I was under the impression that the "plug" (called "freeze valves") concept worked really well in the MSRE, with sources even claiming this was the normal mode of shutdown over the weekends. Cut the power to the cooling fan and the reactor would drain the salt into the storage tanks quite undramatically. (See e.g.: http://nucleargreen.blogspot.s...).

Now of course in this design you didn't need cryogenic cooling, since salt freezes at a rather high temperature. So I'm wondering what the scoop is? Are proposed new designs operating in a region where simple "blow on a pipe" that worked so well at the MSRE not possible anymore?

There's scant evidence that this is in fact true. Murder in these settings are almost all crimes of passion. There's no "subconcious" threat to evaluate.

Which brings us to the heart of the matter. We tend to not commit crimes due to an internalised moral compass given to us both by birth and upbringing. We tend to stay on the straight and narrow because that's the right thing to do, not because we consciously or otherwise perform a running cost-benefit analysis. (In fact, society wouldn't nearly work if that were true.) We as a species don't want to kill members of our own species, and will go to some lengths to avoid that.

There's indeed strong evidence to this as studied in the field of killology, i.e. the study of how to make men kill each other. It turns out that training a killer is a surprisingly difficult thing to do. Quoting a marine corps sergeant "One man in eighty is a natural killer. The rest we have to teach!" (Which I note corresponds nicely with the prevalence rates of psychopathy.) And it's illustrative to learn how this process is carried out. Not with moral guidance on the "rightness of killing" (which would be wholly superfluous under your model, people would just subconsciously evaluate that it's no "OK" to kill, and be done with it), but instead by instilling the automatic somatic reflex to take certain action that will result in the likely death of your opponent.

If my experience is anything to go by, then the QA people on average code about as well as the developers can test. Which is to say, everything from "decent," to "not at all," depending on how good the organisation was overall.

Well, this might be one of those times where "correlation is not causation" is appropriate. What I mean by this is that while the skill of the user certainly matters, so does the quality of the tool. "It's a poor workman who blames his tools" is a warning against poor workmen, not a carte blanche for shitty tools.

So of course, a tool can both help you and hinder you doing what you need to. It's no accident that you see top sportsmen obsessing over their equipment. Or why people don't clamour for manual gear boxes without synchronisation rings any more.

Now, when it comes to programming languages these interactions are very poorly understood. We don't know what makes a certain language (or features) work well for certain programmers in what situations. That said, we've amassed quite a body of evidence to suggest that some things work better than others. Functional programming languages with proper type systems for example seems to make large classes of errors just go away, by making them both obvious and impossible (since the type system wouldn't allow them). They also seem to increase productivity by a factor of four to ten, and increase system performance too boot. (Even though they're "slower" than C in micro benchmarks. Basically the same argument against C from the assembly crowd in the eighties, which we all know fell out in favour of that "slow, bloated, high-level mess" that is C...

Granted, much of this is still in the research state, and security among other things isn't important enough to make people change their ways (at least not yet), but there is a lot more interesting done, and still left to do, to just say that the tool/language etc. side of the equation doesn't matter. It clearly does.

Yes, just see what a horrible place Germany turned into... Losing all those factories really hurt them in the long run.

P.S. Their recovery was also paid for by the US taxpayers, and it seems they got a fairly good deal on that too.

No, they actually correct for the "non random" spread of pellets in the paper using importance sampling. Which is a neat trick and really the takeaway from this paper. I.e. that you can make Monte Carlo methods work, even if you don't have a flat/uniform probability distribution.

Sure there are problems, many and obvious. It's showing its age, no doubt about it.

However, there's a reason that it won, as the stuff that came out of industry (esp. telecom) was and is so much worse that it would make your eyes bleed. Why? Well, because any reasonable solution would make the telephone company less powerful and it would make it more difficult to charge for ever little operation. Hence circuit switched everywhere, all the smarts in the center of the network, and please make that as centralised as possible.

The mistakes made in TCP (in hindsight) were at least honest. We didn't know any better then. The "mistakes" made in telecoms were made for a completely different reason. They were made from a position of power that was going to make damn sure that it didn't lose that power and technology and society be damned.

Remember, that if it weren't for TCP/IP you could have had all the X.25 or ISDN you would have been willing to pay for. Which wouldn't have been a lot... It's no accident that the pricing structure came first, and the protocols as a consequence of that, in the telecom protocols, with pricing not even part of the TCP/IP suite.

Be very careful what you wish for... :-)

Well sure. That's an "abuse" of the system. But I bet most of these are at least honestly not working. And being passive beats being actively malicious every time.

That said. I've met plenty of people in industry that spent their days just carrying around a binder. Hell, I've been one of those guys, at least partially and at least some of the time. So again, it's not a unique to academia.

To summarize. If you haven't been in industry. Don't for a second think the grass is even a shade greener. If it looks that way to you, it's only because marketing got to it before the brown and wilting became too obvious. :-)

Well, I dunno. I think it's more a question of the size of the organisation in that case. As more people are interested, and larger entities (whether corporate or academic) things will move slower, and slower and slower. And the larger the more "useless" political types, middle managers etc. will be attracted. Like flies... Case in point, remember Usenet before the year "September never ended"? Same effect.

In any case. My main point was that academia is after all at least mostly honest. The corporate players are often openly or covertly malicious. Like Stallman put it (paraphrase), it's not a question of how much faster you can run than your competitors, rather, how much you can slow them down, by tripping them up or shooting at them. And if that makes you stand still, that doesn't matter.

Well having done both big corporate telecoms standardisation and academia, I know which place I rather work in... (And I ultimately put my money where my mouth is. Or rather, didn't put my money as it were, salary not being an academic strong suit).

Sure, the local bike shedding can be tiresome, but our actual work, i.e. research, is cut throat and a model of efficiency and sanity. (Don't laugh. Cry if you have to, but don't laugh). There's very little politics in that side of the "business" and if you think there is, don't ever, for the love of all you hold holy, get involved in the corporate world. That's not just moving to the bad side of town, that's leaving civilisation altogether.

We used to hold the IETF, current warts and all, as the highest standard to follow (pun intended), but also saw where we were headed with the increased pressure, as TCP/IP became important to the political types and not just a nerd affair for sensible, reasonable people any more. You know, the kind of people that can listen to argument, grudgingly realise that another suggestion has technical merit and go along with that, instead of pushing their hidden agenda at all cost, and above all else.

When you've seen how the big boys make their sausage, you'd be as surprised as we were that your phone and mobile internet works at all. It's nothing short of an all out heroic struggle by the engineers in the trenches that makes it so. The rest of the system tries with all its might to prevent that from happening.

That of course depends on the actual scenario, but what you consider your job to be will probably be a luxury that society can ill afford. After the dust has settled, we'll be in a situation where we'll be fighting tooth and nail to avoid complete population collapse. We'll need scores of young people to work us out of that hole, and if you're of child bearing age, you'll bear those children. It's after all a unique skill that very few people can be put to do. (I'd for example be pretty crap at it, as I fall for the simplest and most obvious of reasons, I'm a guy.)

That's not to say that you'll be forced at gun (or club) point, but rather that society will bring down quite a bit of weight on you to "make the right decision". So for example, expect contraception to be made illegal rather than made unavailable, and anybody that interferes with a pregnancy to hang from the nearest tree. (Of course, it'd be the smart thing to do anyway, as we'll spend quite a bit of resources on the pregnant and mothers of young, so "Why would she want to do that anyway?")

After a generation or two (if we make it that far) that'll be the norm, standard, and "the way it always was", like Rob Slade puts it; "Don't go out dear, it's not good for the baby." will very rapidly morph into "Don't go out". And remember this is a good thing. It's what we want to happen, because the alternative is much, much worse.

Now, again, to say exactly how things will play out is difficult, because it depends on the scenario. If the scenario is nuclear Armageddon many bright people spent careers thinking about the consequences, and some of this information is now in the open (see e.g. Rob Slades short introduction: "Nuclear warfare 101-103" http://www.giantbomb.com/fallo... , esp. 103 deals with the aftermath. Another good book about the possible aftermath of an EMP strike is "One Second after." It is based on the US Govt. EMP commission report (and has a wikipedia page). It deals mainly with the immediate aftermath, so it doesn't really reach the "we need you to have kids"-part, but is still a somewhat realistic assessment of what society could be like. (It for example contains a long scene where refugees are triaged according to useful skill. If you're not a doctor or electrical power engineer, take a hike.)

But again. The takeaway is that what you consider your job to be will probably come so low down on the list of things to consider that it won't even make the first chapter. And that in a time when people will be far pressed to make it to the end of the first page.

But don't let that discourage you. My assigned role in such a scenario is realistically to die as quietly, and quickly as possible, so as to not use any resources best spent on the deserving. Preferably without putting any undue stress on them, mental or otherwise. I think a heroic but ultimately futile act to save the needing is my preferred way to go, but even that isn't my call. You get at least to have kids (with great loss of control of your life, but hey, nobody is going to be "in control" of much of anything), I don't get a life at all... (And if you're past the age where child bearing/rearing is a realistic occupation for you, I'll even let you lead me in the charge unto the breech. How's that for an offer you'd probably do best not to refuse?

So on a more upbeat note, lets agree that civilisation is a good thing and make our damnedest to try and preserve it, rather than go stocking up on soap just yet.

The usual suspect is learned helplessness. Or "you can run but you'll just die tired." If you've died tired time and time again, haven't seen anyone that hasn't, and everybody tells you by word and deed, to just die already, because what's the point of dying tired, what are you supposed to think? Or do for that matter?

Nope, that's too strong. If that was true then we wouldn't even use correlation as a tool at all. And we do. Because correlation is evidence of causation. It's not strong evidence, and it's not absolute evidence, but evidence all the same. If there's strong correlation, that's clear cause for further investigation, for where there is causation there is invariably correlation.

So whole correlation doesn't show causation, it correlates with it...

And while that's true. Few people (if any?) have died from their sprinklers coming on. Many people have died in a fire...

So the cost of "fire" vs. "sprinkler" isn't symmetric.

Which is interesting from a European background. We've definitely noticed for a long time, and our cars don't squeal nearly as much in the movies as US ones do. It was something I grew up with, learning that american cars apparently squealed their tires on ever turn. I even remember news pieces talking about the difference in tire technology between the US the Europe and how american cars actually squealed more IRL than ours... Wasn't so, it turned out.

So, given that we've gotten rid of bullets going an annoying "pew pew" in was movies, is there any chance of US cars not squealing their way around every single corner?