The EU currently is evaluating whether all extradictions to the US will be stopped because the bradley manning case shows that suspects in the US are not safe from torture. (Long periods of isolation are torture according to international standards)
Yes. In movies like "Dark Star" or "2001" we see what can happen if you do not have proper attitude control in your spacecraft. They start to argue, refuse to take orders or just get lazy.
People tend to misestimate the scale. The average solar power per area in Germany is about half of that in Kenia. Solar power prices are falling by 8% each year for 30 years now. At that rate any ROI achieved in Kenia will be achieved in Germany 9 years later. While this is a good reason to built solar plants in Kenia first, the difference in location is almost irrelevant when comparing to nuclear power: 2nd generation nuclear plants are designed to operate for 60 years. A 9 year shift therefore is only a 15% advantage.
Things might work fine at your place, but they work better at other places.
I am living in Germany and per capita we use only 50% of the energy that the US does to create 90% of the wealth. (Or even more wealth if you remove eastern Germany from the equation which still needs some time to catch up.) Stricter regulations for cars, buildings, etc. are a big part of what makes this possible.
Imagine what would happen to the oil price if the US would get their efficiency up to the level of the other industrialised countries.
> The.COM TLD is managed by the US according to US rules because the US created it. The US rule you are talking about is RFC920. RFC 920 is an official DARPA document: "This is an official policy statement of the IAB and the DARPA."
It explicitely has an international scope. It lays the rules for registering a second level domain in.com and does not restrict it to US companies. While at that time almost all ARPANET nodes where in the US (European nodes have been part of the network since 1972), that does not mean that it was intended to stay that way.
Otherwise it would not have made much sense to specify.us and.de domains in RFC 920.
I can think of three options: 1) Expensive, but available immediately: There is license plate reading software in use on highways in Europe. These turnpike systems use cameras to read the license plates and LIDAR 3D laser scanners to reliably measure the size of a truck. The lase information should provide very reliable timing data, but likely are an overkill. As others suggested special markers on the cars could be easier to identify then license plates.
2) cheaper in development but higher material cost for each race Put an android phone with GPS in each car and write a small app that tells the measurement system when they are approaching the goal line.
3) very low deployment cost but more development cost Paint an reflective bar code on the side of the car. A fixed laser is pointing across the goal line. Connect the light detector picking up the reflection to a sound board. This will give you 25us accuracy on the timing and the pattern of the reflection will tell you which car it is. The system will even get you a very accurate speed measurement.
Options 1 and 2 only tell you the ordering of the cars. Detailed timing must be measured with another system. It might be sufficient to interpolate camera frame data.
In german law the copyright on the aggregate does not cover the individual parts, but the decisions to aggregate them in a certain way. (Like which parts to include, how to order them, etc.). http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__4.html In principle you can have a copyright on that without holding the copyright or a license for the individual parts. You would have no right to distribute the aggregate, because you need a license to the individual parts. But you could prevent someone else (who might have these licenses) from distributing an identical aggregate without licensing the aggregate format from you.
Practically usually the aggragation is too primitive to be considered a work in the sense of the law, and I doubt that AVM meets this theshold with their distribution.
BUT: From the article it is clear, that Cybit does not distribute an aggregate. It modifies a part of an aggregation. They could try to invoke 14 of the law, which allows a creator to prevent modifications under certain conditions. http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__14.html But I do not think that holds, as Cybit is only modifying the parts, which are not AVM copyright. The aggregation is kept intact. (At least I don't see any reference to parts of the software beeing removed or software added) Also, the modification by Cybit are unlikely to exceed the threshold set by 14 UrHG.
> But it's been hit by a disaster beyond what was even planned for.
And this is what I find strange: In 1896 a tsunami larger than 30m has occurred in Japan. Tsunamis higher than 10m have occurred a couple of times. Yet, the power plants at Fukushima where designed to withstand only 5m waves. How many other relatively frequent desaster scenarios are there in the world where it is know that the plants are not designed to cope?
The rest of your argument basically is that the mean pollution for nuclear power is relatively good. But every poker player knows that you can't simply optimize the mean result. You also need to take into account the variance. Nuclear power has the potential to render whole cities inhabitable. It might be worthwhile to accept some disadvantages to make sure that does not happen. This is like paying for an insurance: You mean results get worse but the variance is improved.
There usually is an optimum size because there are also physical factors that make small designs beneficial. (e.g. transport losses, worse weight/size ratios, etc)
Nuklear Power has it's optimum size at rather large plants. Other technologies are optimal at smaller sizes.
There are many reasons why less concentration of power (pun intended) is beneficial to society. It make it more likely to create a healthy market, prevents corruption, etc. This should be taken into account when comparing technologies. If two technologies are similar economically the smaller one should be used.
> People on slashdot favor nuclear power because a lot of them have an engineering mindset - everything we do has tradeoffs, and nuclear in general has the best ones for big sources of electricity.
But big sources of electricity are only good for big companies. For everybody else small sources of electricity have many advantages.
> radiation levels were high (at one point they hit 500 milisievarts at one plant, You are aware, that the unit is "Sievert" not "sievart"? Are you also aware, that, that radiation levels are measured in Sievert per unit time (usually hours) and Sievert is a unit for the radiation dose?
The levels at Fukushima are officially reported to have exceeded 1 Sievert per hour at certain times. This means you get the lethal dose in five hours.
> there has not been a single death Except for the five dead workers and probably the two missing ones.
at about a 45 degree angle, it just goes into orbit,
Yes. It goes into an orbit that crosses the earth surface at an angle of 45 degrees.
If there was no atmosphere you could build a larger tower and shoot a cannon parallel to the ground to get a really low orbit that does not cross the ground. (Quickly dismount the tower after firing.)
If something is thrown or shot, the orbit will go through the point the shot was fired. You have a problem if that is on earth surface. Even if you are fast enough for a stable orbit you need a rocket to shift that orbit away from your starting point.
There is a new Material Micronal® PCM by BASF that contains something that melts at the desired room temeperature. Melting takes a lot of heat. Using a certain amount of this material results in a house that behaves like a light building at low temperatures, so it can be heated up quickly using small amounts of energy. However, when the temperature reaches a certain point the walls start to absorb lots of energy like a heavy stone building.
It is also arrogant to assume that the audience can not participate in the creation of art and that a piece of art is immutable.
There are many artist who see this differently and create interactive art many of which are on display in museums.
There also have been pieces of art that are based on the idea that they are slowly altered or even destroyed by the audience using them. I some cases this has been the main artistic idea.
So there are many ways in which a computer game could be considered art. For example simply the scenery could be art, and the physics engine would take the function of the museum as a way to explore it. I guess this is what you mean with your container concept. This however would not make the game itself art. (The same way an iPhone is not a piece of art just because it can play a synphony)
But there also can be games where the artistic concept is the way you interact with the game. This would make the whole game art.
Maybe it is not his definition of art is less the issue. It's his definition of computer games. It does not have to be a first person shooter or jump and run to be a computer game.
Blinkenlights is partly a computer game and is widely considered art.
There are James Bond Movies that Ebert considers to be art in which a computer game plays a central role to the plot and therefore the game is an integral part of that work of art.
There numerous installations in museums that are interactive and based on a computer which essentially are computer games.
Actually, Europeans are even smarter and use easily convertible units for volume and distance so that you can actually do calculations on these values.
We measure in liter/100km where a km is 1000 meters and a liter is 1/1000 cubic meters. So 10l/100km equates to 0.1mm so fuel consumption actually is measured in square meters....
Assuming a state with a fixed budget. Which is the better system to finance that budget? A system where everybody pays the same, or a system where the bad guys pay more then the good guys?
The EU can use this money to either: - spend more (which benefits their citicens in one way or the other) - collect less taxes now - reduce dept, which means less taxes in the future
The correct behaviour on the spending side of the budget is very controversial, but it is a problem complete unrelated to the income side of the budget where fines clearly benefical.
Yeah, but you're going to be running that thing several times a week to back up the wind plants, whereas you're only going to run it several times a decade to back up the nuclear plants.
I really can't see how the difference wouldn't make your choice of fuels matter.
The point is, that the cost of running the thing is a small issue because even in the wind power case the backup is only running a fraction of the time. The real issue is, that you need to invest in expensive power plants that idle most of the time.
The variations are a disadvantage, but they are vastly overestimated. It turns out that for wind power it is a greater problem that they can't be throttled which means that you can't use them to balance other variations in a controlled manner. (even a nuclear plant that reacts extremely slow can use measures like diverting some steam from the turbines.
And as another poster already mentioned: Demand has a 30% variation due to weather and the grid can be designed to cope with that. Apparantly the grid in California is not, but in Germany the downtime is 15 minutes a year.
Slashdot Mirror
>http://xkcd.com/radiation/
Missing on that chart: 300mSv for one year of heavy smoking:
http://www.webspawner.com/users/radioactivetobacco/index.html
The EU currently is evaluating whether all extradictions to the US will be stopped because the bradley manning case shows that suspects in the US are not safe from torture. (Long periods of isolation are torture according to international standards)
Yes. In movies like "Dark Star" or "2001" we see what can happen if you do not have proper attitude control in your spacecraft.
They start to argue, refuse to take orders or just get lazy.
People tend to misestimate the scale.
The average solar power per area in Germany is about half of that in Kenia. Solar power prices are falling by 8% each year for 30 years now. At that rate any ROI achieved in Kenia will be achieved in Germany 9 years later. While this is a good reason to built solar plants in Kenia first, the difference in location is almost irrelevant when comparing to nuclear power: 2nd generation nuclear plants are designed to operate for 60 years. A 9 year shift therefore is only a 15% advantage.
Things might work fine at your place, but they work better at other places.
I am living in Germany and per capita we use only 50% of the energy that the US does to create 90% of the wealth.
(Or even more wealth if you remove eastern Germany from the equation which still needs some time to catch up.)
Stricter regulations for cars, buildings, etc. are a big part of what makes this possible.
Imagine what would happen to the oil price if the US would get their efficiency up to the level of the other industrialised countries.
> The .COM TLD is managed by the US according to US rules because the US created it.
The US rule you are talking about is RFC920. RFC 920 is an official DARPA document: "This is an official policy statement of the IAB and the DARPA."
It explicitely has an international scope. It lays the rules for registering a second level domain in .com and does not restrict it to US companies.
While at that time almost all ARPANET nodes where in the US (European nodes have been part of the network since 1972), that does not mean that it was intended to stay that way.
Otherwise it would not have made much sense to specify .us and .de domains in RFC 920.
What is your source for your statement?
According to wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.com, .com is intended for "Commercial entities (worldwide)".
RFC 920 make no reference to .com beeing used by us entities. Instead a domain .us is intend for that:
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc920#page-2
I can think of three options:
1) Expensive, but available immediately:
There is license plate reading software in use on highways in Europe. These turnpike systems use cameras to read the license plates and LIDAR 3D laser scanners to reliably measure the size of a truck. The lase information should provide very reliable timing data, but likely are an overkill.
As others suggested special markers on the cars could be easier to identify then license plates.
2) cheaper in development but higher material cost for each race
Put an android phone with GPS in each car and write a small app that tells the measurement system when they are approaching the goal line.
3) very low deployment cost but more development cost
Paint an reflective bar code on the side of the car. A fixed laser is pointing across the goal line. Connect the light detector picking up the reflection to a sound board. This will give you 25us accuracy on the timing and the pattern of the reflection will tell you which car it is. The system will even get you a very accurate speed measurement.
Options 1 and 2 only tell you the ordering of the cars. Detailed timing must be measured with another system. It might be sufficient to interpolate camera frame data.
Abstinence will actually extinguish the whole human race from the face of the earth in only a few decades, if used widely.
In german law the copyright on the aggregate does not cover the individual parts, but the decisions to aggregate them in a certain way. (Like which parts to include, how to order them, etc.). http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__4.html
In principle you can have a copyright on that without holding the copyright or a license for the individual parts. You would have no right to distribute the aggregate, because you need a license to the individual parts. But you could prevent someone else (who might have these licenses) from distributing an identical aggregate without licensing the aggregate format from you.
Practically usually the aggragation is too primitive to be considered a work in the sense of the law, and I doubt that AVM meets this theshold with their distribution.
BUT: From the article it is clear, that Cybit does not distribute an aggregate. It modifies a part of an aggregation. They could try to invoke 14 of the law, which allows a creator to prevent modifications under certain conditions. http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__14.html
But I do not think that holds, as Cybit is only modifying the parts, which are not AVM copyright. The aggregation is kept intact. (At least I don't see any reference to parts of the software beeing removed or software added)
Also, the modification by Cybit are unlikely to exceed the threshold set by 14 UrHG.
> But it's been hit by a disaster beyond what was even planned for.
And this is what I find strange: In 1896 a tsunami larger than 30m has occurred in Japan. Tsunamis higher than 10m have occurred a couple of times. Yet, the power plants at Fukushima where designed to withstand only 5m waves. How many other relatively frequent desaster scenarios are there in the world where it is know that the plants are not designed to cope?
The rest of your argument basically is that the mean pollution for nuclear power is relatively good. But every poker player knows that you can't simply optimize the mean result. You also need to take into account the variance.
Nuclear power has the potential to render whole cities inhabitable. It might be worthwhile to accept some disadvantages to make sure that does not happen. This is like paying for an insurance: You mean results get worse but the variance is improved.
There usually is an optimum size because there are also physical factors that make small designs beneficial. (e.g. transport losses, worse weight/size ratios, etc)
Nuklear Power has it's optimum size at rather large plants.
Other technologies are optimal at smaller sizes.
There are many reasons why less concentration of power (pun intended) is beneficial to society. It make it more likely to create a healthy market, prevents corruption, etc.
This should be taken into account when comparing technologies. If two technologies are similar economically the smaller one should be used.
> People on slashdot favor nuclear power because a lot of them have an engineering mindset - everything we do has tradeoffs, and nuclear in general has the best ones for big sources of electricity.
But big sources of electricity are only good for big companies. For everybody else small sources of electricity have many advantages.
Let me get your facts straight:
> radiation levels were high (at one point they hit 500 milisievarts at one plant,
You are aware, that the unit is "Sievert" not "sievart"?
Are you also aware, that, that radiation levels are measured in Sievert per unit time (usually hours) and Sievert is a unit for the radiation dose?
The levels at Fukushima are officially reported to have exceeded 1 Sievert per hour at certain times. This means you get the lethal dose in five hours.
> there has not been a single death
Except for the five dead workers and probably the two missing ones.
So unfortunately due to a bunch of dickhead marketers and organized crime in foreign countries the email system is largely broken.
Foreign countries? Last time I checked, the USA was the clear leader in sending out spam.
Indeed. But the USA are considered a foreign country where I live.
at about a 45 degree angle, it just goes into orbit,
Yes. It goes into an orbit that crosses the earth surface at an angle of 45 degrees.
If there was no atmosphere you could build a larger tower and shoot a cannon parallel to the ground to get a really low orbit that does not cross the ground. (Quickly dismount the tower after firing.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbit
If something is thrown or shot, the orbit will go through the point the shot was fired. You have a problem if that is on earth surface. Even if you are fast enough for a stable orbit you need a rocket to shift that orbit away from your starting point.
And in many aspects they have more freedem of speech and other rights than people in the US....
Special purpose hardware is always faster than general purpose hardware.
Except in the general case...
There is a new Material Micronal® PCM by BASF that contains something that melts at the desired room temeperature. Melting takes a lot of heat.
Using a certain amount of this material results in a house that behaves like a light building at low temperatures, so it can be heated up quickly using small amounts of energy.
However, when the temperature reaches a certain point the walls start to absorb lots of energy like a heavy stone building.
It is also arrogant to assume that the audience can not participate in the creation of art and that a piece of art is immutable.
There are many artist who see this differently and create interactive art many of which are on display in museums.
There also have been pieces of art that are based on the idea that they are slowly altered or even destroyed by the audience using them. I some cases this has been the main artistic idea.
So there are many ways in which a computer game could be considered art.
For example simply the scenery could be art, and the physics engine would take the function of the museum as a way to explore it. I guess this is what you mean with your container concept. This however would not make the game itself art.
(The same way an iPhone is not a piece of art just because it can play a synphony)
But there also can be games where the artistic concept is the way you interact with the game. This would make the whole game art.
Maybe it is not his definition of art is less the issue. It's his definition of computer games. It does not have to be a first person shooter or jump and run to be a computer game.
Blinkenlights is partly a computer game and is widely considered art.
There are James Bond Movies that Ebert considers to be art in which a computer game plays a central role to the plot and therefore the game is an integral part of that work of art.
There numerous installations in museums that are interactive and based on a computer which essentially are computer games.
Actually, Europeans are even smarter and use easily convertible units for volume and distance so that you can actually do calculations on these values.
We measure in liter/100km where a km is 1000 meters and a liter is 1/1000 cubic meters.
So 10l/100km equates to 0.1mm so fuel consumption actually is measured in square meters....
Assuming a state with a fixed budget. Which is the better system to finance that budget? A system where everybody pays the same, or a system where the bad guys pay more then the good guys?
The EU can use this money to either:
- spend more (which benefits their citicens in one way or the other)
- collect less taxes now
- reduce dept, which means less taxes in the future
The correct behaviour on the spending side of the budget is very controversial, but it is a problem complete unrelated to the income side of the budget where fines clearly benefical.
Yeah, but you're going to be running that thing several times a week to back up the wind plants, whereas you're only going to run it several times a decade to back up the nuclear plants.
I really can't see how the difference wouldn't make your choice of fuels matter.
The point is, that the cost of running the thing is a small issue because even in the wind power case the backup is only running a fraction of the time.
The real issue is, that you need to invest in expensive power plants that idle most of the time.
The variations are a disadvantage, but they are vastly overestimated. It turns out that for wind power it is a greater problem that they can't be throttled which means that you can't use them to balance other variations in a controlled manner. (even a nuclear plant that reacts extremely slow can use measures like diverting some steam from the turbines.
And as another poster already mentioned: Demand has a 30% variation due to weather and the grid can be designed to cope with that. Apparantly the grid in California is not, but in Germany the downtime is 15 minutes a year.