Obama scares the hell out of everybody with cybersecurity op-ed - <AUTHOR> http://thedc.com/MzjTuc <comment><USER2> Ridiculous linkbait headline. Why not just link to the op-ed in question?

[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000087239639044433090457753...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444330904577535492693044650.html?KEYWORDS=Obama+cybersecurity)

<comment><USER3> Well the first paragraph of the op-ed is:

"Last month I convened an emergency meeting of my cabinet and top homeland security, intelligence and defense officials. Across the country trains had derailed, including one carrying industrial chemicals that exploded into a toxic cloud. Water treatment plants in several states had shut down, contaminating drinking water and causing Americans to fall ill."

It's a sensationalist piece all around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I find it quite interesting how everytime we're talking about giving more power to the Government, they all seem to get along so well, and they're only arguing about how much power they should get - just more, or _a lot_ more?

</comment><comment><USER5> See:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3896492>

</comment><comment><USER6> "Be afraid! (You are so much easier to control that way.)"

I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but the continual push to always have something to be deathly afraid of that the government will protect you from is straining my credulity. An organized conspiracy (ala the "New World Order")? Unlikely. Enough politicians making enough power grabs to simulate that? Apparently.

</comment><comment><USER7> Is there room for decentralization of utilities to address these issues? Solar for electricity, ambient moisture condensation for water, etc? Is the future of utilities centralized or decentralized?

</comment><comment><USER8> slightly offtopic: The user id - coconuts2314 - looks like a bot. Look at all the submissions and only one lame comment. Shouldn't the HN spam algorithms detect this?

<comment><USER5> There are a bunch of these. I don't think 'pg cares.

<comment><USER9> We ban them when we notice them. It's on my todo list to write some code to do it automatically, but my todo list is long.

<comment><USER5> Good to know. I thought this might have been a place where you figured the voting system sorts it out in the end.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Interesting that this op-ed comes out after his executive order giving him control over telecommunication systems during a national emergency made the rounds around the blogosphere.</comment>


Chile Wants to Borrow US Entrepreneurs for $40,000 - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.forbes.com/maureenfarrell/2010/08/20/chile-wants-to-borrow-us-entrepreneurs-for-40000/

<comment><USER2> This is the first article on HN that specifically states it's 25 projects that get the $40.000, meaning they have an initial budget of $1M.

To put this in perspective, the iFund, which supports iOS projects has a $200M budget.

So, not that I have something with this Chile project, but I feel it's getting way too much "airtime" on HN. I don't need to see this daily on the RSS feed.

I've always disliked contests of this kind. If Chile wants to really push this industry in their country, make it really simple: reduce (or remove) the taxes for software companies. This would make them an instant target for entrepreneurs and would cost them nothing.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for your comment.

In countries with lower cost of labour, reducing or removing taxes on software companies will lead to folks starting outsourcing and service related companies. Not entrepreneurial product based startups.

India is a prime example of this. Compared to the number of software developers in the country, the number of startups that pop up from India is very very low.

So from Chile's point of view, I think its a great pilot plan.

<comment><USER2> By definition startups have a chance of failing. Betting Chile's software strategy on 25 startups is a risky business.

I don't see why lower taxes will reduce entrepreneurship there or introduce only outsourcing -- won't the locals use this chance to create their own startups ?

There are many things to discuss here but I assume some countries either culturally or financially encourage enterprises. If Chile doesn't have the right legal, tax and socio-educational framework then startups will never migrate there.

There are just too many aspects to look at but I do believe that a contest with some $40K prizes can't beat lowering taxes.

<comment><USER4> Eh, lowering taxes puts money in the pocket of everybody who makes any money, and you're primarily taking less money from already existing income. Chile's looking to create new high tech startups. Entirely different problems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _First-time poster, go easy on me!_

Lowering taxes may be better from a textbook economics perspective but this is creative real-world marketing that has already been somewhat effective simply by generating so many headlines.

I'm just one data point but I would have not considered Chile as a potential base for a small venture I'm working on otherwise. Now I will likely apply for this program and keep Chile in mind for future reference. I recognize most people aren't as geographically flexible as I am but the opportunity to spend time in Chile and speak Spanish sounds exciting to me.

</comment><comment><USER6> This reminds me of PG article <http://www.paulgraham.com/maybe.html>

May be they should give 1M and not 40k ? That would surely move some more interesting startups...

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm not sure if i missed something when I initially read about the startup Chile program, but i don't quite remember the documents stating they only wanted US entrepreneurs, am i wrong?

<comment><AUTHOR> They're not limiting it to US entrepreneurs, just limiting their recruitment efforts to California at present. K-Swiss and Apple have convinced the world that the world's best stuff is "Designed in California"

<comment><USER8> The world doesn't know what K-Swiss is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1621583>

</comment><comment><USER10> At twice that, I'd consider it.

From what I hear, lovely country, great weather, and wonderful people. The offer is just a little too cheap for my circumstances.

</comment><comment><USER11> Why isn't govt offering software development services?

</comment><comment><USER12> They don't give you 40k cash, they have some sort of reimbursement plan. You also can't just go down there and give to yourself as a salary. Borderline scam.

<comment><USER13> From what I can tell[1] you can either charge your personal expenses (insurance, housing, etc) or pay yourself a salary, but not both.

Edit: It also looks can also choose whether you prefer to have the funding as advance payment or reimbursement[2]

[1] Section V, pages 4-5, [http://www.corfo.cl/startupchile/download/Technical_and_admi...](http://www.corfo.cl/startupchile/download/Technical_and_administrative_mandatory_guidelines_start_up_chile.pdf)

[2] Section 4, page 8 of the same pdf</comment></comment>


Google Will Shut Down Its Social Network After User Information Was Exposed - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/08/technology/google-plus-security-disclosure.html <comment><USER2> Holy crap.

Poignant quote:

"When the company's technical staff discovered the bug in March, they decided against disclosing the issue to users because they hadn't found anyone that had been affected"

Later it becomes clear that this is because the data couldn't easily be associated with users. But still.

</comment><comment><USER3> There's already a lively discussion at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18169243](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18169243).</comment>


Ask HN: How common is part-time development work? - <AUTHOR> How common is hiring/contracting developers with fewer than 30 hours/week work loads? Does it even make sense for who is hiring? <comment><USER2> It is not common, but I do it for various projects, and have also worked part time for others. On the hiring side, the projects are in maintenance mode and there just isn't 40 hours of work a week, esp. if you split (say) front end and backend. I also do PM consulting, and can manage a number of developers working only a few hours a day.

You have problems if you hire people who are not professional freelancers, or those who can't manage their time. I once broke that rule and hired someone with a full time job. They were pressured into OT at work, quality on my stuff dropped like a rock, and he was grateful to be fired. So unless you're a full time freelancer, I won't hire you. Others might, though!</comment>


At what point is freedom maximized on the IQ curve? - <AUTHOR>

While it is obvious that low IQ will not give you many options in life, I think it is also the case that very high IQ will take away your freedom as well.
There are after all expectations on what one should do with a very high IQ as not to "waste" it.
For example, if you are the sort of person who can win a gold medal in the International Math Olympiad, then maybe becoming an entrepreneur will not make optimal use of your brain power.
Moreover, entrepreneurship is risky. Why should a very smart person take such risk?  Isn't academia safer?
And so the question becomes, what sort of IQ is best to maximize freedom?
P.S.  Very high IQ people who have exercised significant freedom in their projects/career have often been ridiculed.  Consider for example Wolfram and Marilyn vos Savant. <comment><USER2> I think this is the same as saying "You're very tall, you should be a basketball player!" or perhaps "You're very well endowed. It'd be a waste not to go into porn!"

We all have different motivators. The true freedom is being able to choose your career path because you have more options than someone with more limited capabilities. A career is a significant life decision and to a degree it's imperative to disregard what other people want or expect from you in order to have long-term satisfaction.

Perhaps some people are "too smart" for business because the inherent illogic and stupidity of it all can be a constant source of irritation, but that's something you can learn to accept.

Since when are people like Wolfram ridiculed? Maybe you're confusing the perverse American-style backlash against intellectuals with some specific grudge against polymaths.

</comment><comment><USER3> Maybe the freedom comes from other factors. Is your family rich enough? Do they pressure you a lot? I remember that intelligent people from working class at university used to be very puritan compared with middle class. It's terrible to be the only hope of your family to put someone "there".

</comment><comment><USER4> From what I've observed, those with an IQ more than two or so standard deviations above normal have social problems because they relate to others poorly.

Especially if they are introverts. Extroverts do better, but often have hidden difficulties masked by their outgoing personalities.

<comment><USER5> My IQ is more than three standard deviations above normal. In Meyers-Briggs I'm right down the middle between E and I.

Certainly I was never very popular in school, and for a long time there was a feedback loop between peers finding me arrogant and annoying and me becoming even more arrogant and annoying in defense.

But then my family adopted 4 special-needs kids, and I learned that being smart wasn't enough for dealing with everything in life, and also that I wasn't half bad at some of the other stuff: I made a perhaps-surprisingly good big brother. And then I went into the IB program for high school and for the first time personally knew people who were definitely smarter than me (if only in some fields, I told myself). Both experiences were very helpful in teaching me to have an identity outside intelligence.

But as far as relating to people in general, it's not as bad as you might expect. For one thing, almost everyone I know is smart. My parents, my near- age biological brother, my wife, my kids (so I tell myself, but they're too young to know yet really), and most of my friends are all of well above average intelligence.

And overall I find that humility and real (or adequately feigned) interest make interacting with almost anyone pretty workable. For humility, I try to remember that I'm smart through no merit of my own: it's a gift of God (or chance, or the inexorable unfolding of the big bang as you like) through genetics and environment. Of course I participated usefully in my own intellectual growth, but there are any number of sad failures of application and tenacity to count against me in that column, too. For interest, like so many things, it's about faking it till it becomes real.

<comment><USER6> IB programs really teach you a lot about life. Our program was actually inside an inner city school where the population not in the program had a very low rate of success as far as graduating and careers went. There is a lot of pressure involved with having abilities of any kind. People begin to expect results, regardless of your other passions or wishes.

I agree, humility and genuine respect is absolutely critical to relating up and down the chain of both IQ and command. That said, sometimes you have to think if life wouldn't be easier if everyone had the IQ of a 3 year old. At least then innovation would come naturally, and everyone would learn to share.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm not sure I buy the premise. Wolfram and vos Savant are bad certainly examples.

Savant is not so much ridiculed as ignored. She may be fantastically smart, but she is nothing more than "Dear Abby" ([http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/linkset/2005/03...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/linkset/2005/03/25/LI2005032502583.html)) with a gimmick. She did waste her brain power, but it hasn't really harmed her.

Wolfram, on the other hand, is not really a target of ridicule. He is mocked a bit because his claims about cellular automata are overblown (and probably false), but everyone takes him seriously. A few idiot academics may feel he wasted his talents, but that's all.

Plenty of other very smart people who have exercised significant freedom are treated quite respectably. I think the premise is wrong.

But what do I know, I'm a guy with an IQ 1 standard deviation below the mean.

</comment><comment><USER8> Assuming the individual is emotionally healthy, I think higher IQ means more freedom.

Some dangers are that some very bright people get sucked into academe or other prestige occupations... rather than things that truly allow them to engage their intellect.

</comment><comment><USER9> The premise of this question confuses freedom with entropy.

A smart person who does all sorts of stupid things to screw herself up, drinking, who knows what else, can easily live the life of a stupid person.

But what can a stupid person do to live the life of a smart person?

Clearly smart people have more choices.

</comment><comment><USER10> "Isn't academia safer?"

In the long term, assuming you can get tenure, yes. This is a terrible time to be looking for a job as a professor, though - practically every institution has a hiring freeze.

</comment><comment><USER11> If my car can only reach 50mph, I can't drive at 100mph. If my car can reach 150mph, I can cruise at 100mph if I wish to do so.

What is it that a high IQ prevents me from doing that a lower IQ would allow?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not so logical. As explained, there's the feeling that you are "wasting" your IQ if you pursue certain career paths.

Even if the individual does not fall into this trap, there is social pressure to worry about.

<comment><USER12> Or the old question, if you're so smart, how come you ain't rich? Smarts often don't correlate with savvy (or IQ != EQ or however you want to express it). I'd happily trade some of the former for more of the latter. For reason and other, I've never been able to exploit my IQ to the extent that I'd like.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This sort of "freedom" has more to do with upbringing than IQ. A 115 IQ is more than enough brainpower to become a doctor or attorney and a person born in that range in a family with high expectations will be expected to perform at that level. Conversely, there are people with 140+ IQs whose families expect little or nothing of them, although that sort of "freedom" isn't desirable either.

For maximizing life success, I'd say that an IQ in the low 130s is optimal, but anything above 140 is dangerous and rather useless unless you want to "swing for the fences" and achieve something that will be remembered after you die (something that, in my mind, is overrated). People selected as leaders are usually 75-90th percentile (intellectually) within their reference frame, and almost never 95+. The upshot is that the frame of reference gets smarter as one gets older; people with 130 IQs are virtually never popular in high school, but can do well in adulthood. In general, the smarter you are, the later in life you hit your stride, socially speaking.

The risk is that not everyone recovers, although most do, from the negative experiences earlier on. A 30-year-old with a 145 IQ has probably recovered from any innate social problems and become socially normal, neurologically speaking, but in the corporate world he's going to be competing against people in the 120-130 range who have the advantage of positive past experiences.</comment>


Cringley: Japan may have just permanently lost 20% of its electricity supply - <AUTHOR> http://www.cringely.com/2011/03/flea-powder-may-be-saving-lives-in-japan/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+ICringely+(I,+Cringely) <comment><USER3> Like they wouldn't have boron near a nuclear reactor. I'm a PWR man myself, but I am 99% sure that GE BWR designs have a couple of big tanks of borated water specifically for a LOCA. I highly doubt they're having reactivity problems, it's probably just managing the decay heat, and now the radiation leaks, that's the problem. "Just" is a relative word, here, of course.

 _Boiling water reactors are simpler, cheaper, but generally aren't made anymore because they are perceived as being less safe. That's because the exotic coolant in the pressurized water reactor can contain boric acid which absorbs neutrons and can help (or totally) control the nuclear reaction. You can't use boric acid or any other soluble boron-laced neutron absorbers in a boiling water reactor because doing so would contaminate both the cooling system and the environment._

He's completely wrong about industry adoption of BWRs. There are two BWR's planned to be built in the US (along with 3 or 4 PWRs), and I believe that China has contracted with GE for a few as well (along with 4 Westinghouse PWRs and maybe a few Areva ones too).

PWRs are preferred largely because of their higher power densities (a BWR core that produces the same power must be larger) and simpler nuclear calculations and control strategies (two-phase flow makes calculations much more difficult, and it's harder to calculate correct positions for control blades (whose effects are highly localized) than it is to calculate the correct boron concentration (whose effects are smeared over the whole core)). However, now that computers are faster and us nuclear engineers no longer have the excuse of slow computers to hide behind, PWRs are looking to move away from relying on Boron concentration as the main form of control (the Westinghouse AP1000, specifically, relies much more on rod movement than the AP600), because of the cost of performing regular boron dilutions.

He's right that BWRs are simpler and cheaper - about half the moving parts.

<comment><USER4> > Like they wouldn't have boron near a nuclear reactor.

They probably do, the question is whether they can carry it to the site faster than the US navy, and whether the boron tanks have not been compromised.

<comment><USER3> The question is also, and I didn't make it clear enough in my original post:

"Wait, they need _boron_?"

Boron is a neutron absorber, and is therefore used to control the fission rate. You add boron when you're afraid of the fission rate getting out of control (e.g. Chernobyl). This is a legitimate concern here for two reasons:

1) A BWR is significantly more reactive (conducive to a high fission rate) at cold zero power than at hot full power, because cold water is a better neutron moderator than steam.

2) Xenon-135 and Samarium-149 are by-products of nuclear fission that have an effect on reactivity similar to boron. Their half-lives are on the order of hours, so when you crank down the fission rate, a couple hours later you also crank down the concentrations of Xe-135 and Sm-149, which, if you're not careful, can cause the reactor to go supercritical (and possibly prompt supercritical - a form of criticality in which everything happens approximately a thousand times faster - pretty much the worst-case reactivity excursion scenario) again a few hours after shutdown.

So, basically, you need enough negative reactivity from somewhere, either control rods or borated water, to counteract these two reactivity insertions. The Japanese reactor is almost certainly designed so that inserting all of the control rods into the core will kill any and all reactivity increases after shutdown.

What is most likely occurring is that there is very little nuclear fission inside the reactor right now. All the power inside the reactor is coming from decaying fission products, and it's probably on the order of kilowatts, it's just that the when the flow rate through the core drops from gallons per second to essentially nothing, a few kilowatts per cubic foot will get you pretty damn hot pretty damn quick. At this point some of the fuel rods have probably failed as well (if not melted), so the water in the reactor may be nastier than usual.

Unless the control rods have failed or are in the process of failing, I doubt that boron is even necessary for reactivity control, except as insurance. My educated guess is that their problems are entirely thermal- and containment- related, and that there is no danger of a reactivity accident, since a xenon transient or a condensation transient would have run its course by now, so the control rods probably have enough reactivity worth to keep the reactor subcritical indefinitely.

<comment><USER4> They don't want to control reactivity anymore, they likely want to kill the reactor core completely in order to not take any risks (not just to keep the core subcritical, but to avoid it simply melting as well, if the pumps did not work they don't have the waterflow they need, so the next option is to end the core _fast_ ). And for that, boron is the best tool.

<comment><USER3> Subcritical _is_ "killed completely" from a nuclear standpoint - lowering the reactivity of an already subcritical reactor (e.g. adding neutron absorbers) does nothing but make the fission rate decrease faster. The fission rate already changes on short time scales, (e.g. orders of magnitude in minutes/hours during a scram). If the fission rate is already essentially zero, which it is in the Japanese reactor by now, it does nothing at all.

The heat inside the core is being produced by the decay of fission products, and there's absolutely nothing you can do to stop that except wait for enough half-lives that the activity slows down a bit.

Your general thesis, namely that as soon as they decide the reactor can't be salvaged, they'll dump in a bunch of boron just to be safe on the nuclear front, is correct, but where you're wrong is in assuming that adding a bunch of boron will help cool the reactor at all - it won't. All it will do is ensure that the reactor never goes critical again.

This is why spent fuel needs to sit in a pool of water for 5 years before anyone even considers moving it. Decay heat is serious shit, and it's not related to neutron physics at all.

EDIT: Probably time to get more specific about the term "reactivity". Reactivity is related to the "multiplication factor", which tells you how much bigger each generation of neutrons is than the last. It's zero when each subsequent generation is the same size - this is the normal operating state of a reactor, positive when each subsequent generation of neutrons is larger, and negative ... you get the idea.

If you've ever touched population dynamics in a differential equations class, you'll realize that this is a recipe for exponential growth and decay. Basically the time scale on which nuclear reactions proceed is "reactivity / mean neutron lifetime", with the caveat that if your reactivity is _just_ above zero, neutron population growth is constrained by the longest-lived neutrons (it's like if every family has 2 kids, except for a couple hundredths of a percent, who have three, but put their third kids in cryostasis for a thousand years). In practice, this is how reactors are operated, because the mean neutron lifetime is _very_ small, so the worst thing that can happen is if your reactivity moves outside of this regime (this happened at Chernobyl). If your reactivity is negative, you are _always_ constrained by the longest- lived neutrons, but that's okay, because even this time scale is pretty short.

The upshot here is that if each successive generation of neutrons is smaller than the last, the number of neutrons (and hence things like fission rate that depend linearly on the number of neutrons) decays exponentially with a pretty short time constant.

The definition of "subcritical" is "having negative reactivity", so if the reactor is subcritical for any length of time, the fission rate will have exponentially decayed down to a tiny number.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't know much about nuclear reactors. To my untrained ear, what Cringely says sounds fairly reasonable. But then, having read a bunch of articles of his linked in the past on computer hardware and software, which I do know something about, I find that what he writes usually falls into one of two categories: (1) stuff that's obvious to anyone who knows what they're talking about and are paying any attention at all, and (2) crack-pot half-baked ideas that are laughable and completely wrong.

He's also lied about having a PhD. I wouldn't consider him a very trustworthy source. If he's saying something reasonable, someone else more credible has probably already said it.

<comment><USER6> He has an article in which he gives an explanation of what happened at TMI in his own words. Being a nerd for this stuff and having read the report of the president's commission (which he claims to have been on) I was... shocked to say the least.

Its hard to imagine he was actually on the same committee as the people who wrote the report. His explanation had _elements_ that mirrored the report. For instance, there was a particular warning light discussed in both. But what function the light served in the plant, its behavior during the crisis, the operators' response to it, or its overall role in the incident, on these Crigley was dead wrong.

I suspect he got assigned to the president's commission for political reasons, or because he was a 'public media personality,' but that he actually contributed nothing. He remembers an indicator light because he sat there dumbfounded in the meeting where the smart people on the committee discussed it. He then incorporated that into his incredibly child-like and incorrect mental model of what happened.

Suffice to say, regardless of his experience on the TMI president's commission, his understanding of nuclear power is even more comically incorrect than his understanding of computers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here's what you need to read instead of Cringley:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_Water_Reactor_Safety_Sy...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_Water_Reactor_Safety_Systems)

Combine that with these:

[http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp- com/release/11031219-e....](http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp- com/release/11031219-e.html)

[http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp- com/release/11031220-e....](http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp- com/release/11031220-e.html)

And you can see what's going on. Ignore everything else.

</comment><comment><USER8> Uhm... the other units at _Chernobyl_ re-entered service for a solid decade after that incident. (Only one of them lasted a decade. Unit 2 caught on fire in '91. Unit 1 was shut down in '96 and Unit 3 lasted until Dec '99.)

Cringley's prediction will be wrong. There are a lot of units at that station, two of which are ABWR cores. I would speculate that the _majority_ of these units will return to service.

<comment><USER9> I think you're right but I give him credit for drawing attention to a big issue that everyone else is ignoring which is Japan's diminished production capacity (rather than focusing on the doomsday meltdown scenarios most of the media are fixated on).

Even if they return to service eventually there's going to be downtime. That's going to force Japan to use more fossil fuels which will drive up the price (even more). Add a spike in oil costs to the loss of japanese economic output and I think our modest economic recovery just hit a big snag.

<comment><USER10> Oil isn't used to make electricity. The major options are nat gas and coal.

This disaster will likely drive DOWN oil prices since Japan will likely need less of it in the short term.

<comment><USER11> I'm sorry? _Oil isn't used to make electricity_

Oil is used in some types of power station, and the markets are already reacting to not only the increased demand, but due to the infrastructure damage in the north of the country, the fact it'll be harder than ever to get it delivered.

<http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20110312-700945.html>

<comment><USER10> I initially assumed that Japans energy gneration profile was similar to the US where it's almost all coal and LNG which is why I didn't think it would impact the oil market as much.

A bit of googling gave me this article which states that oil is actually more popular than coal. [http://www.fepc.or.jp/english/energy_electricity/electric_po...](http://www.fepc.or.jp/english/energy_electricity/electric_power_sources/index.html)

I still wonder if their demand will go up since a lot of the infrastructure is damaged and unusable. But if it does go up, chances are they'll need more fuel oil.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> One of the interesting things about disaster recovery planning for nuclear power plants is that you count on (X) number of things to go wrong and figure out how the plant recovers gracefully. In Japan they've effectively had three things go wrong: earthquake, tsunami, and general infrastructure damage. Most disaster scenarios only cover a single event and TEPCO has a lot to deal with.

In a disaster scenario the first reactions are generally passive (dropping of control rods, changing where water flows) and then "all" that remains is to cool the decay heat. Aye, here's the rub: the cooling system is not a passive system. It requires power to drive the water pumps for the cooling system that siphons the heat away from the reactor vessel. After initiating reactor shutdown the most critical time period is the first little while as that is when there is the most heat. Too much heat and it'll damage the fuel, vessel, and/or the cooling system and can effectively damage the reactor enough so to prevent it from ever recovering (thus, meltdown).

The questions left to ask are to what degree the cooling systems (primary and backup) are working, and whether they've been powered consistently. With that bit of information alone we'd be able to make a pretty accurate estimate as to the state of the reactors in question. What is scary is that it would be really simple to say that all of those systems are working as expected and that there is nothing to worry about. Since that hasn't been said I'm of the opinion that there is definitely something to worry about.

<comment><USER13> These "three things" boil down to one thing (the earthquake) and its foreseeable impacts. I certainly hope the disaster planners wouldn't see these things as independent failures (and assess probabilities accordingly), but that kind of hubristic "we can calculate the probabilities of all failure modes" thinking is one of the reasons I'm not a big fan of nuclear.

<comment><USER14> _but that kind of hubristic "we can calculate the probabilities of all failure modes" thinking is one of the reasons I'm not a big fan of nuclear._

Would you be more comfortable with "we can't estimate the probabilities of all failure modes"? I am sure that all engineers involved in planning the failure- handling systems know that those "calculations of probabilities" are only estimates based on some assumptions.

I think nuclear often gets bad press _because_ you can measure and calculate a lot of risks to a much higher precision than in other industries. Like "x amount of radiation released" where x is actually a very small number but the fact that you can measure it and make an estimate as to how many cancer cases will be caused by it makes it scary, while people don't care much about the risks of, say, coal-mining because thats harder to measure/estimate.

<comment><USER15> Doesn't seem to extend beyond energy production. For instance, tell people all about the dangers in chicken mcnuggets, or smoking, or a sedentery lifestyle, and they don't get very excited at all. Even if you quote statistics.

Certainly they never go as far as voting against chicken farms.

Its got to be the theoretical nature of nuclear power generation that has something to do with it. Its invisible, unfathomable and secretive, so folks distrust it?

<comment><USER16> Chicken mcnuggets, tobacco smoke, and sedentery lifestyles are not members of the set of "things that can cause arable land to become permanently uninhabitable". Nuclear accidents are in that set and that is why the public is (rightly) concerned about them.

<comment><USER17> Nuclear accidents are not members of the set of "things that are at all likely to actually hurt you or anybody you know". Sedentary lifestyles and tobacco smoke _are_ in that set, but they lack the novelty and sensationalism that gives nuclear accidents their cachet.

<comment><USER18> I think that people (self included) are generally more accepting of risk if it's control is within their own hands. Dying of tobacco related illnesses or obesity is mostly within my own control. Dying because a a nuclear reactor leak is pretty much 100% out of my control.

<comment><USER17> Even then, people's estimates of danger are crazy. A nuclear accident is far less likely to kill you than any number of other things that are outside your control. A drunk driver running into you, for example, or a natural gas explosion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > _Hillary isn't the kind of person to choose the wrong words_

How has no one pointed out there was never any coolant delivered and Hilary Clinton did in fact misspeak? It renders this article a bit moot.

[http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/11/japan-quake- nuclea...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/11/japan-quake-nuclear- coolant-idUSN1125270120110311) "US did NOT deliver coolant to Japan nuclear reactor"

"Ultimately, however, Japan did not need assistance from the United States but Clinton did not appear to have been updated before she made her public remarks."

<comment><USER20> ...or the Japanese sourced the coolant themselves (which appears to be the case) and the article is correct.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I trust Japanese engineering more than Cringley predictions. Let's wait and see what the engineers do.

BREAKING NEWS: Pressure successfully released from Fukushima No. 1 reactor: agency - <USER2>

[http://twitter.com/martyn_williams/statuses/4645894316531712...](http://twitter.com/martyn_williams/statuses/46458943165317121)

\-----

Govt says radioactive measurements near plant roughly doubled, confirming release of gas.

[http://twitter.com/martyn_williams/statuses/4645969566958387...](http://twitter.com/martyn_williams/statuses/46459695669583872)

<comment><USER22> _"I trust Japanese engineering more than Cringley predictions."_

What does that even mean?

<comment><USER23> That Cringely is less reliable than Japanese manufactured / designed goods.

<comment><USER22> That doesn't make any sense.

<comment><USER24> Why is that

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> However the events unfold I wonder if this will cause more nations to investigate other reactor technologies like Thorium. The abundance of Thorium and its inherent safety mechanisms (as a liquid at least) make the technology very exciting.

Check out the Google Tech Talk <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZR0UKxNPh8>

<comment><USER26> Hmm. Here in Central Europe this would probably read:

"However the events unfold we can rest reassured that scientists have to acknowledge that any use of nuclear technology for electrical power generation is inherently unsafe and therefore irresponsible."

And then we build a new coal power plant.

<comment><USER22> Not even probably. In Germany, opposition parties already (and once again) demanded of the government to rethink their nuclear strategy. (No new nuclear power plants are built or planned in Germany but the coalition government recently extended the runtime of existing nuclear power plants.)

I'm a bit annoyed that the only two options in Germany seem to be to either shut all nuclear power plants down or to extend the runtime of the already existing and rather old nuclear power plants. It seems to me that it is possible to have safer nuclear power but no political party in Germany seems to be willing to even talk about that.

<comment><USER27> It is worth mentioning that France is still big on nuclear and we will likely be buying French power from nuclear plants.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> FUKUSHIMA DAIICHI-1 was already scheduled to be shutdown this month.

<http://www.icjt.org/plants/uni/a/uni194a.html>

neutronicus has even more reasons why what Bob says is very likely wrong.

</comment><comment><USER29> I suspect the decision to use sea water to cool the reactor means that they have decided to write off the plant. It was 40 years old anyway and nearing the end of it's service life.

<comment><USER28> the end of its service life was this month!

<http://www.icjt.org/plants/uni/a/uni194a.html>

<comment><USER18> Wondered when someone would mention that. Had seen the link to it in the comments on the Cringely article, posted by a Cringely sceptic. Weird coincidence that it happen the month it was due to be decommissioned.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> CNN reports explosion at one of the plants.

<http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/03/12/japan.nuclear/>

</comment><comment><USER31> I find it notable that you have mounting pressure that could risk the integrity of the pressure vessel, yet can't turn a turbine connected to a pump to drive cool water through heat exchangers... If a reactor self-destructs unless you can cool it down actively after an _emergency_ shutdown, there must be some serious design issues there.

After you completely kill the fission, you still have some heat being generated from the decay of fission byproducts doesn't sound weird that the device has enough power to self destruct but not enough to cool itself down?

</comment><comment><USER32> The Fukushima plant produces 4.7GW: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_I_Nuclear_Power_Plant>

The total nuclear production of energy in Japan is 47GW: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country>

Nuclear is 28.9% of Japan's energy source (same Wikipedia-article as above).

It doesn't add up. Where does the number 20% come from? 2% is closer to the truth.

</comment><comment><USER33> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_X._Cringely>

Robert X. Cringely is the pen name of both technology journalist Mark Stephens and a string of writers for a column in InfoWorld, the one-time weekly computer trade newspaper published by IDG.

<comment><USER31> I think that, currently, Cringely is just Stephens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> let's just hope a loss of power supply is everything they have to worry about. it seems some caesium already got out.

</comment><comment><USER35> Can they not simply ship in extra batteries, or are they batteries too large to be moved?

<comment><USER36> Well. The datacenter across the street from my office has backup batteries which weigh in at half a ton apiece. Arranged in groups of _eight_.

And I'm betting they're positively puny compared to what you'd want for a nuclear plant's cooling system, so simply "shipping in" some extras may not be all that feasible...

<comment><USER35> I'm sure they are large; I was thinking mostly that as 20% of Japan's energy and a nuclear reactor are on the line, they'd be able to move many tons of batteries. Also remember, modern cars weight 1.5-2 tons, and are carried in sets of 8-10 cross-country by truck.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I guess the obvious question is whether 80% of electricity supply meets demand, probably not, how can Japan generate the additional 20% in a hurry?

<comment><USER38> Losing a plant means you lose a percentage of your peak capacity but not necessarily that you won't be able to provide the total amount of energy demanded by the economy. You could potentially move a portion of the usage to off-peak hours, starting with some industrial loads for example, moving a few factory shifts to the night.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Japan probably won't need that 20% for a while. Their demand just dropped significantly.

</comment><comment><USER39> Not wanting to change the topic. But why on earth would you even consider nuclear power generation when you are in such a geologically unstable area? Sounds like idiocy to me. Fingers crossed here, could do without another man made disaster.

<comment><USER40> Why is this getting downvoted? It was the first thing that came to my mind too. Not only is the country prone to earthquakes, but as I understand, several of their power stations are built right on the east coast.

It's possible to make a building like a skyscraper fairly earthquake proof, but is it really possible to make things like nuclear power stations earthquake proof? Assuming the building is made to 'wobble', wouldn't that wreak havoc on the cooling systems and other gear inside?

<comment><USER41> Yes. It is possible:

<http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf18.html>

It's not like they don't think of this stuff ahead of time. This was planned for.</comment></comment></comment>


First Google Android Web-Enabled TV On The Way - <AUTHOR> http://www.mobileinc.co.uk/2010/04/google-domination-first-android-tv-on-the-way/

<comment><USER2> I am a bit of an Android fanboi, but one thing that would prevent me from buying something like this is the hardware makers' consistent inability to keep the current version of Android running on their devices. I want root and full specs so I can do this, or I want daily builds from git. Otherwise, I'm not wasting my money on something that's outdated before I open the box.

(I've been promised Android 2.0 on my Archos 5 IT since December, and I've been promised Android 2.1 on my myTouch3G since last fall. Neither have materialized. So fuck you, hardware makers, I'm not wasting any more of my money until you start leaning how to write software in addition to making cool-looking hardware.

For Android especially, there's no excuse. The amount of dev time you save by using the open-source solution should give you plenty of time to run "make" and upload the result to the Internets once in a while.)

</comment><comment><USER3> A modern digital TV is a big monitor with a tuner slapped on. It's so blindingly obvious that we need to slap a computer on there, too, that it's surprising this hasn't already happened.

The reason isn't "interaction between commercials and Android handsets" (yawn, back to the future called, they want their TV back) - it's so we can run applications on it, that can talk to the internet and make the TV experience interactive.

<comment><USER4> _A modern digital TV is a big monitor with a tuner slapped on._

I think that's precisely why we should _not_ add a computer there as well. I expect to keep a TV much longer than a computer, so I'd rather be free to upgrade one without the other.

In fact, what I really want is to buy a TV-grade monitor without either a tuner (because the video feed comes either from my DirecTivo or my XBox) or speakers (because my stereo handles that stuff).

<comment><USER3> Think of it not as a computer, but a tuner for the interwebs. If it can display a full-screen MKV HD stream, with room to spare, is programmable, and it can talk to the control-channel on the HDMI inputs, it's hard to imagine what should come about that would render it obsolete.

<comment><USER5> 3D, new codecs, new DRMs, etc. If you truly want a future-proof box it would have to be ridiculously overpowered (like the PS3 was in 2006) and thus expensive, but few people are willing to pay now for option value that will be unlocked later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is that article really correct? Hulu has actively blocked itself from being run on devices, and Netflix doesn't have a Linux client (other than the Roku). Their apps page (<http://www.peopleoflava.com/television/scandinavia/apps/>) makes no specific mention of these.

<comment><USER2> Seems like Dell has made a deal with Netflix for streaming videos to their Android-based Mini 5. So it is possible that these folks did too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> _Can't wait for notifications to interupt me whilst watching The Wire._

That would be a great feature for a tablet like the iPad or a smartphone. Have the notifications come up on synced devices so the video screen can stay unmolested for the viewers.

<comment><USER2> You mean, exactly how things work right now? (If someone calls me, it comes up on my phone, not on my TV.)

<comment><USER7> But with Twitter, Facebook, and everything else that comes up on Growl.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The cable companies really dropped the ball on this one.

They already have computers (cable boxes) sitting under every TV in the country. Can't think of a bigger competitive advantage.</comment>


FBI's Secret Surveillance Tech Budget Is 'Hundreds of Millions' - <AUTHOR> https://theintercept.com/2016/06/25/fbis-secret-surveillance-tech-budget-is-hundreds-of-millions/ <comment><USER2> One could buy a lot of Tor nodes, 0-days, fiber taps, stingrays, and Storage Pod's with that kind of money. Wonder what they're spending it on. Anyway, last I checked, they were still spending top dollar on XTS-400's and cross- domain software (probably SAGE) to guard their bigger secrets. Cost them a few million a year. Remember that when they advise just using a good configuration of Windows or something to stop nation-states. It was fairly clear to me pre- Snowden, given their own security measures, that they were saying one thing and doing another for an unstated reason. Crystal clear now. ;)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Trusted_Operating_Progr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Trusted_Operating_Program)

[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.133...](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.133.4225&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

<comment><USER3> A secure system that run X windows?

<comment><USER2> Possibly a modification of it or enforced through the security kernel. Look up Epstein's "15 years after TX" paper for example of older, secure X. Nitpicker GUI is a modern approach. Otherwise, they just ported old crap over due to customer demand with a warning to only use it in trustworthy environments. That happens too.

However, XTS-400's are usually operated in console mode as cross-domain solutions. These are like ultra-thorough firewalls with content scanning, assurance that OS resists hackers, and various covert/side channels plugged. Guards actually predate firewalls: a knockoff of guards that had less features and always (even today) less assurance of secure implementation. Defense sector still prefers guards on points where multiple levels, esp Internet and classified, connect. Although, even most guards are at weak EAL4 OS's now. (sighs)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> $70 million in funding to "counter the threat of Going Dark".

[https://www.justice.gov/jmd/file/822286/download](https://www.justice.gov/jmd/file/822286/download)

<comment><USER5> That much to pick on RMS? Wow!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Paid by the tax payer, used against the tax payer.

</comment><comment><USER7> Now that the FBI has erected itself as the in-the-clear spying apparatus, you can likely kiss any rights you have today good bye down the road, if you're not a billionaire yourself.

<comment><USER8> Why do you think billionaires would be exempt? If I was the fbi or powers behind the fbi, I would be much more worried about an activist billionaire than an average person. If anything, the surveillance apparatus, it's for targeting the billionaires. People behind the fbi are not interested in going after small criminals who keep the people terrified and in need of the police.

Why do you think zuckerberg tapes the camera on his laptop ?

<comment><USER7> > Why do you think zuckerberg tapes the camera on his laptop ?

As a joke. Same goes for the tape on his mic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Well there's a lot of iPhones, so at a million dollars a phone, it gets eaten up pretty quickly.</comment>


Libv8 + libfastcgi = server-side Javascript - <AUTHOR> http://tokuhirom.vox.com/library/post/libv8-libfastcgi-server-side-javascript.html

<comment><USER2> w00t serverside javascript again. I remember using this one one of my earlier web projects using Broadvision 4.1 10 years ago. Here is a press release for that application server for those history of technology buffs - [http://www.e-consultancy.com/news-blog/19472/broadvision- shi...](http://www.e-consultancy.com/news-blog/19472/broadvision-ships-latest- technology-for-extended-relationship-management-over-the-web.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Aptana Jaxer (<http://www.aptana.com/jaxer>) is another serverside Javascript thing. What's cool about it, though, is that it runs under Gecko, so you can do all sorts of DOM manipulation craziness server-side. It's fantastic when you're dealing with user created HTML.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've been doing that with Rhino and Jetty for a while (and so have the folks from Spring, Helma, et al.)

I still want to try v8 though, and webkit is definitely a more mature engine for html than tagsoup and cobra.

<comment><USER5> Not to mention the recent AppJet stack release! ...which I guess is Rhino and Jetty. Still cool, though.

I've even been messing about with some of this fellow's stuff, including a very pretty mini-web framework: <http://peter.michaux.ca/>

He's working on the problem that is really holding server-side JS back: no libraries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Server side javascript isn't completely new idea, but I really like the option. I'm happy in PHP, Python, but it simplifies architecture if you can create a library that blurs the line between client and cloud.

</comment><comment><USER7> Since someone is going to say this sooner or later...

As much as I'd like to write a more robust language than Javascript, I'd probably prefer this over PHP.</comment>


Opening API for the largest video game database in the world - <AUTHOR> https://rawg.io/apidocs <comment><AUTHOR> CTO at RAWG.io here. Happy to answer any questions!</comment>


Life Sentence for British Student Draws Criticism for U.A.E - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/life-sentence-for-british-student-casts-shadow-over-u-a-e-1542820081 <comment><USER2> Non-paywall: [https://outline.com/62WBbd](https://outline.com/62WBbd)

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't know why anyone would visit a country with such insane laws, it's just too dangerous. Sure they seem to have a lot of interesting stuff going on and to see, but a big fat NOPE after you read anything about their rules and how they treat people!

<comment><USER4> Look at Japan: 23-day police custody period. After that there's a 99.99% confession rate. Carlos Ghosn, president of Nissan, seems to have just discovered it: He will be interrogated for 12 days. I would never go to such countries.

<comment><USER5> Japan is not going to torture him, keep him up without letting him sleep are they? They have the rule of law and generally treat people well. You can't seriously compare those countries, can you?

<comment><USER6> It's definitely much better than KSA, but 23 days in police custody? Most people would break under the pressure alone - no torture necessary...

<comment><USER7> Try Sweden... 365 days of policy custody.

<comment><USER8> There's no limit that I know of.

<comment><USER7> No, you are correct, there's no limit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Article is light on details other than to say he was carrying out "legitimate academic research into security policy following the Arab spring". Let's say that someone from say China came to the US to stake out airports and study the US's airport security protocol. I'm not sure the outcome would be much different. Even if this was all totally above board it Seems a bit naive to think this isn't something that you should get permission and clearance to do. I think the fact that it's played out this way makes me think it was probably not strictly academic. I guess I will start DDGing more details.

<comment><USER10> If my memory serves me right the guy was caught a year or two ago and was under heavy investigation by UAE counter-intelligence team.

And a life sentence is not something UAE courts would hand out lightly, especially in these circumstances.

My best guess is that UAE have not got what it asked for to release the guy pre-trial, but will get something now and sheikh will pardon the guy next week.

<comment><USER11> According to an earlier article [1] he was detained in May, seemingly of this year.

1\. [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england- tyne-45871581](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tyne-45871581)

<comment><USER10> Okay, half a year ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's absurd that a British citizen, or a citizen of any democratic county, is living and studying in a repressive, corrupt and violent regime like the United Arab Emirates. These countries and their kleptocratic Sheikhs throw wealth derived from oil and blood at western universities, and bribe their officials into setting up "campuses" in their states. Then they get upset when arriving students don't conform to the apathetic conformity drilled into their own citizens.

The Cold War is over. Yet somehow western democracies are still clinging on to alliances with barbarous regimes like Saudi Arabia and UAE. And now we see the fruits of it: Yemeni citivilians murdered during an unending war, a British citizen imprisoned for life for offending his hosts, and an agent of the Saudi royalty installed as president of the USA. What an utterly pathetic state of affairs.

<comment><USER13> > The Cold War is over. Yet somehow western democracies are still clinging on > to alliances with barbarous regimes like Saudi Arabia and UAE.

That's because those in power are the moderate ones, who are able to keep the most extreme elements of Islamic fundamentalism at bay. You want to topple Saudi Arabia and UAE? Great, now it's run by ISIS. Sometimes you have to choose the lesser evil.

<comment><USER14> If only US and NATO applied that logic to Lybia and Syria

<comment><USER15> They did for a long time.

<comment><USER16> Yep. It was easy for us to topple Libya, and we almost succeeded with Syria as well, if Russia hadn't stepped in. A secular government is easy to stir up the fundamentalists against, to use them as foot soldiers in your regime change operation.

They won't have as much luck with Iran, since it's government is so strongly aligned with the fundamentalists, the pool of willing cannon fodder will be smaller.

I hope, at some point, these illegal regime change operations that the US and other western countries have been involved in for so many decades, will eventually stop.

<comment><USER15> Lybia and Syria had their own rebellions to deal with. Without a popular uprising, it's very doubtful that the USA would intervene at all like they did before in Iraq and Afghanistan. Say what you will, but the people of a country should have a right to change its government.

Also, when chaos is set into motion, the west has to decide if the costs of not getting involved are greater than getting involved. Often doing nothing isn't viable either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> [https://globalnews.ca/news/4684113/matthew-hedges-student- ua...](https://globalnews.ca/news/4684113/matthew-hedges-student-uae-prison- spying/)

> Hedges, a 31-year-old doctoral student at Durham University, has been held > in the UAE since May 5, when he was arrested at Dubai International Airport > after a two-week research visit.

Surely you can't spy in any significant way on a country you entered 2 weeks ago.

> The hearing lasted less than five minutes and his lawyer was not present, > his family said.

</comment><comment><USER18> Surely even if he is a spy, the UK will eventually be able to negotiate his release? How many years could this take? UAE has a lot of revenue from tourism, I don't know how much of that is from the UK, but I assume that provides enough leverage to get something going. I just don't see a life sentence being a true life sentence for any _citizen_ Westerner caught by a nation like the UAE.

<comment><USER19> UAE and UK are pretty must best friends. Historically they have strong ties from the days of the British empire (Britain was allied with most of the Gulf countries to secure trade routes to India), and even now there are very strong political, economic and royal ties to the country. Most of the Western expats living there are from the UK, and there are a lot of UK financial companies with offices there. Going the other way, London is the place to go for Emiratis that want to escape the summer heat. I'm sure there is a lot more going on behind the scenes to provoke this reaction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> How is this relevant to HN? Isn't "most political stuff" explicitly off topic?

Also, most people calling out UAE to be a "dangerous" place and make misinformed should really learn more before making blanket statements. I have lived there for half of my life and also lived in the world "largest democracy" and also in the US. I feel safer in the UAE as an immigrant than I do in either of those places.

For context, in India you have PSA, AFSPA, etc which are barbaric laws to which thousands of civilians have lost their lives. In the U.S, most of my Muslim friends (and myself included) feel constantly threatened by racism/xenophobia (this includes physical attacks).

Edit: PSA or Public Safety Act is when the Indian Government can "legally" detain you in Kashmir (an area illegally occupied by India, disregarding UN resolutions to hold a referendum) under the pretext that you are a threat to public safety. Children as young as 14 years old have been booked under this act, and jailed.

AFSPA (Armed Forced Special Powers Act) is when the Indian Armed forces can put a bullet in your head and face no judicial probe, which seems like a violation of international law to me.

Bet Saudi Arabia feels real safe now.

<comment><USER21> Sorry but there are enough incidents coming out of UAE and the arab world (KSA), where it seems easy to run afoul of the law (alcohol, drugs, sex/rape, religion) and end up in big trouble

You go after India but don't reveal what country you hail from though.

The US is so big though that it's impractical to make such a blanket statement.

There are mosques in every big city- no one seems to be opressed because of their religious views. You will never be judged for offending a deity or the government.

<comment><USER20> I am from Indian occupied Kashmir.

I guess I would say there are other cultures in the world centered around other belief systems (not always religious) that are impossible to grasp as an outsider. As somebody who has lived in both KSA and UAE for a long time, I can tell you that people from the UAE are the most generous, kind, and honestly classy people you will come across (something that is not accounted for when generalizing them as a barbaric people like many do in this post)

I have never seen an Emirati as much as yell at somebody in the streets. Happiness of citizens is actively discussed and worked on, on a government level. Seeing the police makes me feel safe, not threatened.

Maybe that's why there are so many expatriates there.

You should totally visit. It's an amazing place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> True story : I went on a vacation in Dubai and Abu Dabhi with my wife. 1-2 days priot I sold my iphone to some random guy and brought that cash with me. I imedietly exchanged 100 euros in Dubai after I landed to have some of their currency for small things. I also exchanged larger amount in a hotel before paying for it and moving to a different hotel to explore another part of the emirate.

Anyhow, one day later my phone is ringing with some strange number calling. It was a manager from the first hotel saying that I used counterfited euro bills in their hotel. My heart sank reeeally hard in an instant. He said he is sure because only I exchanged euros before they went to the bank to store the money or whatever. The bank informed them that they are fake bills and by the law he said they need to say who used them. BUT, that was my lucky day and the manager said that they did not report me and will not if I repay them with real money. I imidately agreed and asked them for a way to pay with a CC because I was in another part of the emirate, they agreed and that was settled, I overpeyed a bit because he probably saved me.

After that I ran to my room and took out all the bills I got from the iPhone sale and me and my wife needed almost an hour to figgure out that they are really fake, by looking over the internet and checking what is usually harder to fake. Tell tell sign was the 3d lines/bumps on parts of the bill. Everything else looked perfectly well!!! Now, I was confused why the money changer at the airport did not bust me right away so I went to a mall and exhanged another bill (which was real, not counterfited) and they just took it without checking. Few days later when leaving the country I was very scared on the boreder/aurport police check point but everything went well. Uff. I was so close to having a horror story myself... I immidiately reported to the police in my country what has happened.

Before this I never ever had such experience and always naively trusted random people when I bought and sold things on the internet. Now I know better. Was so close to be really screwed by some random guy because of some small amount of money.

<comment><USER20> So you got scammed on the internet. How is that relevant or have anything to do with Dubai/Abu Dhabi?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> for those that can't read WSJ

[https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle- east-46288510](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-46288510)

</comment><comment><USER23> These countries are great for vacations, to do business and to work...until they aren't. In reality, and backed by their laws, they are backward and savage fifth world countries. Stay the hell away, or at least calculate the risk of being framed for espionage for telling the truth about the royals or going to jail for consensual sex.

</comment><comment><USER24> Doesn't make sense really, the UK military does regular exercises with the UAE, anything they wanted to know about defence they could just go see

</comment><comment><USER25> Rule of thumb: don't enter any country where you need an exit visa to leave.

<comment><USER14> You dont need one in UAE.

<comment><USER25> My mistake then — neighboring Saudi Arabia and Qatar both have an exit visa system, AFAIK.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I used to live there, strange place. Only ever got rejected at clubs for wearing shorts, can you imagine wearing pants in a desert? fuck all that

</comment><comment><USER27> Yet no word about a Scot being tortured and electrocuted, held in jail for a year.

[https://www.thescottishsun.co.uk/news/2604512/jagtar- singh-j...](https://www.thescottishsun.co.uk/news/2604512/jagtar-singh-johal- charged-funding-murder-of-rss-leaders/)

<comment><USER28> This was in India. What does it have to do with the U.A.E story???

<comment><USER27> No criticism for India. But there is for uae</comment></comment></comment>


Attempting to Code the Human Brain - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304851104579361191171330498.html

<comment><USER2> People think computers will be able to understand what we understand without experiencing what we experience. I think that's a mistake. A computer without hands will never see what we see when we watch baseball. A computer without facial muscles will never see what we see when we see a person cry.

No creature could ever hold a conversation with a human about being a human without experiencing actual human life. The pooping and the drunkenness and the boredom and the hand holding and the uncomfortable shoes, and the slipping on ice--all of it. No amount of reading or looking at photos will create an understanding equivalent to the one we get from continuous interaction through a human body embedded the actual world.

Now, you could give a robot all of those experiences, but that AI would run into exactly the same intelligence challenges that a healthy aging human runs into. Not the memory loss and all that, but the ideas start to solidify. Certain things start to see unquestionable. Strange ideas seem like a waste of time. Some of aging isn't decrepitude, it's just side effects of the pile of data getting bigger.

Sure, being able to extrapolate more moves into the future (a la Deep Blue) will lessen some of that. But not all.

AI fantasists act like the limits of human intelligence are all _human_ limits. But some of them are just the limits of intelligence.

I believe the cyborg reality will last a very, very long time. Biological intelligence will not be killed off until the great slow turning off of lights that the second law promised us. And at that point the robots won't be spared either.</comment>


You're guilty of becoming complacent - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@jhabdas/what-is-snapchat-really-7a023477f03f <comment><USER2> This is blatant bait-and-switch hidden marketing for Snapchat, correct? Wouldn't expect them to stoop to this level.</comment>


Is my crazy fast Snake clone any good? - <AUTHOR> http://paul-drummond.tumblr.com/post/77898085232/foobit-speed-freak-released

<comment><USER2> It's alright and fun enough, but there are a few things that frustrate me:

\- The fonts throughout. Having big "pixelly" fonts doesn't look good if they're not blocky pixel fonts, the anti-aliasing just makes it look like you've slapped any old font on there. If you're going for blocky/pixelly then do it well.

\- The controls. Though I get that it's the gameplay mechanic, I couldn't find any correlation between where I hit the screen and the direction the foo moved. Am I missing something? does tapping on the left of the screen make the foo move left, and likewise for tapping the right?</comment>


Be proactive, not reactive – Faster DOM updates via change propagation - <AUTHOR> http://blog.bitovi.com/change-propagation/ <comment><USER2> Interesting article.

Some thoughts off the top of my head: Proxies are presented as a possible candidate to improve performance, but in conversations w/ some vdom library authors, I learned that proxy performance is far too bad to make it a viable option for high-performance vdom engines (in addition to having abysmal cross- browser support today)

Another issue is that observable overhead _must_ be offset by savings in number of DOM operations in order for change propagation to be worth it. For example, a `reverse` operation would not benefit much, if at all, since it requires touching almost all DOM nodes in a list, and would incur worst case overhead on top of it.

While naive vdom can lose in needle-in-haystack scenarios, vdom libraries often provide other mechanisms (thunks, shouldComponentUpdate, per-component redraws, etc) to cope w/ those scenarios.

In addition, the field of vdom performance has very strong traction currently. Authors of vdom libraries often share knowledge and implementation ideas and there are now libraries than can perform faster than naive vanilla js in some cases by employing techniques like DOM recycling, cloning and static tree diff shortcircuiting, as well as libraries w/ strong focus on granular localized updates.

<comment><USER3> > thunks, shouldComponentUpdate, per-component redraws, etc

I'm not sure how those would deal with the scenarios focused on in the article. The only one I'm familiar with is per-component redraws which wouldn't apply.

<comment><USER2> The general gist is that one would use the subtree diff skipping APIs to prevent expensive diffs, and per-component redraws to selectively update things in the problematic subtree. Admittedly, it's not perfect and requires a not-so-trivial amount of app-space code, but at least it's not a black box renderer like, say, Angular 1.

Ultimately, there are a vast number of different scenarios, some of which are likely to remain open problems for the foreseable future (e.g. a 100,000 item reverse), and some of which can be worked around via application space "escape hatches" such as the use of granular update APIs and techniques like occlusion culling.

As I said, it's very interesting to see work that tackles the problem from an algorithmic complexity angle, and it's always healthy to explore different performance characteristics, but I think it's important to also keep in perspective what is the performance profile of solutions currently in the market, because looking at their theoretical algorithmic complexity alone doesn't tell the whole story.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Rendering the initial list takes much, much longer with the change propagation implementation than with the virtual dom one. I'd say, without benchmarking it, I see about 2 seconds or more difference. Even if the virtual dom is slightly slower at reacting to change, the time to render the latter implementation is more than enough to make me not want to choose it.</comment>


What happens when a check box and a select have a baby? A dropdown check list - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/dropdown-check-list/

<comment><USER2> This is great! However, I would argue this is how browsers should by default treat multi select boxes, they are a UI nightmare for non technical users.

</comment><comment><USER3> Bravo, an outstanding example of progressive enhancement onto good semantic markup.</comment>


Efficient management Python projects dependencies with Docker - <AUTHOR> https://jpetazzo.github.io/2013/12/01/docker-python-pip-requirements/ <comment><USER2> I like how Docker crowd seems to be undereducated about what packaging systems can do for dozen years already.

\- If something not packaged by distribution is needed, one can just create own package.

\- If something is packaged, but in wrong version, most of the time the package can be simply rebuilt.

\- If a required library is fscked up, doesn't cooperate and needs to be put into a virtualenv, whole virtualenv still may be put into a package.

Installation and deployment is then a breeze, pulling all the dependencies (including C libraries), and not compiling everything over and over again. Moreover, deployment is _repeatable_ , which means a developer may install project's dependencies and work on the code directly from git workdir.

A side bonus is immunity from another instance of left-pad farce, where inaccessibility of one single tarball hanging somewhere in the internet broke down whole build process.</comment>


Japanese breakthrough will make wind power cheaper than nuclear - <AUTHOR> http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/research-innovations/blogs/japanese-breakthrough-will-make-wind-power-cheaper-than-nuclea <comment><USER2> People have been working on shrouded wind turbines for decades. Over and over again, the shrouds end up costing more than the cost of extending the blades and tower enough to capture the equivalent amount of wind.

I won't say that it will _never_ work, but the list of failures is so long that anyone who mentions shrouded wind turbines without mentioning their history of failure should be suspected of being clueless. Inventing a new name for them, like "wind lens," makes them even more suspect.

For a weak census of recent attempts, see Google Image Search: <http://www.google.com/search?q=ducted+wind+turbines>

1868, Ernest Bollee in France: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89olienne_Boll%C3%A9e>

1926, Dew Oliver, San Gorgonio Pass in California, USA: [http://books.google.com/books?id=7M9C1Adp0yQC&pg=PA46...](http://books.google.com/books?id=7M9C1Adp0yQC&pg=PA46&lpg=PA46&dq=dew+oliver+turbine)

("The abandoned [Oliver] turbine remained at the top of San Gorgonio Pass for almost two decades until it was dismembered for its scrap metal during World War II.")

2005, Enflo turbine, still trying in 2011: <http://www.enflo-windtec.ch/>

2007, FloDesign: <http://fdwt.com/> $56M in funding so far.

2008, Marquiss Wind Power: $1.3M Series A in 2008, now dead: <http://www.marquisswindpower.com/>

To be fair, Enflo and FloDesign haven't failed yet, or at least their websites are still up.

<comment><USER3> I'm doing my own renewable energy startup right now, with our own innovations in turbine design. And while the engineering is critical, it is not the problem with the industry.

Energy startups fail primarily due to a lack of appreciation for the intensive capital required to make renewable energy work.

This is an industry where every project will cost millions of dollars, hundreds of millions, or even a billion for truly large-scale operations.

And that is EVERY project. You do not just come up with a design, test it, then repeat it 500 times. Each site has its own unique properties, each turbine need to be manufactured and shipped, connected into a grid, operated and maintained.

So you need a permanent source of massive amounts of cash to operate. Your standard VC firm normally is not an option because the ROI is likely to be 10 years out, and that is too long for most investors.

When the ROI does come in, it is massive. But this is a high-risk, long-term play, and it just doesn't match the interest of most VCs.

We have built our first production units, field tested them, and are ready to roll, but have spent the last 3 months lining up finances because we do not want to be another failed company added to the list.

<comment><USER4> This is an area where I think government should provide generous grants and investments. Innovation for this type of problem is possible, but it takes more than 2 guys in a basement. Plus, as you mentioned, few VCs will want to wait a decade to see the results. Government can wait, however.

I'm not in the field, so I'll naively ask: Is the US government, or any government for that matter, doing anything about it?

<comment><USER5> Energy production is one of the purest of the wealth producers. If the energy producer can't break even on their own strength, then needing government subsidy (especially indefinitely) is all but a mathematical proof that the subsidized energy production method is a net loss to society as a whole; were it not, they would _be_ profitable and not need the subsidy. See also corn- based ethanol.

Yes, I am aware of subsidizing R&D but that has diminishing returns too, and given the amount already poured in around the world and the rather dismal returns, I'm underwhelmed by the proposition that pouring _even more_ in will turn things around. You can _always_ claim that if you just keep pouring the money in it'll all turn around; it's a null argument when it comes down to it. (We'd almost certainly be better off pouring equal funds into getting nuclear going instead.)

<comment><USER6> _Energy production is one of the purest of the wealth producers._

Extractive energy production where you can dump negative externalities onto the public or hide your subsidy in a part of the budget that is not directly traceable to you (e.g. Marines in Iraq and destroyers in the straits of Hormuz) is surely one of the purest wealth producers, but if forced to actually compete on its own the equations would look a bit different...

<comment><USER5> It would still be radically net positive. Oil is a stonking great deal; you put in one joule and get something like 10 to 30 back. (Note how I phrased that in energy terms this time, that's an important point.) You can't actually subsidize something of that size to profitability, because the energy industry is on of the _bases_ of the economy; if oil is a net loss, the whole edifice comes crumbling down regardless of what you do. You can't subsidize the oil industry into net energy profitability with wealth taxed away from dry cleaners and accountants, and it doesn't matter what games you play with dollars if you aren't making a true net energy profit at the base of the economic structure.

Wind and solar both generally barely break even or barely above if you take a full accounting of their energy inputs and costs, biofuels are often a net loss (depends on the crop, but I think the balance of the argument has corn ethanol as a net loss, cane sugar seems to be a net gain, but...), and the problem is they're competing with things that easily get tens of times of returns on energy expended with the fossil fuels and nuclear power.

One of the things you rarely see correctly computed is what it would truly take to power our entire society with renewable energy, _including_ the sudden new energy expenditures necessary to keep our purely-renewable infrastructure maintained with replacement gear. As the net energy benefit of the average piece of gear approaches 1x, the necessary expenditures approach infinity. Replacing 10-25x sources with 1.5-3x sources requires yet again far more resources than the naive multiplications and divisions would imply, if you don't make the mistake of assuming free infrastructure that never decays, or one-time-cost infrastructure that never decays.

(Incidentally, this is why cheap solar, in the sense of truly cheaper without government subsidy solar, is exciting. A solar panel that can make back 5-10x the expenditure to make and install it, and isn't a massive expenditure of metal and glass and silicon is a big deal, it makes things practical that weren't before. Or a solar installation consisting of lots of cheap reflectors concentrating the energy on a centralized station. I still think we might be able to go both net positive and practical on solar. Wind I'm less optimistic about, it's difficult to see what we can cut out of our wind generators and still have wind generators the way we can cut down on the mass/energy footprint of a solar installation with clever engineering. In the limiting case, a reflector is a sheet of foil and an amortized central station; a wind generator is an entire wind generator.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Annoying article, it talks more about the (in my opinion very naïve and utopian) ramifications about the technology if implemented on a massive scale, than about the technology itself.

[http://news.discovery.com/tech/lens-wind-turbines-magnify- po...](http://news.discovery.com/tech/lens-wind-turbines-magnify-power.html) is marginally better (and more brief), I'm sure there are further sources.

<comment><USER8> I'm confused. The discovery article says "Each Lens, which measures 112 meters in diameter, can provide enough energy for an average household." Does that mean we need millions (or even billions) of these structures?

<comment><USER9> So the diameter more than the width of a football (NFL) field. And... one of those per each household? Besides the visual obstruction, just finding such space for each abode is daunting anywhere (not to mention somewhere with the population density of Japan).

EDIT: Or, consider the transmission costs from areas where such land _is_ available.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The article itself has almost no information on the actual technology. The embedded video is much more helpful, and explains how the "lens" around the turbines helps to disperse air and create a low pressure zone on one side of the turbine. The relatively higher pressure air on the other side naturally wants to push through, greatly increasing the efficiency of the turbines.

<comment><USER11> So in theory, this "wind lens" could be applied to existing wind turbines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I drove across western New York this weekend and saw a few large wind farms. I found the view was quite pleasant and made a point to stop the car near the base of one to listen for noise -- I heard nothing above the background.

Wind's got two big problems. The power isn't where you want it in time and space. The wind doesn't blow all the time, so wind turbines need to be supported with "peaking" power plants which will almost certainly burn natural gas. Any effort to store power is likely to be as expensive as generating it. Another problem is that good wind resources aren't close to demand, so a large network of new power lines need to be built to get power into cities. Power companies aren't excited about this, because the power isn't available at the times they want it, and NIMBYism makes it quite hard to acquire new rights of way for power lines.

As for a comparison to nuclear, that's a comparison that can come out any way you like. Nuclear fuel is almost free, compared to the capital costs of building the plant. When you try to charge that cost to a kWh of electricity, it all depends on the lifetime of the plant and the cost of capital. For a while it seemed that nuclear plants have a longer life than we anticipated they would, which lowers the cost of electricity a lot. The Fukushima accident will probably cause people to give up on older BWRs, which hurts the economics.

In the past, the construction of nuclear plants has proven to be risky and unpredictable -- often nuclear plants cost many times more to build than originally planned. If the industry is going to have a future, it's going to need to answer this problem through technology (small modular reactors) and management (project management, quality control.)

</comment><comment><USER13> He brushes off "utility-scale storage" but to actually power the country with wind, storage is a big problem. He mentions batteries. The cheapest battery is lead-acid. Here's an estimate of just how much lead it would take to run the country on lead-acid batteries: [http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the- math/2011/08/nation-sized-bat...](http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the- math/2011/08/nation-sized-battery/)

Short answer: 50 times more lead than exists in known deposits, and $25 trillion dollars.

That's probably an overly pessimistic estimate. He assumes that we have to handle the wind stopping all over the country for a week (or, equivalently, going down to 30% for ten days). But I think it makes the point that renewables can't take over until we figure out scalable storage.

I did see one interesting idea: go someplace with lots of solid granite bedrock. Carve out a giant plug and store power by using hydraulics to raise the plug. [http://www.solarserver.com/solar-magazine/solar-energy- syste...](http://www.solarserver.com/solar-magazine/solar-energy-system-of- the-month/hydraulic-hydro-storage.html)

That article says claims that "an analysis of a future of renewable energy shows that a mix of wind and solar energy needs, at least, a two day storage capacity." With that assumption, two plugs of 500m radius and 1km deep could handle all of Germany, at a cost of half a euro per kWh.

On the other hand, my ex-geologist brother was fairly sceptical of this idea.

<comment><USER14> Doubt lead batteries would work on this scale. Other solutions: pump water up into some mountain reservoir (simlar to the granite plug idea), actually they already do this, they can run some hydroelectric power plants in reverse. Compress air into some airtight undeground chamber. Or even use giant gyroscopes to store energy for a short period (maybe night vs day type scenario).

<comment><USER13> Yep. The question though is, how much hydropower can you actually build? How much volume is available in abandoned mines and so on, or what would it cost to dig out new ones just for this? A lot of things sound great, until you actually work out the cost and maximum capacity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Direct from the University:

[http://www.riam.kyushu-u.ac.jp/windeng/en_aboutus_detail04.h...](http://www.riam.kyushu-u.ac.jp/windeng/en_aboutus_detail04.html)

"Wind power is proportional to the wind speed cubed. If we can increase the wind speed with some mechanism by utilizing the fluid dynamic nature around a structure, namely if we can capture and concentrate the wind energy locally, the output power of a wind turbine can be increased substantially. At wind energy section of Kyushu University, a new efficient wind power turbine system has been developed. This system has an diffuser shroud at the circumference of its rotor to embody the wind energy concentration. The diffuser shroud is now named "Wind lens". To apply the wind-lens structure to a larger size turbine, we have developed a compact collection-acceleration device"

</comment><comment><USER16> How much would it cost to buy the equiivalent of 25% of Alaska and then build 2.6 million huge turbines? From the pictures, these turbines look like they use a lot more material than current turbines because of the huge ring around them, so they're probably a lot more expensive.

Add to this the costs of reworking the power grid to distribute power from the new turbines across the country, and decommissioning all of the existing power generating facilities.

I doubt the turbines could ever recover their costs before they get worn out and need replacement.

<comment><USER17> I think those not familiar with the size of Alaska (particularly from the "lower-48") might conceptually think of it as about the size of Texas. 'Tis not so.

20% of the size of Alaska is roughly the size of two or three full Midwest states. 20% of AK is about 132K sq miles, equivalent to about 80% the size of California (total ~164K sq miles).

[http://www.google.com/search?q=alaska%20size%20compared%20to...](http://www.google.com/search?q=alaska%20size%20compared%20to%20us&tbm=isch)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Alaska_area_compared_to_co...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Alaska_area_compared_to_conterminous_US.svg)

One of the insights from the video (and not mentioned in the article) is the option of using ocean area for wind collection, rather than doing it on land.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> "Cheaper than nuclear" is a great pitch -- you can always adjust upward!

Does "nuclear" strictly mean operating costs? Or does it include the billions of government capital investments? How about storing waste for a period of time longer than recorded human history?

<comment><USER19> Storing nuclear material ('waste') is only a problem because it's not processed or exploited economically. Well, with the thorium cycle there is the possibility of burning a large proportion of existing waste and with electricity generation on the side.

This material can also be 'downblended' (the opposite process of enrichment) or simply mixed in with sea water in very small concentrations. Being long- lived radioactive sources also means the relative radioactivity (per volume) is low.

<comment><USER18> Sure, but as a competitor to this technology, that's just more to add to the cost.

It will cost many billions of dollars to develop infrastructure to "downblend" waste products, build thorium reactors, litigate, etc.

<comment><USER20> It would cost more to buy enough land to build the wind turbines described in the article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> _Of course this assumes the concurrent deployment of a nationwide Smart Grid that could store and disburse the variable sources of wind power as needed using a variety of technologies — gas or coal peaking, utility scale storage via batteries or fly-wheels, etc_

That parenthetical comment, dismissed with the lead-in "Of course..." is actually itself a huge technological hurdle that is decades away from reality.

</comment><comment><USER22> I always have to laugh when wind advocates are forced to get to the point and explain how many wind turbines they're actually going to need. Yes, a 200k square mile patch of land with 3 _million_ wind turbines isn't an indication that perhaps this isn't quite the right approach to solving our energy needs. It's just plain absurd.

</comment><comment><USER23> I've seen some content-free articles, but this one really takes the vapor- cake. It spends two sentences very nonspecifically talking about a technical development in wind energy, then paragraph after paragraph waxing rhapsodic about the wonderous world of the future that awaits us.

</comment><comment><USER24> Conventional turbines are already near the Betz limit - no room for tripling their efficiency. There's potential to reduce the amount of material required (e.g. kite-based systems like those proposed by Makani), but this design doesn't look like it will deliver that. So something is probably wrong with the reporting here, to say nothing of the fluff written around the story (deploying 2.6M giant steel structures without causing any deaths?). So how the heck did it get 125 points?

</comment><comment><USER25> Wind and solar power can never make up the bulk of base load power production on their own. They produce power on their own schedule, not based on when it's needed. Until we have vastly more efficient energy storage systems these will forever be niche power sources. They aren't entirely useless, but they are still 2nd or 3rd string, and this sort of innovation (increasing capacity and efficiency) won't change that.

</comment><comment><USER26> The article mentions this in passing, but wind energy tends to be exactly wrong for the daily increase of electrical load. As the sun rises and temperatures increase, the wind tends to die down. That's why storage was mentioned. That's probably a more important problem to solve: how do we efficiently store energy produced now for later?

</comment><comment><USER27> Based on a tumbling-domino-theory of assumptions, this could be excellent. I particuarly like the fact that this new technology will be the answer to current unemployment because of the maintenance jobs it will create ... presumably, overnight.

<comment><USER28> Also we get rid of those dangerous mines. Why they are dangerous? People have to work there.

Luckily wind-turbine building and maintenance is not dangerous...

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The article is badly one-sided. Some misconceptions were already mentioned, here are more which comes to my mind:

"Of course, this assumes the concurrent deployment of a nationwide Smart Grid that could store and disburse the variable sources" -> the price is extreme and not calculated. Furthermore, you would still need 100% backup in traditional sources.

"it will create lots and lots of permanent jobs" -> therefore badly increases the price of the power generated

"projected growth in electric vehicles" -> thus further increasing the demand for electricity

</comment><comment><USER30> The technology could be interesting, but this article is painful to read.

"One downside often cited by advocates of coal and gas power is that wind turbines require a lot more maintenence than a typical coal or gas power plant. But in a lagging economy this might just be wind power's biggest upside — it will create lots and lots of permanent jobs, sparking a new cycle of economic growth in America."

He thinks the fact that they require more maintenance and are less efficient is good for the economy. Unbelievable.

<comment><USER31> It is a tempting mistake to make. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window>

Anything that increases the cost of energy will decrease the ability of a civilization to advance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> See also: [http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/20110613232554data_trunc_sy...](http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/20110613232554data_trunc_sys.shtml) . More broadly, the piece has a crude understanding of the complex issues around energy and cost.

</comment><comment><USER33> Anyone here familiar with or suffer from megalophobia? The "wind lens" on these seems to somehow aggravate my very mild case more than normal turbines do. While I hope for the success of this tech, I don't relish the idea of driving past a field of them at all.

</comment><comment><USER34> Would be helpful if it said on what basis it will make wind power cheaper than nuclear. Cheaper maximum generating capacity? Cheaper raw per watt cost? Cheaper per watt cost even after taking into account the extra power storage capacity wind power requires?

<comment><USER35> Yeah, you are right. There are many variables that need to be defined first.

How much does it cost to put nuclear power generation in a house? You can't. So therefore wind power is infinitely cheaper than nuclear.

If you put a wind turbine on the side of a building where that side forms a wind tunnel, then you can generate power very cheaply - if you only count the cost of the generator and the batteries. If you count the cost of the building that makes the natural wind tunnel and repairs it is more.

Same with nuclear - you need to count other costs. The cost of a rare accident is billions or trillions. The cost of cleanup, ruined nearby industries ( and even not so nearby industries (Wales farmers)) can be massive.

Wind power can be used without storage depending on what needs to use the wind power. Like the article mentions, car batteries are quite useful to store the power in. There are many uses for electricity that do not require continuous electricity. Likewise it can be used as a complementary source of renewable energy. There are communities that generate 100% of their energy from renewable sources, and part of that is from wind.

Wind is also a cheaper investment. Nuclear costs a lot of money initially, and on an ongoing basis. At a small scale, I can buy a portable wind generator for my ipod for under $30. At a large scale, some communities have farms that generate 5 gigawatt hours a year.

How do you price the cost to the environment of wind farms? Noise pollution, and visual pollution. The cost of safety - that is damage to human and animal life. Wind power causes the lowest amounts of death to humans, but apparently causes bird deaths.

It's all very complicated, but wind power does have some clear cost advantages. From scale of investment required, to safety cost advantages, to reduced environmental cleanup costs, to reduced tourism and land price effects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> The video tells it all: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifF-MOuzM_s>

I think this is also a great example for startups. When things don't go as planned (nuclear disaster) don't give up innovating.

</comment><comment><USER37> "Cheaper than nuclear" until the environmental impacts are mitigated. One turbine every forty acres times 2.6 million is likely to comprise a significant change on a massive scale...before considering the support infrastructure.

</comment><comment><USER38> I thought the problem with wind wasn't the cost, it was that all the places with both consistent wind and no migratory birds that will get your project killed have been taken?

</comment><comment><USER28> Wikipedia already has an article about the phenomenon. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_lens>

</comment><comment><USER39> Japan is also well positioned to make use of hydrothermal. All those vents along fault lines pushing out superheated steam is currently unused.

</comment><comment><USER40> An oil pipeline across Alaska? Eeeeevil. Clearing out hundreds of thousands of square miles and covering them in turbines? The future!

<comment><USER41> You do realize most wind turbines are installed in land that's _already cleared_ , such as farmland or the ocean, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> the title of this link is misleading. "will" should be replaced with "could".

</comment><comment><USER43> They had me until "nuke-u-lar".

Still, I'm all for these sorts of technologies. I hope it works. Now we need to work on STORING this energy efficiently.

<comment><USER44> not only that. Every year in Germany 150.000 birds and bats are hit by the wings of wind turbines. Not good ..</comment></comment>