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Japan

Submission + - as much radiation as a dental X-ray (wsj.com)

blauwbaard writes: The popular world press is predicting a Nuclear Armageddon. My personal knowledge of nuclear power plants is confirming the above article is spot on. This is not a second Chernobil. Chernobil should have been shutdown at the end of the fifties anyway. This is the worst nuclear accident, which will ever happen with a western style nuclear plant. Guess I will keep on going to the dentist.

Comment Re:Read this first (Score 4, Insightful) 691

The choice isn't between nuclear scientist vs random PhD, but between random PhD and sensationalist churnalism. The guy's writeup was a lot better than what I've read anywhere else over the past couple of days and his assertions seem to be supported by the small number of specialist sites that provide reasonable information.

Comment Re:(1)Bad for nuclear (2)I'm sure Japan will be OK (Score 1) 691

As far as I understand it, there are three things to fix:

- Use a modern design, not one from the 1970s, so that a meltdown is avoided by physics and not engineering

- Build bigger tsunami barriers, to cope with the once in a hundred years of flooding.

- Do not place backup generators on low ground.

Comment Re:Used cars, anyone? (Score 1) 769

I realize that Slashdot is pro-nuclear, and hell, even I'm pro-nuclear. But please don't embarrass yourself or this site by referring to the ongoing disaster at Fukushima Daiichi as a plant "having some problems". I assure you the experts dealing with this problem are not minimizing the seriousness of what's going on. It's very serious, it's ongoing, and until the plant is stabilized, it's legitimate world news.

More like pro-physics/reality to be honest. I would characterize the nuclear power plant event as an accident that should be a minor note in the japanese coverage. Tens of thousands of people might be dead from the tsunami and oil refineries / chemical plants are/were on fire with a lot more serious effects than a minor radioactivity release and a partial meltdown. Even a full meltdown would only have had effects that were confined to the power plant. The media coverage and the evacuation zone is a total overkill. This is costing lives, they are evacuating people from a non-event when other people need assistance. It's winter and they are still finding people trapped on rooftops etc.

The lesson that pro-nuclear folks should be learning from this disaster is that Fukushima Daiichi and similar 1960s-era reactors should not be operating in the year 2011, and most especially not in an area with high seismic activity. You know this, I know this, and I guarantee that the experts who run the plants knew it before the quake.

The lesson that anti-nuclear folks should be learning from this disaster is that 1960s-era reactors shouldn't be operating in the year 2011, but those fuckers blocked the building of 2011 era reactors, so we're stuck with 30-40 year old designs - which weren't bad as this event shows, but we could do better.

While this particular incident seems to be under control, as long as these plants are operating, there's a very real possibility of a catastrophic meltdown somewhere, in the next few decades. And that will do ten times more to stop the deployment of nuclear power than Greenpeace --- or the Slashdot boogeyman of the day --- could ever do.

Sure, a meltdown might happen, but once people realise that it only costs a lot to clean up, but doesn't have major effects outside the power plant and doesn't make 400 km^2 uninhabitable, then it might actually reverse itself, at least hopefully. Personally though, I wouldn't bet on a full meltdown happening in the next 30 years. Even a 9.0 earthquake and a tsunami wasn't enough to achieve that.

Comment Re:I agree, with one caveat (Score 1) 769

There is no risk. Even forgetting the fact that the USA has uranium deposits, the simple fact is that it's very easy to stockpile a supply of uranium that would power a nuclear power plant for a decade. It takes very little uranium to do that as opposed to let's say coal or oil that cannot be stockpiled in any comparable sense. Where do you stockpile a couple tons of uranium? That's easy. Where do you stockpile half a billion barrels of oil? That's hard.

Sure, urianium is rare, but of course we only need very little of it.

Comment Re:what it is (Score 1) 121

What you propose is just dancing around the problem. The slow hop has finite throughput. You either tell the sender to send only as much as the pipe can transfer, or you force the limit on the sender by queueing things which in turn increases latency, which in turn decreases the transfer's bandwidth.

Comment Last straw that broke the camel's back (Score 3, Interesting) 374

Ok, I'm getting a new business laptop in a week or so anyway, so it's the perfect time to start using debian instead of Ubuntu anyway.

I can't say I will mind, the last couple of Ubuntu releases were shit, I couldn't even upgrade to the last one as a bug is still unfixed that makes wifi speeds crawl at 70kbyte/s tops for certain wireless cards.

Comment Re:Does This Even Matter? (Score 3, Informative) 186

It is widely used with a huge range of hardware implementations.

Quoting from wikipedia: AMD, ARM, and Broadcom have announced support for hardware acceleration of the WebM format.[31][32] Intel is also considering hardware-based acceleration for WebM in its Atom-based TV chips if the format gains popularity.[33] Qualcomm and Texas Instruments have announced support,[34][35] with native support coming to the TI OMAP processor.[36] Chip&Media have announced the fully hardware decoder for VP8 that can decode full HD resolution VP8 streams at 60 frames per second.[37]

It gives much better compression than WebM will ever have.

No. VP8 already has better compression efficiency than h.264 and at the same time being on par in quality with h.264. From the technical point of view, WebM has the potential to be a lot better than H.264.

Comment Irresponsible. (Score 4, Insightful) 380

This is really irresponsible on Cisco's part. I don't care about their monetary considerations, adding IPv6 support into their Linux derived routers wouldn't have been all that hard or costly for them.

Their refusal to enable IPv6 support is having a bad effect on IPv6 adoption. I don't think most people realise how bad IPv4 exhaustion can be. IPv4 exhaustion puts a cap on internet growth, which in turn retards economic growth.

Seriously Cisco, fuck you, just fuck you.

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