It's great that the EU is trying to assert itself in this area - having the US control 90% of the internet's technology is exactly the type of monoculture that is decried on the desktop - but is there any way this project won't end up crushed under the weight of its own bureaucracy?
The EU being a huge bureaucracy actually is a common misconception. The EU has less public workers than The Hague, which with ~300.000 citizens is the third city of the Netherlands
As any hacker knows: a complex system cannot be absolutely secure, especially under risk-augmenting constraints (often 'cost effectiveness').
However, there are certain absolute guarantees you can make based on physics. I know 100% sure that the glass of water on my table will not levitate itself because of the laws of physics. Modern reactors are based on passive safety measures. If left by its own devices, modern 4th generation reactors will not melt down but go into a rest state. That does not mean that nothing will go wrong, but it does mean that if anything goes wrong, the consequences will not be overly disastrous.
Wrong. The three gorges dam alone displaced over a million people. You also seem to forget coal mining, which causes thousands of deaths each year, by the way.
Chernobyl killed about 3000 people, that about 10% of the amount of mine workers that die in China each year. And Chernobyl was a very unsafe design with unsafe procedures. Modern nuclear power plants are inherently safe - if the cooling fails, the nuclear core will stay at a resting temperature until started up again.
In the face of a nuclear attack a nuclear power plant is way safer than say, a refinery.
Pebble bed reactors are inherently safer and make efficient use of nuclear fuel. And they can be a lot smaller than conventional nuclear reactors, which makes them more attractive for smaller scale use.
However, PBRs have a very large drawback. It is nearly impossible to extract useful material from the spent fuel pebbles. Manufacturing these pebbles is not a trivial process, by the way.
Personally, I'd like to see more development of integral fast reactors. They are not modular in design, but these plants are designed with the entire fuel cycle in mind and can burn up nuclear fuel so efficiently that the waste degrades to background radiation in just 300 years.
Everytime there is an article about global warming there will be an army of sceptics who say that global warming has not been scientifically proven and that trying to do anything about it is a wast of money and bad for the economy.
This bothers me a great deal. Although it may not be possiple to _prove_ without a hair of a doubt that global warming is occurring, there are way too many signs saying our climate is changing drastically.
We know this and we know that CO2 and other greenhouse gases have a strong influence on our climate. Looks like reason enough to strive for a change to me. Because of the upcoming shortage of fossil duels, reducing fuel depency also makes sense ecologically. And no, without significant increases in nuclear power usage, the hydrogen economy is not it.
Google Earth has ~30m resolution. I can see the larger roads, but nothing like the 1m data they have of Amsterdam and Rotterdam:(
Have a lot of fun in Utrecht, it's a very nice city! Actually, if the data were better, you'd be able to see my house at lat=52.0964391273, lon=5.12191902758:)
For the last couple of months I have been checking obstinately if high-resolution data was finally available for my location - Utrecht, the Netherlands. But to no avail, I still have to manage with a measly 30m resolution. I can't quite see my house from up here!
I understood the general reason for it - You start with the large cities and work down from there. There is little reason to provide hires data of the Sahara.
But now we have been taken over by THE FRIGGIN' MOON! The data of that desolate celestial body is more accurate than the data of the Netherlands.
"Their timely responses to most letters show that they were both aware of the importance of this intellectual intercourse,"
Of course they were, they are respectively the most important Physicist and Biologist ever. If they had the intelligence to conceive their theories, it should be rather obvious that sorting their mail was not outside the realm of their wit.
Would it kill submitters to expand acronyms? Or give a little background on the "frammazazz project" for those of us who have no idea what it is? I read some of these summaries and am even stupider than when I started. And that's saying something.
It is nice that C# exists, and it has a lot of nice features, but I fail to understand you 'raw productivity' statement. How is C# more productive to code in than, say, Java 5?
I'm not dissing your opinion, I just want to see some solid reasons. I think that the existence of C# is good for everyone as it will drive innovation in Java, and vice versa, but I don't see where it has massive advantages overall.
I do like C# slightly better than Java 5 but that's not the big difference. It's the tools. VS.NET just works really well. I've worked quite a lot with Eclipse and although it's a nice IDE, VS.NET (especially 2005) is lightyears ahead.
There is very little hires data for the Netherlands. I live in Utrecht, the fourth largest city of the Netherlands but unfortunately there is only ~30m resolution data for it. There is ~1m data for some places (about 2% of Netherlands' surface area) and super high resolution data for the city center of Amsterdam but that's it. Does anyone have a clue if and if so, when, better data for the Netherlands will be available?
funny that you mention it. I wish there would be a / find function instead of ctrl+f. Being the two tools I use mostly throughout the day I would appreciate a unified way of searching, regardless where I want to search.
Right on! I'd love to use:wq to quit FireFox (or:q! when browsing pr0n;). Waaay better than alt-f4 or File->Exit!
This would effectively cancel out the UK's recent successes in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and would have wider global implications as well.
This would only be true if the soil would not be releasing CO2 prior to the recent reductions in greenhouse emissions.
Yes, there is a lot of uncertainty concerning the mechanics of CO2 emissions. But that doesn't mean we should stop trying to reduce them each time we find out that we are not the only source of CO2 emissions.
Slashdot Mirror
It's great that the EU is trying to assert itself in this area - having the US control 90% of the internet's technology is exactly the type of monoculture that is decried on the desktop - but is there any way this project won't end up crushed under the weight of its own bureaucracy?
The EU being a huge bureaucracy actually is a common misconception. The EU has less public workers than The Hague, which with ~300.000 citizens is the third city of the Netherlands
As any hacker knows: a complex system cannot be absolutely secure, especially under risk-augmenting constraints (often 'cost effectiveness').
However, there are certain absolute guarantees you can make based on physics. I know 100% sure that the glass of water on my table will not levitate itself because of the laws of physics. Modern reactors are based on passive safety measures. If left by its own devices, modern 4th generation reactors will not melt down but go into a rest state. That does not mean that nothing will go wrong, but it does mean that if anything goes wrong, the consequences will not be overly disastrous.
Wrong. The three gorges dam alone displaced over a million people. You also seem to forget coal mining, which causes thousands of deaths each year, by the way.
Chernobyl killed about 3000 people, that about 10% of the amount of mine workers that die in China each year. And Chernobyl was a very unsafe design with unsafe procedures. Modern nuclear power plants are inherently safe - if the cooling fails, the nuclear core will stay at a resting temperature until started up again.
In the face of a nuclear attack a nuclear power plant is way safer than say, a refinery.
You bring up a very valid point. We'll be stuck with fossile fuels for a long time anyway, so research into CO2 sequestration is also very important.
Pebble bed reactors are inherently safer and make efficient use of nuclear fuel. And they can be a lot smaller than conventional nuclear reactors, which makes them more attractive for smaller scale use.
However, PBRs have a very large drawback. It is nearly impossible to extract useful material from the spent fuel pebbles. Manufacturing these pebbles is not a trivial process, by the way.
Personally, I'd like to see more development of integral fast reactors. They are not modular in design, but these plants are designed with the entire fuel cycle in mind and can burn up nuclear fuel so efficiently that the waste degrades to background radiation in just 300 years.
What...? Are CTRL, ALT and DEL placed next to each other?
Everytime there is an article about global warming there will be an army of sceptics who say that global warming has not been scientifically proven and that trying to do anything about it is a wast of money and bad for the economy.
This bothers me a great deal. Although it may not be possiple to _prove_ without a hair of a doubt that global warming is occurring, there are way too many signs saying our climate is changing drastically.
We know this and we know that CO2 and other greenhouse gases have a strong influence on our climate. Looks like reason enough to strive for a change to me. Because of the upcoming shortage of fossil duels, reducing fuel depency also makes sense ecologically. And no, without significant increases in nuclear power usage, the hydrogen economy is not it.
Google Earth has ~30m resolution. I can see the larger roads, but nothing like the 1m data they have of Amsterdam and Rotterdam :(
:)
Have a lot of fun in Utrecht, it's a very nice city! Actually, if the data were better, you'd be able to see my house at lat=52.0964391273, lon=5.12191902758
At 10% FireFox is starting to become interesting to malware producers. I guess I'll switch to Opera.
For the last couple of months I have been checking obstinately if high-resolution data was finally available for my location - Utrecht, the Netherlands. But to no avail, I still have to manage with a measly 30m resolution. I can't quite see my house from up here!
I understood the general reason for it - You start with the large cities and work down from there. There is little reason to provide hires data of the Sahara.
But now we have been taken over by THE FRIGGIN' MOON! The data of that desolate celestial body is more accurate than the data of the Netherlands.
Thank you for making me realise the pleasure of not being circumsised!
Of course they were, they are respectively the most important Physicist and Biologist ever. If they had the intelligence to conceive their theories, it should be rather obvious that sorting their mail was not outside the realm of their wit.
How much cheaper is a 8088 than a Pentium 4? It wouldn't make a lot of difference, if any.
Would it kill submitters to expand acronyms? Or give a little background on the "frammazazz project" for those of us who have no idea what it is? I read some of these summaries and am even stupider than when I started. And that's saying something.
Seksueel Overdraagbare Aandoening.
It's dutch.
It means 'Sexually Transmitted Disease'.
You've been warned.
Your native tongue is Arabic, right?
Close. Dutch.
(Yeah I know it has vowels [and semi-vowels] like any other language, however, not in the written form.)
In fact, in Dutch it's the other way around. Linguists around the world agree that Dutch is the closest terrestrial relative to Klingon.
AJAX is a floor cleaning product.
Yes. And a Greek play, a Greek hero, an anti-aircraft missile and a soccer club from Amsterdam.
All the good words were used up long ago. Maybe it's time to stop using vowels and open up the possibility of words like krggggnx!
I'm starting to become tiered of flaming microsofties, so maybe I will just skip them.
...or you could consider not flaming them?!
It's much better, runs everywhere and is already used by many big vendors. I strongly recomend Java.
That's nice to hear. Fortune 500 companies are always interested in recommendations by Anonymous Cowards.
It is nice that C# exists, and it has a lot of nice features, but I fail to understand you 'raw productivity' statement. How is C# more productive to code in than, say, Java 5? I'm not dissing your opinion, I just want to see some solid reasons. I think that the existence of C# is good for everyone as it will drive innovation in Java, and vice versa, but I don't see where it has massive advantages overall.
I do like C# slightly better than Java 5 but that's not the big difference. It's the tools. VS.NET just works really well. I've worked quite a lot with Eclipse and although it's a nice IDE, VS.NET (especially 2005) is lightyears ahead.
AFAIK The USGS has excellent maps of the entire country.
There is very little hires data for the Netherlands. I live in Utrecht, the fourth largest city of the Netherlands but unfortunately there is only ~30m resolution data for it. There is ~1m data for some places (about 2% of Netherlands' surface area) and super high resolution data for the city center of Amsterdam but that's it. Does anyone have a clue if and if so, when, better data for the Netherlands will be available?
funny that you mention it. I wish there would be a / find function instead of ctrl+f. Being the two tools I use mostly throughout the day I would appreciate a unified way of searching, regardless where I want to search.
Right on! I'd love to use :wq to quit FireFox (or :q! when browsing pr0n ;). Waaay better than alt-f4 or File->Exit!
It's called posturing. Just about every animal does it.
Well there's a perfectly valid explanation for a foreign policy.
This would effectively cancel out the UK's recent successes in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and would have wider global implications as well.
This would only be true if the soil would not be releasing CO2 prior to the recent reductions in greenhouse emissions.
Yes, there is a lot of uncertainty concerning the mechanics of CO2 emissions. But that doesn't mean we should stop trying to reduce them each time we find out that we are not the only source of CO2 emissions.