Well, it is among other things another Ubuntu release cycle. It is 6 months of ATI driver development. It is more than the time left in the OOXML process in the ISO. This could be bigger than it appears on first sight...
Essentially the safest reactor by far is the lead cooled fast reactor. It uses molten lead as a coolant in a non-pressurised vessel that doesn't have any tubes entering or leaving bellow the lead surface, making a loss of coolant accident virtually impossible. Thermal expansion of the fuel will shut it down well before dangerous temperatures. Because lead has a high thermal conductivity and heat capacity it doesn't need any pumps to circulate the coolant, natural convection from the temperature difference is enough. Thus even a complete loss of power, loss of pressure in the pressure vessel, and failure of the control rod shut-down system, will not damage the core.
As an added bonus it can operate with a fast neutron spectrum, allowing it to destroy the long lived isotopes of nuclear waste, leaving only fission products that decay bellow uranium levels within 300 years. It could even be used to destroy existing waste from PWRs. And the cost? Well, because it doesn't need any cooling pumps or pressurisers for the primary loop, can operate at high temperatures with good thermal efficiency, and due to the modest size of its containment structure, it is expected to be one of the cheapest design of all reactors, putting it bellow many fossil fuel plants even before carbon quotas are taken into consideration.
Really, pebble beds are good and nice, but it is nothing compared to some of the designs in the pipeline...
It is increasingly starting to look like the US system will grind to a halt. The real question is what it will take for competition from abroad to force a reform. My guess is that sooner or latter the US economy will take such a hit that the rest of the world will no longer be dependant upon it. When that happens Black Tuesday will look like statistical noise in comparison.
Seven years, how many thousands of programmers, evil genius and chair-throwing asshole at the top, and it's still not ready? Perhaps modern OS development is a task so complex that traditional human organizations -- the hierarchical corporation being the most powerful to date -- can no longer tackle it. Is open-source collaboration the next big thing in societal evolution?
I doubt being unable to implement the IEEE standards for multiplication is too complex for traditional human organizations... A far more simple explanation is that the bean counters made a series of bad decisions based on profit margins, this delayed the whole project and then they rushed it to release. Usually the difference between a disaster which didn't happen and one which did is down to the measures which were supposed to prevent it having been dropped or degraded to save money.
The following comments will be posted by various people to this article
You forgot one:
People who really shouldn't have bothered with the article, let alone the thread, will complain about what other people say about it. Personally I troll all those trolls who don't troll themselves...
Just prohibit them from charging more for the retail version than the OEM version. BAM problem solved. No more incentive for vendors to grin and bear it with the crazy per-machine deals. No more ways for Microsoft to threaten them with increased OEM prices if they sell Linux. No more pressure on consumers to buy a new motherboard just to get a new OEM license. It solves it all. Just require that Microsoft set one single price for their OS across the entire EU and prohibit them from charging as much as a Euro-cent extra for the stand-alone version. Once you stop them from playing games with the prices you have basically stripped their monopoly from half its power. The next step is to require that official institutions use open standards, and suddenly Microsoft's monopoly doesn't look half as scary any more.
Reread my post, there are special windows with filters that selectively block low frequency IR associated with black-body radiation at 20C, thus reducing radiative losses. The Germans have started to use them as they can give a net heat-gain even during the winter.
One square meter of land on a bright sunny day will get appx 1.6kW of light in an hour
Eh? Power = Energy / Time 1.6kW is a measure of power, not energy. You probably meant that 1 square metre receives 1.6kW hours of energy in an hour, which would give 160W hours per hour per square meter, or in power terms, 160W/m^2. That is, about the same power as would be necessary to power 3 strong light bulbs.
Somehow I think a 1m^2 window would be simpler, and if you use a triple glazed argon filled one ( as the Germans do for the passive-house standard) then you can neglect heat loss (in fact, you can get a net heat-gain ), making them considerably more efficient than chaining a 11% solar panel to an energy saving light bulb with 7%-8% efficiency (giving an overall efficiency of about 0.8% ).
No, really, in the vast majority of cases your money is better spent on insulating your house.
From TFA: The cost to the consumer _could_ be as low as _$2_ per watt.
Anybody spot the weasel word? Then there is the $2 cost to the consumer, rather than the $1 which is the cited production cost. Also, the article makes no mention of what levels of incoming radiation these numbers were calculated for. $1/W means something quite different in Egypt than it would mean in Sweden. Is the $2/W derived from the peak efficiency under ideal weather conditions, or is it the average over a year?
Essentially, if you want a real estimate of the price of a power technology you don't want price per power, you want Energy per Life-cycle costs. So if these cells last for 10 years you want to know how much total energy they could be estimated to produce during that time, compared to the cost of the panel. Other aspects like intermittent production and so on factor in, but in any way, price per [peak ?] power output is not a very useful number from an economical point of view. For solar cells you want at least the estimated cost over a life cycle with the assumed weather conditions specified. Less than that and you can easily massage the data by making strange assumptions.
a)How long do they last b)How fragile are they c)What temperature ranges can they survive d)How strong light do they need e)What environmental impact will the cadmium have
Sure, if it works all will be happy and dandy, but I somehow suspect there are some catches not mentioned here.
Well based on my coursework last week at least the U-232 alpha-decay energy appears to be accurate. That is, the peak we detected using a surface barrier detector fit quite well with Wikipedia's value. Ok, so the peak overlaps somewhat with one from Th-228, which complicates the experiment if you don't have a pure sample, but it appears to be correct. Now if you were looking for a reliable source on ME politics... well... let me know if you find one.
Really, come on, I think the article informing customers they may want to opt-out of the Verizon upgrade, or maybe the new alpha ATI driver could have used this space. Is there anybody on here who is NOT sick of iPhone articles yet?
(And I don't mean which countries don't enforce their laws. I mean which countries actually have laws offer the most freedom for citizens.)
By that metric the US would be very permissive given the constitution. You can't just look at the letter of the law, at the end of the day the courts will have to interpret it, so it is really a matter of how things actually work out in practice. In principle US citizens have more legally recognised rights than we have in Sweden, in practice you have to consider how authorities actually operate. All kinds of things play into that, including things like who can afford a lawyer. Also, two laws with the exact same wording could have very different meanings in different countries, because things like "proven", "liable" and "forbidden" mean different things in different contexts.
Of course the difference is that the atmospheric composition is known from reliable sources, with great accuracy, and is actually a useful thing to know. The claims in this article on the other hand...
I'm sure the European commission will LOVE apple locking the iPhone to O2, and I'm sure they will LOVE how it will operate together with iTunes. I'm also sure the European market will LOVE that it has shoddy 3G support. Also, I'm sure the lack of big Telecom monopolies in most EU countries will make it just as successful to do this over here as in the US. Don't get me wrong. Apple will make money here. It just won't be because the iPhone or the price plan, or service, or provider will be any good, but rather because the marketing and the hype will be. In short, they are going to offer a very sucky deal combined with a massive marketing campaign, and a lot of idiots will think the iPhone is actually remarkably innovative, when it really isn't even equal to a lot of phones already on the European market.
Then, if it actually does become a large success the EC will want to have something to say about the relationship between the iPhone, iTunes and the iPod, and also the deal with O2. If they actually decide to do something about it then a bunch of people who can barely find Europe on the map, let alone know anything about its legal history, will moan and accuse the EU of being partial against US companies, and as a result get flamed on slashdot [for great justice]. Politics at its finest...
If they were really smart they would use static, silent, and small ( in file-size terms ) adds. SVG would be ideal. What point is there in adds if they annoy people so much they block them or get negative associations towards your company because of them ? Heck, if I were making these adds I'd make it EASY for users to avoid them should they want to. The last thing you want to do is to prompt users to install tools that nuke your adds on the assumption that will be highly detrimental to their browsing experience. If you are really good at what you make your users WANT to watch the adds, maybe by making them artistic, entertaining or otherwise worthwhile watching. There is more to advertising than being as noticeable as possible...
The list includes at best 1 element which actually has a decent impact on how fun the game will be to play, AI, and it isn't even ranked highest. Seriously, I don't remember playing Super Mario because of the realistic "material physics" of the bouncing stars or bricks which shatter if you knock your fist against them... Based on this article I'd say the greatest challenge to designing a video game is convincing all the idiots that realism actually doesn't mean a whole lot compared to gameplay. Defcon's supersonic submarines and rather inefficient missile trajectories didn't exactly stop people enjoying that game.
When the e-mails were leaked I called for them to DMCA it as that would effectively confirm the leaked information as authentic while doing nothing to prevent its spread. I sarcastically ended that comment with "you have to outdo your own incompetence somehow". Little did I know they were actually going to be that fucking stupid. There is a reason the military, NRC, CIA etc.. has a policy of never confirming or denying leaks. Doing so would essentially confirm/debunk the accuracy of the leaked information. Good job MD, you just made a mistake most people have known not to do for more than a century. Idiots...
So lets see what will happen. People will start encrypting their connections. Then presumably AT&T will block or degrade encrypted connections ( thus causing security issues ). Now, queue stenography. TCP/Noise in images, audio and video clips. With a strong cipher encrypted data is mathematically indistinguishable from noise unless you have the key. Lets see their filters distinguish between an audio stream recorded using a noisy microphone and a stream containing an encrypted stream overlay. I'm sure their servers won't have any problem whatsoever trying to do image analysis on every single webcam simultaneously. Then you can proceed to trying to distinguish a noisy video from one with encrypted data embedded in it. Really, AT&T and pals, here is a message for you. The great firewall of China fails at censoring the net, and that one is run by the fucking government. You seriously think you can do better ( worse) than the PRC and still make a profit? Good fucking luck.
Damn, jokes about sharks aside, the scientific and technical implications of a gamma laser will be immense. Nuclear physicists will love to have one of these to probe nuclei with as an example ( so far you need a massive particle accelerator to do it ). Heck, if you reached sufficiently high energies you could even use it to fission the actinides in nuclear waste without the need to rely on particle accelerators or critical reactors. Positron-electron annihilation probably won't get you high enough energies for that thou.. You would need something in the GeV range of energies.
Uhm, so basically what they are saying is that one shoudl only run code from sources you trust? Gee, I would never have thought of that... The problem with web-pages and scripts and applets is that you sometimes want to run un-trusted code with limited privileges. That is solved by privilege separation and making sure your interpreter / virtual machine is free from vulnerabilities and won't leak sensitive data. Have guess which bit is the tricky part...
Slashdot Mirror
So, what is 6 months...
Well, it is among other things another Ubuntu release cycle. It is 6 months of ATI driver development. It is more than the time left in the OOXML process in the ISO. This could be bigger than it appears on first sight...
If you think that one sounds good, have a look at this paper on liquid metal cooled reactors:
http://nucleartimes.jrc.nl/Doc/ICONE13-50397.pdf
Essentially the safest reactor by far is the lead cooled fast reactor. It uses molten lead as a coolant in a non-pressurised vessel that doesn't have any tubes entering or leaving bellow the lead surface, making a loss of coolant accident virtually impossible. Thermal expansion of the fuel will shut it down well before dangerous temperatures. Because lead has a high thermal conductivity and heat capacity it doesn't need any pumps to circulate the coolant, natural convection from the temperature difference is enough. Thus even a complete loss of power, loss of pressure in the pressure vessel, and failure of the control rod shut-down system, will not damage the core.
As an added bonus it can operate with a fast neutron spectrum, allowing it to destroy the long lived isotopes of nuclear waste, leaving only fission products that decay bellow uranium levels within 300 years. It could even be used to destroy existing waste from PWRs. And the cost? Well, because it doesn't need any cooling pumps or pressurisers for the primary loop, can operate at high temperatures with good thermal efficiency, and due to the modest size of its containment structure, it is expected to be one of the cheapest design of all reactors, putting it bellow many fossil fuel plants even before carbon quotas are taken into consideration.
Really, pebble beds are good and nice, but it is nothing compared to some of the designs in the pipeline...
It is increasingly starting to look like the US system will grind to a halt. The real question is what it will take for competition from abroad to force a reform. My guess is that sooner or latter the US economy will take such a hit that the rest of the world will no longer be dependant upon it. When that happens Black Tuesday will look like statistical noise in comparison.
65,534 ought to be enough for everybody.
You forgot one:
People who really shouldn't have bothered with the article, let alone the thread, will complain about what other people say about it. Personally I troll all those trolls who don't troll themselves...
But will it run Linux?
Just prohibit them from charging more for the retail version than the OEM version. BAM problem solved. No more incentive for vendors to grin and bear it with the crazy per-machine deals. No more ways for Microsoft to threaten them with increased OEM prices if they sell Linux. No more pressure on consumers to buy a new motherboard just to get a new OEM license. It solves it all. Just require that Microsoft set one single price for their OS across the entire EU and prohibit them from charging as much as a Euro-cent extra for the stand-alone version. Once you stop them from playing games with the prices you have basically stripped their monopoly from half its power. The next step is to require that official institutions use open standards, and suddenly Microsoft's monopoly doesn't look half as scary any more.
Reread my post, there are special windows with filters that selectively block low frequency IR associated with black-body radiation at 20C, thus reducing radiative losses. The Germans have started to use them as they can give a net heat-gain even during the winter.
Eh? Power = Energy / Time
1.6kW is a measure of power, not energy. You probably meant that 1 square metre receives 1.6kW hours of energy in an hour, which would give 160W hours per hour per square meter, or in power terms, 160W/m^2. That is, about the same power as would be necessary to power 3 strong light bulbs.
Somehow I think a 1m^2 window would be simpler, and if you use a triple glazed argon filled one ( as the Germans do for the passive-house standard) then you can neglect heat loss (in fact, you can get a net heat-gain ), making them considerably more efficient than chaining a 11% solar panel to an energy saving light bulb with 7%-8% efficiency (giving an overall efficiency of about 0.8% ).
No, really, in the vast majority of cases your money is better spent on insulating your house.
From TFA:
The cost to the consumer _could_ be as low as _$2_ per watt.
Anybody spot the weasel word? Then there is the $2 cost to the consumer, rather than the $1 which is the cited production cost. Also, the article makes no mention of what levels of incoming radiation these numbers were calculated for. $1/W means something quite different in Egypt than it would mean in Sweden. Is the $2/W derived from the peak efficiency under ideal weather conditions, or is it the average over a year?
Essentially, if you want a real estimate of the price of a power technology you don't want price per power, you want Energy per Life-cycle costs. So if these cells last for 10 years you want to know how much total energy they could be estimated to produce during that time, compared to the cost of the panel. Other aspects like intermittent production and so on factor in, but in any way, price per [peak ?] power output is not a very useful number from an economical point of view. For solar cells you want at least the estimated cost over a life cycle with the assumed weather conditions specified. Less than that and you can easily massage the data by making strange assumptions.
a)How long do they last
b)How fragile are they
c)What temperature ranges can they survive
d)How strong light do they need
e)What environmental impact will the cadmium have
Sure, if it works all will be happy and dandy, but I somehow suspect there are some catches not mentioned here.
Well based on my coursework last week at least the U-232 alpha-decay energy appears to be accurate. That is, the peak we detected using a surface barrier detector fit quite well with Wikipedia's value. Ok, so the peak overlaps somewhat with one from Th-228, which complicates the experiment if you don't have a pure sample, but it appears to be correct. Now if you were looking for a reliable source on ME politics... well... let me know if you find one.
Really, come on, I think the article informing customers they may want to opt-out of the Verizon upgrade, or maybe the new alpha ATI driver could have used this space. Is there anybody on here who is NOT sick of iPhone articles yet?
By that metric the US would be very permissive given the constitution. You can't just look at the letter of the law, at the end of the day the courts will have to interpret it, so it is really a matter of how things actually work out in practice. In principle US citizens have more legally recognised rights than we have in Sweden, in practice you have to consider how authorities actually operate. All kinds of things play into that, including things like who can afford a lawyer. Also, two laws with the exact same wording could have very different meanings in different countries, because things like "proven", "liable" and "forbidden" mean different things in different contexts.
Of course the difference is that the atmospheric composition is known from reliable sources, with great accuracy, and is actually a useful thing to know. The claims in this article on the other hand...
I'm sure the European commission will LOVE apple locking the iPhone to O2, and I'm sure they will LOVE how it will operate together with iTunes. I'm also sure the European market will LOVE that it has shoddy 3G support. Also, I'm sure the lack of big Telecom monopolies in most EU countries will make it just as successful to do this over here as in the US. Don't get me wrong. Apple will make money here. It just won't be because the iPhone or the price plan, or service, or provider will be any good, but rather because the marketing and the hype will be. In short, they are going to offer a very sucky deal combined with a massive marketing campaign, and a lot of idiots will think the iPhone is actually remarkably innovative, when it really isn't even equal to a lot of phones already on the European market.
Then, if it actually does become a large success the EC will want to have something to say about the relationship between the iPhone, iTunes and the iPod, and also the deal with O2. If they actually decide to do something about it then a bunch of people who can barely find Europe on the map, let alone know anything about its legal history, will moan and accuse the EU of being partial against US companies, and as a result get flamed on slashdot [for great justice]. Politics at its finest...
If they were really smart they would use static, silent, and small ( in file-size terms ) adds. SVG would be ideal. What point is there in adds if they annoy people so much they block them or get negative associations towards your company because of them ? Heck, if I were making these adds I'd make it EASY for users to avoid them should they want to. The last thing you want to do is to prompt users to install tools that nuke your adds on the assumption that will be highly detrimental to their browsing experience. If you are really good at what you make your users WANT to watch the adds, maybe by making them artistic, entertaining or otherwise worthwhile watching. There is more to advertising than being as noticeable as possible...
The list includes at best 1 element which actually has a decent impact on how fun the game will be to play, AI, and it isn't even ranked highest. Seriously, I don't remember playing Super Mario because of the realistic "material physics" of the bouncing stars or bricks which shatter if you knock your fist against them... Based on this article I'd say the greatest challenge to designing a video game is convincing all the idiots that realism actually doesn't mean a whole lot compared to gameplay. Defcon's supersonic submarines and rather inefficient missile trajectories didn't exactly stop people enjoying that game.
When the e-mails were leaked I called for them to DMCA it as that would effectively confirm the leaked information as authentic while doing nothing to prevent its spread. I sarcastically ended that comment with "you have to outdo your own incompetence somehow". Little did I know they were actually going to be that fucking stupid. There is a reason the military, NRC, CIA etc.. has a policy of never confirming or denying leaks. Doing so would essentially confirm/debunk the accuracy of the leaked information. Good job MD, you just made a mistake most people have known not to do for more than a century. Idiots...
So lets see what will happen. People will start encrypting their connections. Then presumably AT&T will block or degrade encrypted connections ( thus causing security issues ). Now, queue stenography. TCP/Noise in images, audio and video clips. With a strong cipher encrypted data is mathematically indistinguishable from noise unless you have the key. Lets see their filters distinguish between an audio stream recorded using a noisy microphone and a stream containing an encrypted stream overlay. I'm sure their servers won't have any problem whatsoever trying to do image analysis on every single webcam simultaneously. Then you can proceed to trying to distinguish a noisy video from one with encrypted data embedded in it. Really, AT&T and pals, here is a message for you. The great firewall of China fails at censoring the net, and that one is run by the fucking government. You seriously think you can do better ( worse) than the PRC and still make a profit? Good fucking luck.
Damn, jokes about sharks aside, the scientific and technical implications of a gamma laser will be immense. Nuclear physicists will love to have one of these to probe nuclei with as an example ( so far you need a massive particle accelerator to do it ). Heck, if you reached sufficiently high energies you could even use it to fission the actinides in nuclear waste without the need to rely on particle accelerators or critical reactors. Positron-electron annihilation probably won't get you high enough energies for that thou.. You would need something in the GeV range of energies.
Uhm, so basically what they are saying is that one shoudl only run code from sources you trust? Gee, I would never have thought of that... The problem with web-pages and scripts and applets is that you sometimes want to run un-trusted code with limited privileges. That is solved by privilege separation and making sure your interpreter / virtual machine is free from vulnerabilities and won't leak sensitive data. Have guess which bit is the tricky part...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NE5elL30w4
Is there a place to buy the T-shirt yet?