It also makes a wonderful yellow pigment for paints. On canvas, of course, not children's toys -- though it has largely been replaced by safer compounds even in artists' paints.
This is not to say that the leak shouldn't be found and fixed, but the notion that this demonstrates that our nuclear power plants are unsafe is absurd.
If it's safe, why should the leak be found and fixed?
Let's be honest here. To the advocates of nuclear power, Chernobyl isn't a demonstration of the danger of nuclear power, so why should any lesser event be considered such?
In any case, the comparison you give is, at best, misleading, and at worst, deliberately so. For the comparison to be meaningful, we'd need to know the mix of uranium isotopes in order to compare their decay modes, energies, and products. Just waving your hands and disingenuously equating radioactive elements is bullshit. Either you haven't the foggiest notion what you're talking about, and therefore wouldn't be able to tell that it would be much better to have a kilogram of Uranium-238 sitting on your lap than a kilogram of Cobalt-60, or you're an energy industry shill who knows good and goddamn well what he's talking about and you're doing what energy industry shills do whenever they're conscious: spreading dangerous half-truths and hoping that the lamentable state of physics education in this country lets you get away with it.
You do realize, don't you, that you have described a skill that, like being able to tell the difference between the Olsen twins, is completely useless?
Try instead to learn to tell the difference between marketing and buzz versus information of actual value.
Oh, and hint: Mary-Kate is usually the one looking directly at the camera.
one of the biggest fails of open source is it's lack of reliable support or response to customer deamnds, if more big names jump on board an throw money at developers it'll only help OSS.
Right, because big companies are famous for the reliable support they provide and their responsiveness to customer demands. Seriously, have you ever tried to get actual customer support from a large company? What's the last large company that implemented a feature you wanted? Or merged a patch you wrote for the feature you wanted into the trunk?
This is like the old argument that private corporations are inherently more efficient than government, a point of view that must originate from people who have never in their lives been involved in a large private corporation. Both big business and government are grossly inefficient because they are large enough that individual initiative and responsibility disappear.
It's not Stallman's words that are being obeyed blindly here, it's Eric S. Raymond's words. For reasons known only to ESR and God, he decided that the metric of success for "Open Source" was corporate adoption and competing with corporate products. Stallman's Free Software ideology, for all of its occasional hidebound rigidity, had user freedom and choice as its metric for success. Free Software is a huge success insofar as we, as users (and developers) have an embarrassment of riches as far as freedom and choice go. Open Source, on the other hand, is pretty consistently seeing its big successes increasingly menaced by the corporate players its advocates went out of their way to provoke. And in that arena, it's not choice, freedom, or even product quality that counts, it's money, and you can safely assume that even relatively minor transnational corporations have more money to throw around than any Open Source initiative ever will.
Live by the sword, die by the sword. The same applies to marketshare.
Until they implement the current SVG standards, they should be kept away.
Pretty much. It'd be like me wanting to get in on the SVG committee, and I have one advantage that Microsoft doesn't: I've actually used SVG. Okay, two advantages: I don't have a vested interest in seeing the standardization process fail miserably.
Seriously. The massive parallelism of the brain is really quite something. I've gotten into the habit of making a point of getting up and walking outside or going to the bathroom whenever I hit a dead end, just for five minutes or so, and it's amazing how the solution will come to me more often than not.
So the short version is that an American company is suing the Chinese government because China is violating the basic human rights of its citizens without having a proper software license?
I'm not sure which circle of Hell is reserved for a complete and total inversion of priorities, but I'm sure CyberSitter will find out.
As spectacular as some of its failures have been -- like slamming a probe into Mars because one group failed to convert the units the other group was using -- it's important to recognize that NASA is capable of equally spectacular successes. These rovers have done way more than anyone expected and helped us learn a tremendous amount about Mars. We definitely got more than our money's worth on this project, and the scientists and engineers whose hard work made it happen deserve some serious accolades.
Imagine that a football player gave his view on copyright and innovation. You'd laugh. But a guy sings a song on the radio, and all the sudden his utterances appear in the NY Times?
I rather doubt the cause of his celebrity is the issue here, it's just his celebrity, period. If a well-known football player wrote a reasonably articulate editorial and flogged it around, I'm sure he could find a major newspaper to publish it, especially if the topic of that editorial was protecting the content industry, of which newspapers are part. We just hear from singers more often because, let's be honest, they're more likely to be able to form complete sentences than football players.
That said, the validity of an argument is independent of its source. If Bono had advanced a cogent argument and hadn't gotten his facts wrong, he'd be worth listening to. Unfortunately, he didn't, so he isn't.
I know Americans like to equate meters with yards, and when dealing with a small number, this is a close enough approximation for most purposes. However, 30 meters is 98.4 feet, so a better approximation for the purposes of this post would have been 100 feet.
Didn't we learn our lesson regarding sloppy unit conversions during one of our recent multi-million dollar collisions with Mars?;)
There's a difference in scale here that your argument fails to take into account. The consequence of a serious plane crash is a few hundred dead and a localized fire. The consequences of Chernobyl involved rendering a large area uninhabitable by humans for generations.
I'm in favor of nuclear power, but with a degree of caution proportional to the cost of failure. Equating a fender-bender with a core meltdown is indicative of the sort of recklessness that is precisely what worries the doubters.
It's worth noting that, unlike Intelligent Design or the flat-earthers, the public's fear of nuclear power does have some basis in reality. There have been extremely serious nuclear accidents -- Chernobyl being the worst of them so far -- and the energy industry is about as honest about the risks of energy technologies in general as the tobacco industry is about the health risks of smoking. Public skepticism about nuclear energy claims may be overblown, but it's also been well-earned.
Personally, I'd like to see more of the newer reactor designs put into practice, but even so, the hair on the back of my neck stands up every time some politician bloviates about "over-regulation". Technologies that can render large swaths of the landscape uninhabitable in the worst-case scenario need extensive (and well-enforced) regulations, especially when the private industrial sector that will be running them is as notoriously corrupt as the energy industry.
Whenever salespeople talk about "what consumers want", it's the same as when politicians talk about "what the American people want": it's what they want. There's more money in cranking out special-purpose devices with high profit margins than there is in cranking out commodity general purpose computers with razor-thin margins. As it happens, this is the exact reverse of what most consumers want, hence the need for marketing flaks to deny it at every opportunity.
Nokia's grasping at straws here, because they know that when the iPhone gets down around the $50 price point, they're toast.
When the iPhone gets down to the $50 price point, it will be because other manufacturers' offerings are sufficiently competitive with the iPhone to force its price down, and insofar as a considerable part of the iPhone's success, like the iPod's, is that it's fashionable, getting down to the range where it's the default throwaway free phone will destroy its exclusive cachet. Despite considerable effort to the contrary by the major players, the mobile phone market is still quite competitive. There's no overwhelmingly dominant single player, and there's not likely to be one any time soon.
This is a civil lawsuit. The point is to make the plaintiff whole and cause the infringement to cease. It is not about any sort of punishment.
Civil suits sometimes involve punishment, hence punitive damages, which are awarded in order to discourage infringing behavior when the actual compensatory damages are insufficient to do so.
It's a dumb idea. That said, it's also not worth getting worked up about if management is going to pay for the shirts and give you enough of them to get through the week with clean shirts without having to do extra laundry. Is it demeaning? Well, sure, but no matter what you wear, non-technical personnel are going to think of you -- as they think of all of us -- as some kind of mutant idiot-savants. Until someone writes software to replace non-technical managers, it's something we unfortunately have to live with.
I have a problem with censorship, but I also have a problem with intentionally misleading people, then screaming censorship when the folks you're trying to quietly impersonate come after you.
I can't disagree with that, but the real misdeed here is the lack of due process and the negligent clobbering of the unrelated 4500 sites. I'm not a Canadian lawyer, but I sure wish I was one right now.
Yes, we can probably make air travel completely secure, or very nearly so. The problem is that the level of scrutiny that would require would make air travel too expensive for anyone to afford and so unpleasant that even those rich enough to afford it would be unwilling to undergo it.
That said, there's room for progress, but odds are we won't see any. We'll just see more nonsensical, ineffective rules and more numerous pissing contests with the semi-literate thugs they hire for airport security.
I yield the point to your more extensive knowledge. My experience with the TRS-80 stops with the Model III, after which my school brought in PCs, 386-based, I think. All kinds of anachronisms appear in cash-strapped schools: my favorite machines in the lab were a pair of IBM System/3 Model 10 minicomputers, refrigerator-sized beasts with dials and blinkenlights and card readers which, by the time I parted ways with them in 1988, had been out of production for more than twelve years. But how else would I have reimplemented troff in RPG-II? (The other options were COBOL and FORTRAN-IV.)
Oh look, it's the obligatory "The whole of the African continent resembles the Serengeti, and everyone lives in a mud hut" comment.
Yeah, it would probably shock most Americans to learn that there are actual cities in Africa with skyscrapers and neon lights and cell phones. They just don't see those on National Geographic specials -- no doubt because Kenyan accountants aren't as colorful as herd-following Maasai tribesmen, to say nothing of not being very effective at arousing paternalistic western feelings.
A more constructive observation might be that creating jobs in Africa by manufacturing the damn things there would help to address the other problems that stem from poverty, to say nothing of getting around the excessive import duties that will otherwise make even $100 computers unaffordable to most Africans.
Now, mind you, there are Africans living in utter destitution, and we should by all means remember to help them out, too, but if we have higher hopes for our African friends than leaving them waiting for the latest UN food convoy, lending a hand to help their less-deprived neighbors build a stable urban life is a good idea. I'm not sure the OLPC is the way to do it, but it's not a bad idea, and certainly more productive than carping from the sidelines.
If, as many believe, mobile phones will become the main computing platform for most of the world [...]
Aside from sheer numbers, I'm not sure that actually means anything. Of the twenty or so applications I use most commonly on my PC, none of them would translate to a phone in any useful way, mostly because of the lack of a full-sized monitor and keyboard. How much gets done on mobile phones -- other than talking and texting -- that would materially affect anything of consequence if it suddenly stopped?
The main threat to FOSS is a broad failure to capitalize on its potential strengths because too much FOSS development is devoted to playing a rather childish game of imitating commercial software development -- a curious choice, considering that the shoddiness of commercial software was one of the driving forces behind the emergence of FOSS. What people are using on their phones has about as much importance as what's running inside the control box for your HVAC system.
You take the average gain of the last 30 seconds of a program before it goes to commercial, and don't allow the commercials to be any louder than that.
I suspect that you'd discover that those last 30 seconds would just get a lot louder. Let's try to remember that the networks exist to sell advertising, not to produce the shows; the shows are just how they lure people into seeing the ads. TV isn't about art, or even entertainment, it's about selling ads. It's odd how often people seem to forget this basic fact and come to harbor bizarre beliefs about news programs keeping them informed and dramas being about art and social issues.
If anyone finds a way to make the ads ignorable, TV will just go away.
Slashdot Mirror
It also makes a wonderful yellow pigment for paints. On canvas, of course, not children's toys -- though it has largely been replaced by safer compounds even in artists' paints.
This is not to say that the leak shouldn't be found and fixed, but the notion that this demonstrates that our nuclear power plants are unsafe is absurd.
If it's safe, why should the leak be found and fixed?
Let's be honest here. To the advocates of nuclear power, Chernobyl isn't a demonstration of the danger of nuclear power, so why should any lesser event be considered such?
In any case, the comparison you give is, at best, misleading, and at worst, deliberately so. For the comparison to be meaningful, we'd need to know the mix of uranium isotopes in order to compare their decay modes, energies, and products. Just waving your hands and disingenuously equating radioactive elements is bullshit. Either you haven't the foggiest notion what you're talking about, and therefore wouldn't be able to tell that it would be much better to have a kilogram of Uranium-238 sitting on your lap than a kilogram of Cobalt-60, or you're an energy industry shill who knows good and goddamn well what he's talking about and you're doing what energy industry shills do whenever they're conscious: spreading dangerous half-truths and hoping that the lamentable state of physics education in this country lets you get away with it.
You do realize, don't you, that you have described a skill that, like being able to tell the difference between the Olsen twins, is completely useless?
Try instead to learn to tell the difference between marketing and buzz versus information of actual value.
Oh, and hint: Mary-Kate is usually the one looking directly at the camera.
Does this mean I can use my medical insurance to buy furniture at Pier 1 now?
one of the biggest fails of open source is it's lack of reliable support or response to customer deamnds, if more big names jump on board an throw money at developers it'll only help OSS.
Right, because big companies are famous for the reliable support they provide and their responsiveness to customer demands. Seriously, have you ever tried to get actual customer support from a large company? What's the last large company that implemented a feature you wanted? Or merged a patch you wrote for the feature you wanted into the trunk?
This is like the old argument that private corporations are inherently more efficient than government, a point of view that must originate from people who have never in their lives been involved in a large private corporation. Both big business and government are grossly inefficient because they are large enough that individual initiative and responsibility disappear.
It's not Stallman's words that are being obeyed blindly here, it's Eric S. Raymond's words. For reasons known only to ESR and God, he decided that the metric of success for "Open Source" was corporate adoption and competing with corporate products. Stallman's Free Software ideology, for all of its occasional hidebound rigidity, had user freedom and choice as its metric for success. Free Software is a huge success insofar as we, as users (and developers) have an embarrassment of riches as far as freedom and choice go. Open Source, on the other hand, is pretty consistently seeing its big successes increasingly menaced by the corporate players its advocates went out of their way to provoke. And in that arena, it's not choice, freedom, or even product quality that counts, it's money, and you can safely assume that even relatively minor transnational corporations have more money to throw around than any Open Source initiative ever will.
Live by the sword, die by the sword. The same applies to marketshare.
Until they implement the current SVG standards, they should be kept away.
Pretty much. It'd be like me wanting to get in on the SVG committee, and I have one advantage that Microsoft doesn't: I've actually used SVG. Okay, two advantages: I don't have a vested interest in seeing the standardization process fail miserably.
Seriously. The massive parallelism of the brain is really quite something. I've gotten into the habit of making a point of getting up and walking outside or going to the bathroom whenever I hit a dead end, just for five minutes or so, and it's amazing how the solution will come to me more often than not.
So the short version is that an American company is suing the Chinese government because China is violating the basic human rights of its citizens without having a proper software license?
I'm not sure which circle of Hell is reserved for a complete and total inversion of priorities, but I'm sure CyberSitter will find out.
As spectacular as some of its failures have been -- like slamming a probe into Mars because one group failed to convert the units the other group was using -- it's important to recognize that NASA is capable of equally spectacular successes. These rovers have done way more than anyone expected and helped us learn a tremendous amount about Mars. We definitely got more than our money's worth on this project, and the scientists and engineers whose hard work made it happen deserve some serious accolades.
Imagine that a football player gave his view on copyright and innovation. You'd laugh. But a guy sings a song on the radio, and all the sudden his utterances appear in the NY Times?
I rather doubt the cause of his celebrity is the issue here, it's just his celebrity, period. If a well-known football player wrote a reasonably articulate editorial and flogged it around, I'm sure he could find a major newspaper to publish it, especially if the topic of that editorial was protecting the content industry, of which newspapers are part. We just hear from singers more often because, let's be honest, they're more likely to be able to form complete sentences than football players.
That said, the validity of an argument is independent of its source. If Bono had advanced a cogent argument and hadn't gotten his facts wrong, he'd be worth listening to. Unfortunately, he didn't, so he isn't.
I know Americans like to equate meters with yards, and when dealing with a small number, this is a close enough approximation for most purposes. However, 30 meters is 98.4 feet, so a better approximation for the purposes of this post would have been 100 feet.
Didn't we learn our lesson regarding sloppy unit conversions during one of our recent multi-million dollar collisions with Mars? ;)
There's a difference in scale here that your argument fails to take into account. The consequence of a serious plane crash is a few hundred dead and a localized fire. The consequences of Chernobyl involved rendering a large area uninhabitable by humans for generations.
I'm in favor of nuclear power, but with a degree of caution proportional to the cost of failure. Equating a fender-bender with a core meltdown is indicative of the sort of recklessness that is precisely what worries the doubters.
It's worth noting that, unlike Intelligent Design or the flat-earthers, the public's fear of nuclear power does have some basis in reality. There have been extremely serious nuclear accidents -- Chernobyl being the worst of them so far -- and the energy industry is about as honest about the risks of energy technologies in general as the tobacco industry is about the health risks of smoking. Public skepticism about nuclear energy claims may be overblown, but it's also been well-earned.
Personally, I'd like to see more of the newer reactor designs put into practice, but even so, the hair on the back of my neck stands up every time some politician bloviates about "over-regulation". Technologies that can render large swaths of the landscape uninhabitable in the worst-case scenario need extensive (and well-enforced) regulations, especially when the private industrial sector that will be running them is as notoriously corrupt as the energy industry.
In other words, this guy is completely wrong.
Whenever salespeople talk about "what consumers want", it's the same as when politicians talk about "what the American people want": it's what they want. There's more money in cranking out special-purpose devices with high profit margins than there is in cranking out commodity general purpose computers with razor-thin margins. As it happens, this is the exact reverse of what most consumers want, hence the need for marketing flaks to deny it at every opportunity.
Nokia's grasping at straws here, because they know that when the iPhone gets down around the $50 price point, they're toast.
When the iPhone gets down to the $50 price point, it will be because other manufacturers' offerings are sufficiently competitive with the iPhone to force its price down, and insofar as a considerable part of the iPhone's success, like the iPod's, is that it's fashionable, getting down to the range where it's the default throwaway free phone will destroy its exclusive cachet. Despite considerable effort to the contrary by the major players, the mobile phone market is still quite competitive. There's no overwhelmingly dominant single player, and there's not likely to be one any time soon.
After all, it's not as if Canada was in a position of unleashing an Operation Desert Storm over Germany.
Especially not with their navy tied up trying to intimidate mighty Denmark over the Arctic seafloor.
This is a civil lawsuit. The point is to make the plaintiff whole and cause the infringement to cease. It is not about any sort of punishment.
Civil suits sometimes involve punishment, hence punitive damages, which are awarded in order to discourage infringing behavior when the actual compensatory damages are insufficient to do so.
It's a dumb idea. That said, it's also not worth getting worked up about if management is going to pay for the shirts and give you enough of them to get through the week with clean shirts without having to do extra laundry. Is it demeaning? Well, sure, but no matter what you wear, non-technical personnel are going to think of you -- as they think of all of us -- as some kind of mutant idiot-savants. Until someone writes software to replace non-technical managers, it's something we unfortunately have to live with.
I have a problem with censorship, but I also have a problem with intentionally misleading people, then screaming censorship when the folks you're trying to quietly impersonate come after you.
I can't disagree with that, but the real misdeed here is the lack of due process and the negligent clobbering of the unrelated 4500 sites. I'm not a Canadian lawyer, but I sure wish I was one right now.
Yes, we can probably make air travel completely secure, or very nearly so. The problem is that the level of scrutiny that would require would make air travel too expensive for anyone to afford and so unpleasant that even those rich enough to afford it would be unwilling to undergo it.
That said, there's room for progress, but odds are we won't see any. We'll just see more nonsensical, ineffective rules and more numerous pissing contests with the semi-literate thugs they hire for airport security.
I yield the point to your more extensive knowledge. My experience with the TRS-80 stops with the Model III, after which my school brought in PCs, 386-based, I think. All kinds of anachronisms appear in cash-strapped schools: my favorite machines in the lab were a pair of IBM System/3 Model 10 minicomputers, refrigerator-sized beasts with dials and blinkenlights and card readers which, by the time I parted ways with them in 1988, had been out of production for more than twelve years. But how else would I have reimplemented troff in RPG-II? (The other options were COBOL and FORTRAN-IV.)
If he had bought a Trash-80, would we all be programming Motorola chips today?
Maybe, but it wouldn't be because of the TRS-80, which had a Zilog Z80 CPU.
Oh look, it's the obligatory "The whole of the African continent resembles the Serengeti, and everyone lives in a mud hut" comment.
Yeah, it would probably shock most Americans to learn that there are actual cities in Africa with skyscrapers and neon lights and cell phones. They just don't see those on National Geographic specials -- no doubt because Kenyan accountants aren't as colorful as herd-following Maasai tribesmen, to say nothing of not being very effective at arousing paternalistic western feelings.
A more constructive observation might be that creating jobs in Africa by manufacturing the damn things there would help to address the other problems that stem from poverty, to say nothing of getting around the excessive import duties that will otherwise make even $100 computers unaffordable to most Africans.
Now, mind you, there are Africans living in utter destitution, and we should by all means remember to help them out, too, but if we have higher hopes for our African friends than leaving them waiting for the latest UN food convoy, lending a hand to help their less-deprived neighbors build a stable urban life is a good idea. I'm not sure the OLPC is the way to do it, but it's not a bad idea, and certainly more productive than carping from the sidelines.
If, as many believe, mobile phones will become the main computing platform for most of the world [...]
Aside from sheer numbers, I'm not sure that actually means anything. Of the twenty or so applications I use most commonly on my PC, none of them would translate to a phone in any useful way, mostly because of the lack of a full-sized monitor and keyboard. How much gets done on mobile phones -- other than talking and texting -- that would materially affect anything of consequence if it suddenly stopped?
The main threat to FOSS is a broad failure to capitalize on its potential strengths because too much FOSS development is devoted to playing a rather childish game of imitating commercial software development -- a curious choice, considering that the shoddiness of commercial software was one of the driving forces behind the emergence of FOSS. What people are using on their phones has about as much importance as what's running inside the control box for your HVAC system.
You take the average gain of the last 30 seconds of a program before it goes to commercial, and don't allow the commercials to be any louder than that.
I suspect that you'd discover that those last 30 seconds would just get a lot louder. Let's try to remember that the networks exist to sell advertising, not to produce the shows; the shows are just how they lure people into seeing the ads. TV isn't about art, or even entertainment, it's about selling ads. It's odd how often people seem to forget this basic fact and come to harbor bizarre beliefs about news programs keeping them informed and dramas being about art and social issues.
If anyone finds a way to make the ads ignorable, TV will just go away.