Hmm, I think someone who calls themselves PythonDeveloper is likely a little biased. I personally like the design of Windows 8 and think a lot of the Windows apps are looking a lot better more recently. I think Win8 will be a success, but there is no question it will be better than Vista. I don't know how you could even try and compare Win8 to that piece of junk.
Gee.. I wonder why? Hugo Chavez will steal the election through fraud and thuggery again, and all the tweets his people see will be cheerful and happy. All the tweets we see will be pro Hugo.
The White House will say nothing about this, as usual.
Be nimble and open minded, learn new languages, watch and discover new technologies, mentor people (don't be a land baron), and most important of all, DBAD (Don't Be A Dick).
The guy you mentor may become your boss, and so might the guy you are a dick to.
In the tech sense, DBAD typically means be nice, and don't be a technology nazi. There is no "perfect" technology for a solution. If the team wants PHP, and PHP works as a solution, DBAD, make it work for the team and don't force Ruby or Java down their throats.
The thorium and nuclear advocates. In the 1950s, during the 'Atomic Age', we heard over and over that nuclear power plants were safe, and the power source of the future. The Atomic Energy Commission said that nuclear power would soon be as cheap as power from other sources. We said 'go ahead!'
It's easy to be optimistic about thorium and nuclear energy. The problem is that our optimism has burned us before, and in big, easily obvious ways at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, but also in the difficulties of radioactive waste management. And we don't have practical evidence that thorium power really will be useful, only assurances from the same sorts of people that said, back in the 1950s, that fission power was safe and would soon be as cheap as that from conventional sources.
Reread the letter from the Telegraph. It doesn't want to deal with the decades of lying "self-serving opponents of anything nuclear science", and the "waste" that is the Blue Ribbon Commission on nuclear waste, nor the effort to "convince the anti-nuclear voters that their thinking has been wrong." Instead, the author wants to make an end-run around to entire system: bypass the legislative system and the popular vote, and appeal directly to the executive, almost as if the executive were tzar.
That's why the letter sounds desperate. It's thrown its hands up at democracy.
The obvious, and mentioned, analogy is to Kennedy and the moon program, but there was already popular support for the moon program; at the very least from pulp novels and TV shows. There was also no existing wide-spread concern about the public dangers of rockets. Therefore I don't see how they really are comparable.
More than REALLY desperate. How about seriously concerned for the well being of the planet? I guess if I were to die knowing that I helped reverse a calamity that allowed future generations to enjoy their futures rather than dwindle from disease, extreme weather, economic collapse or even a Mad Max scenario which might be a best case scenario, then I'd feel it was worth this effort.
All I want to happen is that some form of energy that does not create green house gases to replace the coal plants and other polluting sources that are currently ruining the lives of many forms of animal and plant life on land and in the seas.
We can make very good educated guesses about Thorium molten salt reactors that can be made better than the already successful experiments that took place at Oak Ridge National Laboratory back in the 60's and 70's.
Scientists who actually study nuclear energy know that the damage caused by the fossil fuels has been far, far greater than that cause by nuclear energy.
If I were preaching to the President to lie to the public then that would be pathetic. It would be non-democratic to try to go with the whole mess without getting the people's approval but that is not what the article is saying. I wrote the article and I do believe that people want to know the truth and if someone like Obama were to suddenly start down that path there is a much better chance that he would get that message across than anyone else.
In case you had not noticed every election year is getting further and further from democracy because neither candidate is addressing the real problems in their campaigns. When they do get elected after a close election nothing much changes. They are criticized for false promises. Well I'm only asking that something valuable actual be part of the agenda.
The system does not work very well. The wealthy can damage an opponent anonymously by funding smear campaigns just because the opponents want to improve conditions for the majority of the population.
The four year cycle that every president has does not get enough time to implement his plans and he's blamed for the damages caused by previous regimes. The republicans successfully blocked most of Obama's ideas for change then they criticize him for not doing anything.
The fear factor has played a role in preventing technology from advancing. Besides the assassinations of the 60's and the terrorist attacks that keep killing people the irrational fear has been growing. Fear of things people don't understand is normal to some extent. What is beginning to be less normal is that people are willing to be fed information without investigating and seeking the truth.
The Chernobyl accident is the only truly serious nuclear accident that took place. It is well documented. Even a little research reveals that Chernobyl was unique because it had no containment. That is why people died. The other two you mention had far less radiation and no deaths occurred at Three Mile Island or are predicted by the well informed scientists and professionals at Fukushima.
The article is really just an exercise to make the reader think.
You asked why it sounded desperate. I gave you an answer. Now you're saying that you're "REALLY desperate." Then why did you ask the question when you already knew the answer? Ahh, but at the end you said it was "really just an exercise to make the reader think", so I take it it was not meant to be convincing.
I already addressed your point about "very good educated guesses." That is, the people in the 1950s said that they made "very good educated guesses" about the reactors then being designed, which in turn were based on "already successful experiments." It's the same sort of people making the predictions now - how do we know that their predictions are any more well grounded? Freeman Dyson, in "Disturbing the Universe", gave a reason which resonates with me. In short, you need multiple iterations to get a the technology working well, and the reactors which came online in the 1950s-1970s were too early in the evolution cycle. The exception was military reactors, which went through lots of iterations, but of course which aren't appropriate for utility power generation.
Which is exactly how the Moon missions worked - build plenty of rockets, watch them explode, figure out what went wrong, and do a new iteration. How many iterations of thorium power plants will we need to develop in order to make safe, efficient, economical thorium power plants? One, ten, one hundred? What practical experience justifies that estimate? So permit me to feel skeptical when I read echoes of the rose-colored promises from the Atomic Age which mention nothing about the practical matters learned the hard way.
You may say that all you want is "some form of energy that does not create green house gases" but the article barely mentions other non-greenhouse-gas systems, and mostly dismissively in the ambiguously written line "The newest reactors produce far less waste, run far more safely and are far more reliable than solar or wind." (It's ambiguous because it reads like 'the newest reactors run far more safely than solar or wind', when it's trying to say that they are safer than older reactors.) It also mentions nothing about improved energy conservation.
I never said anything about preaching to the President to lie. You (since you say you are the author) are the one who calls people liars, specifically the "self-serving opponents of anything nuclear science."
Your comments about the political system are only somewhat applicable. The US is not the only political system in the world. India has strong economic incentives to go towards thorium, and have a technological base at least equal to the 1960s US, yet they don't predict working thorium reactors for at least another few decades. BTW, your argument seems to be that everything's getting corrupted, and you just want things to go corrupt in the way you want it to be. I am morally opposed to that justification.
You mistake the lesson I took from TMI, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, which is that people don't like reactors because dense power sources which can't trivially be shut off are suspect. Coal is 'safe' because its direct failure modes is to catch on fire, and that's easily handled. Solar is 'safe' because its direct failure mode is to stop generating electricity. Wind is 'safe' because its failure mode is to fall down. Hydro based on large reservoirs is less safe, because the history of dam breaks shows that they have some pretty nasty failure modes. All of these 'safe' systems have have hundreds of design iterations and improvements, and real-world failures. Note that by 'safe' I am not including environmental impact. The term "safe" has several different meaning, and I'm limiting it to just this one.
This article was supposed to make me think? It made me think that the author understands neither people nor politics nor history.
I never wanted an argument. I think you are using my article to show off a few of your own personal pet peeves. You are trying to squeeze my article as an example of those but I think you are trying to fit a round peg into a square hole. The word desperate is really inappropriate since desperation implies that I have some sneaky agenda. Over 15 years of experiments and research is not guess work which took place in a real laboratory. The guesswork I was referring to was that which will take place to do even better reactors than have already been built. The Molten Salt Reactor was very easy to operate. When they finished a weeks work. They simply turned it off for the weekend and turned it back on the following Monday. That cannot be done with the reactors that became the dominant reactor Light Water Reactors.
You wanted comments else you wouldn't be here. I gave comments. I certainly gave some of my own peeves. I thought that was obvious.
Look, I'll say this again. You asked which of the two PythonDeveloper thought were desperate. It's pretty obvious that he meant the author of the essay about "the thorium and nuclear advocates." Now you completely agree that you are desperate. Why did you ask the question if you weren't looking for an argument? The non-argumentative one would be "yes, I am desperate; Desperate that we as a civilization won't be able to survive."
You think that desperate implies a sneaky agenda. It doesn't. Here are all the dictionary entries: "1. reckless or dangerous because of despair or urgency: a desperate killer. 2. having an urgent need, desire, etc.: desperate for attention. 3. leaving little or no hope; very serious or dangerous: a desperate illness. 4. extremely bad; intolerable or shocking: clothes in desperate taste. 5. extreme or excessive." Notice how none of those imply a sneaky agenda.
Nor am I against reactors. I'm explaining, the best I can, why anything associated with nuclear power is viewed with deep distrust. Referencing work from the 1960s doesn't help. That's from the same era of researchers which downplayed the negative consequences of Operation Plowshare. The problem is that the public reaction against decades of official optimism, which deliberately deemphasized the actual consequences, cannot be easily overcome just by more optimism.
The only way to do it is to set up pilot plants now, redo the same sort of engineering project as the MSR but using the fixes suggested from that project (I believe KAMINI did that), and then develop a demonstration pilot plant which actually produces power, test out the entire lifecycle (including breeding U-233 from thorium), present all experienced problems with radioactive contamination, effect of fluorine on the pipes, etc. And above all, make that information available for public and expect rejection.
This work of convincing the public cannot be done in a single presidential term. It'll be at least 5 years just to get the full engineering data. Hence, I find the proposal that the President should use Roosevelt's bully pulpit to advocate the issues on a national scale at odds with what I think is the right way to actually do this.
Furthermore, you wrote "When they finished a weeks work. They simply turned it off for the weekend and turned it back on the following Monday." but based on http://www.energyfromthorium.com/pdf/NAT_MSREexperience.pdf , they most certainly did not have a weekly work schedule. It does not appear that you are working from the primary or even the secondary sources to make the above statement. Is you're above statement meant metaphorically? As it, I interpret it as truthiness.
In any case, you are confusing the issues. TRIGA is safe enough that it can be operated by undergraduates, and it can also be "turned off for the weekend." I think it can even be turned off for lunch. While power production reactors are a different scale entirely. Can you tell me how much decay heat will come from a thorium MSR which has been generating 300 MW use for 6 months? Can that sort of power reactor be so easily shut off and walked away from?
I read that the MSR decommissioning costs were higher than expected. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment#... says "the MSRE cleanup project was estimated at about $130 million", including a possibility for a nuclear criticality accident caused by the U-233 remaining in the system. To say nothing of the "one atmosphere of fluorine" gas above the solid salt. Are those costs and problems amplified in a full-scale commercial power plant?
And if you want to talk about alternatives to light water reactors, then one should also look to pebble bed reactors. Wikipedia quotes Richard Muller as saying they are "in every way... safer than the present nuclear reactors, and arguably safer than the global-warming danger posed by fossil fuels." Now, where have I heard that argument before? Note that PBRs had problems which were only identified by building reactors, and more PBRs have been built then thorium ones. Why should I presume that thorium MSRs won't also have problems?
I'm pro-thorium. What got me was this guy was clearly only interested in having Obama work on this, as a means to get re-elected. If he was truly an advocate of the technology, he would have sent it to both parties.
Thorium234 is much safer than uranium or other fissile material, and unlike those, it can be used to make neighborhood reactors, allowing energy independence on a local scale.
I'm the guy who posted the blog. If you were to see the blog in context you would change your point of view. The rest of the site is devoted to Thorium Molten Salt Reactors. Romney is the last person I would want to run for President. I think Obama needs an edge. By bringing in a controversial idea like clean green nuclear energy he might ruin his chances but he might not. It truly is a lesser of two evils situation. I happen to believe Romney is a lot worse. I have observed the situation closely. Steven Chu has no interest in solving the problems with the NRC. The NRC is seriously holding back innovation.
I'm calling it.... This is the beginning of the end for YouTube (LOL)... Probably not, but it is proof that they are willing to do what many people consider "evil" to please their stockholders.
b) Move send/cancel to top or side, away from the word-suggestion-list. I kept cancelling when choosing words from the word list as I typed.
c) Any way to allow me to choose the radius? 21km seems arbitrary. I might want just people on my block to see it, or people in Dallas/Fort Worth (50km away). Obviously there should be an upper limit, but that could also be opened for a price, say for political campaigns.
b) yeah that was recently introduced and seems to be causing an issue with some users.
c) the radius is actually dynamic (21km is the upper limit currently) and varies depending on the activity: the more activity, the smaller the radius, so that you always receive a manageable number of messages.
That's a mistake, IMHO. You're pushing a LOT more data over the air by sharing an image versus a URL to a google map. Additionally, Google has partner adverts on those maps that they get revenue from, and if you get enough traffic viewing the maps, you can go to them and get a revshare.
When people start using it to broadcast events like accidents, fires, etc., you're going to want to use URLs, not pics.
Problem with sharing URLs is that people would be able to zoom in and see exactly where the messages/echoes come from. Not all of our users would be comfortable with that.
In thinking about this, you're going to want to develop an API that lets advertisers send messages to users within a range of a location, probably referenced by lat/long. Allow users to turn off ads sent by advertisers, and develop some sort of commerce..
For example, you can send 2 messages a day. If you respond to an advertiser, you get 5 message credits... Of course I'd want to choose the advertisers I could get messages from, if any.
Well we're definitely thinking about advertisements and our early users are already using the service to post ads, some business owners even offer reductions (20% off if you come by in the next 2 hours, stuff like that).
I don't know about limiting the number of messages per user per day though. If we go that way, why not just charge to post more messages and forego the need for advertisers altogether?
Well, if I got the app, and some idiot started posting racist rhetoric or links to pics of their penis, i'd rather get fewer than an unlimited amount.
Additionally, people should be able to block posters, and the weight of those blocks can ban a user if there are enough and the velocity is high.
In that vein, it would seem that an IRC approach with "channels" might be better, so that you can have a private "channel" with your friends nearby, or move into the "starbucks" channel to get deals and updates from your local Starbucks.
Perhaps allow people to create "private" channels, by invite only, if they buy the paid version of the app..
Think about ease of use here. It should allow people to "subscribe" to channels or categories rather than have to click, click, click to change channel/category. What they get is a "stream" of echos that are mixed together that they can filter out.
If it's more CraigsList in nature, I don't think it will have the staying power.
Windows 8 will be the next Windows Vista 32-bit for Microsoft.