We could just design and build thorium reactors for a lower cost.
They are safe.
Of course they are not. Extracting a lot of energy from something with high energy density is never safe. This is particularly so when the scheme involves radioactive goo.
This is of course compounded by your standard array of corrupt, stupid and greedy nuke plant operators. And you don't get a different brand of them unless you drop your libertarian wet dreams.
So, no. Thorium reactors are currently not an alternative.
[quote]Unless you live in Somalia, or any other libertarian hellholle, self-defense is indeed not a legitimate reason to own a firearm[/quote]
That's just your opinion, not fact. Self-defense is a well recognized legal defense in the US, beginning with Runyan vs.State (1877)
1. Reading comprehension: it was about legitimacy of owning a gun, not legitimacy of self defense.
2. If the risk of someone doing something stupid with a gun is significantly higher than the risk of something happening to this same someone due to violent crime (which is the case in most of europe, for example, but also in most of the US), then yes, it makes sense to question your right to own a gun.
Consider the G. Zimmerman case. Had he not owned a gun, how much easier and nicer that evening would have been.
So, self-defense is NOT a legitimate reason to own a firearm?
Unless you live in Somalia, or any other libertarian hellholle, self-defense is indeed not a legitimate reason to own a firearm. Most people in reasonable places will die of old age without ever having the opportunity nor the need to defend themselves from anything interesting with a gun. A lot of times, carrying a gun when in trouble is a lot more dangerous as you might get killed instead of just mugged, and might accidentally kill someone out of a misunderstanding.
When the data going to the climate models is of such short duration as to be meaninless or is outright garbage in the first place
That is simply not true about the data that is being used.
and there is no way to even test a one hundred year prediction in less than a century (should be sorta obvious)
The only really conclusive way of testing a prediction is whether it is true after the fact. If that is your standard, then you cannot be sure of the sun raising tomorrow, nor of anything else that isn't already history.
Instead, you can test whether a prediction makes sense, sometimes indirectly. There is still a risk of error, but that is something one has to live with to be able to make useful predictions.
it is not even clear what place a confidence interval would even have in this discussion.
I was just wondering if you had any shadow of an idea of what is involved in rational thinking and inference under incomplete information (which means - under all interesting situations).
If we know the inputs are dubious and incomplete and the outputs are untestable I don't even know where science fits into this discussion.
With that standards, most of the successful branches of science and their applications would be out of the question. You couldn't build airplanes nor could you take any medicine.
The way this works, instead, is that you use all the information you can in the smartest possible way to make an assessment of how things can be expected to develop, and test whether this prediction makes sense with what is available. Then you make a decision based on that, taking into account risk, and how confident you are of the prediction. The data, as well as the statistics behind modern climate science may not be perfect, but they are pretty damn good. And they predict catastrophic warming due to the significant co2 release by man with a very high confidence. I'd say it is reasonable to act.
The idea our actions are changing the environment is fairly intuitive, but our level of scientific knowledge, records and computational ability are utterly inadequate to applying the scientific method to understanding it in anything like the level of detail needed to have a 'consensus' on it.
What's missing for a consensus is people pulling their heads out of their asses.
Therefore all we are left with is faith based belief calling itself science.
Not at all. But you have no idea what you are talking about. Do you even know what a confidence interval is?
Which just happens to recommend the deepest desires in the hearts of those making the policy recomendations. Total coincidence.
This is bullshit.There is no clear consensus on what should be done about the warming among people who understand that it is real. Could be going all electric with lots of nuclear plants, could be crawling back up the trees, etc.
The deniers, however, want to keep doing things just as before, and that perfectly maches what they believe. And that's not a coincidence.
It is simply not possible for this design to explode
That is exactly the type of claim I take issue with. If you are talking "gigawatts" and "can't blow up", then you are likely talking nonsense.
like Fukushima.
That's a very narrow definition of safe. It will most likely have its own way of making a mess. Perhaps it will be bloody unlikely in theory, but in practice, corrupt, greedy and stupid operators will make it happen.
Thorium on the other hand produces much more power per gram and has very little waste. The waste it does produce is exceedingly less dangerous than the current 1950s style reactors.
Experience suggests that this is an oversimplification. The HTTR (High Temperature Thorium Reactor) had a few unexpected failure modes that led to some discharge of radioactive stuff into the atmosphere. The other german experimental Thorium reactor (Juellich) almost went boom because, for some nowadays not so mysterious reason, the graphite was heated way beyond what it should have. Nobody knew that back then. While nothing happened, it still is a mayor waste problem to this day.
This leads us to another issue. The failure mode of the HTTR was not that unexpected. It was, like the Tsunami issue at Fukushima, predicted by other people and ignored by those responsible. The designers and builders of the the HTTR made a point about how they were completely sure that nothing could possibly go wrong, and whoever claimed otherwise was an idiot. Doubts were brushed aside. The moral of the story is that we cannot trust the judgement of nuclear engineers to the extent that would be necessary.
"The design is inherently safe, nothing can go wrong" -- yeah, right.
What do you expect Amazon to do? Give a free full ride to anyone who asks? In order to stay in business, amazon must turn a profit, and in order to do that, it must maintain a level of productive throughput at an affordable price.
Yes. So what Amazon should do is to lobby for a law that regulates this type of work. If everyone who does retail has to treat their packbots in the same way, there is no advantage in mistreating them, and the race to the bottom is stopped. Competition can then move to something else.
Do you realize that you could tax everyone with actual income over $250K at 100% and it would not come close to covering the entitlements provided by the government.
Not if you think of money as some hard asset, which is the view that goldbugs have of money. (Money is a hard asset on the person scale, but not on the country scale).
What would happen if you tax rich people very heavily (100% is a bit excessive, but, say, something reasonable like 80%) is that people will invest that extra money to avoid taxation, and so it keeps going around producing more money, making everyone richer. You could pay for the social system, and would probably need less of it anyway.
If you want to see an example of how high taxes spurred investment and invation, then please read the history of boeing and the development of the 747.
I don't know the details either. But if they as much as claim that they could replicate the results of 900 or so studies, then I would start from the assumption that they are full of it.
Perhaps I should read the paper. But as someone who knows how how the information in "studies" gets there (you choose the nicest picture), and how much it is worth (the result will be mostly OK, but the data will have, ah, simmered a little bit in hot water), I can tell you that replicating the results of 900 or so studies is like having a simulation of middle earth. Impressive, sure, but fantasy nonetheless.
At least, this is the first thought I have after reading the headline and the blurb.
I think this is mostly historical legacy, as others have noted; 15 years ago these would have been entirely proprietary Unix systems, where typical prices were $50,000 for the workstation and $3000 just for the compilers. Switching to Linux was the obvious thing to do.
Hm - no. Not just legacy. The fact is that windows sucks. You still can't have multiple desktops for it. And all the other eye candy matters shit when you want to do some serious number crunching. Etc. And there is far too little open source for it.
Even worse yet, windows sucks epically as a platform for running emacs.
The fact that it has been done in the past with impunity as a method for social engineering and you seem to approve of that is quite frankly, scary as hell!!!
What always amazes me is the incredibly low level of sophistication in these matters that is displayed in this kind of discussion. No vision of the state, no vision of politics, no vision of civilization. No vision and understanding of anything.
Remember: The power to tax is the power to destroy.
Please wipe the foam off your mouth. It makes you look even more stupid.
Of course you will be picking up more of the tab. Anytime you expand something that costs money SOMEONE has to pay for it, and that someone is you. There isn't a single provision in Obamacare that will reduce costs.
Not true. In the case of healthcare, having people getting adecuate medical attention sooner means less health issues spiralling out of control and less expensive emergencies. Costs will go down.
A good, state run single payer system (like many Europeans have) would have reduced the costs furthrer.
I have never figured out why anyone would want this.
I started using focus follows mouse late in the 90s, and I like it because you can switch windows by basically giving the mouse a gentle slap that propells the pointer into approximately the right area. It's fast and easy. Click to focus means I have to move the pointer to a place where I can click safely, and then press the button, all of which taken together is more cumbersome. Not much, of course, but enough to matter in terms of comfort.
Studies show that people that live here illegally use resources that they do not pay for (education for their kids, medical services, etc). They also send a huge amount of money back to Mexico. Many of them work for cash and don't pay taxes.
I bet that if you plug only *one* tax loophole for the rich, there will be enough money to pay for the education of all those kids, plus buying each of those illegal dads a proper suit. Nothing fancy, but a decent suit with a nice tie. And you would make them happy.
God could have programmed the constants and rules of the universe, then walked away. Therefore god could have done it all and science could never disprove it.
That's ok as a working assumption. But then? What are the consequences of that, talking in the broadest possible sense? Also, that is not the god the standard believer seems to believe in.
I can also tell you that living without religion is possible and quite enjoyable.
Yes. For 100 years or so. After that, pretty much nothing enjoyable happens.
I guess you really believe that. I was about to say something about data, but that would be arrogant, I suppose.
Belief in something greater than oneself can be sufficient reason. Seeing how it changes other people, and oneself, is another.
How can you even call that 'reasons'?
Trying to have an answer to "why", which science cannot come close to answering, yet another. Even the basic "how did it all come into existance", which science really can't say as a fact.
And it doesn't bother you that your answers may be wrong?
The scientific perspective truly is that there was no god involved in creation.
That is ridiculously untrue. Science is science, not religion. Science has no perspective on God because God is outside the scope of any science. Any scientist who starts dealing with God is stepping out of science firmly into religion.
I think you do not know much about science. When trying to find an explanation, no serious scientist invokes god. That's what I meant. The scientific perspective is indeed that no, there is no god. And nobody can forbid me from drawing my own conclusions about the universe from that, and from the incredible success science has had in making our lifes better. In particular when compared whith what religion has done and continuous to do to us.
Also, it is easy to formulate a hypothesis like "is it true that there is a benevolent god that loves everyone and wont let you down if you believe in him and pray?" and test it against data (well, alas).
You can explain everything plausibly without a God figure,
Which is not "there is no God". It may be "this is a plausible explanation", but it certainly isn't "this is the only way it could have happened".
The question is, should I believe in god? Is he/she/it necessary as a concept? Observation suggests it isn't, and for many people, that is as much religion as they need: emprically, there is no god around to help us nor to worry about. We are here by ourselves, and we better care well for each other, because nobody else will. I can also tell you that living without religion is possible and quite enjoyable.
I've see so many wrong and simply ignorant words put in the mouths of "believers" by people who have no clue and no desire to understand what those believers really think to accept any patent statement like yours. You don't really know what "believers" think, so saying that you've proven there is no God because you don't understand why he'd do what his believers think he'd do is just... well, presumptive to be kind.
Empirically, those reasonable believers look to me a lot like closet atheists.
I still haven't figured out why people believe. What's the point?
I'd also point out that assumptions are called assumptions because they are not testable.
Erm - no, that is not true. You can assume things "for the sake of argument", to figure out if i makes sense bothering to test them. In fact, that's pretty standard. Lots of assumptions are testable.
I don't know if it was deliberate, but the lumping of the concept of evolution as "changes over time" and evolution as "how life began" has caused more wasted time as people debate two vastly different things.
The scientific perspective truly is that there was no god involved in creation. At all. You can explain everything plausibly without a God figure, and in fact it makes a lot more sense. That's why many feel that it has been proven that God does not exist. At least not in the way believers think of their gods.
That usually means the presentation was made by someone who is incompetent.
Oh, but wasn't it supposed to be all easy?
It is like people using the spacebar to "align" columns in a text document instead of using a table, and then wondering why it looks so ugly when they print it or change the font.
But powerpoint and word are supposed to be WYSIWYG, a promise, it seems, that they cannot keep reliably. Using spaces isn't the smartest thing, but it should work in a WYSIWYG environment as long as you do not change the font.
Pearl thinks that once breakthroughs are made in handling uncertainty, AIs will quickly gain 'a far greater understanding of context, for instance providing with the next generation of virtual assistants with the ability to recognise speech in noisy environments and to understand how the position of a phrase in a sentence can change its meaning.
Oh, of course. But pretending that these "breakthroughs in handling uncertainty" are just a minor stumbling block is somewhat silly. These are some of the hardest problems in maths right now, and there are no easy solutions on the horizon.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course they are not. Extracting a lot of energy from something with high energy density is never safe. This is particularly so when the scheme involves radioactive goo.
This is of course compounded by your standard array of corrupt, stupid and greedy nuke plant operators. And you don't get a different brand of them unless you drop your libertarian wet dreams.
So, no. Thorium reactors are currently not an alternative.
1. Reading comprehension: it was about legitimacy of owning a gun, not legitimacy of self defense.
2. If the risk of someone doing something stupid with a gun is significantly higher than the risk of something happening to this same someone due to violent crime (which is the case in most of europe, for example, but also in most of the US), then yes, it makes sense to question your right to own a gun.
Consider the G. Zimmerman case. Had he not owned a gun, how much easier and nicer that evening would have been.
Unless you live in Somalia, or any other libertarian hellholle, self-defense is indeed not a legitimate reason to own a firearm. Most people in reasonable places will die of old age without ever having the opportunity nor the need to defend themselves from anything interesting with a gun. A lot of times, carrying a gun when in trouble is a lot more dangerous as you might get killed instead of just mugged, and might accidentally kill someone out of a misunderstanding.
That is simply not true about the data that is being used.
The only really conclusive way of testing a prediction is whether it is true after the fact. If that is your standard, then you cannot be sure of the sun raising tomorrow, nor of anything else that isn't already history.
Instead, you can test whether a prediction makes sense, sometimes indirectly. There is still a risk of error, but that is something one has to live with to be able to make useful predictions.
I was just wondering if you had any shadow of an idea of what is involved in rational thinking and inference under incomplete information (which means - under all interesting situations).
With that standards, most of the successful branches of science and their applications would be out of the question. You couldn't build airplanes nor could you take any medicine.
The way this works, instead, is that you use all the information you can in the smartest possible way to make an assessment of how things can be expected to develop, and test whether this prediction makes sense with what is available. Then you make a decision based on that, taking into account risk, and how confident you are of the prediction. The data, as well as the statistics behind modern climate science may not be perfect, but they are pretty damn good. And they predict catastrophic warming due to the significant co2 release by man with a very high confidence. I'd say it is reasonable to act.
What's missing for a consensus is people pulling their heads out of their asses.
Not at all. But you have no idea what you are talking about. Do you even know what a confidence interval is?
This is bullshit.There is no clear consensus on what should be done about the warming among people who understand that it is real. Could be going all electric with lots of nuclear plants, could be crawling back up the trees, etc.
The deniers, however, want to keep doing things just as before, and that perfectly maches what they believe. And that's not a coincidence.
Better yet - buy two and set up a decent backup scheme.
That is exactly the type of claim I take issue with. If you are talking "gigawatts" and "can't blow up", then you are likely talking nonsense.
That's a very narrow definition of safe. It will most likely have its own way of making a mess. Perhaps it will be bloody unlikely in theory, but in practice, corrupt, greedy and stupid operators will make it happen.
Experience suggests that this is an oversimplification. The HTTR (High Temperature Thorium Reactor) had a few unexpected failure modes that led to some discharge of radioactive stuff into the atmosphere. The other german experimental Thorium reactor (Juellich) almost went boom because, for some nowadays not so mysterious reason, the graphite was heated way beyond what it should have. Nobody knew that back then. While nothing happened, it still is a mayor waste problem to this day.
This leads us to another issue. The failure mode of the HTTR was not that unexpected. It was, like the Tsunami issue at Fukushima, predicted by other people and ignored by those responsible. The designers and builders of the the HTTR made a point about how they were completely sure that nothing could possibly go wrong, and whoever claimed otherwise was an idiot. Doubts were brushed aside. The moral of the story is that we cannot trust the judgement of nuclear engineers to the extent that would be necessary.
"The design is inherently safe, nothing can go wrong" -- yeah, right.
Yes. So what Amazon should do is to lobby for a law that regulates this type of work. If everyone who does retail has to treat their packbots in the same way, there is no advantage in mistreating them, and the race to the bottom is stopped. Competition can then move to something else.
That's a no-brainer, really. That is the way it works in civilized countries. This, however, is what happens in uncivilized countries.
Not if you think of money as some hard asset, which is the view that goldbugs have of money. (Money is a hard asset on the person scale, but not on the country scale).
What would happen if you tax rich people very heavily (100% is a bit excessive, but, say, something reasonable like 80%) is that people will invest that extra money to avoid taxation, and so it keeps going around producing more money, making everyone richer. You could pay for the social system, and would probably need less of it anyway.
If you want to see an example of how high taxes spurred investment and invation, then please read the history of boeing and the development of the 747.
I don't know the details either. But if they as much as claim that they could replicate the results of 900 or so studies, then I would start from the assumption that they are full of it.
Perhaps I should read the paper. But as someone who knows how how the information in "studies" gets there (you choose the nicest picture), and how much it is worth (the result will be mostly OK, but the data will have, ah, simmered a little bit in hot water), I can tell you that replicating the results of 900 or so studies is like having a simulation of middle earth. Impressive, sure, but fantasy nonetheless.
At least, this is the first thought I have after reading the headline and the blurb.
Ah - I think you are onto something, my dear AC. They should rewrite FB in Lisp!
Hm - no. Not just legacy. The fact is that windows sucks. You still can't have multiple desktops for it. And all the other eye candy matters shit when you want to do some serious number crunching. Etc. And there is far too little open source for it.
Even worse yet, windows sucks epically as a platform for running emacs.
What always amazes me is the incredibly low level of sophistication in these matters that is displayed in this kind of discussion. No vision of the state, no vision of politics, no vision of civilization. No vision and understanding of anything.
Please wipe the foam off your mouth. It makes you look even more stupid.
Not true. In the case of healthcare, having people getting adecuate medical attention sooner means less health issues spiralling out of control and less expensive emergencies. Costs will go down.
A good, state run single payer system (like many Europeans have) would have reduced the costs furthrer.
What also has to be said is that conservatives are A-OK with this kind of stuff. Evil people that they are.
I started using focus follows mouse late in the 90s, and I like it because you can switch windows by basically giving the mouse a gentle slap that propells the pointer into approximately the right area. It's fast and easy. Click to focus means I have to move the pointer to a place where I can click safely, and then press the button, all of which taken together is more cumbersome. Not much, of course, but enough to matter in terms of comfort.
I bet that if you plug only *one* tax loophole for the rich, there will be enough money to pay for the education of all those kids, plus buying each of those illegal dads a proper suit. Nothing fancy, but a decent suit with a nice tie. And you would make them happy.
That's ok as a working assumption. But then? What are the consequences of that, talking in the broadest possible sense? Also, that is not the god the standard believer seems to believe in.
I guess you really believe that. I was about to say something about data, but that would be arrogant, I suppose.
How can you even call that 'reasons'?
And it doesn't bother you that your answers may be wrong?
I think you do not know much about science. When trying to find an explanation, no serious scientist invokes god. That's what I meant. The scientific perspective is indeed that no, there is no god. And nobody can forbid me from drawing my own conclusions about the universe from that, and from the incredible success science has had in making our lifes better. In particular when compared whith what religion has done and continuous to do to us.
Also, it is easy to formulate a hypothesis like "is it true that there is a benevolent god that loves everyone and wont let you down if you believe in him and pray?" and test it against data (well, alas).
The question is, should I believe in god? Is he/she/it necessary as a concept? Observation suggests it isn't, and for many people, that is as much religion as they need: emprically, there is no god around to help us nor to worry about . We are here by ourselves, and we better care well for each other, because nobody else will. I can also tell you that living without religion is possible and quite enjoyable.
Empirically, those reasonable believers look to me a lot like closet atheists.
I still haven't figured out why people believe. What's the point?
I wish that were true. They also seem to get more deranged with each generation.
Erm - no, that is not true. You can assume things "for the sake of argument", to figure out if i makes sense bothering to test them. In fact, that's pretty standard. Lots of assumptions are testable.
The scientific perspective truly is that there was no god involved in creation. At all. You can explain everything plausibly without a God figure, and in fact it makes a lot more sense. That's why many feel that it has been proven that God does not exist. At least not in the way believers think of their gods.
Oh, but wasn't it supposed to be all easy?
But powerpoint and word are supposed to be WYSIWYG, a promise, it seems, that they cannot keep reliably. Using spaces isn't the smartest thing, but it should work in a WYSIWYG environment as long as you do not change the font.
Oh, of course. But pretending that these "breakthroughs in handling uncertainty" are just a minor stumbling block is somewhat silly. These are some of the hardest problems in maths right now, and there are no easy solutions on the horizon.