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The science of computing existed well before the first computers.

You've got it backwards, there was no "science of computing" unless you count mathematics as a science (some do). The first "computer science" programs were established after, and in response to, the invention of electronic computers. As much as people like to rave about astronomy and telescopes, CS is very much about studying the mathematical properties of computing machinery.

Computer Science as a degree didn't exist until around the 80s.

This is the part that is unequivocally false.

Take U of Pittsburgh, for example:

MS program in 1966/67
PhD program in 1970
BS program in 1974

https://cs.pitt.edu/about/history/phase1/

Right, because that's the only factor to be considered.

Oh wait, it isn't.

https://www.library.pitt.edu/c...

Well, it's not from the levelized cost of energy, as nuclear is better than most renewables, and the always-available nature is highly attractive. But it is extremely expensive, especially because of activist intervention delaying development for 5 to 10 years, or more...

Yo! ... iggymanz! Physics degree, eh? You might enjoy this:

http://philsci-archive.pitt.ed...

Click on the PDF download on that page. Turns out physics is moving right along with GR-QFT reconciliation, although I have no idea how many are paying attention. Dr. Mark Stuckey, et al, have a book due out soon, "Beyond the Dynamical Universe", that I've been reading the Kindle version of ... the physics is great, but McDevitt's "neutral monism" philosophy is ridiculous (not a Philosophy precedent, by any means). Just Google-Scholar "Stuckey Silberstein" for heaps and gobs of papers.

Of course, neither STR nor QFT explain a perceived "now" ... what's needed for an explanation requires a cross-discipline investigation ... physics + neuroscience. All 100% science, no emotive urges anywhere.

Your "known phenomenon" is essentially Presentism, which is most compelling until you realize that the Block Universe of STR via RoS (Stuckey's Blockworld) has no flowing present time, no "now" and certainly no dynamical behavior at all. It seems a minor logical exercise to note that, if something doesn't exist in the universe, it must be an artifact of consciousness, so both the illusion of a flowing present time and the feeling of "now" are rooted in the stream of consciousness. Note that the illusion and the reality feel exactly the same.

"Einstein's Breadcrumbs" (EB) specifically addresses this alternative:

"Indeed, the reality of our experience of the flow of consciousness and the perception of change within that flow perfectly explain the illusory feeling of the flow of time as well as explaining its stubborn persistence. Coupled with the illusion of “now” it's obvious why the illusory feeling of the flow of time gives rise to a belief in Presentism – Presentism is the way it feels. Note, however, that an actual, biological feeling of flowing time is impossible because we cannot feel it – we have no sensory inputs attuned to flowing time, a most reasonable arrangement considering that it doesn't exist."

The "now", of course, is simply a feeling of the immediacy of conscious experience. I don't currently have EB posted somewhere that I can provide you a link to ... the "ERLTalk @ outlook.com" email allows me to send you a PDF copy. I believe you'd benefit from reading it, so please reconsider your email reluctance -- lots of substantiating quotations from physicists and sources identified, as well as a wealth of explanation that's simply impossible to post. EB is 25 pages long, including footnotes. I'd much enjoy and surely benefit from your thoughts about it.

Consciousness in the Block Universe also looks very much like a most impressive simulation architecture and I've discussed that idea in a separate section. I hope to see your email ... I won't do anything but email you the EB PDF. Should you decide to exchange views after reading EB, simply let me know and we could continue emailing.

On the other hand, the cost of nuclear power in the USA is pretty much 95% the fault of Democrats. Various Democrat sub-groups came up with a plan to use the courts to make nuclear power too expensive, and it worked. This has been very well known for about 3 decades now, despite nonstop gaslighting to push the myth that the cost of nuclear power is either a mystery or the natural consequence of physics or engineering.

If women are different from men in a way that would result in them having diverse perspectives, then why is it unreasonable to assume that those same diverse perspectives might lead them to other career choices?

As to your second point, the evidence seems to point the other way. I believe it was you who made a post in the previous thread in this topic indicating that Iranian women were more likely to be involved in software jobs as some evidence that it must be socially based. Interestingly enough, you'll see higher rates in other countries too. India is one example where there are significantly more women in computing. What you fail to understand is that this has little to do with cultural differences (and you'd be hard pressed to argue that either India or Iran have better views towards women in general than western democracies) and is the result of economic ones. Computer science jobs are well paying and in high demand, and do potentially afford you the opportunity to immigrate to a western democracy that may be preferable to the type of people who are intelligent enough to excel in the software development field.

When you remove economic pressures (the Scandinavian countries which have among the best social safety nets have the same low numbers of women in CS as the U.S.) and have a society that leaves you essentially free to pursue whatever ambitions you might have, it is hardly unsurprising that any biological tendencies that may predispose people to one field or another are more prevalent. To use an analogy, you can only really see if one strain of plant yields more only after you ensure that they all have sufficient water to thrive. If you somehow created a society that was able to ensure that everyone in life had an equal start, the only possible variance left would come down to biological differences.

There's a substantial amount of evidence to suggest men and women are different. Even at a surface level, we see large differences in things like personality, which has been demonstrated to be highly heritable. I'm not quite sure how you could look at those differences and come to the conclusion that it isn't going to result in differences in vocation selection or other life choices that can impact a person's career. I suppose you could argue that somehow all of these differences are merely a result of society, but that ignores the heritability of personality as well as evidence from studies that examined sex-based behavior difference in infants. See a recent study that examined children roughly one to two and half years of age in nurseries, a similar earlier study which examined infants 1 - 2 years of age , and another study which examined infants as young as three months old. There was another study that examined toy preference in young monkeys that found similar sex-based differences which does suggest that this is something that goes back quite far in our evolutionary history.

It's funny that you bring up global warming, because a lot of the evidence suggests that you are incorrect, yet you continue to act in much the same way as people who contest the science behind global warming. I seriously question how you could reconcile the studies I've presented above with your beliefs that biology plays such a little role in the outcomes we're observing. I suppose you could claim the science is biased, but then how do you know that the scientists publishing articles about climate change aren't biased?

Originally scheduled to come online by 2018, the V.C. Summer nuclear project in South Carolina had been plagued by disputes with regulators and numerous construction problems.

This is by design. The left has seized this approach above all others to kill nuclear power plants.

They have networks of friendly lawyers who file bogus suits before amenable judges. They have friendly regulators that change the rules midstream. The effect is delay, delay, delay. And that means cost, cost, cost. While tthe construction site sits idle, the utility often has to pay a squadron of union electricians and/or plumbers to sit around while it is resolved in court or while engineering updates the plans to take into account the newest retarded rule change.

A few years delay can double the cost.

See also: http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~bl... (old, but good)

That's the plain and simple truth. Nuclear Fission only looks like it works if it is cross-funded by obscene truckloads of taxpayers money

That's true now. It wasn't true forty years ago. Oh, nuclear fission was never the "too cheap to meter" dream originally touted, but it actually was extremely economical for a couple of decades. If you'd like to understand what changed, read this.

If nuclear power was not regulated to death it would be quite cheap..... Not saying it should be regulated, but at the level they have it today is just ridiculous.. Like for the decommissioning where you have parts, with less radiation than other natural sources, are required to be stored and managed at huge costs.. Would be cheaper to just dump it in one of the old uranium mines and the radioactivity would still be less than from before it was dug up...

http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~bl...

The second part is that it's almost impossible to get approval for any new, better, reactors that would be a lot safer and more efficient.

So.. Yea, it could have been almost that... But then oil/coal-barons started lobbying for more regulation because they saw it as a threat..

So, I'm reading up on my history. I apparently had some bad information fed to me in high school because I very clearly remember being taught that copyright law was almost non existent until an outcry after the death of Stephen foster. The who of which seems to have been a myth.
https://www.copyright.gov/circ...
http://www.pitt.edu/~amerimus/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

On the other hand what you are saying doesn't make all that much sense either , because without copyright law the 'public domain' simply does not exist, or if it does all works once first sale occur exist within in.

http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~bl...

They didn't manage to get it wrong, the wrong was done to them intentionally.

Wow, how dumb are you?

That is obviously a "creation myth" every "religion" or nation has that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

https://asabharwal.com/explori...

http://www.crystalinks.com/mao...

http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/crea...

http://www.viking-mythology.co...

etc. just some random links.

If you can not cope with the fact that ancient civilizations somehow mystified their origins ... then perhaps you should chose a different hobby?

Probably fishing? I was told sitting at some water with a fishing pole and pondering how the world works is a quite relaxing thing. You could also try meditation. But as you occur to me to be an angry man: what about rock climbing? As soon as you climb (not in a hall obviously) you are one on one with your environment, does not really matter how difficult. You have only the rock, the sky the wind and if you are advanced enough to "relax" and "meditate" a bit while climbing: bees, eagles, falcons, swallows ... nature. When you are on top of your climbing route you will realize: for hours you have not thought about anything at all. Except for putting gear into the wand, moving forward, looking into the valley, at the sun, at the sky ... and realizing: it is just you. Regardless how angry you are, you can not fight the rock ...

Probably it cures your anger and hate?

I dont get what is wrong in your eyes with the Adam and Eve myth. It is a nice story and every child know: it is just a story.

Probably you believed it was true when you were a young child and are now ashamed and feel abused.

Sorry, when it was first told to me at age of 4 I knew it was "a story" and not anything other. Probably that is why my mother called me "smart".

Oh not this nonsense again. Have a go: http://philsci-archive.pitt.ed...

Perhaps no paradoxes, but it seems like discretizing time at least is a problem:

http://philsci-archive.pitt.ed...

Discretizing space leads to problems of Lorentz invariance - preferred frames almost universally exist in discretized spaces, and there always exists some transformation under which a non-trivial region of space is occupied by a low number of geometrical atoms (causal set theory tries to address this, but isn't really complete).

https://arxiv.org/abs/0709.053...

According to this article, regulations and red tape quadrupled the cost of a nuclear plant in the US from 1970 to 1980

COSTS OF NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS - WHAT WENT WRONG?

A major source of cost escalation in some plants was delays caused by opposition from well-organized "intervenor" groups that took advantage of hearings and legal strategies to delay construction. The Shoreham plant on Long Island was delayed for 3 years by intervenors who turned the hearings for a construction permit into a circus. The intervenors included a total imposter claiming to be an expert with a Ph.D. and an M.D. There were endless days of reading aloud from newspaper and magazine articles, interminable "cross examination" with no relevance to the issuance of a construction permit, and an imaginative variety of other devices to delay the proceedings and attract media attention.

But the worst delay came after the Shoreham plant was completed. The NRC requires emergency planning exercises for evacuation of the nearby population in the event of certain types of accidents. The utility provides a system of warning horns and generally plans the logistics, but it is necessary to obtain cooperation from the local police and other civil authorities. Officials in Suffolk County, where Shoreham is located, refused to cooperate in these exercises, making it impossible to fulfill the NRC requirement. After years of delay, the NRC changed its position and ruled that in the event of an actual accident, the police and civil authorities would surely cooperate. It therefore finally issued an operating license. By this time the situation had become a political football, with the governor of New York deeply involved. He apparently decided that it was politically expedient to give in to the opponents of the plant. The state of New York therefore offered to "buy" the plant from the utility for $1 and dismantle it, with the utility receiving enough money from various tax savings to compensate for its construction expenditures. This means that the bill would effectively be footed by U.S. taxpayers. As of this writing, there are moves in Congress to prevent this. The ironic part of the story is that Long Island very badly needs the electricity the Shoreham plant can produce.

If it does, it messes up a lot of physics, apparently: http://philsci-archive.pitt.ed...

This is a good read:

http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~bl...

It is written about the American experience, but I would expect most of it to apply to Japan too. Not the anecdotes, obviously, but the tactics the watermelons (both protestors and regulators, sadly) use appear to be nearly universal.

What is the importance of being 5 years late?

Costs Of Nuclear Power Plants - What Went Wrong?

Sure! And it only took 10 seconds of Googling to find. This book chapter explains how public hysteria forced the NRC to repeatedly tighten regulations, which drastically increased costs not only due to the sheer increase in materials and increased labor to design things to comply (what the author calls "regulatory racheting"), but also the need to repeatedly re-engineer things as the regulations changed mid-construction (what the author calls "regulatory turbulence").

Ahh, but delays actually make a huge difference.

http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~bl...

It sounds like the European anti-nuke nutjobs have been paying attention to how the American crazies killed off the American nuclear industry.

http://www.esm.psu.edu/about/w...

http://www.engineering.pitt.ed...

http://engineering.berkeley.ed...

Seems like a few known colleges would disagree with your assumption.

I assume this is an allusion to the folk tale "The Seal Wife" (#4080 on the Christiansen list) about a "selkie" (someone from an indigenous culture that makes swimsuits from sealskins) who washes up on an island on the north side of Scotland. She takes off her swimsuit and sets it aside, but a fisherman steals it. Stockholm syndrome ensues.

fMRI looks at what regions of the brain are active (by looking at which the rate at which different regions consume oxygen) and has been used to communicate with patients that can not otherwise communicate. First the patient is told to imagine two different activities (one at a time) like walking through a house and playing tennis. The pattern of brain activation is different for each thing but consistent between trials. Then, you can ask questions like "imagine playing tennis if X or walking through the house if not X" The results have been widely replicated. It has been widely used in MCS (minimally conscious state) but no reason it should not work in locked in patients. You can google it and find lots of article. Here are a couple. http://www.medscape.com/viewar... http://www.safar.pitt.edu/arch...

Nope, its 45MWe. As for the scaling, I live in Alaska where we have a coal cogeneration plant - I think it'd be nice and pollution limiting if it was nuclear, or at least nuclear supplemented.

Right you are, 160MW thermal 45MW electric, I'm getting too hasty on fact-checking. Still on the small side but perfect for Alaska, especially if your city or town is already piped for steam heating.

NuScale is projecting less than $5,000 cost per KW for these which is comparable to a recent utility sized 2010 capital cost estimate of $5,339/KW. In 2008 Moody's had really spoiled the mood by projecting $7,000/KW as the cost of new nuclear power and warning investors away.

So why is the capital cost of nuclear some 4-5 times the cost of a combined cycle natural gas plant (~$1,400/KW)? Aside from the obvious reasons like being dangerous and Atomic.

In 1970-71 Consolidated Edison built the Dresden plant for $146/kW ... still going today like an Energizer Bunny with ~1.7GWe. This is plant was built for ~50 times less than Moody's 2008 cost estimate.

What the hell is going on?

I found no easy answers, but plenty to ponder in Chapter 9 ("Costs of nuclear power plants -- what went wrong?") of The Nuclear Energy Option, a great little book by Bernard Cohen [full text online]. This work is dated [1990] and quaint -- he is bemoaning a plant that cost $3,326/kW in 1986 -- the whiner! But he does a good job describing the NRC practice of "regulatory ratcheting", where standard numeric metrics of safety have been codified, all the tough work is over, and every succeeding generation of regulators gains a round of applause and gets to wear festive party hats if they just plug in new (always higher: click) numbers.

This is an example of what I call "No one ever lost their job" syndrome, a creeping cancer of our society on many fronts. It is a malady that especially affects safety cultures. No one ever lost their job by announcing that things are not quite as safe as they could be, or regulation is strangling essential industries. The NRC has created plug-in metrics like requiring more concrete, more frequent inspections, margins and limits, time-tables and reporting requirements. And heavier fines (announcing a hike in fines works even when there are no infractions or violations, the public imagines this is being done to punish evil corporations who are foaming at the mouth and straining on their leashes this very moment).

Then there is outright abuse and intimidation. The recent yarn, Uneven Enforcement Suspected At [US] Nuclear Power Plants which made my eyeballs pop out on springs when I read it. It seems to say that the NRC is concerned that regulation (by the NRC) might be lacking in some (un-visited) regions for unknown reasons and the NRC is ... crap, no I cannot even summarize it, it's so ridiculous. They are treating better safety record in some plants as something suspicious to be investigated. Then their 'suspicions' are released in a Senate report which the nuke-hysteria press predictably treats as some smoking gun. It should go beyond embarrassment. I feel some one should lose their job over this -- a regulatory agency releasing damaging speculation on an industry on a topic they are supposed to be sure of.

But no one will lose their job, even when they susp

Inherently safe: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIGA
"The TRIGA reactor uses uranium zirconium hydride (UZrH) fuel, which has a large, prompt negative fuel temperature coefficient of reactivity, meaning that as the temperature of the core increases, the reactivity rapidly decreases. It is thus highly unlikely, though not impossible for a nuclear meltdown to occur."

Yeah, so many good ideas have been shelved as you point out because they did not fit with the political or social or economic priorities of the time.

CANDU is somewhat safer than usual:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor#Safety_features

More on why reactors capitalism built were expensive:
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter9.html

How they could be better by being smaller (like TRIGA):
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter10.html
"Natural circulation can also be used to protect the containment from breaking open due to excess pressure. In present-day power plants, active cooling using water pumps is necessary to control the pressure. But with the smaller reactor, there is less energy to dissipate, making natural circulation a viable alternative."

One intriguing possibility is a central factory that makes small nuclear power units meant to run without significant maintenance for 30 years and which then go back to the factory for reprocessing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_nuclear_reactor

I have a lot of respect for the people who maintain what we have though:
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/episodes/nuclear-turbine/
"Sean Riley puts on his hazmat suit and heads into the radiation zone for his next tough fix, replacing a steam turbine in a nuclear power plant to boost its energy-producing capacity. Dismantling an enormous turbine and putting it back together again is tough work at the best of times, but when there's risk of radioactive particles inside, tough is an understatement."

That said, I'm not really a fan of big centralized power plants for social reasons, so I lean towards solar, superinsulated homes, and energy efficiency. Also, while in theory nuclear energy could be run well, in practice, given corporate secrecy and other social dysfunctions, like with TEPCO, I have little confidence current profit-oriented corporations could run big nuclear reactors safely. "Silkwood" is another example, although one can see that with corporations that handle anything dangerous, including chemicals used to make ICs -- at least nuclear releases are easier to monitor than most chemical or biochemical releases.

An example is in the USA with dozens of nuclear plants similar to Fukushima requiring active systems to shut down (and power) that are all at the end of their lives and which should have never been built. They should be shut down as unsafe and replaced with something safer (nuclear, fusion, solar, or otherwise), but likely will just be run longer until the next disaster.

With solar reaching grid parity (cheaper than grid electricity from coal,natural gas, and nuclear), it is hard to argue for nuclear without some huge design breakthroughs. It was hard even ten or twenty years ago when one could point to the solar pricing trends (but people scoffed). Hot or cold fusion maybe would be the next step for "nuclear" though, and one could argue fusion plants would have less environmental impact than covering 1% of the landscape with solar panels. Although "solar roads" is a neat idea.
http://www.solarroadways.com/intro.shtml
"When multiple Solar Road Panels are interconnected, the in

Inherently safe: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIGA
"The TRIGA reactor uses uranium zirconium hydride (UZrH) fuel, which has a large, prompt negative fuel temperature coefficient of reactivity, meaning that as the temperature of the core increases, the reactivity rapidly decreases. It is thus highly unlikely, though not impossible for a nuclear meltdown to occur."

Yeah, so many good ideas have been shelved as you point out because they did not fit with the political or social or economic priorities of the time.

CANDU is somewhat safer than usual:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor#Safety_features

More on why reactors capitalism built were expensive:
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter9.html

How they could be better by being smaller (like TRIGA):
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter10.html
"Natural circulation can also be used to protect the containment from breaking open due to excess pressure. In present-day power plants, active cooling using water pumps is necessary to control the pressure. But with the smaller reactor, there is less energy to dissipate, making natural circulation a viable alternative."

One intriguing possibility is a central factory that makes small nuclear power units meant to run without significant maintenance for 30 years and which then go back to the factory for reprocessing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_nuclear_reactor

I have a lot of respect for the people who maintain what we have though:
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/episodes/nuclear-turbine/
"Sean Riley puts on his hazmat suit and heads into the radiation zone for his next tough fix, replacing a steam turbine in a nuclear power plant to boost its energy-producing capacity. Dismantling an enormous turbine and putting it back together again is tough work at the best of times, but when there's risk of radioactive particles inside, tough is an understatement."

That said, I'm not really a fan of big centralized power plants for social reasons, so I lean towards solar, superinsulated homes, and energy efficiency. Also, while in theory nuclear energy could be run well, in practice, given corporate secrecy and other social dysfunctions, like with TEPCO, I have little confidence current profit-oriented corporations could run big nuclear reactors safely. "Silkwood" is another example, although one can see that with corporations that handle anything dangerous, including chemicals used to make ICs -- at least nuclear releases are easier to monitor than most chemical or biochemical releases.

An example is in the USA with dozens of nuclear plants similar to Fukushima requiring active systems to shut down (and power) that are all at the end of their lives and which should have never been built. They should be shut down as unsafe and replaced with something safer (nuclear, fusion, solar, or otherwise), but likely will just be run longer until the next disaster.

With solar reaching grid parity (cheaper than grid electricity from coal,natural gas, and nuclear), it is hard to argue for nuclear without some huge design breakthroughs. It was hard even ten or twenty years ago when one could point to the solar pricing trends (but people scoffed). Hot or cold fusion maybe would be the next step for "nuclear" though, and one could argue fusion plants would have less environmental impact than covering 1% of the landscape with solar panels. Although "solar roads" is a neat idea.
http://www.solarroadways.com/intro.shtml
"When multiple Solar Road Panels are interconnected, the in

The paper this press release is about doesn't seem to be online, but two papers from the past few months analyzing this GRAIL data (with some of the same authors) are available:

"Gravity Field of the Moon from the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) Mission", the initial report of the observations

"The Crust of the Moon as Seen by GRAIL", reconstructing the crust thickness and composition from the observations

I suspect a lot of those extra costs are really due to China not having so many parasitic "horse judges" doing a "heck of a job" in the businesses involved with construction. I'm not suggesting that China is not corrupt, simply that the US nuclear lobby is vastly more so.

What the Hell are you on about? Nuclear power plants in America are expensive due to "regulatory racheting" and "regulatory turbulence". Ever-more-expensive requirements, moving goal posts, and frequent lawsuits and other interference makes large expensive projects into impossible and hugely expensive projects.

http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter9.html

Did you seriously just suggest that USA nukes are over twice as expensive as Chinese due to corruption from the US nuclear lobby? *facepalm*

Since the Chinese government wants the power, those plants will be built, and the goalposts won't be moving during construction.

You mentioned corruption. In China there is a real problem with sub-standard materials and construction, with people being bribed to look the other way. If any nuclear plants ever get finished again in America, they will be expensive but safe. In China, who knows.

http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire.com/dr20121003-china-s-infrastructure-is-failing-owing-to-substandard-materials-corruption-and-lax-regulation

Did you seriously suggest that America has worse corruption problems than China? *facepalm*

In the case of Roundup, a lot of studies have been done testing the danger to human health, and it seems to be no more dangerous than manure.

Well, there have been a lot of studies run by Monsanto that seem to show that. But then there are other studies that show links to Parkinson's and Autism, cancer, degradation of soil nutrients, as well as lethal effects in amphibians, and perhaps most alarming, a recent study found roundup in the urine of 44% of European Union citizens. Not only that, but it seems that it is actually many of the adjucts used in Roundup applications that are being shown to have the most toxicity, an issue most of the studies completely ignore by studying only the glyphosate, instead of the entirety of the compounds being used in such abundance.

1). Any *blueprint* was never any further away than

1) FOAF network analysis
2) a signal splitter
3) the power to force your nation's providers to cooperate
4) a data warehouse
5) analysts.
6)??????
7) profit !

I *really* don't think many nations needed the U.S. to tell them that.

So the *blueprint* point is totally false- the NSA did not provide a much needed but missing blueprint to anyone for any purpose

2) What nefarious thing has the NSA or US government ever done with this knowledge? Name one thing. As I see it, the US with all this data collection and the apparent restraint *to do nothing* with it, makes the US a provably good steward of the internet, almost better than we could have hoped for, given men and their nature.

I totally agree a despotic regime could emerge and would leverage this database in the process. I actually actively fear a Cheney or a Gonzales or a Rumsfeld or a Pipes or a Wolfowitz getting a hold of this kind of power.

That's why it's very important - VERY IMPORTANT- for the presumed demographic of slashdot to vote. b We're what keep the REAL fascists at bay.

I also think we need a provable, physical way (encryption / partial keys held by a number of judges? dunno..) to prevent the kind of leveraging of the chain of command that would permit neocons from gaining access to this database in the dark and use it against his political enemies

(I'll link to the specific thing the neocons did that has me so concerned at the bottom of this post)

Without the chain of command, we're fucked; it is a totally necessary part of any military.. But the chain of command + read/write access to this database means the power to potentially destroy who you want, in any way you want, for any reason you want and to distort reality itself to the intelligence community in any way you want. This represents a non-trivial, even existential and decidedly non-theoretical threat to our nation.

\http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_B

and for those familiar with it, go to Criticisms section .

Cheney literally re-assembled Team-B in the run up to the Iraq war. scroll to: " team b sweeps the series "

http://www.pitt.edu/~gordonm/JPubs/TeamBqjs.pdf

That's why we also need to go easy on Snowden and Manning. Here's my reasoning, it's pretty simple - they're young and idealistic and didn't mean to harm America - and that matters.
Not that many people can know or can get their minds around the full,ugly picture of all the trade-offs that reality forces on you. Those tradeoffs are analyzed, decided upon, get institutionalized, and finally become structural, procedural.

Later, some regular guy working in the system looks at the fleshy details of what those trade-offs entail, and it appears callous and horrifying. They're just going to react out of a surfeit of humanity.

Do we really want to punish those people to the hilt and over time , through word of mouth reputation, actually prevent people of good conscience from joining up ? Read Antigone- it's no way to run a nation.

Obama's Executive Order is a good start.

http://www.publicintegrity.org/2012/10/15/11473/obama-order-protects-intelligence-community-whistleblowers

Republican hate it but there has has has to be some place they can go "out" of a system they think is breaking the law and into the light, because that's the psychology that's motivating them to do this in the first place. "They're doing this in the dark. " No one knows what's going on" Holy shit!".

IMHO the military has to publicly differentiate between acts of espionage and acts like these and gauge its public and prosecutorial reaction accordingly. What is reality telling you? This is how people are now. This goes to the core of what this generation is. Even the military has to chan

How about this quote from a review that was in Science Magazine, May 17 2013:

“Since the advent of hydraulic fracturing, more than one million treatments have been conducted with perhaps only one documented case of direct groundwater pollution resulting from the injection of chemicals,” said Radisav Vidic, lead author of the review and William Kepler Whiteford Professor and Chair in the Swanson School of Engineering’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “There is no evidence of groundwater contamination—even if it does exist.”

TrashGod wrote:
> The article is touting a potentially more effective delivery system (gun), rather than a particular fragment (bullet).

Yes, that looks like a fair assessment. But the story as posted and linked is still essentially incomplete, because it doesn't mention what useful thing they propose to deliver. There has to be some beneficial payload in order to make this delivery system any use at all, assuming of course that it works as a delivery system.

The possible example of a 'payload' that you mention (not mentioned in the original article or links), for which you provided a separate link, is of something to down-regulate the production of protein(s) that induce cellular senescence in chronic wounds. This looks as if it could even be actually harmful if added to a wound, because the article you linked explains that the (natural) induction of this senescence restricts fibrosis in wound-healing. But, fibrosis "can be defined as the replacement of the normal structural elements of the tissue by distorted, non-functional and excessive accumulation of scar tissue" and gives rise to "many clinical problems" http://www.math.pitt.edu/~cbsg/Materials/Wound_Healing_Overview.pdf (such as keloids, hypertrophic scars, strictures and a whole list of problems). Thus, downregulating this senescence-inducing protein would be expected to increase the level of fibrosis in the healing wound, and to increase those problems: a harm, not a benefit.

There are plenty of technical 'solutions' around that might be wonderful if there was actually a problem of the right shape for them to solve -- read: they are of no real use because there is no useful application for what they might do. As pure science this one may have interest, but as a useful product, there's no sign here of that.

Lefties don't respect property rights?

The most egregious abuse of private property rights I have ever seen was in Connecticut where the right wingers took private land to make sure the shopping mall developers could make more money.

It was the liberals on the US Supreme Court that tried to stand against such illegal confiscation.

For reference:
http://www.law.pitt.edu/magazine/fall-2007/taking-homes-for-a-shopping-mall-the-abuse-of-eminent-domain-in-a-post-kelo-world

God right wingers are delusional.

Or you could just remove the law of excluded middle without having to introduce a third / null value.

This also has some interesting uses in quantum mechanics.

See:

http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter9.html ...specifically the sections on "Regulatory Ratcheting" and "Regulatory Turbulence".

The problem was not the design by GE-Hitachi (foreigners are not allowed to own businesses in Japan), it was installation without appropriate siting. One of the reactors original designers, Yukiteru Naka, wanted to resite the diesel generators and batteries, but TEPCO would have none of it, See this Japan Times article from a little over a year ago:

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/nn20110714a2.html

The article also pretty clearly indicates that Toshiba, who manufactured the plants, also had misgivings, since all BWR's in the US were sited on rivers, rather than on the ocean.

That's very stupid. Hypothetical questions can have value, and if you insist on answering them all with "no" you lose that value. Here's an example taken from Albert Einstein; I've modified it somewhat, but the ideas are the same:

If I pursue a beam of light with the velocity c (velocity of light in a vacuum), do I observe such a beam of light as an electromagnetic field at rest though spatially oscillating? Yes, according to the Gallilean transformation, I would. However, there seems to be no such thing, neither on the basis of experience nor according to Maxwell's equations, so I deduced the principle of relativity.

(Original here)

If you insisted on answering "no" to his question, you'd get the wrong conclusion. Just because you can't get to velocity c doesn't mean the thought experiment is "outside the framework of Truth" (whatever the hell that means). This would all be fine if you simply accepted that an argument can have a truth value independent of its premises and conclusions. The argument "If all cats are dogs and all dogs are horses, all cats are horses" is true. However, the premises are false, so the conclusion does not necessarily follow from the truth of the argument, and in fact in this case the conclusion is false. I could write this more clearly in first order predicate logic if needed.

To be honest, you don't really know what you're talking about, your professors were probably annoyed by your smugness mixed with your stupidity--not the fact that you were right--and you should have been modded down, not up.

Studies are done world-wide of lake sedimentology and glacier ice chronology to better understand climatic and human activities over periods where historical records either don't exist or are limited. Have they been done in Peru? Yes. For example, this one deals with human activities over ~1400 years, and this one deals with sediment cores from Lake Titicaca and wet/dry climate cycles. This paper is a good example of how multiple studies from several sites can be combined together to better understand the history of climate change across a larger region (South America and the Carribbean). Lakes in arid areas are particularly interesting because they are so sensitive to changes in climate, so they get studied a lot.

There are additional citations in those papers, and if you search for "Lake Titicaca" "sediment core" and "climate", you'll find plenty of studies in the Peru/Bolivia area, but because most of what you've done is sneer at the idea that anyone could figure out anything about past climates, I doubt you'll really care. However, if other people want to investigate the topic there is plenty available. It is inevitably technical, but the basic principles are not hard to grasp with a bit of effort.

A video you may like on India and thorium power:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl5DiTPw3dk

And I'm not going to disagree that in theory nuclear energy can be done as safely as most other big industrial processes (as long as the industry is focused more on safety and less on short-term profit maximization and the corruption of regulators). But even when that is true, the systems still tend to be more centralized than renewables, which has political implications.

"The Nuclear Energy Option" by Bernard L. Cohen is a great book you'd like relate to advocating for the safety of nuclear power with many good points; from one chapter (on improved designs):
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter10.html
"By the early 1980s it became apparent that a new conceptual design of nuclear reactors was called for. The cost of electricity from coal- and oil-burning plants had escalated to the point where their competition did not require maximum efficiency from nuclear plants. Furthermore, the added efficiency achieved by pushing temperatures, pressures, and power densities to their limits was overshadowed by the efficiency lost due to shutdowns when these limits were exceeded. But above all it would be much easier to satisfy the public's demand for super-super safety by starting over with a new conceptual design than by using myriads of add-ons to a design originally targeted on rather different goals. In the mid-1980s, several reactor vendors undertook these new designs. Let us consider some of the thinking that served as their basis. ..."

But, back to the analysis on renewables. Thanks for agreeing that 3% works with your figures. But you have not addressed the point that you are sizing for the worst case month in a northern location. Remove your 4X worst-case assumption in sizing and you will get around the 1% figure I cited and you suggested showed I did not know what I was talking about. :-)

Solar levels are more constant near the equator, so clearly there you don't have to size at 4X there.

You say there is not "efficient" way to move heat, but as I said, you can store energy from the summer months or move it by embodying it in energy-intensive things like aluminum, liquid nitrogen, ground up rock, or you can make hydrogen -- so you can shift industrial demand from winter to summer. And most of energy use in the USA is for process heat and other similar things is by industry, not residential.

As I pointed out elsewhere, the state of the art in residential construction is not to require a furnace (with good well-insulated passive solar construction with air-to-air heat exchangers). So, energy efficiency at home is a better investment. Just passing new building codes would take care of most of that problem in thirty years with home construction turnover.

On solar PV efficency which links to land use:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell_efficiency
"Solar cell efficiencies vary from 6% for amorphous silicon-based solar cells to 40.7% with multiple-junction research lab cells and 42.8% with multiple dies assembled into a hybrid package.[7]"

Again though, we use 50% of the land in the USA to make animal products that are mostly killing us (cancer, heart disease, etc.) and also polluting half our water supply while using up the other half (see "The Rave Diet"). So devoting 1% of our land to clean renewable energy, by contrast, does not seem impossible. It would even probably be a more profitable use of the land than agriculture.

What about energy storage via, say, compressed air in salt caverns is not "scalable" or proven?
http://www.smartgridnews.com/artman/publish/Technologi
"Paul Denholm, lead analyst for DOE's National Renewable Energy Lab in Boulder, Colorado,

âoeEverything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.â

A decent module system definitively won't be luxury
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~micheles/scheme/module-system-talk/

I'm familiar with a similar story, though it's about Nasreddin Hodja.

Wonder which came first.

You make a good case, and you probaby would like this book by Bernard L. Cohen that says much the same:
    http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/BOOK.html

Also, at some point, even with meltdowns, we can just site new nuclear plants where the old one melted down. So, Fukushima is now a good place to site more plants, as is Chernobyl, given the evacuations and the grounds are already contaminated. We could also produce synthetic fuels in those areas and ship them elsewhere. And we could build lots of robots to do the work.

Thorium reactors are even safer and we have much more thorium (thousands of years) than uranium and plutonium (hundred years?) for reactors.. But ironically it is said that thorium technology was not developed in the 1940s and 1950s precisely because it was safer and you could not make bombs from it.

With all that said, I'm still rooting for stuff like solar roadways, maglev wind, or the Rossi/Focardi eCat.
    http://www.solarroadways.com/
    http://www.maglevwindturbine.com/
    http://pesn.com/2011/05/31/9501837_Cold-Fusion_Number-1_Claims_NASA_Chief/

Even various forms of hot fusion are looking promising.

Although solar thermal could have done the job from the 1970s and on. Renewables IMHO have been cheaper than fossil fuels when you consider the externalities like pollution, health impacts, risks, defense costs, and so on.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power

One can argue about the externalities from different nuclear options (such as who pays for the permanent evacuation around Fukushima or follow on effects like loss of agriculture or other economic problems in the area). If we do see a nuclear resurgance, it is going to look very different than today's plants (or should).

Conventional nuclear tends to be fairly centralized which has various political implications in a democracy. Yes there ideas like Hyperion, but they still probably require big central plants to make them and reprocess them. Mainstream nuclear in general requires a higher level of transparency then our society seems capable of on a sustained basis so far. Fukushima is just one more example of that lack of transparency or foresight.

Still, it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, as if our society ran off of cheap thorium power, our politics might be better and less short-term if it assumed abundance instead of scarcity.

The good news is, we have lots of energy options, and the human imagination continues to invent more of them:
    http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/TCHAR40.txt

Thank you. That's one of my favorites.

Sad to see more and more comments about greed and problems in Japan, too. :-( Like this one:
    "Reports: Lax oversight, 'greed' preceded Japan nuclear crisis"
    http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2011/0316/Reports-Lax-oversight-greed-preceded-Japan-nuclear-crisis

Or this:
    "As Japan nuclear crisis unfolds, a small town questions government reassurances"
    http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2011/0316/As-Japan-nuclear-crisis-unfolds-a-small-town-questions-government-reassurances

Now workers are having to abandon a plant, although return:
    http://www.adn.com/2011/03/16/1756438/radiation-level-soars-after-japan.html

And the plant design was said to be unsafe:
    "JAPAN DISASTER: GE engineer says he quit over unsafe reactor design"
    http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2011/03/17/2003498413

Basically, it would seem like any reactor design that requires active cooling is unsafe and should be mothballed? Passive cooling ones like Hyperion or stuff like TRIGA is better.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIGA
    http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter10.html

In the robot capital of the globe as Japan is, where are the robots for nuclear cleanup? I helped a tiny bit with the Workhorse project for TMI (helping make a model mockup that helped get the contract):
    http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=three-mile-island-robots

Do they have stuff like Workhorse for nuclear disasters in Japan? If not, that is indeed lack of planning.

Other comments by me and someone else related to this thread are here:
    http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2036928&cid=35486070

So, it seems like Japan is struggling with issues about corruption and incomplete planning too? Even if so far, overall, they still seem to be doing better than the USA after Katrina under Bush... Or even now? Especially as the USA now is seemingly expanding its torture policies to torturing US soldiers going down a slippery slope as is suggested here (in response to someone probably concerned about wrongdoing by his country):
    http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/03/2011310153040668605.html

Pictures of the Japan devastation:
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/powerful-quake-aftershocks-rattle-tokyo/2011/03/11/ABX65lQ_gallery.html

Very sad to see so much disaster. I can hope for the best for everyone there. "Never send to know for whom the bell tolls..."

Sigh.

This calamity shows Mother Nature can still really kick ass...

And that's why we should cooperate more globally and not worry so much about fighting each other with all the advanced technology we have been creating. While this tragedy is horrible, just horrible, something like an asteroid strike on the Earth, a supervolcano eruption like in Yellostone, or a massive plague could kill billions. So, this should be a warning to our global society that we should cooperate more to prepare together for what Mother Nature can still dish out at random times.

See also:
http://lifeboat.com/ex/main

And by me:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html

Like with Hurricane Katrina where the USA lost a city, this event will be a test of the Japanese character. The good news is, you can see in Japan aspects of what a healthy society looks like (unlike the USA during Katrina or before). Japan prepared a lot for this (good building codes, to begin with). Their leadership has responded immediately. People are helping each other. News is being posted right away through their advanced social networks. (Many individuals wanted to help with Katrina, and were turned back, and parts of the New Orleans area descended into violence and fear...) You can be sure, as a society, Japan will come through this even stronger and healthier and better prepared for the next event. I wish I could say stuff like that about the USA these days? I don't know, even as I have a lot of faith in US individuals in a crisis. But in the USA, government is painted as the enemy. We don't know what good government would feel like anymore, sadly -- government that is accountable, or plans well, or prioritizes human needs over short-term profits to a few.

With that said, more money put into solar energy research in Japan is probably a good idea... And if you are going to have nuclear power plants, designs like Hyperion power might make more sense (ignoring how you still need reprocessing facilities that might be at earthquake risk). That plant design was 40 years old. This book explains why old nuclear power plant designs are riskier:
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter10.html
"The nuclear power plants in service today were conceptually designed and developed during the 1960s. At that time, it was deemed necessary to achieve maximum efficiency and minimum cost in order to compete successfully with coal- or oil-burning plants. The latter were priced at 15% of their present cost and used fuel that was very cheap by current standards. In order to maximize efficiencies in the nuclear plants, temperatures, pressures, and power densities were pushed up to their highest practical limits. Safety features were exemplary for that era, and even for current safety practices in other industries. But they were not up to present-day demands for super-super safety in the nuclear industry.
As the public became more concerned with nuclear safety, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission required that new safety equipment and procedures be added on, in the process discussed in Chapter 9 as "regulatory ratcheting." The amount of labor and materials for these add-ons exceeded that for the plant as originally conceived. With this added complexity, the plants became difficult and expensive to construct, operate, and maintain. Moreover, the level of safety was still limited by the original conceptual design.
By the early 1980s it became apparent that a new conceptual design of nuclear reactors was called for. The cost of electricity from coal- and oil-burning plants had escalated to the point where their competition did not require maximum efficiency from nuclear plants. Furthermore, the added efficiency achieved by pushing temp

Well said!

See also:

Plans:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_parity
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan
http://www.earth-policy.org/index.php?/books/pb3/pb3_table_of_contents
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power

Cars:
http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm
http://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/oil-gas-crude/461
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/09eb7f4c973349f2?hl=en

Agriculture:
http://www.remineralize.org/
http://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2002/2002html_summer/article6.htm
http://www.seriouseats.com/2007/11/the-subsidized-food-pyramid.html
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
http://drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx

But, with all that said, the same sorts of reasons solar energy is getting better (better materials, better designs, better discussions, better insights into physics) is the same reason small scale nuclear is getting better (even as I would agree solar is safer and more decentralized than conventional nuclear). And example of small nuclear:
http://www.hyperionpowergeneration.com/

Related case for nuclear power:
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/

Let's say, in a moderate worse case in Japan that 100,000 people die from some nuclear radiation accident and the clean up cost a couple trillion dollars. Nuclear power still might have been cheaper in Japan, all things considered, than coal which causes a lot of pollution and related illness.

Would it have been cheaper in that sense than solar and wind? Probably not...

Still, given this is the worst quake to have hit Japan in a century, and the nuclear plants are not being talked about as having total meltdowns, this event itself might prove how safe they can be in some situations.

Of course, dealing with direct terrorism intended to cause them to malfunction may be a different issue, but many major industrial facilities, like at Bhopal, have that risk. And ideas like Hyperion help reduce that risk. Ultimately, if we try harder to make our global economy work for everyone, we might have less fears that people will commit terrorism because the hate us because we support their oppressors for various reasons...

On economic transformation, see:
http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation

BTW, an example of perhaps cold fusion (still needs more confirmation):
http://pesn.com/2011/03/07/9501782_Cold_Fusion_Steams_Ahead_at_Worlds_Oldest_University/

Personally, I want to be able to print solar panels in a solar-powered 3D printer. :-)

We've got a better one already made. It's nothing more than a fancy airbrush and heals burn wounds MUCH faster than this device.

http://www.mirm.pitt.edu/news/article.asp?qEmpID=328

Took 5 seconds of googling. Here is an analysis of why he should have recused himself rather than writing a poorly reasoned "excuse" to stay on the bench:

United States Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia should be commended for writing an extraordinarily detailed memorandum explaining his reasons for refusing to recuse himself from a case in which his duck hunting partner, Vice President Richard Cheney, is a named party. The Sierra Club alleges in the litigation that energy industry officials were de facto members of the National Energy Policy Development Group (NEPDG), a federal energy task force chaired by Cheney, and that NEPDG’s records and minutes therefore must be made public pursuant to the Federal Advisory Committee Act. The statutory basis for recusal is 28 U.S.C. sec. 455(a), which provides that any judge “shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.”

I was just about to come here and mention DTI, but you beat me to it.

I'm not sure if they're down to neuron/axon resolution yet, but I do know they're pretty close. Dr. Walter Schneider at the University of Pittsburgh has created a movie image of the various connections in his brain.

http://www.lrdc.pitt.edu/schneider/

that demonstrated that low-dose radiation is actually beneficial, acting like a vaccination to reduce cancer rates and extend lifespan of nuclear workers and atomic bomb survivors.

Basically the guy looses all credibility here.

Well, maybe you can help me. I'm having serious difficulty finding any serious refutation of in-depth studies of radiation hormesis (which you claim makes someone lose all credibility). Maybe if you're so experienced in debating these issue, you could provide me with such a refutation to Bernard L. Cohen's paper published in Health Physics from 1995 titled "Test of the linear-no threshold theory of radiation carcinogenesis for inhaled radon decay products."

Here is a link to the original paper: http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/LNT-1995.PDF

A tl;dr version of it was described here.