Interesting. I cruised around the site a little and found this bit about the "psychology" of social engagement. Maybe somebody at Slashdot is using this to try to understand us... so they can design Beta to be more "engaging". If so, I think they've got us figured all wrong.
Here's the little comment I left there. (It's still pending... it'll be interesting to see if they actually post it.)
It's interesting that this includes Slashdot... mostly because any conclusions you might draw from it will be horribly wrong if you're trying to understand the Slashdot community. I think I see now where some of the design imperatives driving the Beta site are coming from, and unfortunately, they might end up driving away all the people that actually create the content.
You're obviously not paying attention then. Plenty of people have posted *exactly* what's wrong with the comment system in beta. Maybe you haven't seen them because you're actually using beta?
Look, you have to understand something: Slashdot discussions generate interesting content by allowing tons of garbage to be posted, mixed around, and evolved. Part of the evolution comes from the interactive nature of community discussion, and part of it comes from the moderation process. For this evolution process to work properly, you have to be able to see a lot of posts at once, all in one shot. You need to be able to see some contextual information about the people posting comments. When you post your own comments, you need to be able to quote or link to other posts easily. When you want to moderate, you need to be able to do it in place, at the comment you intend to moderate.
Beta breaks all of these vital features; without them, the nature of Slashdot discussion changes completely. People will read fewer comments because the new layout hinders rapid seeking, scanning, and comprehension of potentially valuable posts... all while making it much more difficult to skim past the stuff that doesn't interest you. When people read fewer comments, they post fewer comments. When the total number of comments starts to drop, the exploration of the discussion space becomes much less thorough. Potentially valuable or interesting discussion paths will be missed. Those rare, but highly sought after gems of insight and wisdom borne from the cesspool of chaos will become much more scarce.
You want to know why people hate the beta so much? It's because it kills the evolutionary discussion dynamic that makes this community what it is. There's nothing else like it, and many of us do not want to lose it.
More than once have I seen a parent thread modded -2 (offtopic or trolling), with valuable and interesting child threads below it modded +5
Yes, this is exactly what I was getting at. Think of the comment/moderation system as a kind of genetic algorithm... a somewhat random, nonsensical exploration of the conversation space that eventually evolves better and/or more interesting ideas. Some of the best posts I've ever seen wouldn't have happened without the seeding and fertilization provided by trolls and off-topic commenters.
Just because your group of pals are complete dicks to everyone does not mean that your group of pals aren't complete dicks and shouldn't be listened to.
Wow. That's the most impenetrable sentence I've tried to read all day. Congratulations!
Holy crap! You're right, that's what they're planning to do. They know that the REAL re-design (probably already finished) was going to cause a minor shit-storm, so they made a FAKE beta design that they could back away from in order to institute "Slashdot Classic"! (Somehow not as good as the original, but also not a complete crapfest like beta.)
I seem to have had this now misguided impression that there was a healthy professional element of the community here who would give constructive feedback but all I've seen is a mob of angry comment children. I hope you all leave when it switches over so we can build anew without you.
Hello, you must be new here. Welcome to Slashdot.
Seriously, your comment shows that you really don't understand Slashdot at all. Thread hijacking by angry comment children is part of the chaos that eventually gets filtered and distilled to yield truly interesting content. This is what makes Slashdot special.
This kind of post is one of the things that makes Slashdot (in its current form) so special... and in a very "meta" fashion, does it while describing that special quality so perfectly.
I was thinking something similar, but it was more like being destroyed by the very community that you were trying to court... out of an unwillingness to heed the warnings from that same community.
Believe me, there's no confusion about the immensity of the community's contribution to the site.
That's a bit of an understatement. Without the community, there is no Slashdot. So why do you think the community exists in the first place?...
... because the design permits unfettered chaos while providing the means for users to wade through it quickly and efficiently, so they can easily promote the best content to the top!
Beta hinders that style of conversation. Yes, the chaos does create a lot of noise, but some of that "noise" is valuable. Some of the best posts I've ever seen on Slashdot... whether funny, insightful, interesting, informative, touching, inspirational, or just plain nuts... were actually completely off-topic. Beta makes it much more difficult for the chaotic mish-mash to occur, grow, and be distilled.
Do you not understand his argument, or are you really just an asshole? The value of Slashdot that keeps old-timers coming back, and brings new people in, is the content... and virtually all of that content is created and moderated by the users. Yes, the site itself is valuable as well, but only because it enables a certain style of discussion and fosters a particular kind of community, all built around that user content.
When the site no longer enables the discussion and fosters the community that is Slashdot, it ceases having any value. People will leave. The quantity, quality, and very nature of the content will change... and as that continues, more people will leave. Now you're into a potentially unstoppable death spiral, and whatever remains will be just a pale image of the greatness that once existed.
Do you expect us to keep our mouths shut? We don't want to see Slashdot die! Even if an alternative pops up somewhere, it won't have all the history that this site has. Losing all of that will be tragic.
I'm not sure how long I've been on Slashdot... at least 10 or 11 years, I guess. It's been a continuous source of enjoyment for me, even though I've never been a particularly active user. Oh, I comment every now and then, I moderate and meta-moderate occasionally, and I may have even tried submitting a story or two at some point (I honestly don't remember). There have been periods when I left Slashdot for some time, when something else really caught my interest and monopolized my attention, but I always came back. I felt like I was part of a persistent community that would last.
Now, the previously unthinkable may happen... I may leave and never come back. Beta is that bad. I hate the way it looks, the way it works, and how it will affect all the things I love about Slashdot.
This is really sad. I never thought I would feel this way about a website. I used to enjoy segfault back in the day, and I remember feeling that loss pretty keenly. The loss of slashdot will be infinitely worse. I hope it won't happen, but I fear that it will.
Please, please, please... if anyone at Dice is listening... don't kill my Slashdot.
31 GW is still pretty damn high... that's like 31 average-sized nuclear power plants dedicated 100% to running the internet... or like 25 simultaneous lightning strikes to get a fraction of a second of porn.
I interpreted that sentence to mean 270 TWh over the 3 years it takes to double internet traffic (according to the article). That's still a little over 10 GW.
Please provide links to this so-called "SAGE report", because all I can find are self-published opinion pieces by anti-nuclear activists such as Amory Lovins and Peter Bradford... who, despite being a former commissioner of the NRC, has a long record of being anti-nuke.
2/3rds of all new generation installed in the last year is renewable. Spin that any way you want.
OK, I'll bite... here's what I think is going through the head of someone developing a renewable energy project:
Holy Shit! Have you seen how much over cost these dipshits are willing to pay for renewable power? And, even better, they already assume that we can't be baseload or dispatchable, so we get paid a premium for the power we generate even when they don't need it!!!
I don't understand your numbers, your analysis, or what you're trying to conclude. Why didn't you just publish a link to the DOE Transparent Cost Database, which is linked from the page you cited?
From the Levelized Cost of Energy visualization, I see these costs for nuclear and solar PV, in $/kWh: * nuclear.. range of 0.04 to 0.12, median 0.06 * solar PV.. range of 0.15 to 0.59, median 0.28
Here in Ontario-ari-ari-o, we pay our reactors 5.5 cents a kWh flat, when we sell it for about 2.9 cents. What a deal!
That's the way the Ontario market is set up... payouts are almost always higher than market price. The difference is made up by the "Global Adjustment", which is generally pretty huge and goes mostly to non-nuclear generators. The sentence that you wrote about "what a deal" nuclear is for Ontario is accurate, but incomplete; its true meaning is not what you intended. Here's what you should have written.
Here in Ontario-ari-ari-o, we pay our reactors 5.5 cents a kWh flat, when we sell it for about 2.9 cents. What a deal! That's only about 2.5 cents/kWh above market, compared with the 17 cents/kWh above market paid to the non-utility, non-nuclear generators!
False. In Toronto, I've had bacon & bacon (with cheese!) on a kaiser. Yes, that's right... Canadian bacon topped with regular bacon (and cheese!). Even better, the same place had ham & bacon & bacon sandwiches too.
Canadians (except the Jewish or Muslim varieties) love them some pork.
Just last month, the Ontario Appeals Court ruled that a cellphone that's not digitally locked (such as with a password) can be searched without a warrant... but if locked, a warrant is required.
Now the Canadian Supreme Court says that access to text messages requires a warrant. This is interesting because the Ontario case from last month involved text messages that were searched without a warrant.
I would assume that the Canadian Supreme Court ruling takes precedence over the Ontario Appeals Court ruling... for text messages. However, photos, video, chat logs, etc apparently don't get the same protection.
So... lock your phone with a password, no matter what... even if it's just a minimal one that's easy to type.
Maybe the merging of "vaguely related things" into "one giant monster" was the wrong choice... but only if you're looking back at it from the current reality of powerful hardware available at low cost. Back then, it was the right choice. A monolithic, fully pre-emptive, multitasking, virtual memory based operating system with a common application programming interface was the innovation that made ubiquitous computing possible.
Okay, this all sounds awesome. I can see how it's not like a traditional operating system... it spawns servers dynamically in response to external requests, it must provide a way to control those servers while also facilitating (and mediating) their access to hardware, and I imagine that it probably has a way to receive and process internal commands that may alter how it is operating.
Analyses conducted in the late 1970s concluded that the Mark I would almost certainly result in disaster in the event of sustained power loss - and it did.
Yeah... unfortunately, the containment failures at Fukushima matched the models pretty well. I've posted it before, but the following document is illuminating... see the section titled "BWR 3/4 Perspectives", including the parts regarding station blackout (SBO), transients with loss of coolant injection, and transients with loss of decay heat removal (DHR).
I still don't understand why TEPCO didn't install hardened containment vents back in the '90s. If they had, things would have gone very differently. They must have known about NRC Generic Letter 89-16.
The other thing I don't understand is why Unit 1 didn't handle the situation better than the others. It should have because it has an Isolation Condenser instead of Reactor Core Isolation Cooling... I'm not sure that anyone has yet explained what happened with this.
Slashdot Mirror
They want to make the site attractive to non-technical artsy folk, since we've been doing it wrong this whole time.
You don't know how right you are...
http://slashdotmedia.com/under...
Interesting. I cruised around the site a little and found this bit about the "psychology" of social engagement. Maybe somebody at Slashdot is using this to try to understand us... so they can design Beta to be more "engaging". If so, I think they've got us figured all wrong.
http://slashdotmedia.com/under...
Here's the little comment I left there. (It's still pending... it'll be interesting to see if they actually post it.)
It's interesting that this includes Slashdot... mostly because any conclusions you might draw from it will be horribly wrong if you're trying to understand the Slashdot community. I think I see now where some of the design imperatives driving the Beta site are coming from, and unfortunately, they might end up driving away all the people that actually create the content.
You're obviously not paying attention then. Plenty of people have posted *exactly* what's wrong with the comment system in beta. Maybe you haven't seen them because you're actually using beta?
Look, you have to understand something: Slashdot discussions generate interesting content by allowing tons of garbage to be posted, mixed around, and evolved. Part of the evolution comes from the interactive nature of community discussion, and part of it comes from the moderation process. For this evolution process to work properly, you have to be able to see a lot of posts at once, all in one shot. You need to be able to see some contextual information about the people posting comments. When you post your own comments, you need to be able to quote or link to other posts easily. When you want to moderate, you need to be able to do it in place, at the comment you intend to moderate.
Beta breaks all of these vital features; without them, the nature of Slashdot discussion changes completely. People will read fewer comments because the new layout hinders rapid seeking, scanning, and comprehension of potentially valuable posts... all while making it much more difficult to skim past the stuff that doesn't interest you. When people read fewer comments, they post fewer comments. When the total number of comments starts to drop, the exploration of the discussion space becomes much less thorough. Potentially valuable or interesting discussion paths will be missed. Those rare, but highly sought after gems of insight and wisdom borne from the cesspool of chaos will become much more scarce.
You want to know why people hate the beta so much? It's because it kills the evolutionary discussion dynamic that makes this community what it is. There's nothing else like it, and many of us do not want to lose it.
More than once have I seen a parent thread modded -2 (offtopic or trolling), with valuable and interesting child threads below it modded +5
Yes, this is exactly what I was getting at. Think of the comment/moderation system as a kind of genetic algorithm... a somewhat random, nonsensical exploration of the conversation space that eventually evolves better and/or more interesting ideas. Some of the best posts I've ever seen wouldn't have happened without the seeding and fertilization provided by trolls and off-topic commenters.
Just because your group of pals are complete dicks to everyone does not mean that your group of pals aren't complete dicks and shouldn't be listened to.
Wow. That's the most impenetrable sentence I've tried to read all day. Congratulations!
Holy crap! You're right, that's what they're planning to do. They know that the REAL re-design (probably already finished) was going to cause a minor shit-storm, so they made a FAKE beta design that they could back away from in order to institute "Slashdot Classic"! (Somehow not as good as the original, but also not a complete crapfest like beta.)
I seem to have had this now misguided impression that there was a healthy professional element of the community here who would give constructive feedback but all I've seen is a mob of angry comment children. I hope you all leave when it switches over so we can build anew without you.
Hello, you must be new here. Welcome to Slashdot.
Seriously, your comment shows that you really don't understand Slashdot at all. Thread hijacking by angry comment children is part of the chaos that eventually gets filtered and distilled to yield truly interesting content. This is what makes Slashdot special.
This kind of post is one of the things that makes Slashdot (in its current form) so special... and in a very "meta" fashion, does it while describing that special quality so perfectly.
Thank you, Anonymous Coward.
I was thinking something similar, but it was more like being destroyed by the very community that you were trying to court... out of an unwillingness to heed the warnings from that same community.
Believe me, there's no confusion about the immensity of the community's contribution to the site.
That's a bit of an understatement. Without the community, there is no Slashdot. So why do you think the community exists in the first place?...
Beta hinders that style of conversation. Yes, the chaos does create a lot of noise, but some of that "noise" is valuable. Some of the best posts I've ever seen on Slashdot ... whether funny, insightful, interesting, informative, touching, inspirational, or just plain nuts ... were actually completely off-topic. Beta makes it much more difficult for the chaotic mish-mash to occur, grow, and be distilled.
Well, aren't you just an entitled little shit.
Do you not understand his argument, or are you really just an asshole? The value of Slashdot that keeps old-timers coming back, and brings new people in, is the content... and virtually all of that content is created and moderated by the users. Yes, the site itself is valuable as well, but only because it enables a certain style of discussion and fosters a particular kind of community, all built around that user content.
When the site no longer enables the discussion and fosters the community that is Slashdot, it ceases having any value. People will leave. The quantity, quality, and very nature of the content will change... and as that continues, more people will leave. Now you're into a potentially unstoppable death spiral, and whatever remains will be just a pale image of the greatness that once existed.
Do you expect us to keep our mouths shut? We don't want to see Slashdot die! Even if an alternative pops up somewhere, it won't have all the history that this site has. Losing all of that will be tragic.
I'm not sure how long I've been on Slashdot... at least 10 or 11 years, I guess. It's been a continuous source of enjoyment for me, even though I've never been a particularly active user. Oh, I comment every now and then, I moderate and meta-moderate occasionally, and I may have even tried submitting a story or two at some point (I honestly don't remember). There have been periods when I left Slashdot for some time, when something else really caught my interest and monopolized my attention, but I always came back. I felt like I was part of a persistent community that would last.
Now, the previously unthinkable may happen... I may leave and never come back. Beta is that bad. I hate the way it looks, the way it works, and how it will affect all the things I love about Slashdot.
This is really sad. I never thought I would feel this way about a website. I used to enjoy segfault back in the day, and I remember feeling that loss pretty keenly. The loss of slashdot will be infinitely worse. I hope it won't happen, but I fear that it will.
Please, please, please... if anyone at Dice is listening... don't kill my Slashdot.
31 GW is still pretty damn high... that's like 31 average-sized nuclear power plants dedicated 100% to running the internet... or like 25 simultaneous lightning strikes to get a fraction of a second of porn.
I interpreted that sentence to mean 270 TWh over the 3 years it takes to double internet traffic (according to the article). That's still a little over 10 GW.
hours in 3 years: 3*365.25*24 = 26298 h
average power over that period: 270 TWh / 26298 h = 10267 MW
So... like 8 simultaneous lightning bolts to run the internet for a fraction of a second?
Please provide links to this so-called "SAGE report", because all I can find are self-published opinion pieces by anti-nuclear activists such as Amory Lovins and Peter Bradford... who, despite being a former commissioner of the NRC, has a long record of being anti-nuke.
2/3rds of all new generation installed in the last year is renewable. Spin that any way you want.
OK, I'll bite... here's what I think is going through the head of someone developing a renewable energy project:
Holy Shit! Have you seen how much over cost these dipshits are willing to pay for renewable power? And, even better, they already assume that we can't be baseload or dispatchable, so we get paid a premium for the power we generate even when they don't need it!!!
I don't understand your numbers, your analysis, or what you're trying to conclude. Why didn't you just publish a link to the DOE Transparent Cost Database, which is linked from the page you cited?
http://en.openei.org/apps/TCDB/
From the Levelized Cost of Energy visualization, I see these costs for nuclear and solar PV, in $/kWh: .. range of 0.04 to 0.12, median 0.06 .. range of 0.15 to 0.59, median 0.28
* nuclear
* solar PV
There, that's more understandable.
Arg... URL got cut off.
http://canadianenergyissues.com/2010/11/17/ontario-nuclear-power-moderates-subsidizes-the-cost-of-gas-and-renewables-an-investigation-into-the-price-of-political-correctness/
Here in Ontario-ari-ari-o, we pay our reactors 5.5 cents a kWh flat, when we sell it for about 2.9 cents. What a deal!
That's the way the Ontario market is set up ... payouts are almost always higher than market price. The difference is made up by the "Global Adjustment", which is generally pretty huge and goes mostly to non-nuclear generators. The sentence that you wrote about "what a deal" nuclear is for Ontario is accurate, but incomplete; its true meaning is not what you intended. Here's what you should have written.
Here in Ontario-ari-ari-o, we pay our reactors 5.5 cents a kWh flat, when we sell it for about 2.9 cents. What a deal! That's only about 2.5 cents/kWh above market, compared with the 17 cents/kWh above market paid to the non-utility, non-nuclear generators!
For more info, see the following:
Ha... that's what I get for skimming!
False. In Toronto, I've had bacon & bacon (with cheese!) on a kaiser. Yes, that's right... Canadian bacon topped with regular bacon (and cheese!). Even better, the same place had ham & bacon & bacon sandwiches too.
Canadians (except the Jewish or Muslim varieties) love them some pork.
Just last month, the Ontario Appeals Court ruled that a cellphone that's not digitally locked (such as with a password) can be searched without a warrant... but if locked, a warrant is required.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/02/21/1343231/cellphone-privacy-in-canada-encryption-triggers-need-for-warrant
Now the Canadian Supreme Court says that access to text messages requires a warrant. This is interesting because the Ontario case from last month involved text messages that were searched without a warrant.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/02/cops-can-search-mobile-phoneonly-if-its-not-password-protected/
I would assume that the Canadian Supreme Court ruling takes precedence over the Ontario Appeals Court ruling... for text messages. However, photos, video, chat logs, etc apparently don't get the same protection.
So... lock your phone with a password, no matter what... even if it's just a minimal one that's easy to type.
Maybe the merging of "vaguely related things" into "one giant monster" was the wrong choice... but only if you're looking back at it from the current reality of powerful hardware available at low cost. Back then, it was the right choice. A monolithic, fully pre-emptive, multitasking, virtual memory based operating system with a common application programming interface was the innovation that made ubiquitous computing possible.
Okay, this all sounds awesome. I can see how it's not like a traditional operating system... it spawns servers dynamically in response to external requests, it must provide a way to control those servers while also facilitating (and mediating) their access to hardware, and I imagine that it probably has a way to receive and process internal commands that may alter how it is operating.
So how is it not an OS?
Analyses conducted in the late 1970s concluded that the Mark I would almost certainly result in disaster in the event of sustained power loss - and it did.
Yeah... unfortunately, the containment failures at Fukushima matched the models pretty well. I've posted it before, but the following document is illuminating... see the section titled "BWR 3/4 Perspectives", including the parts regarding station blackout (SBO), transients with loss of coolant injection, and transients with loss of decay heat removal (DHR).
http://www.osti.gov/bridge/purl.cover.jsp?purl=%2F205567-BJIEKT%2Fwebviewable%2F
I still don't understand why TEPCO didn't install hardened containment vents back in the '90s. If they had, things would have gone very differently. They must have known about NRC Generic Letter 89-16.
https://forms.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/gen-comm/gen-letters/1989/gl89016.html
The other thing I don't understand is why Unit 1 didn't handle the situation better than the others. It should have because it has an Isolation Condenser instead of Reactor Core Isolation Cooling... I'm not sure that anyone has yet explained what happened with this.