Nuclear safety is amazingly safe as-is, what is needed is replacing older plants with new designs that are inherently more safe and provide that safety more cost effectively.
The reactionary approach due to Fukushima is precisely the wrong way to look at things, the takeaway lesson should be that even with the worst possible scenario nuclear is vastly safer than coal, gas and hydro and possibly safer than solar. It's the small frequent events vs large singular event problem that plagues the car vs airplane safety disparity all over again.
We as a species need to learn to evaluate risk better or at least try to be more fact based in global infrastructure matters.
If Obama has a sense of humour he should admit he wasn't born in the US, but that he actually is a 400 year old dutch soldier and he was a citizen of the united states at the time of the adoption of the constitution.
...>1Gbit/s is currently not on the top of my list of residental broadband problems. Sure, more bandwidth is always nice, but there is a long list of issues that impact me more, like the crappy unreliable modems/home gateways that is provided by ISPs, the bufferbloat issues in them that cause latency to be intolerable, the lack of IPv6, the underprovisioned networks, etc...
I still have some liquid soap left from last year's flu hysteria.
And some air masks too. Who wants some?
There was also a hysteria for the mad cow disease, but my wife did not buy anything, we merely rode the car through pools of soapy water back then (near farms)
The problem when the media says apocalypse is coming once a year, and we're still there the next year is that we pay less attention the next time.
Not every disaster that didn't happen was hysteria. They are just unlikely. If an catastrophe has 5% chance to happen and if it would happen it would kill a third of the world population, it makes sense to try to reduce that 5% chance. Whether those methods for reducing the risk work or not is another matter, but by definition 95% of the time when disaster doesn't happen we end up with some people saying there was nothing to be afraid of in the first place.
The point is, noone has died from the nuclear accident and so far the effects have been entirely localized to the power plant, with no health effects to the outside world. What's more, it is extremely unlikely that anything like that could ever happen. The media hysteria is entirely overblown with so many wrong statements flying around that it's impossible to find a mainstream coverage without errors in every second paragraph.
What the situation at the nuclear powerplant is: an accident, a critical event, nuclear meltdown, a serious situation, something to pay attention to, a testament to the security of nuclear design.
What it isn't: a nuclear disaster, a nuclear nightmare, an apocalypse, Chernobyl, a radiation leak requiring people to leave the area outside the exclusion zone.
Someone writing to BBC and complaining about the coverage of events put this in much better words than I could have:
Kevin Dunn, in Tokyo, writes: "Why is the western media so focused on the non-event that Fukushima is? An expert on the Chernobyl aftermath on BBC tonight said, "nothing has been learnt from Chernobyl by the media", it's the same sensationalist, stress and anxiety inducing scaremongering. The lessons that have been learnt are in action now by Tepco power company. She says that they have done everything "by the book", and she "very much doubts" anyone will be seriously effected by the damage of the plants. The Fukushima nuclear power plant situation is not the disaster, the real disaster is further north where tens of thousands of men, women and children have died, millions are homeless, hundreds of kids are now orphans. We have made donations and hope to volunteer. The Japanese people need our help, not for us to run away and abandon them to their fate."
In any event, there is an RSS/Atom feed on the site I created. If let's say enough radiation escapes from the nuclear plant to cause more than a dozen deaths over the next 30 years, I will switch the site to say "YES". I don't expect that to happen though.
The choice isn't between nuclear scientist vs random PhD, but between random PhD and sensationalist churnalism. The guy's writeup was a lot better than what I've read anywhere else over the past couple of days and his assertions seem to be supported by the small number of specialist sites that provide reasonable information.
I realize that Slashdot is pro-nuclear, and hell, even I'm pro-nuclear. But please don't embarrass yourself or this site by referring to the ongoing disaster at Fukushima Daiichi as a plant "having some problems". I assure you the experts dealing with this problem are not minimizing the seriousness of what's going on. It's very serious, it's ongoing, and until the plant is stabilized, it's legitimate world news.
More like pro-physics/reality to be honest. I would characterize the nuclear power plant event as an accident that should be a minor note in the japanese coverage. Tens of thousands of people might be dead from the tsunami and oil refineries / chemical plants are/were on fire with a lot more serious effects than a minor radioactivity release and a partial meltdown. Even a full meltdown would only have had effects that were confined to the power plant. The media coverage and the evacuation zone is a total overkill. This is costing lives, they are evacuating people from a non-event when other people need assistance. It's winter and they are still finding people trapped on rooftops etc.
The lesson that pro-nuclear folks should be learning from this disaster is that Fukushima Daiichi and similar 1960s-era reactors should not be operating in the year 2011, and most especially not in an area with high seismic activity. You know this, I know this, and I guarantee that the experts who run the plants knew it before the quake.
The lesson that anti-nuclear folks should be learning from this disaster is that 1960s-era reactors shouldn't be operating in the year 2011, but those fuckers blocked the building of 2011 era reactors, so we're stuck with 30-40 year old designs - which weren't bad as this event shows, but we could do better.
While this particular incident seems to be under control, as long as these plants are operating, there's a very real possibility of a catastrophic meltdown somewhere, in the next few decades. And that will do ten times more to stop the deployment of nuclear power than Greenpeace --- or the Slashdot boogeyman of the day --- could ever do.
Sure, a meltdown might happen, but once people realise that it only costs a lot to clean up, but doesn't have major effects outside the power plant and doesn't make 400 km^2 uninhabitable, then it might actually reverse itself, at least hopefully. Personally though, I wouldn't bet on a full meltdown happening in the next 30 years. Even a 9.0 earthquake and a tsunami wasn't enough to achieve that.
There is no risk. Even forgetting the fact that the USA has uranium deposits, the simple fact is that it's very easy to stockpile a supply of uranium that would power a nuclear power plant for a decade. It takes very little uranium to do that as opposed to let's say coal or oil that cannot be stockpiled in any comparable sense. Where do you stockpile a couple tons of uranium? That's easy. Where do you stockpile half a billion barrels of oil? That's hard.
Sure, urianium is rare, but of course we only need very little of it.
What you propose is just dancing around the problem. The slow hop has finite throughput. You either tell the sender to send only as much as the pipe can transfer, or you force the limit on the sender by queueing things which in turn increases latency, which in turn decreases the transfer's bandwidth.
Ok, I'm getting a new business laptop in a week or so anyway, so it's the perfect time to start using debian instead of Ubuntu anyway.
I can't say I will mind, the last couple of Ubuntu releases were shit, I couldn't even upgrade to the last one as a bug is still unfixed that makes wifi speeds crawl at 70kbyte/s tops for certain wireless cards.
...given the billions of dollars in military aid and training the USA has offered to Mubarak's regime - the teargas branded "made in USA" was just the obvious part.
It is widely used with a huge range of hardware implementations.
Quoting from wikipedia: AMD, ARM, and Broadcom have announced support for hardware acceleration of the WebM format.[31][32] Intel is also considering hardware-based acceleration for WebM in its Atom-based TV chips if the format gains popularity.[33] Qualcomm and Texas Instruments have announced support,[34][35] with native support coming to the TI OMAP processor.[36] Chip&Media have announced the fully hardware decoder for VP8 that can decode full HD resolution VP8 streams at 60 frames per second.[37]
It gives much better compression than WebM will ever have.
No. VP8 already has better compression efficiency than h.264 and at the same time being on par in quality with h.264. From the technical point of view, WebM has the potential to be a lot better than H.264.
This is really irresponsible on Cisco's part. I don't care about their monetary considerations, adding IPv6 support into their Linux derived routers wouldn't have been all that hard or costly for them.
Their refusal to enable IPv6 support is having a bad effect on IPv6 adoption. I don't think most people realise how bad IPv4 exhaustion can be. IPv4 exhaustion puts a cap on internet growth, which in turn retards economic growth.
The purpose of a salt is to compartmentalize a password hash. I agree with what you said, I just wanted to add a quick soundbyte to use when explaining why a salt is needed for say, anything above 10 users.
Slashdot Mirror
Nuclear safety is amazingly safe as-is, what is needed is replacing older plants with new designs that are inherently more safe and provide that safety more cost effectively.
The reactionary approach due to Fukushima is precisely the wrong way to look at things, the takeaway lesson should be that even with the worst possible scenario nuclear is vastly safer than coal, gas and hydro and possibly safer than solar. It's the small frequent events vs large singular event problem that plagues the car vs airplane safety disparity all over again.
We as a species need to learn to evaluate risk better or at least try to be more fact based in global infrastructure matters.
If Obama has a sense of humour he should admit he wasn't born in the US, but that he actually is a 400 year old dutch soldier and he was a citizen of the united states at the time of the adoption of the constitution.
Haven't you seen it on Doctor Who?
...>1Gbit/s is currently not on the top of my list of residental broadband problems. Sure, more bandwidth is always nice, but there is a long list of issues that impact me more, like the crappy unreliable modems/home gateways that is provided by ISPs, the bufferbloat issues in them that cause latency to be intolerable, the lack of IPv6, the underprovisioned networks, etc...
Uranium based ones: easy to build, hard to get materials for
Plutonium based ones: relatively easy to get materials for, very hard to build
This has been known for years, nothing much is new here.
Not every disaster that didn't happen was hysteria. They are just unlikely. If an catastrophe has 5% chance to happen and if it would happen it would kill a third of the world population, it makes sense to try to reduce that 5% chance. Whether those methods for reducing the risk work or not is another matter, but by definition 95% of the time when disaster doesn't happen we end up with some people saying there was nothing to be afraid of in the first place.
Of course. Genetic research in the Soviet Union was set back by decades because Stalin selected the theory that was wrong.
At least that was a theory, albeit a flawed one. Creationism is just a logical paradox - the omnipotent entity - not falsifiable.
No, but the idea came from sites like these.
The point is, noone has died from the nuclear accident and so far the effects have been entirely localized to the power plant, with no health effects to the outside world. What's more, it is extremely unlikely that anything like that could ever happen. The media hysteria is entirely overblown with so many wrong statements flying around that it's impossible to find a mainstream coverage without errors in every second paragraph.
What the situation at the nuclear powerplant is: an accident, a critical event, nuclear meltdown, a serious situation, something to pay attention to, a testament to the security of nuclear design.
What it isn't: a nuclear disaster, a nuclear nightmare, an apocalypse, Chernobyl, a radiation leak requiring people to leave the area outside the exclusion zone.
Someone writing to BBC and complaining about the coverage of events put this in much better words than I could have:
In any event, there is an RSS/Atom feed on the site I created. If let's say enough radiation escapes from the nuclear plant to cause more than a dozen deaths over the next 30 years, I will switch the site to say "YES". I don't expect that to happen though.
Do they ask for the password to change the email address aswell? If not, an attacker could just change the email address and ask for a password reset.
As an oncologist, I fully support this idea!
I kid, I kid.
The choice isn't between nuclear scientist vs random PhD, but between random PhD and sensationalist churnalism. The guy's writeup was a lot better than what I've read anywhere else over the past couple of days and his assertions seem to be supported by the small number of specialist sites that provide reasonable information.
As far as I understand it, there are three things to fix:
- Use a modern design, not one from the 1970s, so that a meltdown is avoided by physics and not engineering
- Build bigger tsunami barriers, to cope with the once in a hundred years of flooding.
- Do not place backup generators on low ground.
More like pro-physics/reality to be honest. I would characterize the nuclear power plant event as an accident that should be a minor note in the japanese coverage. Tens of thousands of people might be dead from the tsunami and oil refineries / chemical plants are/were on fire with a lot more serious effects than a minor radioactivity release and a partial meltdown. Even a full meltdown would only have had effects that were confined to the power plant. The media coverage and the evacuation zone is a total overkill. This is costing lives, they are evacuating people from a non-event when other people need assistance. It's winter and they are still finding people trapped on rooftops etc.
The lesson that anti-nuclear folks should be learning from this disaster is that 1960s-era reactors shouldn't be operating in the year 2011, but those fuckers blocked the building of 2011 era reactors, so we're stuck with 30-40 year old designs - which weren't bad as this event shows, but we could do better.
Sure, a meltdown might happen, but once people realise that it only costs a lot to clean up, but doesn't have major effects outside the power plant and doesn't make 400 km^2 uninhabitable, then it might actually reverse itself, at least hopefully. Personally though, I wouldn't bet on a full meltdown happening in the next 30 years. Even a 9.0 earthquake and a tsunami wasn't enough to achieve that.
Haha, sorry I couldn't not notice the irony of this. Geothermal energy is from radioactive decay in Earth's core.
Yeah, right after Ayn Rand comes back from the grave to ride on a monster truck and flattens George Monbiot's prius.
There is no risk. Even forgetting the fact that the USA has uranium deposits, the simple fact is that it's very easy to stockpile a supply of uranium that would power a nuclear power plant for a decade. It takes very little uranium to do that as opposed to let's say coal or oil that cannot be stockpiled in any comparable sense. Where do you stockpile a couple tons of uranium? That's easy. Where do you stockpile half a billion barrels of oil? That's hard.
Sure, urianium is rare, but of course we only need very little of it.
I think a student phrased it perfectly.
What you propose is just dancing around the problem. The slow hop has finite throughput. You either tell the sender to send only as much as the pipe can transfer, or you force the limit on the sender by queueing things which in turn increases latency, which in turn decreases the transfer's bandwidth.
Ok, I'm getting a new business laptop in a week or so anyway, so it's the perfect time to start using debian instead of Ubuntu anyway.
I can't say I will mind, the last couple of Ubuntu releases were shit, I couldn't even upgrade to the last one as a bug is still unfixed that makes wifi speeds crawl at 70kbyte/s tops for certain wireless cards.
I was in the audience when he explained the concept. The comments and the article I've seen so far does it no justice. Just watch the video.
...given the billions of dollars in military aid and training the USA has offered to Mubarak's regime - the teargas branded "made in USA" was just the obvious part.
Quoting from wikipedia: AMD, ARM, and Broadcom have announced support for hardware acceleration of the WebM format.[31][32] Intel is also considering hardware-based acceleration for WebM in its Atom-based TV chips if the format gains popularity.[33] Qualcomm and Texas Instruments have announced support,[34][35] with native support coming to the TI OMAP processor.[36] Chip&Media have announced the fully hardware decoder for VP8 that can decode full HD resolution VP8 streams at 60 frames per second.[37]
No. VP8 already has better compression efficiency than h.264 and at the same time being on par in quality with h.264. From the technical point of view, WebM has the potential to be a lot better than H.264.
This is really irresponsible on Cisco's part. I don't care about their monetary considerations, adding IPv6 support into their Linux derived routers wouldn't have been all that hard or costly for them.
Their refusal to enable IPv6 support is having a bad effect on IPv6 adoption. I don't think most people realise how bad IPv4 exhaustion can be. IPv4 exhaustion puts a cap on internet growth, which in turn retards economic growth.
Seriously Cisco, fuck you, just fuck you.
The purpose of a salt is to compartmentalize a password hash. I agree with what you said, I just wanted to add a quick soundbyte to use when explaining why a salt is needed for say, anything above 10 users.