low-end for anything less than that.
The risks are privatized as well. The investor can lose what they put in.
And that's it. So they have very little incentive to vote their shares in any way other than that which will maximize financial return.
The way that maximizes financial return also tends to maximize the risks and there usually is a limit to how much risk a company can manage.
A smart investor would optimize the balance between risks and rewards - there is no profit in investing in a company that goes tits-up due to blindly taking too many stupid or unnecessary risks for the sake or profits.
Also, a company usually has multiple investors with various risk tolerances and interests so companies rarely end up playing all-or-nothing.
But the insurance company needs to prove that first.
Until they cross-reference the claims with shipping weight and account for everything that was supposed to be on-ship, the overweight thing is only allegations.
And frankly, if a ship can be sunk by a few dozens or even a few hundred overweight containers, you have a serious structural or stability problem considering the huge margins that need to be built into ships to accommodate the relentless bending stresses from rolling waves. I would not be surprised if metal fatigue turned out to be the root cause and in that case, overweight containers would merely cause the inevitable to occur sooner.
As far as weight goes, cranes should be monitoring their motor torque (force) and container acceleration when pulling up. This would let them estimate weight somewhat accurately which should prevent major abuse. Since most shipping incidents involving overweight trains/containers have overloads exceeding 100%, +/- 20% accuracy at the crane would already go a long way towards preventing overload-related incidents.
PC sales will continue.
The form factors, price points, performance points, replacement frequency, etc. on the other hand will change.
All-in-ones used to be little more than a gimmick because they used to be grossly under-powered and non-upgradable which made them generally undesirable. Today, even entry-level AiO "oversized tablets" are over-powered for most people's needs so I am expecting them to be a fair bit more popular this time around.
I also expect PC-based "transformable" tablets (with keyboard/battery/optical/IO/charger dock) to give ultrabooks, nettops, laptops and low-end desktops a run for their money.
Still technically PCs, just different form factors.
However, I do expect total PC and PC-equivalent sales to continue decreasing over time due to the sheer number of alternate devices (Android-based phones, tablets, smart-TVs, game consoles, PC-on-a-stick, proprietary game consoles, etc.) that can be used for media consumption and menial tasks that account for the bulk of what non-technical non-gamer PC users tend to use their PCs for.
All the first-party IM/mail services are tapped or highly likely to get tapped by governments so if you want some reasonable shot at privacy, you have to use one of the lesser-known privacy-oriented 3rd-party apps and networks. Preferably a decentralized open-source application and network so governments cannot shut it down nor insert backdoors without a high probability of getting caught.
The problem is if you want to buy or sell bitcoins for normal currencies, you need to go through exchanges and many governments are planning to regulate those exchanges to collect income and sales taxes. If companies are going to use bitcoins for trade, governments will likely tell companies trading within their territory to apply taxes to those bitcoin transactions too.
While governments may not control bitcoin directly, they do have control over entities trading using it within their territory.
Bitcoin may sound nice for tax evasion purposes but if governments make a big deal out of it, it may not last for very long.
Considering the near-impossibility of managing copyright infringement, it is extremely doubtful that governments will be any more successful in preventing the proliferation of "illegal 3D patterns" online and preventing people from printing them on their personal 3D printers.
I smell billions of dollars getting wasted on attempting to prevent the inevitable in our future just like billions have been wasted on copyrights to preserve failing business models.
They need to focus more on addressing the root causes.
My point was: even though the stuck formerly-molten salt may be safe in itself, it is in a position to impede flow in the pipe or valve it may now be clogging and cause future use of those pipes or valves to cause complications or emergencies of its own if not discovered and fixed before then - next time you try to drain the tank in an emergency after missing leftover sub-critical non-molten salt stuck in there, it may fail to work because the clogged pipe or valve is not allowing flow.
So, while molten salt may be easier to keep under control, its very nature also opens up a whole gamut of new potential failure modes. Finding pipe/valve/pump materials that can survive the very harsh nature of molten salt for a long time is a big challenge as well.
They pulled the plug and let the molten salt drain out.
Sometimes, pipes get clogged, valves get stuck, servos fail, etc. and "simply draining" becomes far more complicated than it should be. Ex.: you have a pipe that had leftover "molten salt" in it but that leftover was too far below critical mass to keep itself molten and ends up forming a plug.
While there may be more safety "designed-in", failures in possibly frightening and unexpected new ways are always an option.
While graphite displacing water contributed to making a bad situation worse (was there actually anything left that could have been done to save it or at least mitigate damage at that point?), Chernobyl would never have been in that state in the first place if plant engineers simply hadn't ignored the test preparation procedure (smooth power reduction to avoid poisoning) and reactor operating guidelines.
They rushed power-down, poisoned the reactor and then tried to brute-force power-up by removing too many control rods. A British documentary about it said that postmortem examination found evidence of only six control rods accounted for out of a minimum of 26 according to the manufacturer's operating guidelines. If a modern reactor was allowed to operate this far into its danger zone, I doubt it would fare much better.
As someone else said though, modern designs try to make most past mistakes nearly impossible to repeat even deliberately. Can't break the manufacturer's minimum control rod requirement on a whim if the minimum complement for whatever fuel cycle is being used is installed permanently during refueling or its equivalent is mixed directly into the fuel.
What they didn't realize, and their training did not emphasize was the expansion of the high pressure steam to atmospheric would cool it to nearly exactly what the gauge read. In the heat of battle they did not remember some fundamental fluid dynamics nor read a PVT graph.
In an emergency, do you really want to have to go through a PVT graph to figure out the vapor-liquid ratio and that you are losing mass? To me, considering what is at stake, that seems like an unnecessary burden and risk plant designers put on plant operators to avoid using relatively cheap water-level sensor such as a simple tube with a bunch of float-switches in it.
If the people at Davis-Besse had missed PT drifting out of the expected range, would they still have taken the correct action once all the alarms started going off in bulk? Maybe, maybe not; it would likely depend a lot on what distraction(s) caused them to miss it in the first place.
In most industrial incidents, multiple circumstances usually have to line up just right for it to happen. Better training, instrumentation, etc. will decrease the likelihood of that happening but will never eliminate it.
People assume it was a single major design flaw or point of failure, but actually there were several major flaws and several missed opportunities to avert disaster.
I did not say it was caused by a single flaw. I said it was the single biggest, dumbest flaw. Running all the power circuits through the same conduit for convenience caused both primary and backup power distribution between reactors to all fail together, which did not help either.
Total power failure is not supposed to happen and at Fukushima, it happened due to dumb site planning errors.