PV collectors aren't that delicate - my house got hit by golf-ball sized hail, which destroyed the shingles, but did not damage the PV system at all.
Wow. Is that the metric we're going by? We've tested nuclear reactor containment domes to hold up to collisions with jet powered aircraft. If we tested PV panels to the same standard, as in jet airplane collisions, then how would PV collectors hold up?
I keep hearing on how nuclear power plants are magnets for terror. Well, isn't any source of electricity? It may be possible to distribute solar power across a wide area but if we are talking about terrorists capable of flying jet planes into major infrastructure features then nuclear power will hold up to this while solar power would not. Solar power wouldn't hold up to a guy gone loony and started firing a machine gun from a Cessna 172. That is unless you want to claim your PV panels are bullet proof?
Nuclear energy needs community support and a plan for maintenance lasting thousands of years.
No, it does not.
The fission products from uranium is not a dumping out of the periodic table and all it's isotopes. We have observed what kind of isotopes are produced and the number is quite small. There are the short lived products that last seconds, minutes, or perhaps a few months. Those we allow to decay in the spent fuel cooling pools on site. A good "rule of thumb" is that in 10 half lives any given isotope is effectively "gone". So keep the fuel in these pools for perhaps a dozen years, we know we can do that because that's standard practice now.
Next are the medium lived products, and there are only a handful of those. Many of which have useful industrial or medical uses and we'd be idiots to just throw them away. These have half lives in the decades and so a "rule of thumb" danger on them if we did throw them away is about 300 years. We've managed projects for 300 years before. Again, this is assuming we did something stupid like throw this stuff in a hole and were guarding it from scrap metal scavengers and curious children.
With the long lived fission products there is a big leap in the length of the half life, we go from decades to millions of years. With half lives this long it's not considered a radiation hazard. This kind of stuff occurs in nature. That doesn't mean we should eat it, no more than people should eat dirt, but it's not a radiation hazard. We can simply landfill this stuff. If we want to take extra care we can encase it in glass or concrete first. If we feel the material has exceptional value then we can use it industrially. This might be true of the more plentiful fission products like zirconium and palladium.
If anyone believes I am mistaken then point to the fission products that concern you, and the half life of those isotopes.
I'm doing a little trolling here, I like reminding solar advocates that the electricity that the panels make is from nuclear fusion.
Oh, they know that and they seem to enjoy pointing that out whenever someone claims nuclear fusion is just 10 years away.
Here's what I like to do, point out to the geothermal people that it's powered by uranium and thorium. We are consuming that energy either way with geothermal or with nuclear. The difference is in how much energy we can draw from that pool of radioactive material in the billions of years it will last. We can consume with considerable losses in the transfer by geothermal or we can mine it, put it in a reactor, and consume it with far greater efficiency by fission. There's enough uranium dissolved in the ocean to last millions of years at current rates. By using both thorium and uranium fuel in breeder reactors we will see the sun consume Earth's atmosphere before we run out of fuel.
If solar power is "sustainable" or "renewable" then so is nuclear. If geothermal power is "sustainable"... well, you get the idea.
Nuclear power is just as renewable, sustainable, and "zero carbon", as any other energy source we know of today. Nuclear power is also as safe, or safer, as anything else today.
For the same cost we can build pumped storage plants, and let the consumer worry about the generation side.
Same costs? How? Nuclear takes the least material to produce power than any energy source available to us, and with the least CO2 produced. Did you even click on the link? Here it is again: http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2...
The ramp-up rate on homeowners choosing to go solar before Juche-Trumpism would be enough to replace a lot of the shortfall, except for the storage problem.
That kind of expenditure does not make it impossible, I will admit that. What it does do is make the storage problem alone a greater expense in time, money, effort, and materials, than if the energy was produced with far more reliable nuclear power. Nuclear power, as it is done today, will need some storage for load following and perhaps even seasonal variation but far far less of it. That "storage problem" is many times more than the cost of building an all nuclear grid of PRODUCTION. I'll emphasize that, the storage needs alone for wind and solar exceed the cost of producing that electricity from even old style nuclear power.
Rather than building a new massive hub and spoke infrastructure, we should be investing in to a truely distributed grid with localized storage facilities to help balance the load
I agree. Let's build many "small" nuclear power plants of about 5 GW generation each (that would be probably 6 current reactors or about a dozen small modular reactors) and spread them about over 200 different sites. Add in some storage from batteries and hydro to keep the grid stable and manage for losses of grid connections, and have some on-site backup generation at vital sites like hospitals, police stations, military bases, airports, and so on. But we have such backup already, or at least we do if we're smart. There's also plenty of hydro storage too in a lot of places. Wherever we need storage for nuclear then we can draw from the same well this storage would draw from as if we did solar and wind.
There is a very important reason we use this "hub and spoke" infrastructure, economy of scale. It's this aversion to building large nuclear power plants that has driven up costs in people to run engineering, administration, security, maintenance, and so on. Put 4 or 6 reactors on a site and watch prices fall.
The latest reactors are safer but no reactor is meltdown proof, just less likely to meltdown.
Can you explain to me how a molten salt reactor would melt down?
A molten salt reactor is still a prototype and so I'll give you that the reactors we use today are not meltdown proof but great care has been taken to prevent a repeat of meltdown like at Fukushima. What happened at Chernobyl will simply never happen again. That was a reactor made from known flawed drawings and built without correcting them. The materials used in construction did not meet even these flawed specs. The reactor was operated in an unsafe manner, and when the inevitable happened there was no containment dome over the core.
Third generation reactors, those being built today, are exceedingly safe. They are able to be rendered safe even in the case of a power loss, unlike the second generation reactors at Fukushima. Should there be a highly unlikely meltdown then the floor under the reactor is designed to prevent the molten core from maintaining fission, and made of material capable of containing the heat from radioactive decay. This is also unlike at Fukushima. There the floor was relatively common concrete and the water within it was able to reflect enough neutrons back to keep fission going. It was only by burning through enough concrete to dilute the fuel did fission stop. New reactors will have materials that remove neutrons and heat immediately to stop this from happening again.
And they are not immune from natural disasters.
That's true. As third generation reactors are built today a tsunami like what hit Fukushima would have likely rendered it out of commission for a long time, but reparable. A more severe quake may render a modern reactor irreparable but no loss of radioactive material would occur. If there is something that can both crack open a modern reactor and overwhelm the safety systems then you have bigger things to worry about than the reactor.
Also, nothing is immune from natural disasters. We've seen nuclear power plants operate through hurricanes, tornadoes, and most anything nature can throw at it. Earthquakes are probably their greatest weakness but, as I stated earlier, we now know how to render them safe in such cases. Compare this to power sources like coal. A coal plant needs large quantities of coal to operate. If it's piled under enough snow and ice that can be a problem. Earthquakes and tsunamis can damage coal power plants too. Windmills will shut down if the wind is too low, or too high. It's also vulnerable to ice, lightning, and other natural events. Solar power is certainly vulnerable, with it's delicate PV collectors or reflecting mirrors.
Nothing is perfect. Given the choices we have it would seem that making nuclear power a large portion of our electric generation capacity would be wise. Given the massive quantity of materials needed for wind and solar for the same energy we don't have much choice but to build more nuclear. http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2...
The Russian 70MW in the article seems too small to really be useful-- you would almost be better off with a LNG tanker and big turbine integrated together.
That is until winter comes, and stays longer than it's welcome.
I do recall a major operation recently of trying to get fuel oil to an Alaskan community that was running low because of an unexpectedly long ice pack in the harbor. Because the US Coast Guard is severely short on ice breaking capacity, and the US in general doesn't have many ice hardened ships, there were Russian companies hired to break the ice and use special ice hardened oil tankers to get just close enough to run a pipe and fill some tanks and prevent everyone from freezing to death.
You can park a bunch of fuel tankers out in the harbor for what you propose. You could also keep breaking the ice to bring more fuel in. Or, as it seems they plan to do, park a floating nuclear power plant in the harbor and not have to worry about it for 10 or 12 years. I'm guessing they still need fuel for some but not all heating and cooking, and for vehicles as well, but with a nuclear power plant they are unlikely have a life and death crisis if a fuel shipment is delayed. People might have cabin fever, and be tired of eating polar bear meat, but they aren't likely to freeze and starve.
North America and Western Europe have zero to negative growth in energy demand, so they don't need new nukes anyway.
That's an insane statement to make. The USA gets 20% of its electricity from nuclear power. These nuclear power plants have an average age of about 40 years. That average age is about the same as the intended operational life span of these reactors. Fortunately these reactors were overbuilt with just crazy safety margins. This means that as more was learned the operators were able to figure out how to get more out of what they had. Through improved techniques and upgrades over time the output of nuclear power increased over time even as older reactors were shut down and not replaced.
This continued extension of the lifespan of these aging reactors cannot continue indefinitely. They will have to be shutdown, and relatively soon, and replaced with something. That something must be new nuclear power.
There is 1000 GW, give or take, of electrical generation capacity in the USA right now. About 100 GW of that is nuclear. The observant might now be asking how 10% of generating capacity being nuclear can provide 20% of the electricity we consume. The answer is that nuclear power plants are operating 90% of their maximum capacity while other generating sources are getting half that, more or less. More generating capacity with coal and natural gas, less than half maximum generating capacity from wind, solar, hydro, and others.
Now coal is not only "bad" (whether that be politically, economically, environmentally, or whatever) they are often old. We will need new generating capacity to replace these coal plants that are scheduled for shutdown. As it is now the US federal government expects to see 20 GW of new natural gas generation installed by the end of this year. We can keep doing that until all the roughly 300 GW of coal is replaced, and the 100 GW of aging nuclear as well, or we can try something else.
We can install more wind and solar but as the article I linked to above from the "A Cubic Mile of Oil" blog, the resources needed for wind and solar are orders of magnitude higher. We're talking a few hundred tons of material per TWh produced versus 10,000 or 15,000 tons. Then there is the issue of CO2 produced and that is laid out in the last paragraph of that article.
The prospect of climate change and ocean acidification are real, and the long time it takes to implement corrective measures means that we must rapidly decarbonize our energy systems. Our fears of radiation are largely unfounded and have had the deleterious effect of continued use of fossil fuels. Even as we deploy wind and solarâ"the nominally low-carbon sourcesâ"the absence of large scale storage systems have forced us into using natural gas power for back up. The design of natural gas power plants used as spinning reserves are selected on the rapidity with which they can be brought online. These designs are among the least efficient of gas-fired plants, with thermal efficiencies around 33%, and thus high carbon emissions. Gas-fired power plants that operate with a combined steam cycle have thermal efficiencies in excess of 50%. Analysis by Larsen and Rez shows that we would do better in terms of carbon emissions if instead of installing low capacity factor wind or solar systems and backing them with natural gas, we simply used a combined cycle natural gas plant.
Wind and solar do not reduce our CO2 output and they will not until we have a sufficient supply of low CO2 storage online. Building natural gas plants up to now only reduced CO2 because it was replacing coal. With added wind and solar more of that natural gas is consumed in inefficient peaker power generators that in the end do not reduce CO2. If we assume no future growth
Have I passed through into a parallel universe? At what point did "intellectually stimulating", "environmentally friendly" and "non-toxic" become nonsense?
My guess is between 1975 and 1990. From about 1975 back to the start of WW1 there was greater concerns than what kind of toys the children had. Parents were more concerned about war, economic depression, and energy shortages then what the toys were made of. After 1975 there wasn't much concern for war, the economy was starting to grow again, and things were looking fairly good. In 1990 things were even better with the Cold War over and so there wasn't parents much concerned about a nuclear war. So, sometime in there with nothing much else to worry about people started to invent problems.
One invented problem was that toys weren't intellectually stimulating enough. So, toys had to get more complicated. Another invented problem was being environmentally friendly, because everything had to be environmentally friendly now. I guess that maybe there was some merit in keeping toys safe but the problems on that seemed to be blown out of proportion. The new more complex toys had motors that could grab fingers and hair, some things got hotter than they should, and were made of new materials with properties that might lead to things that got unexpectedly sharp, small (choke hazard), or whatever. But again since the kids had only toys that "threatened" them people turned to the toys. These problems were fixed quickly and now every toy is exceedingly safe, to the point of being boring.
So, I'd say this nonsense began sometime between 1975 and 1990. But then that's my view, I'm sure someone else might claim it started sooner with a bunch of toy safety scares in the 1950s or 1960s. Before that toys made of pretty mundane stuff (therefore not toxic or not thought to be toxic), and no one thought much of the environment, and (again) had larger concerns than the children's toys. That is especially true of concerns on them being intellectually stimulating when few people graduated high school.
Lego already scores pretty high on all counts that concerned parents then and concern them now. Making them environmentally friendly is the last metric that anyone might be concerned about. The amounts of Lego blocks produced is such a tiny impact on the environment on the grand scheme this is just another invented problem.
They are doing it because of marketing. They're trying to sell more toys by pretending to care about the environment.
DING! DING! DING! DING! DING! DING!
We have a winner!
We are seeing a new generation of parents that have been raised by their tree hugging a pot smoking parents. They want toys that are intellectually stimulating, environmentally friendly, contains no toxic chemicals, and all that other nonsense. Legos are some of the best toys for children as they are. I loved them growing up, as did my brothers and friends. Lego made a big push to get girls to like them with girl friendly color palettes, kits, and marketing. It must have worked because all my nieces and nephews love them. I buy Lego kits for them all and they love me for giving them Lego kits. I just need to buy the Star Wars kits for the boys and the bright pastel colored kits for the girls. Because boys and girls are different.
My siblings aren't all that concerned about Lego being eco-friendly but their spouses are. If there were some eco-friendly way to make the blocks then that would make the Lego kits that more attractive.
Part of the problem is that is costs more to recycle plastic than it does to simply manufacture new plastic. Otherwise there would already be a market for non-subsidized plastic, the way there is a market for aluminum and scrap steel. Also, since most of the cost for recycling is energy, and most off that energy comes from fossil fuels, you aren't really saving anything by recycling plastic (challenge: for anyone who says use renewable energy, calculate the carbon footprint of a solar panel, nuclear power plant, or windmill, plus add the added carbon necessary in economic activity to pay for its higher cost).
I had a chemistry professor comment in one of his lectures that recycling plastics is stupid. People should just burn them. I recall he mentioned this because at the time there was a debate on building a waste burning power plant in the area.
If someone is going to look for an energy source to recycle this plastic, synthesize it, reduce it to it's constituent elements, or whatever you wish to do to lower the carbon emitted, then look closely at nuclear power. Nuclear power is low carbon, safe, and just generally a good idea. If someone wants to raise issues of the waste problem then I'll just say that it appears that any problems on the safety of the waste was included in those calculations. The author, Dr. Ripu Malhotra, also made a powerpoint presentation where he points out that next generation nuclear will consume much of the existing waste. https://drive.google.com/file/...
When it comes to replacing petroleum based transportation fuel, and presumably also petroleum based feedstock for making Lego blocks, there's the US Navy program on developing a hydrocarbon synthesis device. A device that they intend to power with nuclear reactors. https://phys.org/news/2017-10-...
One complaint I keep hearing is the costs of nuclear power. Well, a single reactor does cost a lot of money but it produces lots of energy, it will produce energy at a cost that's at least competitive with any source available today. We know this because of past performance. There's a lot of room for improvement with economies of scale and, in the USA at least, there is sufficient demand to allow for this economy of scale. The US government expects to see 20 GW of new natural gas electrical generation capacity this year. A typical nuclear power reactor produces 1 GW of electrical capacity. We could build a new nuclear reactor every month and still need to build more electrical generation capacity from natural gas, wind, or whatever, to keep up with demand. The USA saw reactors being built at this rate once before and there's no reason to expect we can't do it again. This is especially true given the much greater material needs for the alternatives like wind and solar.
see for a study citation that shows most of the censorship on campus is directed at left wing people. Make of it what you will but the study appears accurate. As for Milo, he was welcome to speak at the campus in question. They asked him to pay for his own security, which is the standard practice for controversial speakers who are likely to result in violence. It doesn't matter who causes the violence (left, right, white, black or purpose), what matters is that the even was deemed risky and required security and the school wasn't going to pay for it.
First is that I didn't mention where this censorship occurred and so your comment on the security fees being raised at the last minute was a lucky guess. Well, the odds were in your favor on that guess.
Second, as this event was at a public university there is already precedent for the school to cover the security costs no matter how high it might be. Just because they believe a bunch of students will riot is not justifiable for a public school to pass on those costs to the student organization that made the invitation. If that was allowed then any school could deny any speaker by merely making the claim that the costs would be too high.
Now, if you want a public space with full security paid for by tax payer dollars that's fine. But that's not what schools are. They're places of learning.
Tell me something. What is a professor? What does a professor do and where does a professor perform his/her duties? The answer is the speak at a public space with full security paid for by the taxpayer. That's what schools are, places of learning by listening to people speak. Milo, Ben Shapiro, or whomever else you can think of, are merely invited professors that came to profess on a topic for which the students invited them. The people that got tickets for the event is not all that different than signing up for a lecture. I saw classes that gave credits for attending these lectures. As I recall they were one credit courses that were required for graduation in some programs, and the schools invited someone to speak twice per week on a variety of topics. If you attended enough of these lectures in the semester then you met that degree requirement.
I don't know what kind of education that Milo Yiannapolous could offer but Ben Shapiro is a lawyer, author, and hosts a popular radio program, UC-Berkeley should be pleased to host someone as educated, intelligent, and popular as Shapiro. UC-Berkeley was taken to court for not wanting to cover the security costs and lost. If any other public school wants to pull that stunt again then I'm thinking they'd get the same treatment in any other court. Shapiro got to speak and the state had to cover the security costs. Milo put his foot in his mouth so deep I'm not sure he'd be able to talk, physically that is, even if anyone were to invite him. I find the man rather repulsive and boring so I'm glad he has faded away, but that doesn't mean I want him denied a platform.
The tone of your post implies an alt-right bent, which would mean you'd oppose taxpayer funded safe spaces for people to speak. Personally as a lefty I'm all for it.
I believe that past precedent on public speaking has already set the ground rules on public speaking. If any private organization wants to rent a park, amphitheater, stadium, or other public facility, for a speech or other event then they should be expected to pay for renting the property and providing security. With student organizations at a public school the rules are a bit different, the school is expected to provide security no matter what those costs might be, and the organization making the invitation is often expected to pay a standard fee that is appropriate for the size of the space requested. I will concede some latitude on the costs and appropriateness of the people invited but that would be exceedingly rare, such as a foreign dignitary, someone that's been con
I agree that there is quite likely enough evidence to seize the computer records from FaceBook. Where I have a problem is he was asked for evidence that can be used against him, and then punished when he refused.
He was punished without due process. He was required to offer evidence to use against him. This is potentially a search without a proper warrant or cause. It's a case like this that gave us the Miranda Warning.
I agree that this is something that could set precedent. The way I see it there's enough precedent to stop this, but for some reason the argument of "on a computer" makes people think that this is somehow novel.
I see. Where I went to university those deemed a minority had the power to demand free tuition, and get it, and the privilege to get admitted with a lower ACT or SAT score than I did. Sounds like racism to me, and against me, a white man.
I'm sure someone will want to defend this because minorities "earned" this because white men discriminated against them in the past. Bullshit! These people didn't experience any discrimination, they were 18 years old at the time and never lived under any discrimination. I didn't discriminate against anyone, certainly not the other applicants that I never met. I was also an 18 year old idiot at the time. I had no "power" or "privilege". I had to take out a loan and find a job to pay for my education, that doesn't sound like a "privilege".
By your definition my university was racist against me. Seems like today this racism is widespread, with universities giving privileges and power to those that are not white men.
I keep getting called a racist for merely being a white man. What do you expect me to do about that? Get myself a tan and curl my hair like Dolezal, or whatever her name is? Go make up some story about a native american ancestor? Put on a dress and lipstick and ask people to, "call me Cait"?
Fuck you. No one is more discriminated against in the USA today than white men.
I'm sure it's just over shared interests in comic books, stargazing, and calligraphy.
What do you think they were talking about? If the suspect was at least half honest about his cannabis habit then I have one shared interest down, and the other isn't comic books.
I recall a story that likely has a grain of truth to it. It goes something like this... Benjamin Franklin was seen leaving the chambers on where they were debating the creation of a new United States government. A lady on the street asked, "What have you given us, Dr. Franklin?" His reply, "A republic, madam, if you can keep it."
He should be allowed to keep his privacy. His loss of privacy due to the government prying into it is the loss of a republic.
I know this is a story from the UK but the rules on keeping a republic is universal. Requiring the revelation of a pass code upon demands of the government violate many basic rights needed to maintain a republic.
The guy is being punished for inconveniencing the government. Well, sometimes law enforcement is inconvenient. They know they can get what they seek from FaceBook, as does the suspect. The suspect also knows he's likely to get a very long sentence if he's caught. So, it's only in his best interest to keep his mouth shut. This kind of punishment serves no purpose but to erode people's rights to be free from government coercion.
People can keep their privacy only if they defend it. By defending privacy against the government they are defending the concept of a republic. It's disconcerting to think that this kind of law exists in what is considered a free nation. Just by asking for the pass code they are violating the suspect's rights.
Voice could possibly come close to the speed if it could get the accuracy up.
That won't happen until we get some kind of standard on spelling vs. pronunciation. Here's an example... I was listening to some music on my Sirius radio and heard a song I liked. I made note of the artist on the radio display, Gina Clowes. How is that pronounced? I have no idea. Does that rhyme with "house", "hose", or "haws"? I made my best guess on the pronunciation and said to my Echo, "Alexa, play music by Gina Clowes," and hoped for the best. The response was something like, "I can't find music by jean clothes". That's like hearing the double translation from English to Chinese and back again, and probably not far from what is actually happening in the software.
I found out that spelling bees are quite unique to the English speaking world. That's because English has "borrowed" so much from other languages that the rules on spelling is that there are none. Spelling anything but the most trivial of words is only by memorization. We can pronounce them and spell them but without a lot of context the two rarely correlate. It takes a lot of brain power to figure this out and we don't think much of it. Getting a human to keep this straight is hard enough, and getting computer to figure this out any time soon will be nearly impossible.
There's people out there trained in the art of transcribing on special keyboards made specifically for this purpose. They can type 200 words per minute, which is a bit faster than typical speaking. They do this by not spelling words but by phonetics. Turning that into precise written English language still requires interpretation from context. Using such a keyboard for things like writing computer code would be, I can imagine, quite difficult.
Noone is in love with the keyboard but it's the best we have currently.
The Yoga has no keyboard but what I really want to know is, does it have a headphone port?
I know how to plug in a keyboard if I need one but I can't figure out how to go plugging in a set of headphones without a 1/8th inch diameter socket.
Just so I'm clear, I'm not a fan of either iterations of touch input devices. I'll pile on with the bashing.
What I'd like is a keyboard that has the keys in a nice vertical and horizontal layout and not cost a small fortune. The only reason the keyboards way back when had this staggered layout was to allow for the levers behind each key to not interfere on mechanical typewriters. Computers never had this limitation My fingers move generally up and down in line with my arms, not slanted to the left by extending them and to the right by bringing fingertips closer to my wrist. I know such keyboards exist but they shouldn't cost more than the computer.
I'm sure that with a touch screen I can layout the keys as I wish with a software update. I'm also sure such a screen lacks any tactile feedback so I can touch type with a error rate far above my already terrible typing. I'm all for innovating on the outdated keyboard designs but let's not go backwards on keyboard design, okay?
Look out. Slashdot Cunts will downmod you for shitting on their precious state.
I hear that shitting on California is quite popular. People will just shit on the streets, in the parks, just anywhere they please. This shitting on California got so bad that they lost a lot of business from national conventions that used to meet there, stating concerns of health and comfort. Now they go to where people learned to shit in a toilet.
Oh, right, not that shitting in a toilet in California is always helpful. A combination of not being able to provide enough municipal water and the mandates for low flush toilets has meant not enough water flows through the sewer systems to clear out the shit. Now they have to ship in bleach by the truckload to clean everything up and kill the smell.
The recent droughts they have is no excuse for not enough fresh water. There are far drier places in the world that can find enough water for people to drink and bathe. They have access to the ocean, so the shortage of drinking water can be only because they failed to build enough desalination capacity. South Africa is in a similar situation. Both saw demand for water rise but did nothing to plan for new capacity of water supply.
The whole state of California is a shit hole. It will only get worse until the politicians stop shitting on it themselves.
People misunderstand what computer science actually is, where it came from, and therefore what it means to study it. As someone smarter than me put it, "Computer science is to computers what telescopes are to astronomy." The computer is just the tool, it's not the ends. People take, or at least should take, computer science with the intent to understand the mathematics, algorithms, and so forth behind the science of computing. If the goal is to just write code then there's community college for that. If someone wants to know how to write code to meet a specification then that's engineering.
Seems to me that it took decades for people to understand the distinction between computer science and software engineering. There's been some good software engineers that studied computer science, just like I met some good mechanical engineers that studied physics in college. Your experience mirrors mine, I've had classmates that major in engineering, computer science, as well as other majors, and there is certainly a different mindset among those in engineering and those in the sciences. Too many people have majored in computer science thinking that's what people take to write good code. It's not, and employers learned this too. I've heard recruiters talk about avoiding computer science majors until they've run out of engineering majors to hire.
CS didn't need to mature, it was doing what it intended. What we needed was software engineering to mature as a discipline separate from EE, math, computer science, and the other realms from which it drew. I see this now in where I went to university, they didn't have a software engineering program. They didn't even have a formal computer engineering program separate from EE. Now they have both a computer engineering program and a "major track" in software engineering for people in EE, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, and other related majors. We'll probably see Software Engineering define itself more in the future and become a formal degree program that's separated out further and become a distinct major soon.
History is fascinating and as an engineering student I took courses on the history of engineering. We must learn our history or, as the saying goes and you point out, repeat our mistakes.
Here's another thing I picked up in engineering, most every course I took in math and engineering was basically a history course. We started out the semester with what people knew since (picking a date somewhat randomly) perhaps the 1850s. People building bridges, firing cannons, or whatever else, figured out patterns and wrote them down. Then in about 1910 they figured out more stuff. In 1950 or so they learned more and wrote it down. And so on and so on. Each passing week of the course was an additional layer of complexity built on what we learned before, just as people in the past learned based on what was known before. I found the best instructors will point out the when and who of history while teaching. It takes little time in class to point this out but adds much in value and context.
I don't believe that majoring in history is a bad thing but I do believe that students must go into it with an occupation in mind. History on it's own might get someone a job teaching it but that's a very limited occupation. I'll see a lot of politicians that studied history in college and I sometimes wonder if this is just a way for them to say they went to college in their future political career or they studied history to be an effective leader and representative of the people. That's not saying both can't be true, but studying things like medicine, accounting, statistics and so on can just as easily prepare someone to be a good politician, as well as allow for an occupation outside of politics.
I had this discussion with my music instructor. I asked out of pure curiosity what he intended to do with his masters in music. He at first avoided answering the question. I later realized that he didn't think of that too much or he didn't have an answer. Later on he made mention of finding a job (or at least the high likelihood of it) as a professional performer in an orchestra and as a private instructor. We don't need too many music majors but they are important to teach music to the engineers that build the stuff we enjoy, like the auditorium that my music instructor is likely performing in right now.
When things are going well people can find work majoring in music and history because people will pay for this as a leisure activity. When things are not so well then people will still need accountants, engineers, physicians, lawyers, and so on. A college education used to be a leisure activity for the wealthy, and in many cases people might be best served to avoid the luxury of a college degree, especially when times are tough.
Can I come to your house and scream at you about why my value system is great, and your value system is terrible? How about your job? Want to invite me along next time you go jogging or riding a bicycle so I can mock your religious views? Can I sit shotgun on your morning commute and berate you about your lifestyle choices?
A speaker coming to a campus, like Milo Yiannopoulos who had his speaking event canceled at a campus near me, is not screaming at me from the passenger seat in my car. These are people that reserved a space on a campus and if you don't like what they have to say then invite your own speaker. In fact I'd be fine if you hold up some placards outside the event. What should never be tolerated is violence in response or disrupting the event with noise making and screaming. If you want the freedom to share your views then you must tolerate those you oppose to speak as well.
Care to have me preach about satanism at your local church?
No? Are those safe spaces for you?
I do feel that my church is a safe space. I suspect that if you ask nicely that you might actually be allowed to speak on satanism at the church, perhaps not during scheduled Sunday worship but the building is open to many diverse groups to meet, such as a local ham radio club that meets in their basement.
You have a misunderstanding of the term safe spaces. It should be obvious by now that most people have plenty of "safe spaces". But, imagine you're a LGBTQ college kid who shares a 12' x 12' dorm room with a bigoted moron. Where do you go to get away from that.
You get away from that by a complaint to the people that run the residence halls. They don't want to see those assigned a room together to get in fights and such so they will find another room. At a minimum they would be most likely willing to let someone out of the contract, I was able to do that because I was not happy in my room. It wasn't a roommate issue, just that the room was only 12x12.
And I agree that shouting down others as a primary form of debate is awful, and all too common. But if you think it's somehow limited to liberal college kids, you must have a very narrow view of the world yourself.
No, I'm pretty sure it's limited to liberal college kids. Most anyone else in college is too focused on doing their calculus and the rest just plain grew up.
I'm quite aware of the paradox. I've heard it expressed in several different ways. One is, "There is one thought that stops all thought and that is the one thought that needs to be stopped." Or, "Don't open your mind so much that your brains fall out."
However, from your sig I would already bet that you will never figure it out. Can you even imagine that your worship words have actual meanings?
I'm trying to figure it out. Here's one thing that I'm quite sure of is when it comes to concepts like one's freedom to speak we must err on the side of speaking freely. I remember as a kid watching some movie on TV about some tribe in Africa, a fictionalized account of historical events. Now in most any other case of what is considered acceptable on television in the West, or what my parents would allow me to watch at that age, topless women would not be among them. But the people making the movie thought that having women in the tribe wear something to cover their nipples would not only be historically inaccurate it would be more distracting than the perceived immodesty. There's a line there on what is considered acceptable and it gets fuzzy sometimes. I saw a similar thing happen with a documentary on the terror attacks on the World Trade Center. Normally a network would be fined for letting profanity be uttered but there was an exception for this case, because the events depicted were beyond the profane and a few "not nice" words from police and firefighters were mild by comparison. Trying to catch all the profanity and remove it would have also sanitized what was happening. You really think I don't understand my signature line? I gave it considerable thought. Just like removing "hate speech" is a greater threat to our freedom than the "hate speech" itself there is a greater threat to our freedoms by disarming people than allowing people to be armed.
The idea of "hate speech" is simply "something I don't like" and it shifts and moves and always seems to ratchet towards more and more tyranny. Same for "assault weapon", it's just a term for "something I want to ban" and the definition only shifts tighter and tighter towards more tyranny. I'll err on the side of greater freedoms despite what threats that might have to my personal safety. That's because nothing is more deadly than a government that gets to define what a person may say or own.
Unless there are "happy murders" and "love frauds" ?
Murder is by definition unlawful. Homicide on the other hand has four kinds, felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy. At least according to Ambrose Bierce. That might equate to (by my estimation at least) murder, manslaughter, self defense, and war.
I remember a short exchange on the distinction between killing and murder in the movie The Big Red One. In short is that you don't "murder" a Nazi, you kill them, much like one would kill a rabid dog. A sick dog isn't ever murdered because there is no crime in that.
I hear this a lot, that guns are only good for murder. If that's true then why do we give guns to soldiers and police? Maybe because not every killing of another human is murder. Why would a private citizen want a sidearm? Like the kind any police officer might carry? Maybe because they don't believe that there's such a thing as a "happy murder" and might want to prevent themselves from being murdered by some sick puppy.
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PV collectors aren't that delicate - my house got hit by golf-ball sized hail, which destroyed the shingles, but did not damage the PV system at all.
Wow. Is that the metric we're going by? We've tested nuclear reactor containment domes to hold up to collisions with jet powered aircraft. If we tested PV panels to the same standard, as in jet airplane collisions, then how would PV collectors hold up?
I keep hearing on how nuclear power plants are magnets for terror. Well, isn't any source of electricity? It may be possible to distribute solar power across a wide area but if we are talking about terrorists capable of flying jet planes into major infrastructure features then nuclear power will hold up to this while solar power would not. Solar power wouldn't hold up to a guy gone loony and started firing a machine gun from a Cessna 172. That is unless you want to claim your PV panels are bullet proof?
Nuclear energy needs community support and a plan for maintenance lasting thousands of years.
No, it does not.
The fission products from uranium is not a dumping out of the periodic table and all it's isotopes. We have observed what kind of isotopes are produced and the number is quite small. There are the short lived products that last seconds, minutes, or perhaps a few months. Those we allow to decay in the spent fuel cooling pools on site. A good "rule of thumb" is that in 10 half lives any given isotope is effectively "gone". So keep the fuel in these pools for perhaps a dozen years, we know we can do that because that's standard practice now.
Next are the medium lived products, and there are only a handful of those. Many of which have useful industrial or medical uses and we'd be idiots to just throw them away. These have half lives in the decades and so a "rule of thumb" danger on them if we did throw them away is about 300 years. We've managed projects for 300 years before. Again, this is assuming we did something stupid like throw this stuff in a hole and were guarding it from scrap metal scavengers and curious children.
With the long lived fission products there is a big leap in the length of the half life, we go from decades to millions of years. With half lives this long it's not considered a radiation hazard. This kind of stuff occurs in nature. That doesn't mean we should eat it, no more than people should eat dirt, but it's not a radiation hazard. We can simply landfill this stuff. If we want to take extra care we can encase it in glass or concrete first. If we feel the material has exceptional value then we can use it industrially. This might be true of the more plentiful fission products like zirconium and palladium.
If anyone believes I am mistaken then point to the fission products that concern you, and the half life of those isotopes.
I'm doing a little trolling here, I like reminding solar advocates that the electricity that the panels make is from nuclear fusion.
Oh, they know that and they seem to enjoy pointing that out whenever someone claims nuclear fusion is just 10 years away.
Here's what I like to do, point out to the geothermal people that it's powered by uranium and thorium. We are consuming that energy either way with geothermal or with nuclear. The difference is in how much energy we can draw from that pool of radioactive material in the billions of years it will last. We can consume with considerable losses in the transfer by geothermal or we can mine it, put it in a reactor, and consume it with far greater efficiency by fission. There's enough uranium dissolved in the ocean to last millions of years at current rates. By using both thorium and uranium fuel in breeder reactors we will see the sun consume Earth's atmosphere before we run out of fuel.
If solar power is "sustainable" or "renewable" then so is nuclear. If geothermal power is "sustainable"... well, you get the idea.
Nuclear power is just as renewable, sustainable, and "zero carbon", as any other energy source we know of today. Nuclear power is also as safe, or safer, as anything else today.
For the same cost we can build pumped storage plants, and let the consumer worry about the generation side.
Same costs? How? Nuclear takes the least material to produce power than any energy source available to us, and with the least CO2 produced. Did you even click on the link? Here it is again:
http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2...
The ramp-up rate on homeowners choosing to go solar before Juche-Trumpism would be enough to replace a lot of the shortfall, except for the storage problem.
That "storage problem" is not trivial. That's a sixteen TRILLION dollar problem.
http://www.roadmaptonowhere.co...
That kind of expenditure does not make it impossible, I will admit that. What it does do is make the storage problem alone a greater expense in time, money, effort, and materials, than if the energy was produced with far more reliable nuclear power. Nuclear power, as it is done today, will need some storage for load following and perhaps even seasonal variation but far far less of it. That "storage problem" is many times more than the cost of building an all nuclear grid of PRODUCTION. I'll emphasize that, the storage needs alone for wind and solar exceed the cost of producing that electricity from even old style nuclear power.
Rather than building a new massive hub and spoke infrastructure, we should be investing in to a truely distributed grid with localized storage facilities to help balance the load
I agree. Let's build many "small" nuclear power plants of about 5 GW generation each (that would be probably 6 current reactors or about a dozen small modular reactors) and spread them about over 200 different sites. Add in some storage from batteries and hydro to keep the grid stable and manage for losses of grid connections, and have some on-site backup generation at vital sites like hospitals, police stations, military bases, airports, and so on. But we have such backup already, or at least we do if we're smart. There's also plenty of hydro storage too in a lot of places. Wherever we need storage for nuclear then we can draw from the same well this storage would draw from as if we did solar and wind.
There is a very important reason we use this "hub and spoke" infrastructure, economy of scale. It's this aversion to building large nuclear power plants that has driven up costs in people to run engineering, administration, security, maintenance, and so on. Put 4 or 6 reactors on a site and watch prices fall.
Meltdown proof until one actually melts down. :)
The latest reactors are safer but no reactor is meltdown proof, just less likely to meltdown.
Can you explain to me how a molten salt reactor would melt down?
A molten salt reactor is still a prototype and so I'll give you that the reactors we use today are not meltdown proof but great care has been taken to prevent a repeat of meltdown like at Fukushima. What happened at Chernobyl will simply never happen again. That was a reactor made from known flawed drawings and built without correcting them. The materials used in construction did not meet even these flawed specs. The reactor was operated in an unsafe manner, and when the inevitable happened there was no containment dome over the core.
Third generation reactors, those being built today, are exceedingly safe. They are able to be rendered safe even in the case of a power loss, unlike the second generation reactors at Fukushima. Should there be a highly unlikely meltdown then the floor under the reactor is designed to prevent the molten core from maintaining fission, and made of material capable of containing the heat from radioactive decay. This is also unlike at Fukushima. There the floor was relatively common concrete and the water within it was able to reflect enough neutrons back to keep fission going. It was only by burning through enough concrete to dilute the fuel did fission stop. New reactors will have materials that remove neutrons and heat immediately to stop this from happening again.
And they are not immune from natural disasters.
That's true. As third generation reactors are built today a tsunami like what hit Fukushima would have likely rendered it out of commission for a long time, but reparable. A more severe quake may render a modern reactor irreparable but no loss of radioactive material would occur. If there is something that can both crack open a modern reactor and overwhelm the safety systems then you have bigger things to worry about than the reactor.
Also, nothing is immune from natural disasters. We've seen nuclear power plants operate through hurricanes, tornadoes, and most anything nature can throw at it. Earthquakes are probably their greatest weakness but, as I stated earlier, we now know how to render them safe in such cases. Compare this to power sources like coal. A coal plant needs large quantities of coal to operate. If it's piled under enough snow and ice that can be a problem. Earthquakes and tsunamis can damage coal power plants too. Windmills will shut down if the wind is too low, or too high. It's also vulnerable to ice, lightning, and other natural events. Solar power is certainly vulnerable, with it's delicate PV collectors or reflecting mirrors.
Nothing is perfect. Given the choices we have it would seem that making nuclear power a large portion of our electric generation capacity would be wise. Given the massive quantity of materials needed for wind and solar for the same energy we don't have much choice but to build more nuclear.
http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2...
Nuclear is just another unsustainable tech.
Here's someone that disagrees with you.
http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2...
And another.
http://environmentalprogress.o...
Here's a couple more.
http://www.roadmaptonowhere.co...
And another.
https://www.brightnewworld.org...
I assume you can cite someone to make your claim? Perhaps you have a doctorate in some relevant field that makes you an expert on this?
We're running out of options, if we haven't already. We will need nuclear power. We need it now.
The major problem I can see with a floating reactor is that it is, by its nature, mobile.
And things that can be moved can be stolen.
Then steal it back!!
The Russian 70MW in the article seems too small to really be useful-- you would almost be better off with a LNG tanker and big turbine integrated together.
That is until winter comes, and stays longer than it's welcome.
I do recall a major operation recently of trying to get fuel oil to an Alaskan community that was running low because of an unexpectedly long ice pack in the harbor. Because the US Coast Guard is severely short on ice breaking capacity, and the US in general doesn't have many ice hardened ships, there were Russian companies hired to break the ice and use special ice hardened oil tankers to get just close enough to run a pipe and fill some tanks and prevent everyone from freezing to death.
You can park a bunch of fuel tankers out in the harbor for what you propose. You could also keep breaking the ice to bring more fuel in. Or, as it seems they plan to do, park a floating nuclear power plant in the harbor and not have to worry about it for 10 or 12 years. I'm guessing they still need fuel for some but not all heating and cooking, and for vehicles as well, but with a nuclear power plant they are unlikely have a life and death crisis if a fuel shipment is delayed. People might have cabin fever, and be tired of eating polar bear meat, but they aren't likely to freeze and starve.
North America and Western Europe have zero to negative growth in energy demand, so they don't need new nukes anyway.
That's an insane statement to make. The USA gets 20% of its electricity from nuclear power. These nuclear power plants have an average age of about 40 years. That average age is about the same as the intended operational life span of these reactors. Fortunately these reactors were overbuilt with just crazy safety margins. This means that as more was learned the operators were able to figure out how to get more out of what they had. Through improved techniques and upgrades over time the output of nuclear power increased over time even as older reactors were shut down and not replaced.
This continued extension of the lifespan of these aging reactors cannot continue indefinitely. They will have to be shutdown, and relatively soon, and replaced with something. That something must be new nuclear power.
Here's a recent article on why nuclear power is a good choice.
http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2...
There is 1000 GW, give or take, of electrical generation capacity in the USA right now. About 100 GW of that is nuclear. The observant might now be asking how 10% of generating capacity being nuclear can provide 20% of the electricity we consume. The answer is that nuclear power plants are operating 90% of their maximum capacity while other generating sources are getting half that, more or less. More generating capacity with coal and natural gas, less than half maximum generating capacity from wind, solar, hydro, and others.
Now coal is not only "bad" (whether that be politically, economically, environmentally, or whatever) they are often old. We will need new generating capacity to replace these coal plants that are scheduled for shutdown. As it is now the US federal government expects to see 20 GW of new natural gas generation installed by the end of this year. We can keep doing that until all the roughly 300 GW of coal is replaced, and the 100 GW of aging nuclear as well, or we can try something else.
We can install more wind and solar but as the article I linked to above from the "A Cubic Mile of Oil" blog, the resources needed for wind and solar are orders of magnitude higher. We're talking a few hundred tons of material per TWh produced versus 10,000 or 15,000 tons. Then there is the issue of CO2 produced and that is laid out in the last paragraph of that article.
The prospect of climate change and ocean acidification are real, and the long time it takes to implement corrective measures means that we must rapidly decarbonize our energy systems. Our fears of radiation are largely unfounded and have had the deleterious effect of continued use of fossil fuels. Even as we deploy wind and solarâ"the nominally low-carbon sourcesâ"the absence of large scale storage systems have forced us into using natural gas power for back up. The design of natural gas power plants used as spinning reserves are selected on the rapidity with which they can be brought online. These designs are among the least efficient of gas-fired plants, with thermal efficiencies around 33%, and thus high carbon emissions. Gas-fired power plants that operate with a combined steam cycle have thermal efficiencies in excess of 50%. Analysis by Larsen and Rez shows that we would do better in terms of carbon emissions if instead of installing low capacity factor wind or solar systems and backing them with natural gas, we simply used a combined cycle natural gas plant.
Wind and solar do not reduce our CO2 output and they will not until we have a sufficient supply of low CO2 storage online. Building natural gas plants up to now only reduced CO2 because it was replacing coal. With added wind and solar more of that natural gas is consumed in inefficient peaker power generators that in the end do not reduce CO2. If we assume no future growth
Have I passed through into a parallel universe? At what point did "intellectually stimulating", "environmentally friendly" and "non-toxic" become nonsense?
My guess is between 1975 and 1990. From about 1975 back to the start of WW1 there was greater concerns than what kind of toys the children had. Parents were more concerned about war, economic depression, and energy shortages then what the toys were made of. After 1975 there wasn't much concern for war, the economy was starting to grow again, and things were looking fairly good. In 1990 things were even better with the Cold War over and so there wasn't parents much concerned about a nuclear war. So, sometime in there with nothing much else to worry about people started to invent problems.
One invented problem was that toys weren't intellectually stimulating enough. So, toys had to get more complicated. Another invented problem was being environmentally friendly, because everything had to be environmentally friendly now. I guess that maybe there was some merit in keeping toys safe but the problems on that seemed to be blown out of proportion. The new more complex toys had motors that could grab fingers and hair, some things got hotter than they should, and were made of new materials with properties that might lead to things that got unexpectedly sharp, small (choke hazard), or whatever. But again since the kids had only toys that "threatened" them people turned to the toys. These problems were fixed quickly and now every toy is exceedingly safe, to the point of being boring.
So, I'd say this nonsense began sometime between 1975 and 1990. But then that's my view, I'm sure someone else might claim it started sooner with a bunch of toy safety scares in the 1950s or 1960s. Before that toys made of pretty mundane stuff (therefore not toxic or not thought to be toxic), and no one thought much of the environment, and (again) had larger concerns than the children's toys. That is especially true of concerns on them being intellectually stimulating when few people graduated high school.
Lego already scores pretty high on all counts that concerned parents then and concern them now. Making them environmentally friendly is the last metric that anyone might be concerned about. The amounts of Lego blocks produced is such a tiny impact on the environment on the grand scheme this is just another invented problem.
They are doing it because of marketing. They're trying to sell more toys by pretending to care about the environment.
DING! DING! DING! DING! DING! DING!
We have a winner!
We are seeing a new generation of parents that have been raised by their tree hugging a pot smoking parents. They want toys that are intellectually stimulating, environmentally friendly, contains no toxic chemicals, and all that other nonsense. Legos are some of the best toys for children as they are. I loved them growing up, as did my brothers and friends. Lego made a big push to get girls to like them with girl friendly color palettes, kits, and marketing. It must have worked because all my nieces and nephews love them. I buy Lego kits for them all and they love me for giving them Lego kits. I just need to buy the Star Wars kits for the boys and the bright pastel colored kits for the girls. Because boys and girls are different.
My siblings aren't all that concerned about Lego being eco-friendly but their spouses are. If there were some eco-friendly way to make the blocks then that would make the Lego kits that more attractive.
Part of the problem is that is costs more to recycle plastic than it does to simply manufacture new plastic. Otherwise there would already be a market for non-subsidized plastic, the way there is a market for aluminum and scrap steel. Also, since most of the cost for recycling is energy, and most off that energy comes from fossil fuels, you aren't really saving anything by recycling plastic (challenge: for anyone who says use renewable energy, calculate the carbon footprint of a solar panel, nuclear power plant, or windmill, plus add the added carbon necessary in economic activity to pay for its higher cost).
I had a chemistry professor comment in one of his lectures that recycling plastics is stupid. People should just burn them. I recall he mentioned this because at the time there was a debate on building a waste burning power plant in the area.
When it comes to doing the calculations you ask, it appears someone did do that.
http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2...
If someone is going to look for an energy source to recycle this plastic, synthesize it, reduce it to it's constituent elements, or whatever you wish to do to lower the carbon emitted, then look closely at nuclear power. Nuclear power is low carbon, safe, and just generally a good idea. If someone wants to raise issues of the waste problem then I'll just say that it appears that any problems on the safety of the waste was included in those calculations. The author, Dr. Ripu Malhotra, also made a powerpoint presentation where he points out that next generation nuclear will consume much of the existing waste.
https://drive.google.com/file/...
When it comes to replacing petroleum based transportation fuel, and presumably also petroleum based feedstock for making Lego blocks, there's the US Navy program on developing a hydrocarbon synthesis device. A device that they intend to power with nuclear reactors.
https://phys.org/news/2017-10-...
One complaint I keep hearing is the costs of nuclear power. Well, a single reactor does cost a lot of money but it produces lots of energy, it will produce energy at a cost that's at least competitive with any source available today. We know this because of past performance. There's a lot of room for improvement with economies of scale and, in the USA at least, there is sufficient demand to allow for this economy of scale. The US government expects to see 20 GW of new natural gas electrical generation capacity this year. A typical nuclear power reactor produces 1 GW of electrical capacity. We could build a new nuclear reactor every month and still need to build more electrical generation capacity from natural gas, wind, or whatever, to keep up with demand. The USA saw reactors being built at this rate once before and there's no reason to expect we can't do it again. This is especially true given the much greater material needs for the alternatives like wind and solar.
see for a study citation that shows most of the censorship on campus is directed at left wing people. Make of it what you will but the study appears accurate. As for Milo, he was welcome to speak at the campus in question. They asked him to pay for his own security, which is the standard practice for controversial speakers who are likely to result in violence. It doesn't matter who causes the violence (left, right, white, black or purpose), what matters is that the even was deemed risky and required security and the school wasn't going to pay for it.
First is that I didn't mention where this censorship occurred and so your comment on the security fees being raised at the last minute was a lucky guess. Well, the odds were in your favor on that guess.
Second, as this event was at a public university there is already precedent for the school to cover the security costs no matter how high it might be. Just because they believe a bunch of students will riot is not justifiable for a public school to pass on those costs to the student organization that made the invitation. If that was allowed then any school could deny any speaker by merely making the claim that the costs would be too high.
Now, if you want a public space with full security paid for by tax payer dollars that's fine. But that's not what schools are. They're places of learning.
Tell me something. What is a professor? What does a professor do and where does a professor perform his/her duties? The answer is the speak at a public space with full security paid for by the taxpayer. That's what schools are, places of learning by listening to people speak. Milo, Ben Shapiro, or whomever else you can think of, are merely invited professors that came to profess on a topic for which the students invited them. The people that got tickets for the event is not all that different than signing up for a lecture. I saw classes that gave credits for attending these lectures. As I recall they were one credit courses that were required for graduation in some programs, and the schools invited someone to speak twice per week on a variety of topics. If you attended enough of these lectures in the semester then you met that degree requirement.
I don't know what kind of education that Milo Yiannapolous could offer but Ben Shapiro is a lawyer, author, and hosts a popular radio program, UC-Berkeley should be pleased to host someone as educated, intelligent, and popular as Shapiro. UC-Berkeley was taken to court for not wanting to cover the security costs and lost. If any other public school wants to pull that stunt again then I'm thinking they'd get the same treatment in any other court. Shapiro got to speak and the state had to cover the security costs. Milo put his foot in his mouth so deep I'm not sure he'd be able to talk, physically that is, even if anyone were to invite him. I find the man rather repulsive and boring so I'm glad he has faded away, but that doesn't mean I want him denied a platform.
The tone of your post implies an alt-right bent, which would mean you'd oppose taxpayer funded safe spaces for people to speak. Personally as a lefty I'm all for it.
I believe that past precedent on public speaking has already set the ground rules on public speaking. If any private organization wants to rent a park, amphitheater, stadium, or other public facility, for a speech or other event then they should be expected to pay for renting the property and providing security. With student organizations at a public school the rules are a bit different, the school is expected to provide security no matter what those costs might be, and the organization making the invitation is often expected to pay a standard fee that is appropriate for the size of the space requested. I will concede some latitude on the costs and appropriateness of the people invited but that would be exceedingly rare, such as a foreign dignitary, someone that's been con
I agree that there is quite likely enough evidence to seize the computer records from FaceBook. Where I have a problem is he was asked for evidence that can be used against him, and then punished when he refused.
He was punished without due process. He was required to offer evidence to use against him. This is potentially a search without a proper warrant or cause. It's a case like this that gave us the Miranda Warning.
I agree that this is something that could set precedent. The way I see it there's enough precedent to stop this, but for some reason the argument of "on a computer" makes people think that this is somehow novel.
I see. Where I went to university those deemed a minority had the power to demand free tuition, and get it, and the privilege to get admitted with a lower ACT or SAT score than I did. Sounds like racism to me, and against me, a white man.
I'm sure someone will want to defend this because minorities "earned" this because white men discriminated against them in the past. Bullshit! These people didn't experience any discrimination, they were 18 years old at the time and never lived under any discrimination. I didn't discriminate against anyone, certainly not the other applicants that I never met. I was also an 18 year old idiot at the time. I had no "power" or "privilege". I had to take out a loan and find a job to pay for my education, that doesn't sound like a "privilege".
By your definition my university was racist against me. Seems like today this racism is widespread, with universities giving privileges and power to those that are not white men.
I keep getting called a racist for merely being a white man. What do you expect me to do about that? Get myself a tan and curl my hair like Dolezal, or whatever her name is? Go make up some story about a native american ancestor? Put on a dress and lipstick and ask people to, "call me Cait"?
Fuck you. No one is more discriminated against in the USA today than white men.
I'm sure it's just over shared interests in comic books, stargazing, and calligraphy.
What do you think they were talking about? If the suspect was at least half honest about his cannabis habit then I have one shared interest down, and the other isn't comic books.
I recall a story that likely has a grain of truth to it. It goes something like this...
Benjamin Franklin was seen leaving the chambers on where they were debating the creation of a new United States government. A lady on the street asked, "What have you given us, Dr. Franklin?" His reply, "A republic, madam, if you can keep it."
He should be allowed to keep his privacy. His loss of privacy due to the government prying into it is the loss of a republic.
I know this is a story from the UK but the rules on keeping a republic is universal. Requiring the revelation of a pass code upon demands of the government violate many basic rights needed to maintain a republic.
The guy is being punished for inconveniencing the government. Well, sometimes law enforcement is inconvenient. They know they can get what they seek from FaceBook, as does the suspect. The suspect also knows he's likely to get a very long sentence if he's caught. So, it's only in his best interest to keep his mouth shut. This kind of punishment serves no purpose but to erode people's rights to be free from government coercion.
People can keep their privacy only if they defend it. By defending privacy against the government they are defending the concept of a republic. It's disconcerting to think that this kind of law exists in what is considered a free nation. Just by asking for the pass code they are violating the suspect's rights.
Voice could possibly come close to the speed if it could get the accuracy up.
That won't happen until we get some kind of standard on spelling vs. pronunciation. Here's an example...
I was listening to some music on my Sirius radio and heard a song I liked. I made note of the artist on the radio display, Gina Clowes. How is that pronounced? I have no idea. Does that rhyme with "house", "hose", or "haws"? I made my best guess on the pronunciation and said to my Echo, "Alexa, play music by Gina Clowes," and hoped for the best. The response was something like, "I can't find music by jean clothes". That's like hearing the double translation from English to Chinese and back again, and probably not far from what is actually happening in the software.
I found out that spelling bees are quite unique to the English speaking world. That's because English has "borrowed" so much from other languages that the rules on spelling is that there are none. Spelling anything but the most trivial of words is only by memorization. We can pronounce them and spell them but without a lot of context the two rarely correlate. It takes a lot of brain power to figure this out and we don't think much of it. Getting a human to keep this straight is hard enough, and getting computer to figure this out any time soon will be nearly impossible.
There's people out there trained in the art of transcribing on special keyboards made specifically for this purpose. They can type 200 words per minute, which is a bit faster than typical speaking. They do this by not spelling words but by phonetics. Turning that into precise written English language still requires interpretation from context. Using such a keyboard for things like writing computer code would be, I can imagine, quite difficult.
Noone is in love with the keyboard but it's the best we have currently.
There we can agree.
The Yoga has no keyboard but what I really want to know is, does it have a headphone port?
I know how to plug in a keyboard if I need one but I can't figure out how to go plugging in a set of headphones without a 1/8th inch diameter socket.
Just so I'm clear, I'm not a fan of either iterations of touch input devices. I'll pile on with the bashing.
What I'd like is a keyboard that has the keys in a nice vertical and horizontal layout and not cost a small fortune. The only reason the keyboards way back when had this staggered layout was to allow for the levers behind each key to not interfere on mechanical typewriters. Computers never had this limitation My fingers move generally up and down in line with my arms, not slanted to the left by extending them and to the right by bringing fingertips closer to my wrist. I know such keyboards exist but they shouldn't cost more than the computer.
I'm sure that with a touch screen I can layout the keys as I wish with a software update. I'm also sure such a screen lacks any tactile feedback so I can touch type with a error rate far above my already terrible typing. I'm all for innovating on the outdated keyboard designs but let's not go backwards on keyboard design, okay?
Look out. Slashdot Cunts will downmod you for shitting on their precious state.
I hear that shitting on California is quite popular. People will just shit on the streets, in the parks, just anywhere they please. This shitting on California got so bad that they lost a lot of business from national conventions that used to meet there, stating concerns of health and comfort. Now they go to where people learned to shit in a toilet.
Oh, right, not that shitting in a toilet in California is always helpful. A combination of not being able to provide enough municipal water and the mandates for low flush toilets has meant not enough water flows through the sewer systems to clear out the shit. Now they have to ship in bleach by the truckload to clean everything up and kill the smell.
The recent droughts they have is no excuse for not enough fresh water. There are far drier places in the world that can find enough water for people to drink and bathe. They have access to the ocean, so the shortage of drinking water can be only because they failed to build enough desalination capacity. South Africa is in a similar situation. Both saw demand for water rise but did nothing to plan for new capacity of water supply.
The whole state of California is a shit hole. It will only get worse until the politicians stop shitting on it themselves.
People misunderstand what computer science actually is, where it came from, and therefore what it means to study it. As someone smarter than me put it, "Computer science is to computers what telescopes are to astronomy." The computer is just the tool, it's not the ends. People take, or at least should take, computer science with the intent to understand the mathematics, algorithms, and so forth behind the science of computing. If the goal is to just write code then there's community college for that. If someone wants to know how to write code to meet a specification then that's engineering.
Seems to me that it took decades for people to understand the distinction between computer science and software engineering. There's been some good software engineers that studied computer science, just like I met some good mechanical engineers that studied physics in college. Your experience mirrors mine, I've had classmates that major in engineering, computer science, as well as other majors, and there is certainly a different mindset among those in engineering and those in the sciences. Too many people have majored in computer science thinking that's what people take to write good code. It's not, and employers learned this too. I've heard recruiters talk about avoiding computer science majors until they've run out of engineering majors to hire.
CS didn't need to mature, it was doing what it intended. What we needed was software engineering to mature as a discipline separate from EE, math, computer science, and the other realms from which it drew. I see this now in where I went to university, they didn't have a software engineering program. They didn't even have a formal computer engineering program separate from EE. Now they have both a computer engineering program and a "major track" in software engineering for people in EE, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, and other related majors. We'll probably see Software Engineering define itself more in the future and become a formal degree program that's separated out further and become a distinct major soon.
History is fascinating and as an engineering student I took courses on the history of engineering. We must learn our history or, as the saying goes and you point out, repeat our mistakes.
Here's another thing I picked up in engineering, most every course I took in math and engineering was basically a history course. We started out the semester with what people knew since (picking a date somewhat randomly) perhaps the 1850s. People building bridges, firing cannons, or whatever else, figured out patterns and wrote them down. Then in about 1910 they figured out more stuff. In 1950 or so they learned more and wrote it down. And so on and so on. Each passing week of the course was an additional layer of complexity built on what we learned before, just as people in the past learned based on what was known before. I found the best instructors will point out the when and who of history while teaching. It takes little time in class to point this out but adds much in value and context.
I don't believe that majoring in history is a bad thing but I do believe that students must go into it with an occupation in mind. History on it's own might get someone a job teaching it but that's a very limited occupation. I'll see a lot of politicians that studied history in college and I sometimes wonder if this is just a way for them to say they went to college in their future political career or they studied history to be an effective leader and representative of the people. That's not saying both can't be true, but studying things like medicine, accounting, statistics and so on can just as easily prepare someone to be a good politician, as well as allow for an occupation outside of politics.
I had this discussion with my music instructor. I asked out of pure curiosity what he intended to do with his masters in music. He at first avoided answering the question. I later realized that he didn't think of that too much or he didn't have an answer. Later on he made mention of finding a job (or at least the high likelihood of it) as a professional performer in an orchestra and as a private instructor. We don't need too many music majors but they are important to teach music to the engineers that build the stuff we enjoy, like the auditorium that my music instructor is likely performing in right now.
When things are going well people can find work majoring in music and history because people will pay for this as a leisure activity. When things are not so well then people will still need accountants, engineers, physicians, lawyers, and so on. A college education used to be a leisure activity for the wealthy, and in many cases people might be best served to avoid the luxury of a college degree, especially when times are tough.
Can I come to your house and scream at you about why my value system is great, and your value system is terrible? How about your job? Want to invite me along next time you go jogging or riding a bicycle so I can mock your religious views? Can I sit shotgun on your morning commute and berate you about your lifestyle choices?
A speaker coming to a campus, like Milo Yiannopoulos who had his speaking event canceled at a campus near me, is not screaming at me from the passenger seat in my car. These are people that reserved a space on a campus and if you don't like what they have to say then invite your own speaker. In fact I'd be fine if you hold up some placards outside the event. What should never be tolerated is violence in response or disrupting the event with noise making and screaming. If you want the freedom to share your views then you must tolerate those you oppose to speak as well.
Care to have me preach about satanism at your local church?
No? Are those safe spaces for you?
I do feel that my church is a safe space. I suspect that if you ask nicely that you might actually be allowed to speak on satanism at the church, perhaps not during scheduled Sunday worship but the building is open to many diverse groups to meet, such as a local ham radio club that meets in their basement.
You have a misunderstanding of the term safe spaces. It should be obvious by now that most people have plenty of "safe spaces". But, imagine you're a LGBTQ college kid who shares a 12' x 12' dorm room with a bigoted moron. Where do you go to get away from that.
You get away from that by a complaint to the people that run the residence halls. They don't want to see those assigned a room together to get in fights and such so they will find another room. At a minimum they would be most likely willing to let someone out of the contract, I was able to do that because I was not happy in my room. It wasn't a roommate issue, just that the room was only 12x12.
And I agree that shouting down others as a primary form of debate is awful, and all too common. But if you think it's somehow limited to liberal college kids, you must have a very narrow view of the world yourself.
No, I'm pretty sure it's limited to liberal college kids. Most anyone else in college is too focused on doing their calculus and the rest just plain grew up.
You need to study Popper's Paradox of Tolerance.
I'm quite aware of the paradox. I've heard it expressed in several different ways. One is, "There is one thought that stops all thought and that is the one thought that needs to be stopped." Or, "Don't open your mind so much that your brains fall out."
However, from your sig I would already bet that you will never figure it out. Can you even imagine that your worship words have actual meanings?
I'm trying to figure it out. Here's one thing that I'm quite sure of is when it comes to concepts like one's freedom to speak we must err on the side of speaking freely. I remember as a kid watching some movie on TV about some tribe in Africa, a fictionalized account of historical events. Now in most any other case of what is considered acceptable on television in the West, or what my parents would allow me to watch at that age, topless women would not be among them. But the people making the movie thought that having women in the tribe wear something to cover their nipples would not only be historically inaccurate it would be more distracting than the perceived immodesty. There's a line there on what is considered acceptable and it gets fuzzy sometimes. I saw a similar thing happen with a documentary on the terror attacks on the World Trade Center. Normally a network would be fined for letting profanity be uttered but there was an exception for this case, because the events depicted were beyond the profane and a few "not nice" words from police and firefighters were mild by comparison. Trying to catch all the profanity and remove it would have also sanitized what was happening. You really think I don't understand my signature line? I gave it considerable thought. Just like removing "hate speech" is a greater threat to our freedom than the "hate speech" itself there is a greater threat to our freedoms by disarming people than allowing people to be armed.
The idea of "hate speech" is simply "something I don't like" and it shifts and moves and always seems to ratchet towards more and more tyranny. Same for "assault weapon", it's just a term for "something I want to ban" and the definition only shifts tighter and tighter towards more tyranny. I'll err on the side of greater freedoms despite what threats that might have to my personal safety. That's because nothing is more deadly than a government that gets to define what a person may say or own.
Unless there are "happy murders" and "love frauds" ?
Murder is by definition unlawful. Homicide on the other hand has four kinds, felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy. At least according to Ambrose Bierce. That might equate to (by my estimation at least) murder, manslaughter, self defense, and war.
I remember a short exchange on the distinction between killing and murder in the movie The Big Red One. In short is that you don't "murder" a Nazi, you kill them, much like one would kill a rabid dog. A sick dog isn't ever murdered because there is no crime in that.
I hear this a lot, that guns are only good for murder. If that's true then why do we give guns to soldiers and police? Maybe because not every killing of another human is murder. Why would a private citizen want a sidearm? Like the kind any police officer might carry? Maybe because they don't believe that there's such a thing as a "happy murder" and might want to prevent themselves from being murdered by some sick puppy.