If the original content is gone, it's illegal to retain it in cache (copyright law). If you then engage in profit-making business using a copy of the image which infringes a copyright, you can be prosecuted under criminal charges and face jail time.
You can't get rid of every single copy of a photo, etc, but you can at least clamp down on widespread dissemination. Might get a big paycheck from any copyright infringers, too.
Perhaps I should clarify one point. Before anyone brings it up, I know that, for the most part, the protocols themselves are "open" enough that, e.g. Pidgin can login to any of the different chat servers. The problem is, that I have to have a seperate account and login to every different chat server.
I want to login to a single chat server of my choice, and still be able to get presence info, chat via text,voice, or video, and transfer files, with anyone on any other server.
I'm sorry, but a huge, huge problem over the last two decades is this whole mentality of can XYZ's proprietary approach replace ABC's proprietary approach.
I don't want protocols that are implemented in a single app by a single vendor. What I want is to be able to use the chat app of MY CHOICE and talk to any other use of any other chat program, so that they can use the chat program of THEIR CHOICE.
So, in my ideal world, people on aim can send texts, audio chats, video, files, etc to people on Google Voice, Skype, WebRTC, MSN, Yahoo, or what-the-heck-ever.
That's the way email has been working forever, and it's a great model. With chat programs, since you can choose who to accept messages from and who to let see when you're online, etc, you have much less problem with spam, etc, than you would with email.
But, why can't we adapt the "user@serviceprovider.tld" model of contacting people to the world of IM, instead of having to have 8 different chat accounts on 8 different service providers, none of whom will interoperate with anyone else?
Email would suck if you needed a seperate email account to send and receive email from every different ISP. Chat sucks today, for that reason.
I tend to agree with you and other posters, that there's nothing particularly "better" about it being in a web browser, and nicely designed stand-alone apps are my preference, too.
However, I do have some comments on some of your points. . .
"- Multiple connections from multiple computers"
I don't know if this browser-based P2P system actually *does* do that, but I don't see why it technically *couldn't*.
"- Messages don't come back, nor you should ever retype a message. If you type and press enter, its the IM system the job to deliver it (much unlike MSN)"
I don't see why a browser-based solution can't queue your messages and deliver them at the next opportunity - however, the server based approach does have the advantage that both computers don't have to be on at the same time, EVER, for delivery of text messages. With the browser based approach, there would have to be short periods, frequently, where both computers are on and logged in at the same time. In practice, I think it's pretty likely that for most users, there would be such windows almost every day, so that's not a huge disadvantage, I don't think.
My previous reply was an attempt at a bit of humor, but more seriously, I generally agree with you.
With the example you give of carbon emissions and climate change, I tend to agree with you. It's not sufficient to try to convince people there is a problem. Without an alternative, to a large extent, we MUST continue doing what we're doing.
This is why, despite some risks (c.f. Fukushima and Chernobyl), I generally support nuclear power. More specifically, I'm pretty enthusiastic about Thorium nuclear power with the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor concept. It can solve the nuclear waste "problem", has characteristics which strongly argue that it should be very safe (almost no risk of a chernobyl or fukushima style disaster, because it is fundamentally different than those reactors in very good ways), and should be able to provide as much energy as we could want for hundreds of thousands to millions of years, all while, very probably, being substantially cheaper than current uranium-fueled light water reactor designs (I say "very probably", because until we get some built, we can't really say with high confidence what the cost will actually end up being, but it strongly looks like they should be cheaper to build).
Giving people a good alternative is, as you say, much more persuasive than lots of studies that tell them what might be true, but is useless to them.
Unless you can show that we are going through a period of substantially more volcanic activity than has been normal over the past 50,000 years, please shut up.
Yes, volcanoes put out CO2. But they've been doing that forever. How do you explain a sustained increase in CO2 levels, which based on ice core samples going back many thousands of years, is increasing at a much faster rate than the previous several thousand years, over the past century?
Oh, and are you claiming that the activities of man (burning huge, huge amounts of oil, coal, natural gas, and burning off massive areas of forest every year) would somehow NOT increase carbon in the atmophere? What mechanism to do you propose is acting as a 'sink' for all that carbon?
I think it's very important to bring out something which most folks seems to be overlooking. There seems to be a presumption that these old folks, *if* they live long enough, *would get cancer* from working in the reactor.
For example, the parents' comment, "To assume someone will perish in a given lifetime, opens doors we may not want to venture through"
I think what he/she is saying is that it's dangerous to assume that someone who is 70 or 72 can do this job because they'll die anyhow before the cancer sets in, which might not actually be the case - maybe they live to 94 then get cancer, right?
But the thing is, we also have to consider that, depending on the radiation dose they receive (and I presume they'll be using safety suits), we're only talking about a slightly increased risk of cancer.
When looking at slightly increased risks, if you have a large population that are exposed (maybe 10,000 or 100,000), we can say pretty much with certainty that some small percentage *will* get cancer (that is, for example, maybe at a given dosage, there will be a statistical likelihood that 1 extra cancer will develop across 10,000 people after 15 years).
But, if we're talking about a very small sample size, say 20 or 30 people chosen to help with the cleanup, while we can't entirely rule out the possibility of someone getting cancer from the radiation, the odds might be in their favor that NONE of them get cancer from the radiation exposure.
Couple the small sample size, with the probability that most of them will die from other causes within the next 15 or 20 years, and you are looking at a situation where of, say 30 people who help with the cleanup, maybe only 3 of them are still alive in 20 years *anyhow*, and then it's *very* unlikely that any of the 3 "survivors" would get a radiation-induced cancer, because the sample size is just so darn small.
I believe Notepad and Paint have had some minor revisions as well, even before Win 7.
Paint, at the very least, added the ability to load and save new image formats (and might have dumped old formats no one uses anymore?). Over the years they added JPEG and PNG.
I will say though, that calc has definitely gotten more love over the years, and especially with Win7.
That all depends on the name of the School, doesn't it?
Private schools tend not to be named after the town. Public universities very often are named after the town they're in. I live in Ohio, I can name quite a few schools named after towns. . .
U of Toledo, U of Akron, Youngstown State University, Cincinnati State, The U of Cincinnati, Kent State University. Out of state I can think of University of Chicago, UC San Diego, UC Berkeley, (pretty much all the UC schools are named for the towns they are in), University of Miami (not to be confused with Miami University which is actually in Ohio), U of Pittsburgh.
I think another point might be that the malware is evolving from doing things which might require system-wide admin privileges, to just doing things which require lower levels of access.
My first thought when I saw an article posted on Ars Technica yesterday, about this change in the malware, was, "But, wouldn't that mean the malware has to run at lower privilege levels"?
Then I realized that something running at "user" privilege levels instead of root, can still be bad. It could probably still keylog that particular user's credentials when going to websites and such. It could still send out spam emails as the user. It could still search through the user's personal files looking for anything "interesting" (or just uploading them en-masse to another 'owned' machine). It could still act as an online file repository for child porn, terrorists, organized crime, etc. It could act as a webserver for a phishing attack.
It could be used as part of a DDOS, or as part of a massive computation network (think something like World Community Grid for organized crime - to, e.g. brute force recover encryption keys for someone or some system the criminals are targetting).
Let me ask you a question - how is any air getting *in*? You start with water. The water is heated by the fuel to several hundred degrees, under pressure. But, some of it starts becoming steam. You now have lots of pressure inside the vessel, but not air - just water and steam. You now open a release valve and the steam starts boiling off and escaping out the relief valve. The positive pressure (of what, several atmospheres?) and the out-rushing steam should largely prevent air from entering .
So, how does the air ever get into the pressure vessel? Very small trace amounts of air/oxygen might lead to a small amount of burning, but as long as the vessel is sealed up well, the oxygen will quickly deplete (ever put a candle under a glass ? Doesn't burn very long.
So, I still don't see how burning is much of a threat as long as the containment maintains structural integrity? Again, though, as I mentioned before, if the earthquake/terrorist attack/whatever does breech the vessel (and outer containment), then it does seem like there could be a possibility for fire in that instance.
I'll use Wikipedia's definition - they state it pretty clearly:
The net capacity factor of a power plant is the ratio of the actual output of a power plant over a period of time and its potential output if it had operated at full nameplate capacity the entire time.
In mathematical notation, this would look like:
CapacityFactor = (Actual Power * Actual uptime) / (Max Power * Max Time).
The above representation is the simplest form, for a power source which runs at a constant power output, which is some fraction of it's total output.
If the power source varies (e.g. a nuclear plant might be run at 60% power during some intervals of time, and 100% at others; solar and wind almost constantly vary), then you have to do a summation.
The easiest way to do this summation is simply to sum up the total number of kWh or mWh that was produced during a time period (e.g. you've had a 'meter' running on the generator and after the time period for which you want to calculate the capacity factor, you look at how much total power was produced, then divide it by the total power that could possibly have been produced in that time period).
The important point to note here is that neither uptime nor power output can exceed 100%. So, to get close to 100% (and 92.6% is pretty close), BOTH uptime and power production have to be close to 100%. It's just not mathematically possible to get a high capacity factor without high uptime. (e.g. if you run at 100% power but with 1% uptime, you're CapFactor is 1%).
More specifically, Capacity factor cannot exceed uptime. It can be less than uptime, but never greater than uptime (because power would have to be greater than 100% in order for CapFactor to exceed uptime).
So, a capacity factor of 92.6% says that uptime is greater than or equal to 92.6%.
So, in a way, yes, capacity factor is uptime, but not exactly.
"1. Is the containment vessel solid? Will this burn through?"
If you've evacuated the water, steam, and whatever air might have been in the reactor, wouldn't there be very little oxygen left in the reactor in order for the fuel or other materials to burn (in the normal sense of burning - oxidation)?
I suppose it could still 'burn through' in the sense that it could denature/melt the materials due to very high heat from the fuel. But, I've read that the meltdown at TMI only resulted in the fuel melting a small fraction of an inch through the containment which was, I believe, over an inch think. Hasn't it been pretty much shown that melted fuel does not produce enough heat to burn through a good containment?
I guess in the case of Fukushima, plant operators had no way of knowing if the containment had been damaged already by the earhquake, and if it *had* been damaged by the quake, perhaps letting it melt would allow the molten fuel to escape through a breech in the containment vessel, into an area where air was present (or, even just allowing the air to enter in, allowing enough oxygen to be present for fuel or other materials to really burn)?
You must have loved the title on another recent Slashdot article, "Swiss to End Use of Nuclear Power", which despite the very conclusive sound of the title, was really about some people in the Swiss Government *talking* about trying to get the Swiss to stop using Nuclear Power. Nothing had at all been passed into law or set as official government policy yet.
I've long since given up worrying about Slashdot titles. They're almost worthless, except to give you a general sense of what sort of topic you're dealing with. Complaining about them is pointless. They'll not get fixed, and the editors won't do any better job in the future.
As I've watched the news about Fukushima, I have wondered if by trying to avoid fuel meltdown, did they make matters *worse*?
I admit, I really have limited knowledge about what went wrong or could have gone wrong. I'm definitely not a nuclear engineer.
But, from the news, it seems like the biggest source of problems was caused by hydrogen explosions. The hydrogen explosions happened because steam from the cooling water, under high heat and pressure, interacted with the Zircalloy fuel cladding, which caused the oxygen to bind to the alloy, and the hydrogen to become H2 gas, which could then build up in the pressure vessel (and ultimately the containment when it was vented from the pressure vessel into the containment, I think?).
This, then, finally ignited, causing the explosions, causing damage to the containments, causing radioactive release.
So, now, my question is, why not just evacuate all the water and steam from the reactor, so that there's no (well, very little - you probably couldnt' remove 100% of the water) hydrogen present in the reactor, then just let the fuel melt to the bottom and harden into a non-critical mass? What's so terrible about the fuel melting down? It happened at TMI, and didn't become a major disaster?
Is it possible that the cure was worse than the ailment, in this case?
Something disappeared from my post, in the second paragraph. I think/. might have gotten confused by my use of less-than and greater-than signs and interpreted them as html tags. I'm reposting the second paragraph as here, with slashdot set to "code" mode.
Here in the real world, when X is multiplied times Y, where 0 <= X <= 1.0 and 0 <= Y <= 1.0, then it's mathematically impossible to get X * Y >=.9 without both values being substantially close to 1.0. How is it that you claim this statistic "hides those factors"? It's simply impossible to get a capacity factor of greater than 90 percent without very high reliability of the plant. In this case, we could say that capacity factor = X * Y, where X = power produced / power max, and Y = uptime / time max.
Here in the real world, we generally expect people are telling the truth unless there is compelling reason to believe they are lieing. Are you suggesting that Mr. Twomey was lieing about Vermont Yankee's reliability in that letter? Based upon what compelling argument do you suggest he's lieing?
Here in the real world, when X is multiplied times Y, where 0 =.9 without both values being substantially close to 1.0. How is it that you claim this statistic "hides those factors"? It's simply impossible to get a capacity factor of greater than 90 percent without very high reliability of the plant. In this case, we could say that capacity factor = X * Y, where X = power produced / power max, and Y = uptime / time max.
When one keeps arguing against a perfectly good statistic, without explaining how it can possibly be obfuscating the truth, one cannot help but wonder why.
Here in the real world, where electricity sells for around 5-15 cents per kWh, resulting in a MW of generation bringing in $438,000 - $1,300,000 per year in revenue, an employee which costs the company maybe $100,000/year (say $50,000 in direct salary, and $50,000 in other costs - overhead, taxes, benefits, etc), is significant, but doesn't really "dominate" the bottom line across the life cycle. The cost of employees would be somewhere in the ballpark of 20-25% of revenues at the low end of the price range. At the high end of the price range, employees become around 10% of revenues.
80% vs 92.6% is looking at a percentage out of 100. There's a max cutoff at 100%. For that type of use of percentages, what it means is that going from 80% to 90% capacity factor means that either at 80% you have TWICE AS MUCH downtime (assuming operating at 100% power all the time you're running), or you're running at somewhat significantly lower power output, while running close to the same amount of time (or somewhere on a spectrum in between, varying the two variables in an inverse relationship).
In the case of "Employees per Megawatt", you are simply comparing two small numbers.
It's like comparing the cost of two small screws (or other small item), where maybe one costs 80 cents for 100 screws, and the other costs $1.09 for 100 screws. In each case, the package of screws is cheap, and the costs are "close" compared to say, another package of screws which costs $4.50 for 100 screws.
I bought a radio last weekend. I compared two radios, which were similar, and had similar features. One cost $85, the other cost $89. I ended up buying the one that cost $89 because, even though it was a 5 percent difference in cost, the slightly more expensive radio had a nice physical design feature I like (it had a more robust antenna connector, and physical connection between the connector and the chassis). In both cases, the radio was cheap. The difference as 4$
If I were buying a house though, a 5 percent difference could be a difference of thousands of dollars (for example, $200,000 vs $210,000. So, scale matters. Just saying something is almost 30% more than something else, without taking into account the base scale you're comparing from, doesn't mean a whole lot.
If power plant employees cost the company, on average, $100,000 (maybe $50,000 in salary, $50,000 in taxes, benefits, overhead, etc). then the plant with.8 employess/MW is spending $80,000, while the other company is spending $109,000. That's not chump change, but if the company is selling the power at, say, 5 cents per kWh (which, I believe, would actually be at the very low-end of power prices), the company would generate about $438,000 per year in revenue from selling that MW of power.
The cost of the employees as a percentage of revenue then, is about 18% for.8 employees, vs 24% for 1.09 employees. That's still something - but it shows up as much less than a 30 percent difference. The higher the price the company sells the power at, the more the effect of the difference in number of employees dwindles.
According to the US DOE, In Jan 2011, the average retail price for electricity in NV was 8.57 cents/kWh, in California it was 12.94 cents. At those sorts of prices, the amount that employees contribute as a percentage of the costs is relatively close.
On the matter of the source, I picked that because, as an executive at the company, if he's not lying, he's in a very good position to really know the truth of the matter.
Capacity factor does take into account downtime, by virtue of the fact that you take, of any given time period, how much power was produced, by how much would have been produced if the source were generating power 100% of the time at full rated power.
So, unless they can run at 150%+ of their rated power output, how can you possibly get a very high capacity factor, like 90%, without being running almost all the time? In light of that, I think your statement that, "it's not up time and tells us little to nothing about reliability", is not really correct. It might not directly be uptime, but uptime is factored into the final result. You cannot get high capacity factors without high uptime.
As for the 'same general ballpark' statement, the way I figure that is that, overall, neither plant needs particularly a lot of employees per MW. A MW is a lot of power.
It's like arguing over little screws that maybe cost 1/2 cent each, in an expensive device, like say a truck, where the vast majority of the cost doesn't come from the screws. So, one device needs.8 screws per unit output, and another uses 1.1 screws per unit output. It's close enough, in the fact that neither contributes a significant portion of the cost of the output of the device.
What planet are you from? 80%? Complete fiction. Vermont Yankee is very reliable, and had, from 2003-2009, an amazing 92.6% capacity factor. Which gives an employee/Mwatt ratio closer to 1.09, which while still slightly higher than the solar plant, isn't particularly bad.
The source for my claim is an open letter from an Entergy executive, being mirrored at the website of Meredith Angwin, who runs the Yes, Vermont Yankee blog.
For more actual *facts* about VY reliability, see this posting at Yes, VY.
In general, nuclear power plants in the U.S. have had an *industry average* of over 90%. That's not a cherry picked record for an individual plant - that's the *average* capacity factor. There are certainly some things to be worried about Nuclear plants, in terms of risks and costs, but reliability just isn't one of them. Let's stick to real problems, instead of making up fake ones.
As for number of employees per MW at nuclear plants, there is probably room for improvement there, with newer designs. However, I don't see that 650 employees for 620MW seems like a particularly *bad* ratio. As mentioned above, it's less than 1.09 empl./MW, so it's in the same general ballpark as the solar plant.
$9826 sounds like a lot of money. . . until you realize that the cost is amortized over some period of time. I don't know what the actual life of the facility will be, but I would think 50 years sounds reasonable. So, if we divide by 50 years, that comes to about $200 per house per year.
However, we also have to factor in that on top of construction costs, there are ongoing maintenance an operation costs, so maybe it comes to about $250/house/yr. That still doesn't sound outrageous to me. I think I pay like $400/year for electricity on my 1-bedroom apartment - and I'm not a large electricity consumer. I have a fridge, stove, microwave (and the stove and microwave I only use maybe 2-4 times a week), a computer, a WiFi router, a cell phone I charge at night, a couple ham radio batteries (1500mAh and 1800mAh) I occasionally charge, and lights (most of my lights are efficient CFLs). In the summer, I run a window A/C unit sometimes - but I'm only cooling a small space.
I don't know what their actual maint/ops costs will be, but $10k per household, if the plant lasts 40-50 years, just doesn't sound particularly expensive.
One of the huge advantages of nuclear fuel, is that, if you are using it *efficiently* (e.g. recycling it in something like an Integral Fast Reactor), one ton of fuel is the equivalent of millions of tons of coal or oil.
What this means is that a country can buy a *relatively* small quantity of Uranium or Thorium, and it might represent 100 years supply of energy. You couldn't easily store 100 years worth of coal - it would be the size of 10 large mountains or something, and would be crazy expensive to buy and store.
100 years worth of thorium or uranium would be large and expensive, but quite manageable for a government or large corporation to do. It would be much cheaper and much smaller than coal.
This means that you can have long negotiating cycles. There's also quite a few countries with Uranium (and, I've heard it said that there's probably a lot of undiscovered Uranium out there, as it hasn't been prospected for anywhere nearly as aggressively as coal and oil), and as the other poster who replied before me pointed out, almost every country has Thorium.
Part of the problem for supply of oil, coal, etc is that we can't buy it faster than it is consumed, and we can't easily store large surpluses (there is, of course, in the U.S. at least, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, but even that is really pretty small - I think a few months' worth of supply?). This makes us very vulnerable to market swings in price.
With Nuclear Fuel, if you've got 20 or 50 years' supply already on-hand, you've got a nice long negotiating cycle in which to get sellers to lower the price. Then, you buy more when the price is right.
Bonus: any country which has already been running nuclear power programs for a couple decades, most likely already has hundreds of years' supply of Uranium in the form of "Spent Nuclear Fuel". What we call "Nuclear Waste", at least here in the U.S. still has about 98-99 percent of its potential energy unused.
So, here in the U.S., we're sitting on, very roughly, 50 years of nuclear waste, which should be able to give us 50 years * 99, worth of energy. OK, that's a bit of a simplification - if we greatly increased our annual production of nuclear power compared to what we produced in the past, you might cut that in half or a quarter (possibly even more). Say anywhere from 500-4000 years of nuclear fuel, depending on how much we increase our nuclear power production.
There's also "depleted uranium", which could be added to the fuel mix in some of the "recycling reactor" designs (the technical name for a recycling reactor is a "fast breeder reactor" - which is a scary sounding name, but they aren't more dangerous than a "thermal reactor", which is what today's reactors are). The above estimate about using nuclear fuel more efficiently also is based upon using the spent nuclear fuel in a fast breeder.
If you use depleted Uranium in a fast breeder reactor, you can again extended the fuel supply by another huge amount. For every ton of Enriched Uranium fuel that has been produce, about 6.5 tons of depleted uranium is produced. Using that in a breeder reactor, again using the 'simplified' estimating approach above, gives us something like 50 years * 6.5 * 100 = 32, 500 years' supply. If you assume we quadruple nuclear power production (so that supply is cut by 1/4), that still gives us something like 8000 years' supply of fuel.
Coal and gas have been running advertising campaigns trying to reassure people we have 100-300 years' supply (about 100 in the case of gas - and that's at *current* consumption rates, which look set to double or triple if we start building a lot of gas power plants and gas-backed solar/wind farms; closer to 200-300 years for coal).
Nuclear is the only fuel-based energy source which can credibly claim around 10,000 years' supply, *at the very minimum*. Solar and Wind, of course, can claim energy supply until the Sun dies; I have some hope solar and wind (and necessary supporting technologies like grid-scale energy storage systems) can mature to help provide part of our energy needs, but I just don't see them, based on the current technology, providing more than about 20 percent of our power.
In truth, with today's academic programs at most university's, anyone wanting to specialize in a technical field (and this might apply to many other fields as well), should probably try, during their junior high and high school years to get "early exposure" to that field. If you already know basic programming in two or three languages, know some basic data structures and algorithms, etc. You will be far, far more prepared after that 15 week course.
It has become common in a lot of high schools to offer 'electorates', or after school clubs, which will give some early exposure to engineering and computer programming. Probably would be worth extending that concept to as many topics as possible (although schools also face budgetary and classroom-availability limitations, and god forbid anyone cut the football, basketball or cheer-leading budgets at most schools).
Slashdot Mirror
If the original content is gone, it's illegal to retain it in cache (copyright law). If you then engage in profit-making business using a copy of the image which infringes a copyright, you can be prosecuted under criminal charges and face jail time.
You can't get rid of every single copy of a photo, etc, but you can at least clamp down on widespread dissemination. Might get a big paycheck from any copyright infringers, too.
Perhaps I should clarify one point. Before anyone brings it up, I know that, for the most part, the protocols themselves are "open" enough that, e.g. Pidgin can login to any of the different chat servers. The problem is, that I have to have a seperate account and login to every different chat server.
I want to login to a single chat server of my choice, and still be able to get presence info, chat via text ,voice, or video, and transfer files, with anyone on any other server.
I'm sorry, but a huge, huge problem over the last two decades is this whole mentality of can XYZ's proprietary approach replace ABC's proprietary approach.
I don't want protocols that are implemented in a single app by a single vendor. What I want is to be able to use the chat app of MY CHOICE and talk to any other use of any other chat program, so that they can use the chat program of THEIR CHOICE.
So, in my ideal world, people on aim can send texts, audio chats, video, files, etc to people on Google Voice, Skype, WebRTC, MSN, Yahoo, or what-the-heck-ever.
That's the way email has been working forever, and it's a great model. With chat programs, since you can choose who to accept messages from and who to let see when you're online, etc, you have much less problem with spam, etc, than you would with email.
But, why can't we adapt the "user@serviceprovider.tld" model of contacting people to the world of IM, instead of having to have 8 different chat accounts on 8 different service providers, none of whom will interoperate with anyone else?
Email would suck if you needed a seperate email account to send and receive email from every different ISP. Chat sucks today, for that reason.
I tend to agree with you and other posters, that there's nothing particularly "better" about it being in a web browser, and nicely designed stand-alone apps are my preference, too.
However, I do have some comments on some of your points. . .
"- Multiple connections from multiple computers"
I don't know if this browser-based P2P system actually *does* do that, but I don't see why it technically *couldn't*.
"- Messages don't come back, nor you should ever retype a message. If you type and press enter, its the IM system the job to deliver it (much unlike MSN)"
I don't see why a browser-based solution can't queue your messages and deliver them at the next opportunity - however, the server based approach does have the advantage that both computers don't have to be on at the same time, EVER, for delivery of text messages. With the browser based approach, there would have to be short periods, frequently, where both computers are on and logged in at the same time. In practice, I think it's pretty likely that for most users, there would be such windows almost every day, so that's not a huge disadvantage, I don't think.
My previous reply was an attempt at a bit of humor, but more seriously, I generally agree with you.
With the example you give of carbon emissions and climate change, I tend to agree with you. It's not sufficient to try to convince people there is a problem. Without an alternative, to a large extent, we MUST continue doing what we're doing.
This is why, despite some risks (c.f. Fukushima and Chernobyl), I generally support nuclear power. More specifically, I'm pretty enthusiastic about Thorium nuclear power with the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor concept. It can solve the nuclear waste "problem", has characteristics which strongly argue that it should be very safe (almost no risk of a chernobyl or fukushima style disaster, because it is fundamentally different than those reactors in very good ways), and should be able to provide as much energy as we could want for hundreds of thousands to millions of years, all while, very probably, being substantially cheaper than current uranium-fueled light water reactor designs (I say "very probably", because until we get some built, we can't really say with high confidence what the cost will actually end up being, but it strongly looks like they should be cheaper to build).
Giving people a good alternative is, as you say, much more persuasive than lots of studies that tell them what might be true, but is useless to them.
"People will always do things that they know to be bad for them."
That's an interesting hypothesis. I think we need a study. . .
Unless you can show that we are going through a period of substantially more volcanic activity than has been normal over the past 50,000 years, please shut up.
Yes, volcanoes put out CO2. But they've been doing that forever. How do you explain a sustained increase in CO2 levels, which based on ice core samples going back many thousands of years, is increasing at a much faster rate than the previous several thousand years, over the past century?
Oh, and are you claiming that the activities of man (burning huge, huge amounts of oil, coal, natural gas, and burning off massive areas of forest every year) would somehow NOT increase carbon in the atmophere? What mechanism to do you propose is acting as a 'sink' for all that carbon?
I think it's very important to bring out something which most folks seems to be overlooking. There seems to be a presumption that these old folks, *if* they live long enough, *would get cancer* from working in the reactor.
For example, the parents' comment, "To assume someone will perish in a given lifetime, opens doors we may not want to venture through"
I think what he/she is saying is that it's dangerous to assume that someone who is 70 or 72 can do this job because they'll die anyhow before the cancer sets in, which might not actually be the case - maybe they live to 94 then get cancer, right?
But the thing is, we also have to consider that, depending on the radiation dose they receive (and I presume they'll be using safety suits), we're only talking about a slightly increased risk of cancer.
When looking at slightly increased risks, if you have a large population that are exposed (maybe 10,000 or 100,000), we can say pretty much with certainty that some small percentage *will* get cancer (that is, for example, maybe at a given dosage, there will be a statistical likelihood that 1 extra cancer will develop across 10,000 people after 15 years).
But, if we're talking about a very small sample size, say 20 or 30 people chosen to help with the cleanup, while we can't entirely rule out the possibility of someone getting cancer from the radiation, the odds might be in their favor that NONE of them get cancer from the radiation exposure.
Couple the small sample size, with the probability that most of them will die from other causes within the next 15 or 20 years, and you are looking at a situation where of, say 30 people who help with the cleanup, maybe only 3 of them are still alive in 20 years *anyhow*, and then it's *very* unlikely that any of the 3 "survivors" would get a radiation-induced cancer, because the sample size is just so darn small.
I believe Notepad and Paint have had some minor revisions as well, even before Win 7.
Paint, at the very least, added the ability to load and save new image formats (and might have dumped old formats no one uses anymore?). Over the years they added JPEG and PNG.
I will say though, that calc has definitely gotten more love over the years, and especially with Win7.
That all depends on the name of the School, doesn't it?
Private schools tend not to be named after the town. Public universities very often are named after the town they're in. I live in Ohio, I can name quite a few schools named after towns. . .
U of Toledo, U of Akron, Youngstown State University, Cincinnati State, The U of Cincinnati, Kent State University. Out of state I can think of University of Chicago, UC San Diego, UC Berkeley, (pretty much all the UC schools are named for the towns they are in), University of Miami (not to be confused with Miami University which is actually in Ohio), U of Pittsburgh.
Need more?
I think another point might be that the malware is evolving from doing things which might require system-wide admin privileges, to just doing things which require lower levels of access.
My first thought when I saw an article posted on Ars Technica yesterday, about this change in the malware, was, "But, wouldn't that mean the malware has to run at lower privilege levels"?
Then I realized that something running at "user" privilege levels instead of root, can still be bad. It could probably still keylog that particular user's credentials when going to websites and such. It could still send out spam emails as the user. It could still search through the user's personal files looking for anything "interesting" (or just uploading them en-masse to another 'owned' machine). It could still act as an online file repository for child porn, terrorists, organized crime, etc. It could act as a webserver for a phishing attack.
It could be used as part of a DDOS, or as part of a massive computation network (think something like World Community Grid for organized crime - to, e.g. brute force recover encryption keys for someone or some system the criminals are targetting).
Well, I'm interested in what you had to say but I didn't click because it leads to a TinyURL, and god knows where that'll take me.
Let me ask you a question - how is any air getting *in*? You start with water. The water is heated by the fuel to several hundred degrees, under pressure. But, some of it starts becoming steam. You now have lots of pressure inside the vessel, but not air - just water and steam. You now open a release valve and the steam starts boiling off and escaping out the relief valve. The positive pressure (of what, several atmospheres?) and the out-rushing steam should largely prevent air from entering .
So, how does the air ever get into the pressure vessel?
Very small trace amounts of air/oxygen might lead to a small amount of burning, but as long as the vessel is sealed up well, the oxygen will quickly deplete (ever put a candle under a glass ? Doesn't burn very long.
So, I still don't see how burning is much of a threat as long as the containment maintains structural integrity? Again, though, as I mentioned before, if the earthquake/terrorist attack/whatever does breech the vessel (and outer containment), then it does seem like there could be a possibility for fire in that instance.
I'll use Wikipedia's definition - they state it pretty clearly:
The net capacity factor of a power plant is the ratio of the actual output of a power plant over a period of time and its potential output if it had operated at full nameplate capacity the entire time.
In mathematical notation, this would look like:
CapacityFactor = (Actual Power * Actual uptime) / (Max Power * Max Time).
The above representation is the simplest form, for a power source which runs at a constant power output, which is some fraction of it's total output.
If the power source varies (e.g. a nuclear plant might be run at 60% power during some intervals of time, and 100% at others; solar and wind almost constantly vary), then you have to do a summation.
The easiest way to do this summation is simply to sum up the total number of kWh or mWh that was produced during a time period (e.g. you've had a 'meter' running on the generator and after the time period for which you want to calculate the capacity factor, you look at how much total power was produced, then divide it by the total power that could possibly have been produced in that time period).
The important point to note here is that neither uptime nor power output can exceed 100%. So, to get close to 100% (and 92.6% is pretty close), BOTH uptime and power production have to be close to 100%. It's just not mathematically possible to get a high capacity factor without high uptime. (e.g. if you run at 100% power but with 1% uptime, you're CapFactor is 1%).
More specifically, Capacity factor cannot exceed uptime. It can be less than uptime, but never greater than uptime (because power would have to be greater than 100% in order for CapFactor to exceed uptime).
So, a capacity factor of 92.6% says that uptime is greater than or equal to 92.6%.
So, in a way, yes, capacity factor is uptime, but not exactly.
"1. Is the containment vessel solid? Will this burn through?"
If you've evacuated the water, steam, and whatever air might have been in the reactor, wouldn't there be very little oxygen left in the reactor in order for the fuel or other materials to burn (in the normal sense of burning - oxidation)?
I suppose it could still 'burn through' in the sense that it could denature/melt the materials due to very high heat from the fuel. But, I've read that the meltdown at TMI only resulted in the fuel melting a small fraction of an inch through the containment which was, I believe, over an inch think. Hasn't it been pretty much shown that melted fuel does not produce enough heat to burn through a good containment?
I guess in the case of Fukushima, plant operators had no way of knowing if the containment had been damaged already by the earhquake, and if it *had* been damaged by the quake, perhaps letting it melt would allow the molten fuel to escape through a breech in the containment vessel, into an area where air was present (or, even just allowing the air to enter in, allowing enough oxygen to be present for fuel or other materials to really burn)?
You must have loved the title on another recent Slashdot article, "Swiss to End Use of Nuclear Power", which despite the very conclusive sound of the title, was really about some people in the Swiss Government *talking* about trying to get the Swiss to stop using Nuclear Power. Nothing had at all been passed into law or set as official government policy yet.
I've long since given up worrying about Slashdot titles. They're almost worthless, except to give you a general sense of what sort of topic you're dealing with. Complaining about them is pointless. They'll not get fixed, and the editors won't do any better job in the future.
As I've watched the news about Fukushima, I have wondered if by trying to avoid fuel meltdown, did they make matters *worse*?
I admit, I really have limited knowledge about what went wrong or could have gone wrong. I'm definitely not a nuclear engineer.
But, from the news, it seems like the biggest source of problems was caused by hydrogen explosions. The hydrogen explosions happened because steam from the cooling water, under high heat and pressure, interacted with the Zircalloy fuel cladding, which caused the oxygen to bind to the alloy, and the hydrogen to become H2 gas, which could then build up in the pressure vessel (and ultimately the containment when it was vented from the pressure vessel into the containment, I think?).
This, then, finally ignited, causing the explosions, causing damage to the containments, causing radioactive release.
So, now, my question is, why not just evacuate all the water and steam from the reactor, so that there's no (well, very little - you probably couldnt' remove 100% of the water) hydrogen present in the reactor, then just let the fuel melt to the bottom and harden into a non-critical mass? What's so terrible about the fuel melting down? It happened at TMI, and didn't become a major disaster?
Is it possible that the cure was worse than the ailment, in this case?
Something disappeared from my post, in the second paragraph. I think /. might have gotten confused by my use of less-than and greater-than signs and interpreted them as html tags. I'm reposting the second paragraph as here, with slashdot set to "code" mode.
.9 without both values being substantially close to 1.0. How is it that you claim this statistic "hides those factors"? It's simply impossible to get a capacity factor of greater than 90 percent without very high reliability of the plant. In this case, we could say that capacity factor = X * Y, where X = power produced / power max, and Y = uptime / time max.
Here in the real world, when X is multiplied times Y, where 0 <= X <= 1.0 and 0 <= Y <= 1.0, then it's mathematically impossible to get X * Y >=
Here in the real world, we generally expect people are telling the truth unless there is compelling reason to believe they are lieing. Are you suggesting that Mr. Twomey was lieing about Vermont Yankee's reliability in that letter? Based upon what compelling argument do you suggest he's lieing?
Here in the real world, when X is multiplied times Y, where 0 = .9 without both values being substantially close to 1.0. How is it that you claim this statistic "hides those factors"? It's simply impossible to get a capacity factor of greater than 90 percent without very high reliability of the plant. In this case, we could say that capacity factor = X * Y, where X = power produced / power max, and Y = uptime / time max.
When one keeps arguing against a perfectly good statistic, without explaining how it can possibly be obfuscating the truth, one cannot help but wonder why.
Here in the real world, where electricity sells for around 5-15 cents per kWh, resulting in a MW of generation bringing in $438,000 - $1,300,000 per year in revenue, an employee which costs the company maybe $100,000/year (say $50,000 in direct salary, and $50,000 in other costs - overhead, taxes, benefits, etc), is significant, but doesn't really "dominate" the bottom line across the life cycle. The cost of employees would be somewhere in the ballpark of 20-25% of revenues at the low end of the price range. At the high end of the price range, employees become around 10% of revenues.
Apples and oranges man.
80% vs 92.6% is looking at a percentage out of 100. There's a max cutoff at 100%. For that type of use of percentages, what it means is that going from 80% to 90% capacity factor means that either at 80% you have TWICE AS MUCH downtime (assuming operating at 100% power all the time you're running), or you're running at somewhat significantly lower power output, while running close to the same amount of time (or somewhere on a spectrum in between, varying the two variables in an inverse relationship).
In the case of "Employees per Megawatt", you are simply comparing two small numbers.
It's like comparing the cost of two small screws (or other small item), where maybe one costs 80 cents for 100 screws, and the other costs $1.09 for 100 screws. In each case, the package of screws is cheap, and the costs are "close" compared to say, another package of screws which costs $4.50 for 100 screws.
I bought a radio last weekend. I compared two radios, which were similar, and had similar features. One cost $85, the other cost $89. I ended up buying the one that cost $89 because, even though it was a 5 percent difference in cost, the slightly more expensive radio had a nice physical design feature I like (it had a more robust antenna connector, and physical connection between the connector and the chassis). In both cases, the radio was cheap. The difference as 4$
If I were buying a house though, a 5 percent difference could be a difference of thousands of dollars (for example, $200,000 vs $210,000. So, scale matters. Just saying something is almost 30% more than something else, without taking into account the base scale you're comparing from, doesn't mean a whole lot.
If power plant employees cost the company, on average, $100,000 (maybe $50,000 in salary, $50,000 in taxes, benefits, overhead, etc). then the plant with .8 employess/MW is spending $80,000, while the other company is spending $109,000. That's not chump change, but if the company is selling the power at, say, 5 cents per kWh (which, I believe, would actually be at the very low-end of power prices), the company would generate about $438,000 per year in revenue from selling that MW of power.
The cost of the employees as a percentage of revenue then, is about 18% for .8 employees, vs 24% for 1.09 employees. That's still something - but it shows up as much less than a 30 percent difference. The higher the price the company sells the power at, the more the effect of the difference in number of employees dwindles.
According to the US DOE, In Jan 2011, the average retail price for electricity in NV was 8.57 cents/kWh, in California it was 12.94 cents. At those sorts of prices, the amount that employees contribute as a percentage of the costs is relatively close.
On the matter of the source, I picked that because, as an executive at the company, if he's not lying, he's in a very good position to really know the truth of the matter.
Capacity factor does take into account downtime, by virtue of the fact that you take, of any given time period, how much power was produced, by how much would have been produced if the source were generating power 100% of the time at full rated power.
So, unless they can run at 150%+ of their rated power output, how can you possibly get a very high capacity factor, like 90%, without being running almost all the time? In light of that, I think your statement that, "it's not up time and tells us little to nothing about reliability", is not really correct. It might not directly be uptime, but uptime is factored into the final result. You cannot get high capacity factors without high uptime.
As for the 'same general ballpark' statement, the way I figure that is that, overall, neither plant needs particularly a lot of employees per MW. A MW is a lot of power.
It's like arguing over little screws that maybe cost 1/2 cent each, in an expensive device, like say a truck, where the vast majority of the cost doesn't come from the screws. So, one device needs .8 screws per unit output, and another uses 1.1 screws per unit output. It's close enough, in the fact that neither contributes a significant portion of the cost of the output of the device.
What planet are you from? 80%? Complete fiction. Vermont Yankee is very reliable, and had, from 2003-2009, an amazing 92.6% capacity factor. Which gives an employee/Mwatt ratio closer to 1.09, which while still slightly higher than the solar plant, isn't particularly bad.
The source for my claim is an open letter from an Entergy executive, being mirrored at the website of Meredith Angwin, who runs the Yes, Vermont Yankee blog.
For more actual *facts* about VY reliability, see this posting at Yes, VY.
In general, nuclear power plants in the U.S. have had an *industry average* of over 90%. That's not a cherry picked record for an individual plant - that's the *average* capacity factor. There are certainly some things to be worried about Nuclear plants, in terms of risks and costs, but reliability just isn't one of them. Let's stick to real problems, instead of making up fake ones.
As for number of employees per MW at nuclear plants, there is probably room for improvement there, with newer designs. However, I don't see that 650 employees for 620MW seems like a particularly *bad* ratio. As mentioned above, it's less than 1.09 empl./MW, so it's in the same general ballpark as the solar plant.
$9826 sounds like a lot of money. . . until you realize that the cost is amortized over some period of time. I don't know what the actual life of the facility will be, but I would think 50 years sounds reasonable. So, if we divide by 50 years, that comes to about $200 per house per year.
However, we also have to factor in that on top of construction costs, there are ongoing maintenance an operation costs, so maybe it comes to about $250/house/yr. That still doesn't sound outrageous to me. I think I pay like $400/year for electricity on my 1-bedroom apartment - and I'm not a large electricity consumer. I have a fridge, stove, microwave (and the stove and microwave I only use maybe 2-4 times a week), a computer, a WiFi router, a cell phone I charge at night, a couple ham radio batteries (1500mAh and 1800mAh) I occasionally charge, and lights (most of my lights are efficient CFLs). In the summer, I run a window A/C unit sometimes - but I'm only cooling a small space.
I don't know what their actual maint/ops costs will be, but $10k per household, if the plant lasts 40-50 years, just doesn't sound particularly expensive.
One of the huge advantages of nuclear fuel, is that, if you are using it *efficiently* (e.g. recycling it in something like an Integral Fast Reactor), one ton of fuel is the equivalent of millions of tons of coal or oil.
What this means is that a country can buy a *relatively* small quantity of Uranium or Thorium, and it might represent 100 years supply of energy. You couldn't easily store 100 years worth of coal - it would be the size of 10 large mountains or something, and would be crazy expensive to buy and store.
100 years worth of thorium or uranium would be large and expensive, but quite manageable for a government or large corporation to do. It would be much cheaper and much smaller than coal.
This means that you can have long negotiating cycles. There's also quite a few countries with Uranium (and, I've heard it said that there's probably a lot of undiscovered Uranium out there, as it hasn't been prospected for anywhere nearly as aggressively as coal and oil), and as the other poster who replied before me pointed out, almost every country has Thorium.
Part of the problem for supply of oil, coal, etc is that we can't buy it faster than it is consumed, and we can't easily store large surpluses (there is, of course, in the U.S. at least, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, but even that is really pretty small - I think a few months' worth of supply?). This makes us very vulnerable to market swings in price.
With Nuclear Fuel, if you've got 20 or 50 years' supply already on-hand, you've got a nice long negotiating cycle in which to get sellers to lower the price. Then, you buy more when the price is right.
Bonus: any country which has already been running nuclear power programs for a couple decades, most likely already has hundreds of years' supply of Uranium in the form of "Spent Nuclear Fuel". What we call "Nuclear Waste", at least here in the U.S. still has about 98-99 percent of its potential energy unused.
So, here in the U.S., we're sitting on, very roughly, 50 years of nuclear waste, which should be able to give us 50 years * 99, worth of energy. OK, that's a bit of a simplification - if we greatly increased our annual production of nuclear power compared to what we produced in the past, you might cut that in half or a quarter (possibly even more). Say anywhere from 500-4000 years of nuclear fuel, depending on how much we increase our nuclear power production.
There's also "depleted uranium", which could be added to the fuel mix in some of the "recycling reactor" designs (the technical name for a recycling reactor is a "fast breeder reactor" - which is a scary sounding name, but they aren't more dangerous than a "thermal reactor", which is what today's reactors are). The above estimate about using nuclear fuel more efficiently also is based upon using the spent nuclear fuel in a fast breeder.
If you use depleted Uranium in a fast breeder reactor, you can again extended the fuel supply by another huge amount. For every ton of Enriched Uranium fuel that has been produce, about 6.5 tons of depleted uranium is produced. Using that in a breeder reactor, again using the 'simplified' estimating approach above, gives us something like 50 years * 6.5 * 100 = 32, 500 years' supply. If you assume we quadruple nuclear power production (so that supply is cut by 1/4), that still gives us something like 8000 years' supply of fuel.
Coal and gas have been running advertising campaigns trying to reassure people we have 100-300 years' supply (about 100 in the case of gas - and that's at *current* consumption rates, which look set to double or triple if we start building a lot of gas power plants and gas-backed solar/wind farms; closer to 200-300 years for coal).
Nuclear is the only fuel-based energy source which can credibly claim around 10,000 years' supply, *at the very minimum*. Solar and Wind, of course, can claim energy supply until the Sun dies; I have some hope solar and wind (and necessary supporting technologies like grid-scale energy storage systems) can mature to help provide part of our energy needs, but I just don't see them, based on the current technology, providing more than about 20 percent of our power.
In truth, with today's academic programs at most university's, anyone wanting to specialize in a technical field (and this might apply to many other fields as well), should probably try, during their junior high and high school years to get "early exposure" to that field. If you already know basic programming in two or three languages, know some basic data structures and algorithms, etc. You will be far, far more prepared after that 15 week course.
It has become common in a lot of high schools to offer 'electorates', or after school clubs, which will give some early exposure to engineering and computer programming. Probably would be worth extending that concept to as many topics as possible (although schools also face budgetary and classroom-availability limitations, and god forbid anyone cut the football, basketball or cheer-leading budgets at most schools).