USA - New York. Scratch Home Built cars are legal to register (subject to safety and possibly emmissions inspection) and drive on public roads. They don't have a VIN but use the mfg serial if available or pretty much any other designation you would like. Yet - without a VIN - they can be registered and driven on public roads. They're not manufactured with an engine...heck, they're really just a collection of spare parts that fit together in some cases.
Granted this will probably vary WIDELY between states much less countries. So before you make such bold "fail" proclamations keep that in mind.
A better analogy of what the GP is complaining about is if 99bottlesofbeer owns a "Lenovo" car but wants to put a "Apple" iRadio into it, he cant despite the connectors being compatible, so he is being artificially prevented from installing an "apple" radio because he doesn't own an "Apple" iMobile. This is not illegal for the Auto market but it's considered seppuku by Auto manufacturers as artificially restricting what the owner can do decreases the overall value and/or appeal of their auto.
Oh, idk - have you seen the stupidity of car manufacturers lately with their radios? Most of them are these huge monstrous things built into half the dashboard and many integrate other controls with them. The ford focus and honda civic both have displays for the radio that are entirely separate from the radio unit and part of the upper dashboard. Scion is quite the opposite shipping their cars without a radio and letting the dealership install which ever you prefer...including none if you want to save money. Replacing the radio in my new Altima is going to require a dashboard kit. Ugh.
Uhm, you realize most RAM comes from a very small number of vendors. Yes Micron/Kingston/etc buy the "good stuff" for their high end RAM but do you really think that's what your're getting from Apple?
Oh, and Kingston will charge more for their Apple ram - simply because they can. Would you pay an extra 5% because for 'certified apple compatible'? Of course. Does that mean they test a product line and then stamp a logo on a small number of entirely random units that they will ship to the apple memory orders? Bingo. Instant increase in their margin.
See though - Dell is actually pretty smart about it. Their upgrade price is generally only slightly more than buying the whole replacement memory or HDD off an internet merchant. Granted they get to KEEP the lesser part - bonus to them - while you wrestle with paying a rip off price for an upgrade vs paying just as much for a whole aftermarket part without the dell warranty.
So yeah, except memory that might be severely overpriced or something i have on-hand I just bit the bullet and pay dell's price. Apple's rip off upgrades though - it's well worth just buying aftermarket. Except i know far too many people who by an Apple because 'they're so easy and just WORK' that they'd never dream of taking it apart to upgrade because 'that's the kind of things you do with a PC'. Ugh...I hate MACs:)
If you don't like something don't listen/watch/participate/eat/drink/worship/drive/use it. I wish I could tag the remaining 6 billion people around me -1 lack of common sense.
Yes monopolies are still Bad Stuff in some cases but the whole 'make it illegal and sue them' thing because you don't like something is just far too prevalant. And honestly, if MS software was too overpriced and too difficult to steal^^^^^ copy^^^^ crack^^^^^ Back Up...someone would offer an alternative and break their monopoly. Difficult? Yes. Impossible? No. Just not worth the effort currently.
So back to Apple. They charge too much for too little? Big deal. Open a "Cheap Mac Upgrade" shop. Or get authorized reseller status and sell upgraded macs for less than apple:) Oh...or don't buy them. Beat the white addiction (hey, that's a DS9 reference without even trying) and move on with your life.
Some good advice depending on his intended career. The trick is...the starter question really sounds a lot like 'i did my 4 years and STILL don't know what i want to be when i grow up' instead of 'what can i do with this degree'
For management track - get you MBA and/or PMP. As long as you're comfortable with corporate 'culture' and 'politics' they're an easy jumpstart to management and well paying jobs. That said, you can still go techie -> mgmt if you have the skills for both. It's more work that way but if you're anti-school like me it does work. As for pay, I can't comment on entry level PM salaries but I do know it scales quickly. Perhaps not as much as a some hardcore programmers at google, but AVP level management in IT where I work are in the 150-200k range. Director is ~125-150.
For techie track there are so many options you'll never even realise all of them. Desktop support if you have the skill puts you around 35-40K in NY at a "real" job. It's fairly easy to get into...get your A+ and Network+ in a few weeks and go. It doesn't make use of your CS degree . Better is getting into systems administration...where you can specialize in AD, exchange, Lotus, unix/linux, SQL, web, general wintel admin, etc. There's more money, far less 'customer' interaction, generally relaxed/no dress code for these guys, and the ability to telecommute depending on your position. Perhaps an even better choice is Cisco. Take their classes and get certified. A hot spot currently is Cisco Voice - VOIP engineers to build/support their VOIP solution including phones, voicemail, etc. Another good branch from there is into video conferencing (goes well with VOIP) and a lot of companies are looking at these two areas to realize huge cost savings. Thus, they'll pay out the ass for people who know the technology. An experienced Cisco VOIP guy is 6 figures at the right shop.
What it comes down to is figuring out what you LIKE doing, and finding a way to make money doing that. *OR* deciding what will make you the most money, best lifestyle (telecommute, etc.), best hours, or whatever other thing you decide is most important. Personally, liking what I do is slightly more important than what they pay me. I've already given up having a life for it...2 hour commute each way (NYC) pretty much ensures it...
Unless google actually stole their CODE i don't see how there's much merrit here. I mean 'new or innovative' certainly doesn't apply to the concept of importing information from one email client to another.
Furthermore, it's google API's in gmail and the interaction with them is obviously standardized same with MS and exchange APIs. So yes, your method is going to be very similar to any competition by design.
At a guess things probably went more like 'hi google we're company XYZ and working on this nifty exchange importer. Can you lend a hand since we're teh sux at programming'
'sure, here's one of our programming guru's who has some spare time that can help out'
'thanks, we're sure to make a bundle off this one!'
'err wait. we're not going to help you build a product to sell. we give away stuff here remember?'
'nooooo you must! you're google! Well we got enough out of you to farm the rest out to india and still get rich'
'that's fine, enjoy.'
When will people learn? There are basic rights granted to US citizens. the right to get rich (or even earn money) is not one of them - much less the right to guaranteed money!!!
Now factor in time. It takes me *maybe* 15 minutes to drive to McDonalds or wendys or the pizzaria, order, and get home. Show me one meal that realistically takes 15 minutes to prepare, server and clean up...that you could eat more than a few times in a row without/emo/wrists.
Just boiling water and making spaghetti takes 15-20 minutes and you still have to clean up.
Let's say you made 10 bucks an hour and dinner takes ~30 minutes of work total but costs 1/4 of fast food. Spend 6 bucks on fast food dinner or spend $1.50 plus 30 minutes of your time at 10 bucks/hr. Dinner is more expensive to eat at home. That's a pretty conservative cost estimate. Most of us on here make a fair bit more/hr and $1.50 is really low end for a single person's meal.
Now, for a family of 7 that someone mentioned - yes. It's well worth cooking as even mcdonalds will cost you on the order of $40-50. I don't buy into the $10 meals for 7 people if you include anything other than basic staple foods of the cheapest type. A box of pasta and jar of sauce does not have the best nutritional value if eaten regularly.
Most people wouldn't. And generally it's not something that would happen even if it were legal. Just because stupid laws go away doesn't mean dignity, privacy, or respect should be thrown out the window.
If it was legal someone along the way would put on a display in times square and get a bit of attention, probably a fair amount of it negative. The negative comments would be expressed as freely as the display was put on so, at a guess it would generally balance out.
In the end who's actually harmed? The only reason a child would be upset would be if his/her parents taught that such a thing was hurtful. Seeing women walk around in sports bras and shorty-shorts doesn't hurt me, but in indian/middle eastern culture it would probably be considered extremely inappropriate, embarassing, and perhaps even tramatic to a young person.
Michaelangelo's David is nude, but not in order to demean the subject or to titillate the observer
Prove that. It's not that I entirely disagree but there is a lot of grey area. Many people assume that sexuality needs to be separated from everything else despite it being one of the primal urges. I disagree.
Why can't David be titillating and art at the same time?
this is not to say I want to see fat people screwing in the streets, just that not everyone thinks the way you do.
Would you support the human whales to screw in times square anyway? It's certainly not my thing but I don't see the actual harm being done other than potential friction burns for those involved.
To follow your example...the fish generally don't pretend to procreate for pleasure and no one objects when they DO procreate. So maybe the problem is people should only have sex in public if they intend to sucessfully procreate.
How about that? It's just nature we're talking about now. Is that obscene?:)
Religion to terrorism. Not only do they go hand-in-hand often enough but they seem to operate on very similar principles.
Terrorism - we hurt you with whatever means we have because you disagree with our views or don't follow our way of life.
Religion - we threaten eternal damnation, expulsion from the community, and whatever else we can imply/coerce (and corporal/capital punishment particularly in older times) if you don't follow our views and ways of life.
This is great - in theory (i'd spend +mod points if I had) and I wish reality matched up.
Unfortunately in the USA people seem to feel they deserve to be comfortable, protected, and coddled anywhere and everywhere they go. How about the FCC complaints about radio (much less TV) in the past few years? Seriously, turn it off or just change the station. Instead, certain people feel the need to impose their own moral views on the greater population.
As far as 'truths' - some people would emphatically argue that !church == hell *IS* 100% true. Those same people would probably also suggest that walking around nude would land you in hell as well. What it comes down to is your beliefs are your own. If they work for you, that's great. Just don't try to impose them on anyone else because, honestly, as strongly as you feel about them there's someone who feels just as strongly opposite them.
Wasn't the USA supposed to be the land of freedom? Tolerance? Well that's the theory I suppose but the vast majority of laws seem to either 1) protect you from yourself (seatbelt or helmet laws) or 2) force you to live your life according to someone else's moral standards - which can vary *greatly* between individual states anyway (e.g. age of consent varies from 14 to 18 if memory serves).
I would welcome having a nuclear plant in my neighborhood or, if my property were a few dozen acres bigger to accomodate it, even in my back yard.
Radiation is essentially zero, safety is as great, and potential fringe benefits (could easily provide municipal steam/heat to a moderate community) make it an easy choice.
Let's compare the people killed *per year* by... say lightning... to the number of deaths related to radiation at nuclear plants *EVER*. According to here (http://www-das.uwyo.edu/~geerts/cwx/notes/chap03/nat_hazard.html) an average of 2000 people die per year due to lightning. Cherynobl? 57.
Let's see...solar is estimated at 8-10$ per watt installed. You want a 1GW plant...hey look! 10B
Yes there's some ecconomy of scale... but that's usually balanced out by politics and business-nonsense overhead.
In the end you're in the same general range with pros and cons on either side. The big difference is today the US gets ~8% of our power from nuclear and ~0.006% from solar.
Yes, but someone might get ahold of a box cutter and after a few intermediate steps knock down two skyscrapers in downtown NYC. Just because something might happen or even DID happen doesn't mean you put life on hold (ok, so the giant pit of WTC is an embarassment but they're finally building). It means you take a careful look and weigh risks.
Should you sell enriched plutonium samples to guests after the group tour of your breeder reactor plant? Probably not. Should you not build something that produces a net gain in available fuel while also producing a shit load of power and potentially solves the looming energy crisis because someone, somewhere, somehow might do something bad?
That sounds like paranoia to me.
Build some breeders in a safe location and the use the fuel to build those 'tennis ball' reactors that use a bit of fuel in a graphite ball and helium coolant.
Well there's the containment vessel and then there's the holding pools.
But no, flying a fully loaded jet into a containment vessel would NOT breach it. They're specifically built and tested to exceed stresses just LIKE that.
Also - for those who don't "get it" - a nuclear *reactor* is not those huge white towers with steam coming out. Those are just heat exchangers for cooling the plant. The actual reactor is in a rather small (by comparison) boring building around the middle of the plant.
Take it a step further: WASTE HEAT from a 2GW plant used to desalinate water and use the power to directly generate hydrogen or other 'stored energy' for timeshifting the power.
Oh, and it's actually about 2/3 of energy lost to generation, transmission and distribution losses. You'd recap a lot by using waste heat for desalinazation and home/business heating or industrial uses. Creating H2 isn't exactly perfectly efficient but timeshifting energy isn't free.
Sorry but this shows your lack of understanding how large scale ecconomy works. Roughly 30% of our energy is imported in the form of oil and natural gas in the USA. If you could build nuclear plants capable of providing 10% of our energy budget you reduce our foreign energy dependence by 1/3. That's a HUGE shift in the global energy market. It doesn't matter if you take that 10% from electrical generation, industrial use, home heating, or whatever.
People use oil because it's easier and cheaper. If your electricity was nearly free would it be worth accepting the somewhat lower range of a pure electric car? Battery charging or swap stations wouldn't be such an issue either. So no, people aren't likely to have nuclear batteries under their hood any time soon. That doesn't mean 50 new nuclear plants wouldn't represent a large change to the overall long term power comsumption in the 'states.
Or someone decides to ignore silly public paranoia and starts building breeder reactors or higher density reactors that 'burn' more than ~10% of the fissile material in their fuel.
Or with breeder reactors you basically have unlimited fuel. They're more complex to design perhaps but are certainly a solution to your claimed "problem".
Also - you probably read a few of the same articles i did about there not being enough fissile uranium around. The catch is it assumes a fixed (and rather low) cost as the ceiling. Once you increase that it becomes a non-issue even without breeder reactors. And before you compare tripling the price of uranium fuel to oil at $140 a barrel - the fuel cost for a nuclear plant is a rather small % of it's operating cost. It's not like they burn a trainload of uranium every few days like a coal plant.
I don't know the details of McCain's "backing" but if it results in more ecconomical and plentiful nuclear plants i'm all for it.
I hate to get involved in the comparison game...but well i'm going to do it anyway.
I wouldn't compare it to a local psychic. I would however, agree that getting raw data and trying to interpret it yourself (or a non-trained person) is akin to trying to diagnose disease via medical textbooks. 'Hmm, the rash kind of looks like 1a and 5c but 5c is cause by AIDS - OH NOES/wrists'.
It's why the lab tech generally will never "read" your MRI/CAT/XRAY even when it's stupidly obvious and he's 3 months from getting his degree to do so - liability. *HOWEVER* those XRAYs are your medical records. You are entitled to a copy of them by law. So what gives? which side of the fence are we on here?
I can see someone fighting this on the grouns that your DNA is to be considered medical records and you are entitled to them with no exceptions.
Protect me from the harm of testing that requires some saliva. That doesn't seem too invasive.
OHHHHHH you mean from what their 'conclusions' are. (sarcasm) well if the company doing the testing sells the data as verified accurate then they're accountable. If they sell the data as 'entertainment purposes' or similar then people need to use their brains and understand that. Hell, if you believed everything on the news you'd be afraid to breathe because it might kill you (News at '11, Tune in and Don't Miss It!)
Seriously - we don't need regulation. We need fewer stupid people.
Slashdot Mirror
Uhm, perhaps i'm mis-reading but...
USA - New York. Scratch Home Built cars are legal to register (subject to safety and possibly emmissions inspection) and drive on public roads. They don't have a VIN but use the mfg serial if available or pretty much any other designation you would like. Yet - without a VIN - they can be registered and driven on public roads. They're not manufactured with an engine...heck, they're really just a collection of spare parts that fit together in some cases.
Granted this will probably vary WIDELY between states much less countries. So before you make such bold "fail" proclamations keep that in mind.
Oh, idk - have you seen the stupidity of car manufacturers lately with their radios? Most of them are these huge monstrous things built into half the dashboard and many integrate other controls with them. The ford focus and honda civic both have displays for the radio that are entirely separate from the radio unit and part of the upper dashboard. Scion is quite the opposite shipping their cars without a radio and letting the dealership install which ever you prefer...including none if you want to save money. Replacing the radio in my new Altima is going to require a dashboard kit. Ugh.
Uhm, you realize most RAM comes from a very small number of vendors. Yes Micron/Kingston/etc buy the "good stuff" for their high end RAM but do you really think that's what your're getting from Apple?
Oh, and Kingston will charge more for their Apple ram - simply because they can. Would you pay an extra 5% because for 'certified apple compatible'? Of course. Does that mean they test a product line and then stamp a logo on a small number of entirely random units that they will ship to the apple memory orders? Bingo. Instant increase in their margin.
See though - Dell is actually pretty smart about it. Their upgrade price is generally only slightly more than buying the whole replacement memory or HDD off an internet merchant. Granted they get to KEEP the lesser part - bonus to them - while you wrestle with paying a rip off price for an upgrade vs paying just as much for a whole aftermarket part without the dell warranty.
So yeah, except memory that might be severely overpriced or something i have on-hand I just bit the bullet and pay dell's price. Apple's rip off upgrades though - it's well worth just buying aftermarket. Except i know far too many people who by an Apple because 'they're so easy and just WORK' that they'd never dream of taking it apart to upgrade because 'that's the kind of things you do with a PC'. Ugh...I hate MACs :)
If you don't like something don't listen/watch/participate/eat/drink/worship/drive/use it. I wish I could tag the remaining 6 billion people around me -1 lack of common sense.
Yes monopolies are still Bad Stuff in some cases but the whole 'make it illegal and sue them' thing because you don't like something is just far too prevalant. And honestly, if MS software was too overpriced and too difficult to steal^^^^^ copy^^^^ crack^^^^^ Back Up...someone would offer an alternative and break their monopoly. Difficult? Yes. Impossible? No. Just not worth the effort currently.
So back to Apple. They charge too much for too little? Big deal. Open a "Cheap Mac Upgrade" shop. Or get authorized reseller status and sell upgraded macs for less than apple :) Oh...or don't buy them. Beat the white addiction (hey, that's a DS9 reference without even trying) and move on with your life.
Some good advice depending on his intended career. The trick is...the starter question really sounds a lot like 'i did my 4 years and STILL don't know what i want to be when i grow up' instead of 'what can i do with this degree'
For management track - get you MBA and/or PMP. As long as you're comfortable with corporate 'culture' and 'politics' they're an easy jumpstart to management and well paying jobs. That said, you can still go techie -> mgmt if you have the skills for both. It's more work that way but if you're anti-school like me it does work. As for pay, I can't comment on entry level PM salaries but I do know it scales quickly. Perhaps not as much as a some hardcore programmers at google, but AVP level management in IT where I work are in the 150-200k range. Director is ~125-150.
For techie track there are so many options you'll never even realise all of them. Desktop support if you have the skill puts you around 35-40K in NY at a "real" job. It's fairly easy to get into...get your A+ and Network+ in a few weeks and go. It doesn't make use of your CS degree . Better is getting into systems administration...where you can specialize in AD, exchange, Lotus, unix/linux, SQL, web, general wintel admin, etc. There's more money, far less 'customer' interaction, generally relaxed/no dress code for these guys, and the ability to telecommute depending on your position. Perhaps an even better choice is Cisco. Take their classes and get certified. A hot spot currently is Cisco Voice - VOIP engineers to build/support their VOIP solution including phones, voicemail, etc. Another good branch from there is into video conferencing (goes well with VOIP) and a lot of companies are looking at these two areas to realize huge cost savings. Thus, they'll pay out the ass for people who know the technology. An experienced Cisco VOIP guy is 6 figures at the right shop.
What it comes down to is figuring out what you LIKE doing, and finding a way to make money doing that. *OR* deciding what will make you the most money, best lifestyle (telecommute, etc.), best hours, or whatever other thing you decide is most important. Personally, liking what I do is slightly more important than what they pay me. I've already given up having a life for it...2 hour commute each way (NYC) pretty much ensures it...
Program manager = manger of project managers
Even a PM is a hard starting place without experience or your PMP though.
Unless google actually stole their CODE i don't see how there's much merrit here. I mean 'new or innovative' certainly doesn't apply to the concept of importing information from one email client to another.
Furthermore, it's google API's in gmail and the interaction with them is obviously standardized same with MS and exchange APIs. So yes, your method is going to be very similar to any competition by design.
At a guess things probably went more like
'hi google we're company XYZ and working on this nifty exchange importer. Can you lend a hand since we're teh sux at programming'
'sure, here's one of our programming guru's who has some spare time that can help out'
'thanks, we're sure to make a bundle off this one!'
'err wait. we're not going to help you build a product to sell. we give away stuff here remember?'
'nooooo you must! you're google! Well we got enough out of you to farm the rest out to india and still get rich'
'that's fine, enjoy.'
When will people learn? There are basic rights granted to US citizens. the right to get rich (or even earn money) is not one of them - much less the right to guaranteed money!!!
Now factor in time. It takes me *maybe* 15 minutes to drive to McDonalds or wendys or the pizzaria, order, and get home. Show me one meal that realistically takes 15 minutes to prepare, server and clean up...that you could eat more than a few times in a row without /emo /wrists.
Just boiling water and making spaghetti takes 15-20 minutes and you still have to clean up.
Let's say you made 10 bucks an hour and dinner takes ~30 minutes of work total but costs 1/4 of fast food. Spend 6 bucks on fast food dinner or spend $1.50 plus 30 minutes of your time at 10 bucks/hr. Dinner is more expensive to eat at home. That's a pretty conservative cost estimate. Most of us on here make a fair bit more/hr and $1.50 is really low end for a single person's meal.
Now, for a family of 7 that someone mentioned - yes. It's well worth cooking as even mcdonalds will cost you on the order of $40-50. I don't buy into the $10 meals for 7 people if you include anything other than basic staple foods of the cheapest type. A box of pasta and jar of sauce does not have the best nutritional value if eaten regularly.
Most people wouldn't. And generally it's not something that would happen even if it were legal. Just because stupid laws go away doesn't mean dignity, privacy, or respect should be thrown out the window.
If it was legal someone along the way would put on a display in times square and get a bit of attention, probably a fair amount of it negative. The negative comments would be expressed as freely as the display was put on so, at a guess it would generally balance out.
In the end who's actually harmed? The only reason a child would be upset would be if his/her parents taught that such a thing was hurtful. Seeing women walk around in sports bras and shorty-shorts doesn't hurt me, but in indian/middle eastern culture it would probably be considered extremely inappropriate, embarassing, and perhaps even tramatic to a young person.
Prove that. It's not that I entirely disagree but there is a lot of grey area. Many people assume that sexuality needs to be separated from everything else despite it being one of the primal urges. I disagree.
Why can't David be titillating and art at the same time?
Would you support the human whales to screw in times square anyway? It's certainly not my thing but I don't see the actual harm being done other than potential friction burns for those involved.
To follow your example...the fish generally don't pretend to procreate for pleasure and no one objects when they DO procreate. So maybe the problem is people should only have sex in public if they intend to sucessfully procreate.
How about that? It's just nature we're talking about now. Is that obscene? :)
Actually you made a very interesting comparison.
Religion to terrorism. Not only do they go hand-in-hand often enough but they seem to operate on very similar principles.
Terrorism - we hurt you with whatever means we have because you disagree with our views or don't follow our way of life.
Religion - we threaten eternal damnation, expulsion from the community, and whatever else we can imply/coerce (and corporal/capital punishment particularly in older times) if you don't follow our views and ways of life.
So yeah...
This is great - in theory (i'd spend +mod points if I had) and I wish reality matched up.
Unfortunately in the USA people seem to feel they deserve to be comfortable, protected, and coddled anywhere and everywhere they go. How about the FCC complaints about radio (much less TV) in the past few years? Seriously, turn it off or just change the station. Instead, certain people feel the need to impose their own moral views on the greater population.
As far as 'truths' - some people would emphatically argue that !church == hell *IS* 100% true. Those same people would probably also suggest that walking around nude would land you in hell as well. What it comes down to is your beliefs are your own. If they work for you, that's great. Just don't try to impose them on anyone else because, honestly, as strongly as you feel about them there's someone who feels just as strongly opposite them.
Wasn't the USA supposed to be the land of freedom? Tolerance? Well that's the theory I suppose but the vast majority of laws seem to either 1) protect you from yourself (seatbelt or helmet laws) or 2) force you to live your life according to someone else's moral standards - which can vary *greatly* between individual states anyway (e.g. age of consent varies from 14 to 18 if memory serves).
I think that's the reactor building drawn to be rather cartoonish:
Real Three Mile Island Pic
http://www.atomicarchive.com/History/coldwar/images/tmi.jpg
Simpsons-esq Drawing with titties
http://www.inkycircus.com/jargon/images/nuclear_power_plant.gif
I would welcome having a nuclear plant in my neighborhood or, if my property were a few dozen acres bigger to accomodate it, even in my back yard.
... say lightning ... to the number of deaths related to radiation at nuclear plants *EVER*. According to here (http://www-das.uwyo.edu/~geerts/cwx/notes/chap03/nat_hazard.html) an average of 2000 people die per year due to lightning. Cherynobl? 57.
Radiation is essentially zero, safety is as great, and potential fringe benefits (could easily provide municipal steam/heat to a moderate community) make it an easy choice.
Let's compare the people killed *per year* by
Let's see...solar is estimated at 8-10$ per watt installed. You want a 1GW plant...hey look! 10B
... but that's usually balanced out by politics and business-nonsense overhead.
Yes there's some ecconomy of scale
In the end you're in the same general range with pros and cons on either side. The big difference is today the US gets ~8% of our power from nuclear and ~0.006% from solar.
Yes, but someone might get ahold of a box cutter and after a few intermediate steps knock down two skyscrapers in downtown NYC. Just because something might happen or even DID happen doesn't mean you put life on hold (ok, so the giant pit of WTC is an embarassment but they're finally building). It means you take a careful look and weigh risks.
Should you sell enriched plutonium samples to guests after the group tour of your breeder reactor plant? Probably not. Should you not build something that produces a net gain in available fuel while also producing a shit load of power and potentially solves the looming energy crisis because someone, somewhere, somehow might do something bad?
That sounds like paranoia to me.
Build some breeders in a safe location and the use the fuel to build those 'tennis ball' reactors that use a bit of fuel in a graphite ball and helium coolant.
Well there's the containment vessel and then there's the holding pools.
But no, flying a fully loaded jet into a containment vessel would NOT breach it. They're specifically built and tested to exceed stresses just LIKE that.
Also - for those who don't "get it" - a nuclear *reactor* is not those huge white towers with steam coming out. Those are just heat exchangers for cooling the plant. The actual reactor is in a rather small (by comparison) boring building around the middle of the plant.
Take it a step further: WASTE HEAT from a 2GW plant used to desalinate water and use the power to directly generate hydrogen or other 'stored energy' for timeshifting the power.
Oh, and it's actually about 2/3 of energy lost to generation, transmission and distribution losses. You'd recap a lot by using waste heat for desalinazation and home/business heating or industrial uses. Creating H2 isn't exactly perfectly efficient but timeshifting energy isn't free.
Sorry but this shows your lack of understanding how large scale ecconomy works. Roughly 30% of our energy is imported in the form of oil and natural gas in the USA. If you could build nuclear plants capable of providing 10% of our energy budget you reduce our foreign energy dependence by 1/3. That's a HUGE shift in the global energy market. It doesn't matter if you take that 10% from electrical generation, industrial use, home heating, or whatever.
People use oil because it's easier and cheaper. If your electricity was nearly free would it be worth accepting the somewhat lower range of a pure electric car? Battery charging or swap stations wouldn't be such an issue either. So no, people aren't likely to have nuclear batteries under their hood any time soon. That doesn't mean 50 new nuclear plants wouldn't represent a large change to the overall long term power comsumption in the 'states.
Or someone decides to ignore silly public paranoia and starts building breeder reactors or higher density reactors that 'burn' more than ~10% of the fissile material in their fuel.
Or with breeder reactors you basically have unlimited fuel. They're more complex to design perhaps but are certainly a solution to your claimed "problem".
Also - you probably read a few of the same articles i did about there not being enough fissile uranium around. The catch is it assumes a fixed (and rather low) cost as the ceiling. Once you increase that it becomes a non-issue even without breeder reactors. And before you compare tripling the price of uranium fuel to oil at $140 a barrel - the fuel cost for a nuclear plant is a rather small % of it's operating cost. It's not like they burn a trainload of uranium every few days like a coal plant.
I don't know the details of McCain's "backing" but if it results in more ecconomical and plentiful nuclear plants i'm all for it.
I hate to get involved in the comparison game...but well i'm going to do it anyway.
/wrists'.
I wouldn't compare it to a local psychic. I would however, agree that getting raw data and trying to interpret it yourself (or a non-trained person) is akin to trying to diagnose disease via medical textbooks. 'Hmm, the rash kind of looks like 1a and 5c but 5c is cause by AIDS - OH NOES
It's why the lab tech generally will never "read" your MRI/CAT/XRAY even when it's stupidly obvious and he's 3 months from getting his degree to do so - liability. *HOWEVER* those XRAYs are your medical records. You are entitled to a copy of them by law. So what gives? which side of the fence are we on here?
I can see someone fighting this on the grouns that your DNA is to be considered medical records and you are entitled to them with no exceptions.
Protect me from the harm of testing that requires some saliva. That doesn't seem too invasive.
OHHHHHH you mean from what their 'conclusions' are. (sarcasm) well if the company doing the testing sells the data as verified accurate then they're accountable. If they sell the data as 'entertainment purposes' or similar then people need to use their brains and understand that. Hell, if you believed everything on the news you'd be afraid to breathe because it might kill you (News at '11, Tune in and Don't Miss It!)
Seriously - we don't need regulation. We need fewer stupid people.