I'd like to take a 'the world is rosy' kind of world view and think capitalism is investing in communism and soon we will all stand together holding hands singing 'Kom By - yah'.
In reality Capitalism and Communism are both dead philosophies with Corporatism the new ism prepared to exploit any source of labor as cheaply as possible. Educated or not, physical or knowledge work U.S or Chinese (or any other nation) the word 'opportunity' seems to becoming less and less available to people who don't sit on a board of directors. Not everyone wants to so what should people be striving for?
Chinese people aren't gaining anything, in terms of working conditions or education, at the expense of America's wealth and opportunity. Somehow the people of both nations gain little, Chimerica, ChinAmerica it's not about us or them, it's 'WEast' - brought together so we both can lose.
I'm sorry, I don't mean to be cynical but our economic system seems so completely fucked right now even though the problems are relatively easy too fix and totally apolitical in nature. The problem is the existing establishment brings so much force to bare on maintaining the status quo they seem utterly irresistible.
Never more a time than now has the enemy been ourselves.
No, that just means that the US doesn't use much CFC 114.
Your assertion only makes sense when compared to pre M.P levels. The Nuclear Industry gets an exemption to the M.P so it can use CFC114 in the enrichment process.
We are discussing CFC114 leaked into the environment. Well over a ton of CFC114 *e.v.e.r.y..d.a.y* - that totally undermines your argument about Nuclear Power's competitive impact on the environment especially when there should be zero emissions of CFC114. How much CFC114 does solar, wind, wave and geothermal emit, answer none.
since most of the international community doesn't comply with the Montreal protocol.
Present your evidence, I have told you where you can gather the data on US CFC emissions and provided links to support my argument - where's yours?
The CFC 114 emissions from the nuclear industry are lost in the noise of global CFC emissions.
Oh, you mean from other countries use of gaseous diffusion for Uranium enrichment? I suppose I should add that to the US emissions then. Care to point your finger a the industry beating G.D enrichment of Uranium for emissions of CFC 114 considering now you know of the Nuclear Industries exemption from the MP?
You ignore the half-life of these isotopes. A lot of them simply can't bioaccumulate because they don't persist in the environment long enough. Second, so what if these isotopes are released? Dose is the poison.
Well pu-239 lasts 25000 years. All other radioactive isotopes with shorter half lives are more radioactive but all share the same properties, they have to go through 20 daughter products before they reach radioactivity comparable to background, or natural, levels.
This means, for example, strontium 90 - which you think is toxic for 28.5 years is actually toxic for over 500 years. This is ample time for many toxic radioactive isotopes to bio-accumulate in the environment for much longer than a human life span.
As for your point on dose you clearly do not know how bio-accumulation functions in the environment and how it relates to the human food chain so I'd suggest some additional research on your part.
IF. We already have figured out how to insure that industrial activities (not just nuclear power generation) don't do that.
Except they are not cost effective to implement are they especially in the Nuclear Power industry otherwise Nuclear power plants would be *underground* wouldn't they? Considering this was one of the Nuclear Industries own recommendations to itself (amongst 30 others) to improve safety and reduce toxicity. The Nuclear industry can't even afford to build a proper waste containment facility or infrastructure plan to deal with it's own spent fuel legacy. Instead it insists on a joke of a facility like Yucca mountain when the DOE's own report concluded it's "inappropriate to store Nuclear Waste".
You have yet to demonstrate a problem with nuclear power (or for that matter any industrial activity) here.
Well the point of *this* discussion was for you to back up you assertion that;
If you actually look at impact on the environment, nuclear is competitive.
which you have consistently failed to do, nor have you specified with what it is competitive with. The only thing it *might* be competitive with, in terms of environmental impact, is coal.
Not a serious argument
I have yet to see anything but rhetoric in your posts. No links, no evidence, dubious reasoning and no facts. I find it difficult to accept any of your arguments until you present some these.
First, nuclear is relatively resource intensive because recycling of fuel rods doesn't occur.
In other words Nuclear power is resource intensive and limitations in material technology mean this is the reality of nuclear power.
If the nuclear industry really is releasing 500 tons of CFC 114 into the atmosphere per year, then it is an insignificant amount and not worthy of discussion here.
Actually if you look up the EPA data (I have it's available on the epa web site), it is the Number 1 highest industrial emitter of CFC114 in the U.S. The evidence is that 93% of US emissions of CFC-114 is from the enrichment of Uranium. The word for that is significant. More significant than any other source since it's the largest emitter every year since the international community banned it's use. That is the official, government recognised, industrially measured FACT of a facility that has been DUE for retirement for at least 10 years. I'll leave it as an excercise for you to establish why Ultracentrifuge is so difficult to establish on a industrial scale.
No other source anywhere in the world comes close certainly does make it worthy of discussion. If you are not aware of *how* uranium is enriched to make nuclear fuel then you probably aren't as informed as you think you are.
Aside from the sole exception of Chernobyl, no one has documented a significant release of radioactive materials into the environment.
Perhaps you should read this, after that you can get familiar with NRC regulations that allow noble gas venting. This list goes on and on, but that should be enough reading material for now.
The radioactive isotopes that are considered particularly dangerous are so due to two things, first, that they have a tendency to accumulate in organic matter (such as strontium 90 in bones, iodine 131 in the thyroid gland, or tritium (hydrogen 3) in any water containing tissue).
So you mean what radioactive isotope emissions are inevitable over the entire industrial process?
Mine tailing: radioactive mine tailings from open cut mining where ever it has occurred, radon 220, radium 226, thorium etc.
Enrichment: U-238 or DU. Used as weapon projectile, is pyrophoric and burns into a radioactive powder. Groundwater contamination from leaking Hexafluoride tanks
Reactor facility: tritium, iodine 131, xenon 141, 143, 144, cerium 141, 143, 144. Noble gasses which decay into more dangerous daughter products (Xenon 137, Krypton 90, rubidium 90, strontium 90, Xenon 135, xenon 133, krypton 85, Argon 39). Of course no epidemiological studies have been performed on the noble gas venting which are released hourly from *all* Nuclear reactors. 4000 gallons of primary coolant water PER DAY containing plutonium 238,239,241, technetium 99, iodine 129, carbon 14 and *ahem* tritium. That's just the authorised *documented* effluents not the accidents.
Reactor decommissioning: cobalt 60, iron 55, nickel 63.
Radioactive Waste: Plutonium, Strontium 90, Iodine 131, Cesium 137 and on and on
Those radioactive isotope emissions all analogue elements in biological organisms, including humans.
But to be blunt, there aren't significant sources, man-made or otherwise of these isotopes in the world today. And due to the rate at which these isotopes decay, old radiation releases rapidly become innocuous over a few generations. This doesn't strike me as a serious ecological problem.
If mankinds industrial activities makes the environment toxic for humans, that in reality qualifies as a serious ecological problem.
Nor do I need to answer this question. It wasn't posed nor is relevant to
If you actually look at impact on the environment, nuclear is competitive.
You mean it's competitive with coal, because I have looked at Nuclear power's impact on the environment and apart from being staggeringly resource intensive it is extremely toxic. From, yes, mining to enrichment where CFC 114 is still used for enrichment today, and up to 1 million pounds of CFC114 leaks into the atmosphere every year even after the inception of the Montreal protocol in 1995. CFC 114 attacks the ozone layer, the ozone layer that protects that algae that makes the oxygen we breathe.
I will ignore BAU operations of Nuclear plants for now, but the issue of spent fuel and radioactive waste still has not been addressed. When Dixie Lee Ray was the head of the Atomic Energy Commission he proclaimed that the disposal of nuclear fuel would be "the greatest non-problem in history" and would be accomplished by 1985, yet here we are in 2010, over twenty years past that date and still there is no High level waste disposal site anywhere. The closest anyone has come is the Swiss and even their project is a multi-decade test project and extremely expensive.
followed distantly by the Chernobyl accident (which IMHO comprises virtually all radiation released by nuclear plants).
My concern is Radioactive isotope release into the environment, which is significant, and the bio-accumulation that occurs in the food chain from the release of these toxic elements. Daily this problem gets worse.
You have not answered how a technology, specific to the deployments of wind turbines will make Nuclear power more economical. As the U.S has significant wind resources it makes complete sense to develop these assets as Nuclear power is not green at all, especially when compared to wind power.
Using these systems we can level the load and allow the greenest power sources (nuclear,
Can you please explain why nuclear power is a green power source. How is Nuclear greener than Wind power?
Using energy storage to allow nuclear and hydro to run most economically is a far better choice than using it to level the output of wind power.
How does compressed air storage make a Nuclear Power plant more economical? Since base load power is a function of the entire grid why is it not reasonable to find a useful way of storing wind energy to supplement base load power on the grid especially when wind power is and extremely scalable form of harvesting energy?
You're going to get yourself and any companies you take 'your' code to sued, heavily, especially if you've ever worked for any of the big boys.
They were 'the big boys'
Your lawyer is a numbskull.
Is this your legal opinion?
But I suspect your a troll because you mention changing variable names, and if you really thought you had the right to do this stuff with 'your' code you wouldn't bother.
So your saying I wouldn't bother shaping the code to fit in with the code and styling practices of the team I am working with. Great way to win friends and influence people you got going there.
So I'm sorry to say, those coders do have rights to keep the code they've produced no matter how badly you seem to not want them to.
You shouldn't be sorry at all. Because of the decision to employ programmers that were astute enough to do this deadlines were met and costs were kept under control. The leverages utilised because a programmer has access to the code they wrote means everyone wins.
After he completes the work, he shows it to us, proves that it works, takes his check and then GOES HOME WITH THE CODE because he owns it, refusing to allow us to use it because it's all his.
This statement is utterly ridiculous. It's against my interests for my client to not use the code I have prepared for them. I am not talking about denying my employer rights to use what I do. I am talking about maintaining my right to be a cost effective software developer with a library of code methods at my disposal. That *benefits* my employer because deployment times are reduced.
We can both use *my* code, get it? It's not like the code suddenly stops working because *SHOCK*HORROR* I have a copy of the code I wrote. Do you expect me to memorise every bit of code I wrote in the last 25 years. Are you saying that all productivity in the Information Technology industry should grind to a halt because programmers have to re-design every bit of code that does the same thing every time there is a new project?
Oh gosh ArcherB, heres a new way to do a login screen - bet you're real happy you paid oodles to on the rights to do that. So you have an easier time understanding it I'll use your bad analogies;
Car;
Lets re-invent the wheel every time. Some very lucky customers actually have wheels - but they are very very very expensive. No wonder Toyota have so many problems with accelerator - they have to re-write the accelerator software routine every time. New tools are produced for every assembly line, which is incompatible with every other production line. Economies of scale mean nothing.
GEICO/Pepsi;
We re-invent musical scales and devise new instruments to play them on every time a new jingle is required.
This is why they have to ask you to sign a waiver if they want to use your kid's pictures for their website, advertising, or to sell to pedophiles;
OMGwtf?
I will make it a point to demand copyright from any coders who work for me in the contract just as I do for photographers.
Go ahead. All your products will take substantially longer to reach market and they will perform poorly. Eventually, because of the heavily hybridised code it will become so bug laden that your product will flop. You will blame the programmers, because they did what you asked. No wonder you get charged so much for photography, this is the true price for your lack of goodwill and you deserve it.
Sorry, but no. Whoever pays the bills makes the rules and owns the product.
Of course as a result none of the programmers in your employ share their really good ideas with you, if they do you immediately criticise any ideas they have as stupid, later taking credit for having those good ideas. They do exactly what you say and you wonder why you have to do *everything*. I bet you find yourself wondering why everyone around you is so incompetent and are about as pleasant to work with as fleas. You are *exactly* the type of controlling, insecure, anally retentive and abusive employer I would prefer starving to working for. That is if you are who you claim.
I am confused about this...What is the deciding factor?
In my opinion it's the method. Code is a method and a series of methods put together in a meaningful way. I am being paid to put methods together in a meaningful way. I may want to put those same methods together in another meaningful way. YMMV
Are you suggesting you should be able to work at Microsoft for years developing code and when you leave, you have the right to take every line of code you wrote with you
You statement implies I am denying my employer possession of a copy of my code. I want to *have* a *copy* of the code I produced. What is wrong with that?
and sell a copy of it to the next company you work for?
Not as a whole but if I code a design pattern and use portions in another project, change the variable name wheres the problem?
Surely you jest.
Interviewer: Is studying computer science the best way to prepare to be a programmer?
Gates: No, the best way to prepare is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating system. -- Bill Gates, from "Programmers at Work" by Microsoft Press, interview with Bill
If copying other peoples work is what Mr Gates recommends what is wrong with copying my own work?
I assume you work for a legally incorporated or otherwise registered employer, otherwise your comment is irrelevant. I also assume that as part of your hiring process you signed en employment contract of some kind.
Yes, a large international corporate.
I further assume your lawyer looked over your employment contract, the one with your signature on it (or a suitable facsimile) and came to this conclusion.
Yes. Not only that I personally read *every* contract I sign that I am to be bound by two to three time to ensure I have a understanding. I then refer my lawyer to the clauses that I am uncomfortable with to seek a answer of how it maybe interpreted.
Most people employed to write code have a clause that anything they produce is a work for hire, and is owned by the company. Of these people, most also have a clause which says if you create code *not* for the company, but while being employed *by* the company at a salary, then anything you write while not at work is also company property, due to you very likely using company time, resources, training, best practices, or something else to do so.
I've encountered contracts that attempt to assign away my rights to my code at work, what I write at home and the code I wrote in the past. I simply do not sign them or seek legal advice. If it's un-enforceable I sign to avoid negative perceptions, if it is enforceable I explain to them why I don't like a clause and try to find a compromise. Sometimes I explain the cost benefits to the employer far outweigh any negatives.
I am extremely disciplined in my coding practises, I diarise *everything*. I can tell you exactly what I worked on 10, 12 or 15 years ago at 14:15 on a Tuesday. I don't use company resources for my code or projects but sometimes I use my resources for the companies projects. How is one employer going to assert their rights over another if I happen to be doing contract work and full time work. Is the employer going to compensate me for the lost income for not doing that work?
I am a musician and a producer, should my employer own the rights to my songs and lyrics or the methods I use to produce music? Where do you draw the line. Do they own the rights to this post or the html code that formats it?
What this means to an employer is they are hiring a professional programmer who is a business person not prepared to roll over and give away their or the companies rights willingly. This far more valuable than some pedantic clause asserting what is useless to them anyway. They have a license to use and modify copies of *my* code anyway and significant disadvantages if they want exclusive rights, everything has to be written from scratch and takes much longer so there is no net benefit to them. Why anyone would sign or want to work for a company so controlling is beyond me and they are simply undermining IT's place in industry overall.
Since expecting an IT union to advocate Technologists rights is unlikely then you had better know and be prepared to defend your rights. The trouble with your generalisation is that undermines rights that should be enhanced for programmers to allow increases in the productivity of the industry overall. Don't be foolish and sign a contract that assigns away your rights because, as a prevailing attitude amongst IT practitioners, it does little to promote the respect professionals in our industry should command and deserve.
I have taken legal action in the past and won. I will defend my rights vigorously if necessarily and aggressively if required. You should to.
You mention moral rights. Those are very weak in the US. I hypothesize that you live in another country, and what your lawyer told you has no bearing on a large percentage of Slashdot programmers.
What you seem to be assuming is that their is only one work. If you contact a programmer to make you a specific program you are paying for the creation and license of that work. You own a copy of that work. The programmer owns the work.
Unfortunately that's not particularly strange at all. Most coders don't own their code either, the company they work for does. Same is true for songwriters, screenwriters, etc.
Well last time I checked with my lawyer I in fact *do* own the code I write and I own the moral rights to any work I produce and those rights cannot be assigned away by copyright or any other because I am the original producer of the work.
Which is how it should be. I have no problem with the people who paid for me to produce some code using the code I produce. I do have a problem with them trying to assign themselves the absolute rights to the code I make, especially if I want to re-use parts of my code elsewhere. Who wants to re-write the same code over again if you have already done it before.
Someone else doesn't own my code just as much as I don't own someone else's code. If someone pays for code they own a copy of it and do what they choose with it. You don't have to make a big deal of it - just make daily backups of what you do and secure your own archive. It's not even about asserting your rights, it's about using them.
On Linux nice only modifies the CPU priority, and you could set that extremely low and not see any impact on an IO limited tasks.
Maybe you're right but I guess it depends on how the driver is designed and we are talking about encapsulating the data read from disk into network bound packets. Something has to do that work and I was sure that when the network daemon generates network traffic it creates CPU load.
There are plenty of economics papers that fully explain scalpers and how they help clear the market. Very few economist think scalping should be illegal because they recognize the scalpers are serving a market.
So what. Economics isn't a science it's a branch psychology with many flaws. If a band like Pearl Jam says the price for a ticket should be $n so their fans can afford to go to the concert there should not be another market mechanism to change that price. The tickets are only a perceived value to those who want them and if the tickets are priced out of that market then the scalpers have only served to produce a part empty sold out venue and denied other revenue opportunities to the venue and the band which lowers the performers income over the duration of the performances.
Clearing the market is only a factor when tickets are the *only* profit generating mechanism for a performer.
I'm paraphrasing, but Dan Seligman of Forbes once wrote that having laws against ticket scalping was in the top ten dumbest ideas of the century.
Which Century, the twentieth or the twenty first century? Was he talking about street hawkers or the guy with $5 million worth of ticket buying software in 2010. The scalper AND the box office are parasitic by nature. You have ignored the point that scalpers price tickets outside of the target market and not all tickets will be sold effecting revenues of the venues and the overall revenues of the performer on tour.
The primary cause for scalping is underpriced tickets to begin with.
The value of the ticket is what 'the market will bare' not 'what the market *can* bare'. The value of the ticket is determined by the performer for a reason, not by a market mechanism that profits only the broker. The performer dictates the supply not the scalper, by putting on additional performances - and they do. Scalpers (operating in this way) distort the perception of demand to the performer.
So a single scalper is holding all the tickets or are you saying they are all in collusion? I think the original story said that the scalper had 2k seats to sell over the course of the Yankee playoffs. Yankee stadium holds 50,086+ people. So either the scalper was in collusion with all other scalpers or he was simply selling tickets at market value. I think it's much more likely he was selling at market value.
It's unlikely. It maybe market value for a sporting event, it's a one time event...
Um, that's demand change and has nothing to do with supply. There are a fixed amount of tickets from the start. They are usually under priced (nearly every scalping economics papers on google talks about this) so demand outstrips supply.
...but I'm referring to concerts and performances where supply can be increased. Perhaps that is the disconnect here.
And only a poor scalper would not sell all his tickets. It doesn't matter if he's already profitable, any tickets left in his hand equals a loss.
No, it equals a failure to maximise profits. A greedy scalper simply prices the tickets above what a punter can afford to pay and in that case only the box office wins by having sold all the tickets. The punter loses because they missed the gig, the venue misses out on beer and food sales and the band loses out on tee shirt and other merchandise sales. These factors affect the long term profitability of the performer and the venues. This directly affects supply of other gigs by distorting profit and sales forecasts for merchandise. These are proven profit centers for both performers and venues and scalpers consume that budget.
Maybe those who wrote the economic theory about scalpers haven't been to many concerts themselves and factored those parameters into their "equations". The generation of profit for the brokers as opposed to the profit of the performer and venue. Besides I wouldn't normally buy from a scalper simply because those tickets are usually too expensive.
Please explain economics to me then. I have bought nearly all my tickets from scalpers at less than face value so I don't think I'm wasting money.
Perhaps the simple explanation is you go to gigs that never sell out. This means the scalpers are forced to sell the tickets at below cost to re-coup their initial investment.
Most high demand concerts that I've seen price their tickets in such a way that there are not enough to satisfy demand at that price even if every ticket was purchased by a person going to the show. So that means at face value of the ticket demand will not be satisfied and equilibrium will not be reached.
Well it's bums on seats, and if you consider that the box office just want the tickets sold to cover costs and that they don't care who buy them then perhaps the scalper is part of their market. What has changed is that the scalper is now a dominant part of the market and is able to effect the overall cost and availability of ticket purchases. Because the average ticket purchaser does not invest in $5 million worth of software to buy tickets they are disadvantaged from the outset. Thus the gig is artificially sold out and the ticket price is artificially raised.
This is what happens in the commodities markets, it's not economics 101 - it's called price gouging. The box office sells out a concert - which mitigates their risk and the scalper engages the risk to generate profit. The disconnect is between the Bands who miss out on earnings and the Fans who pay more for tickets, the brokers however profit nicely and their mutual expense.
Taken to the next level, this is what the music industry does to bands and fans except they lobby for laws to protect their obsolete business model while the box office and scalpers rely on apathy to protect theirs. If *all* bands and gigs were sold in a business that disallowed a box office or scalpers you would see a similar hand waving and gnashing of teeth from them as you do from the RIAA.
Pretty basic economics (think what happens in rent control).
Except it's not really, the scalpers have a software mechanism to buy tickets and I do not. This means that they have asserted a coercive monopoly control over the supply and demand. This means that the equilibrium can never be met because so called "market efficiencies" are biased towards demand.
Dumping the scalpers will not change supply one bit (it won't suddenly add seats to the event).
Yes it would, you're assuming that everyone who would buy a ticket at %100 percent of the cost would buy it at %250. You're also assuming Scalpers sell *all* the tickets where they only enough to cover their costs and make a profit. Of course they *want* to sell all the tickets but at >%200 of the cost the scalper only has to sell *half* of the tickets they purchase to make a profit. So getting rid of Artificial scarcity *would* increase supply. I have been to sold out gigs where there were clearly plenty of seats available.
What I think we'll eventually see is all tickets will be sold auction style. When the organizers see scalpers making this much money on under priced tickets they will want in on it. When that happens I'm sure the same people will cry about tickets costing too much but then they won't have the scalper boogeyman to blame.
Perhaps, but getting rid of Artificial Scarcity would indicate to the organisers that perhaps they need to book a bigger venue for their show so they can satisfy a larger demand. Artificial scarcity limits earnings for a vendor who is essentially trying to move more product (in this case seats) to their target market. Fewer people buy tickets overall if they above what the market will bare and organisers have no w
Many people are poor planners, don't get tickets in time, and are quite "happy" to buy them at over-inflated prices from the scalpers.
I was waiting for months for Faith No More tickets to go on sale. I wasn't sure when they would. I missed out by two days and the concert was sold out. I was so fucking pissed off when I checked on e-bay to find certain sellers had > 10 tickets for sale at more than twice the price they were being sold for from the agencies.
Before ticket sales via the net I never missed out on tickets, now I'm almost certain I'll never get the tickets I want because the scalpers are so effective. Who has time to watch the box office everyday for every concert you want to see, it's so time consuming. Give me the software so I can see the bands I want to see.
Funny story, I went to see Tool back in the late 90's and the scalpers were out in force selling tickets to a 'sold out' show. About 15 minutes before it started the shutters of the box office were flung open and tickets were on sale. People swamped it, leaving the scalpers with bunches of tickets in their hands.
One of them ran up to a friend of mine and said 'Floor tickets to Tool, $5, how can you go wrong'.
Maybe all concerts should be sold this way, leaving a certain amount of tickets available from the box office on the night just to keep the scalpers under control.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, you would have to uuencode it first, so
tar | compress | uuencode > /dev/serialportdevice
should work
I'd like to take a 'the world is rosy' kind of world view and think capitalism is investing in communism and soon we will all stand together holding hands singing 'Kom By - yah'.
In reality Capitalism and Communism are both dead philosophies with Corporatism the new ism prepared to exploit any source of labor as cheaply as possible. Educated or not, physical or knowledge work U.S or Chinese (or any other nation) the word 'opportunity' seems to becoming less and less available to people who don't sit on a board of directors. Not everyone wants to so what should people be striving for?
Chinese people aren't gaining anything, in terms of working conditions or education, at the expense of America's wealth and opportunity. Somehow the people of both nations gain little, Chimerica, ChinAmerica it's not about us or them, it's 'WEast' - brought together so we both can lose.
I'm sorry, I don't mean to be cynical but our economic system seems so completely fucked right now even though the problems are relatively easy too fix and totally apolitical in nature. The problem is the existing establishment brings so much force to bare on maintaining the status quo they seem utterly irresistible.
Never more a time than now has the enemy been ourselves.
Your assertion only makes sense when compared to pre M.P levels. The Nuclear Industry gets an exemption to the M.P so it can use CFC114 in the enrichment process. We are discussing CFC114 leaked into the environment. Well over a ton of CFC114 *e.v.e.r.y..d.a.y* - that totally undermines your argument about Nuclear Power's competitive impact on the environment especially when there should be zero emissions of CFC114. How much CFC114 does solar, wind, wave and geothermal emit, answer none.
Present your evidence, I have told you where you can gather the data on US CFC emissions and provided links to support my argument - where's yours?
Oh, you mean from other countries use of gaseous diffusion for Uranium enrichment? I suppose I should add that to the US emissions then. Care to point your finger a the industry beating G.D enrichment of Uranium for emissions of CFC 114 considering now you know of the Nuclear Industries exemption from the MP?
Well pu-239 lasts 25000 years. All other radioactive isotopes with shorter half lives are more radioactive but all share the same properties, they have to go through 20 daughter products before they reach radioactivity comparable to background, or natural, levels.
This means, for example, strontium 90 - which you think is toxic for 28.5 years is actually toxic for over 500 years. This is ample time for many toxic radioactive isotopes to bio-accumulate in the environment for much longer than a human life span.
As for your point on dose you clearly do not know how bio-accumulation functions in the environment and how it relates to the human food chain so I'd suggest some additional research on your part.
Except they are not cost effective to implement are they especially in the Nuclear Power industry otherwise Nuclear power plants would be *underground* wouldn't they? Considering this was one of the Nuclear Industries own recommendations to itself (amongst 30 others) to improve safety and reduce toxicity. The Nuclear industry can't even afford to build a proper waste containment facility or infrastructure plan to deal with it's own spent fuel legacy. Instead it insists on a joke of a facility like Yucca mountain when the DOE's own report concluded it's "inappropriate to store Nuclear Waste".
Well the point of *this* discussion was for you to back up you assertion that;
If you actually look at impact on the environment, nuclear is competitive.
which you have consistently failed to do, nor have you specified with what it is competitive with. The only thing it *might* be competitive with, in terms of environmental impact, is coal.
I have yet to see anything but rhetoric in your posts. No links, no evidence, dubious reasoning and no facts. I find it difficult to accept any of your arguments until you present some these.
It looks to me like another device from Star Trek is making it's way to reality.
In other words Nuclear power is resource intensive and limitations in material technology mean this is the reality of nuclear power.
Actually if you look up the EPA data (I have it's available on the epa web site), it is the Number 1 highest industrial emitter of CFC114 in the U.S. The evidence is that 93% of US emissions of CFC-114 is from the enrichment of Uranium. The word for that is significant. More significant than any other source since it's the largest emitter every year since the international community banned it's use. That is the official, government recognised, industrially measured FACT of a facility that has been DUE for retirement for at least 10 years. I'll leave it as an excercise for you to establish why Ultracentrifuge is so difficult to establish on a industrial scale.
No other source anywhere in the world comes close certainly does make it worthy of discussion. If you are not aware of *how* uranium is enriched to make nuclear fuel then you probably aren't as informed as you think you are.
Perhaps you should read this, after that you can get familiar with NRC regulations that allow noble gas venting. This list goes on and on, but that should be enough reading material for now.
So you mean what radioactive isotope emissions are inevitable over the entire industrial process?
Mine tailing: radioactive mine tailings from open cut mining where ever it has occurred, radon 220, radium 226, thorium etc.
Enrichment: U-238 or DU. Used as weapon projectile, is pyrophoric and burns into a radioactive powder. Groundwater contamination from leaking Hexafluoride tanks
Reactor facility: tritium, iodine 131, xenon 141, 143, 144, cerium 141, 143, 144. Noble gasses which decay into more dangerous daughter products (Xenon 137, Krypton 90, rubidium 90, strontium 90, Xenon 135, xenon 133, krypton 85, Argon 39). Of course no epidemiological studies have been performed on the noble gas venting which are released hourly from *all* Nuclear reactors. 4000 gallons of primary coolant water PER DAY containing plutonium 238,239,241, technetium 99, iodine 129, carbon 14 and *ahem* tritium. That's just the authorised *documented* effluents not the accidents.
Reactor decommissioning: cobalt 60, iron 55, nickel 63.
Radioactive Waste: Plutonium, Strontium 90, Iodine 131, Cesium 137 and on and on
Those radioactive isotope emissions all analogue elements in biological organisms, including humans.If mankinds industrial activities makes the environment toxic for humans, that in reality qualifies as a serious ecological problem.
You mean it's competitive with coal, because I have looked at Nuclear power's impact on the environment and apart from being staggeringly resource intensive it is extremely toxic. From, yes, mining to enrichment where CFC 114 is still used for enrichment today, and up to 1 million pounds of CFC114 leaks into the atmosphere every year even after the inception of the Montreal protocol in 1995. CFC 114 attacks the ozone layer, the ozone layer that protects that algae that makes the oxygen we breathe.
Reference:Environmental effects of ozone depletion: 1998 Assessment.
I will ignore BAU operations of Nuclear plants for now, but the issue of spent fuel and radioactive waste still has not been addressed. When Dixie Lee Ray was the head of the Atomic Energy Commission he proclaimed that the disposal of nuclear fuel would be "the greatest non-problem in history" and would be accomplished by 1985, yet here we are in 2010, over twenty years past that date and still there is no High level waste disposal site anywhere. The closest anyone has come is the Swiss and even their project is a multi-decade test project and extremely expensive.
My concern is Radioactive isotope release into the environment, which is significant, and the bio-accumulation that occurs in the food chain from the release of these toxic elements. Daily this problem gets worse.
You have not answered how a technology, specific to the deployments of wind turbines will make Nuclear power more economical. As the U.S has significant wind resources it makes complete sense to develop these assets as Nuclear power is not green at all, especially when compared to wind power.
Can you please explain why nuclear power is a green power source. How is Nuclear greener than Wind power?
How does compressed air storage make a Nuclear Power plant more economical? Since base load power is a function of the entire grid why is it not reasonable to find a useful way of storing wind energy to supplement base load power on the grid especially when wind power is and extremely scalable form of harvesting energy?
* Click 2: One great kick in the balls for any integrity the PTO had left
They were 'the big boys'
Is this your legal opinion?
So your saying I wouldn't bother shaping the code to fit in with the code and styling practices of the team I am working with. Great way to win friends and influence people you got going there.
Some people who want to live are executed whilst some people who want to die are sentenced to suffering.
You shouldn't be sorry at all. Because of the decision to employ programmers that were astute enough to do this deadlines were met and costs were kept under control. The leverages utilised because a programmer has access to the code they wrote means everyone wins.
This statement is utterly ridiculous. It's against my interests for my client to not use the code I have prepared for them. I am not talking about denying my employer rights to use what I do. I am talking about maintaining my right to be a cost effective software developer with a library of code methods at my disposal. That *benefits* my employer because deployment times are reduced.
We can both use *my* code, get it? It's not like the code suddenly stops working because *SHOCK*HORROR* I have a copy of the code I wrote. Do you expect me to memorise every bit of code I wrote in the last 25 years. Are you saying that all productivity in the Information Technology industry should grind to a halt because programmers have to re-design every bit of code that does the same thing every time there is a new project?
Oh gosh ArcherB, heres a new way to do a login screen - bet you're real happy you paid oodles to on the rights to do that. So you have an easier time understanding it I'll use your bad analogies;
Lets re-invent the wheel every time. Some very lucky customers actually have wheels - but they are very very very expensive. No wonder Toyota have so many problems with accelerator - they have to re-write the accelerator software routine every time. New tools are produced for every assembly line, which is incompatible with every other production line. Economies of scale mean nothing.
We re-invent musical scales and devise new instruments to play them on every time a new jingle is required.
OMGwtf?
Go ahead. All your products will take substantially longer to reach market and they will perform poorly. Eventually, because of the heavily hybridised code it will become so bug laden that your product will flop. You will blame the programmers, because they did what you asked. No wonder you get charged so much for photography, this is the true price for your lack of goodwill and you deserve it.
Of course as a result none of the programmers in your employ share their really good ideas with you, if they do you immediately criticise any ideas they have as stupid, later taking credit for having those good ideas. They do exactly what you say and you wonder why you have to do *everything*. I bet you find yourself wondering why everyone around you is so incompetent and are about as pleasant to work with as fleas. You are *exactly* the type of controlling, insecure, anally retentive and abusive employer I would prefer starving to working for. That is if you are who you claim.
What the hell are you doing on slashdot
In my opinion it's the method. Code is a method and a series of methods put together in a meaningful way. I am being paid to put methods together in a meaningful way. I may want to put those same methods together in another meaningful way. YMMV
You statement implies I am denying my employer possession of a copy of my code. I want to *have* a *copy* of the code I produced. What is wrong with that?
Not as a whole but if I code a design pattern and use portions in another project, change the variable name wheres the problem?
Interviewer: Is studying computer science the best way to prepare to be a programmer?
Gates: No, the best way to prepare is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating system. -- Bill Gates, from "Programmers at Work" by Microsoft Press, interview with Bill
If copying other peoples work is what Mr Gates recommends what is wrong with copying my own work?
Yes, a large international corporate.
Yes. Not only that I personally read *every* contract I sign that I am to be bound by two to three time to ensure I have a understanding. I then refer my lawyer to the clauses that I am uncomfortable with to seek a answer of how it maybe interpreted.
I've encountered contracts that attempt to assign away my rights to my code at work, what I write at home and the code I wrote in the past. I simply do not sign them or seek legal advice. If it's un-enforceable I sign to avoid negative perceptions, if it is enforceable I explain to them why I don't like a clause and try to find a compromise. Sometimes I explain the cost benefits to the employer far outweigh any negatives.
I am extremely disciplined in my coding practises, I diarise *everything*. I can tell you exactly what I worked on 10, 12 or 15 years ago at 14:15 on a Tuesday. I don't use company resources for my code or projects but sometimes I use my resources for the companies projects. How is one employer going to assert their rights over another if I happen to be doing contract work and full time work. Is the employer going to compensate me for the lost income for not doing that work?
I am a musician and a producer, should my employer own the rights to my songs and lyrics or the methods I use to produce music? Where do you draw the line. Do they own the rights to this post or the html code that formats it?
What this means to an employer is they are hiring a professional programmer who is a business person not prepared to roll over and give away their or the companies rights willingly. This far more valuable than some pedantic clause asserting what is useless to them anyway. They have a license to use and modify copies of *my* code anyway and significant disadvantages if they want exclusive rights, everything has to be written from scratch and takes much longer so there is no net benefit to them. Why anyone would sign or want to work for a company so controlling is beyond me and they are simply undermining IT's place in industry overall.
Since expecting an IT union to advocate Technologists rights is unlikely then you had better know and be prepared to defend your rights. The trouble with your generalisation is that undermines rights that should be enhanced for programmers to allow increases in the productivity of the industry overall. Don't be foolish and sign a contract that assigns away your rights because, as a prevailing attitude amongst IT practitioners, it does little to promote the respect professionals in our industry should command and deserve.
I have taken legal action in the past and won. I will defend my rights vigorously if necessarily and aggressively if required. You should to.
Right, land of the not so free, eh :-(
Thank you for such an eloquent explanation.
Well last time I checked with my lawyer I in fact *do* own the code I write and I own the moral rights to any work I produce and those rights cannot be assigned away by copyright or any other because I am the original producer of the work.
Which is how it should be. I have no problem with the people who paid for me to produce some code using the code I produce. I do have a problem with them trying to assign themselves the absolute rights to the code I make, especially if I want to re-use parts of my code elsewhere. Who wants to re-write the same code over again if you have already done it before.
Someone else doesn't own my code just as much as I don't own someone else's code. If someone pays for code they own a copy of it and do what they choose with it. You don't have to make a big deal of it - just make daily backups of what you do and secure your own archive. It's not even about asserting your rights, it's about using them.
Don't give up your rights - Bob Marley
better out than in
Maybe you're right but I guess it depends on how the driver is designed and we are talking about encapsulating the data read from disk into network bound packets. Something has to do that work and I was sure that when the network daemon generates network traffic it creates CPU load.
Check the nice manual page
Increment it slowly and he won't know whats going on (mu-ha ha)
So what. Economics isn't a science it's a branch psychology with many flaws. If a band like Pearl Jam says the price for a ticket should be $n so their fans can afford to go to the concert there should not be another market mechanism to change that price. The tickets are only a perceived value to those who want them and if the tickets are priced out of that market then the scalpers have only served to produce a part empty sold out venue and denied other revenue opportunities to the venue and the band which lowers the performers income over the duration of the performances.
Clearing the market is only a factor when tickets are the *only* profit generating mechanism for a performer.
Which Century, the twentieth or the twenty first century? Was he talking about street hawkers or the guy with $5 million worth of ticket buying software in 2010. The scalper AND the box office are parasitic by nature. You have ignored the point that scalpers price tickets outside of the target market and not all tickets will be sold effecting revenues of the venues and the overall revenues of the performer on tour.
The value of the ticket is what 'the market will bare' not 'what the market *can* bare'. The value of the ticket is determined by the performer for a reason, not by a market mechanism that profits only the broker. The performer dictates the supply not the scalper, by putting on additional performances - and they do. Scalpers (operating in this way) distort the perception of demand to the performer.
It's unlikely. It maybe market value for a sporting event, it's a one time event...
No, it equals a failure to maximise profits. A greedy scalper simply prices the tickets above what a punter can afford to pay and in that case only the box office wins by having sold all the tickets. The punter loses because they missed the gig, the venue misses out on beer and food sales and the band loses out on tee shirt and other merchandise sales. These factors affect the long term profitability of the performer and the venues. This directly affects supply of other gigs by distorting profit and sales forecasts for merchandise. These are proven profit centers for both performers and venues and scalpers consume that budget.
Maybe those who wrote the economic theory about scalpers haven't been to many concerts themselves and factored those parameters into their "equations". The generation of profit for the brokers as opposed to the profit of the performer and venue. Besides I wouldn't normally buy from a scalper simply because those tickets are usually too expensive.
Perhaps the simple explanation is you go to gigs that never sell out. This means the scalpers are forced to sell the tickets at below cost to re-coup their initial investment.
Well it's bums on seats, and if you consider that the box office just want the tickets sold to cover costs and that they don't care who buy them then perhaps the scalper is part of their market. What has changed is that the scalper is now a dominant part of the market and is able to effect the overall cost and availability of ticket purchases. Because the average ticket purchaser does not invest in $5 million worth of software to buy tickets they are disadvantaged from the outset. Thus the gig is artificially sold out and the ticket price is artificially raised.
This is what happens in the commodities markets, it's not economics 101 - it's called price gouging. The box office sells out a concert - which mitigates their risk and the scalper engages the risk to generate profit. The disconnect is between the Bands who miss out on earnings and the Fans who pay more for tickets, the brokers however profit nicely and their mutual expense.
Taken to the next level, this is what the music industry does to bands and fans except they lobby for laws to protect their obsolete business model while the box office and scalpers rely on apathy to protect theirs. If *all* bands and gigs were sold in a business that disallowed a box office or scalpers you would see a similar hand waving and gnashing of teeth from them as you do from the RIAA.
Except it's not really, the scalpers have a software mechanism to buy tickets and I do not. This means that they have asserted a coercive monopoly control over the supply and demand. This means that the equilibrium can never be met because so called "market efficiencies" are biased towards demand.
Yes it would, you're assuming that everyone who would buy a ticket at %100 percent of the cost would buy it at %250. You're also assuming Scalpers sell *all* the tickets where they only enough to cover their costs and make a profit. Of course they *want* to sell all the tickets but at >%200 of the cost the scalper only has to sell *half* of the tickets they purchase to make a profit. So getting rid of Artificial scarcity *would* increase supply. I have been to sold out gigs where there were clearly plenty of seats available.
Perhaps, but getting rid of Artificial Scarcity would indicate to the organisers that perhaps they need to book a bigger venue for their show so they can satisfy a larger demand. Artificial scarcity limits earnings for a vendor who is essentially trying to move more product (in this case seats) to their target market. Fewer people buy tickets overall if they above what the market will bare and organisers have no w
Thank you for trying Enry.
I was waiting for months for Faith No More tickets to go on sale. I wasn't sure when they would. I missed out by two days and the concert was sold out. I was so fucking pissed off when I checked on e-bay to find certain sellers had > 10 tickets for sale at more than twice the price they were being sold for from the agencies.
Before ticket sales via the net I never missed out on tickets, now I'm almost certain I'll never get the tickets I want because the scalpers are so effective. Who has time to watch the box office everyday for every concert you want to see, it's so time consuming. Give me the software so I can see the bands I want to see.
Funny story, I went to see Tool back in the late 90's and the scalpers were out in force selling tickets to a 'sold out' show. About 15 minutes before it started the shutters of the box office were flung open and tickets were on sale. People swamped it, leaving the scalpers with bunches of tickets in their hands.
One of them ran up to a friend of mine and said 'Floor tickets to Tool, $5, how can you go wrong'.
Maybe all concerts should be sold this way, leaving a certain amount of tickets available from the box office on the night just to keep the scalpers under control.