...all factors considered
Except that you haven't come close to considering all factors. Once again, another advocate for nuclear power conveniently disregards the pesky problem of long-term storage of nuclear waste in making the claim that nuclear is 'the cleanest form of energy'. This a huge problem that has yet to be solved, and until it is, there will remain many tons of highly radioactive nuclear waste in the form of spent fuel rods littering our landscape for thousands of years to come. This one issue pretty much shoots down every one of your arguments for 'clean' nuclear power, including your 'small footprint' claim. How many acres of land are we now using to store this stuff, and how many more acres will we need?
Astrophysicist Dr. Louis Frank first proposed the existence of small dark comets in 1986. In 1990 he wrote 'The Big Splash' where he theorized that most of the Earth's oceanic water, and probably life itself, resulted from small comets that enter the atmosphere at the rate of more than 20 per minute. It's an intriguing read that needs to be taken with many large grains of salt. He was roundly criticized and ridiculed for his theory and these days he doesn't talk much about it anymore. His current profile at the University of Iowa makes no mention of his dark comet research.
The guy is no lightweight. He worked with James Van Allen and co-wrote with him several papers describing what we now know as the Van Allen radiation belts that circle the Earth. Is he about to be vindicated?
Microsoft dominance has nothing to do with ease-of-use or installation, and it never has. It has everything to do with marketing and the leverage of it's market share to brutally squash the competition. Anybody who has recently installed both Linux and Windows can vouch for the fact that Windows is seriously lagging in the ease-of-installation department. My 14-year-old son recently installed Linux Mandrake and Windows on separate partitions on the same machine. With the exception of some help with partitioning he installed Linux on his own. The Linux install took all of about 45 mins, including the partition formatting, and managed to detect and install 2 NICs, a printer, and an SB Live! sound card without a hitch. Christ, the install had the network configured and was d/l'ing crypto packages before the first and only reboot! By comparison, the Win 98 SE install was unable to successfully install even one NIC during the installation. The Win 98 partition eventually had to be reformatted, Windows was reinstalled without the NICs present, and the NICs were manually installed later, for a total of over 3 hours and about 8 reboots. The poor kid was so frustrated and disgusted with the Windows install that he still hasn't bothered trying to install the printer and the sound card - he just cancels past the "Add New Hardware Wizard" when he boots into Win98. The only things he uses Windows for are school projects that require the use of Office 2000. His Windows printing is done across the network via Samba. He's talking now about repartitioning the HDD to give more room to Linux, but he's still frightened at the prospect of having to reinstall Windows.
speaking of stupidity...any instructor of software development that still doesn't know about the GPL should probably NOT be teaching software development. this is a person who doesn't care enough about the subject to stay abreast of the latest in her field, and the GPL is by no means a late-breaking development. the GPL and open source in general is such a hot topic these days that there is absolutely no excuse for her ignorance. unfortunately, this only underscores the difficulty you will have convincing your school to invest in Linux. BTW, for those who insist that Linux is harder to install than Windows: i installed Mandrake 7 over the weekend. the install detected and installed drivers for both NICs and had me connected to the Internet to download crypto packages before the install was even finished. exactly one reboot later my network was up and running, my SB Live! was working, and I was printing. one reboot. period.
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...all factors considered
Except that you haven't come close to considering all factors. Once again, another advocate for nuclear power conveniently disregards the pesky problem of long-term storage of nuclear waste in making the claim that nuclear is 'the cleanest form of energy'. This a huge problem that has yet to be solved, and until it is, there will remain many tons of highly radioactive nuclear waste in the form of spent fuel rods littering our landscape for thousands of years to come. This one issue pretty much shoots down every one of your arguments for 'clean' nuclear power, including your 'small footprint' claim. How many acres of land are we now using to store this stuff, and how many more acres will we need?
Astrophysicist Dr. Louis Frank first proposed the existence of small dark comets in 1986. In 1990 he wrote 'The Big Splash' where he theorized that most of the Earth's oceanic water, and probably life itself, resulted from small comets that enter the atmosphere at the rate of more than 20 per minute. It's an intriguing read that needs to be taken with many large grains of salt. He was roundly criticized and ridiculed for his theory and these days he doesn't talk much about it anymore. His current profile at the University of Iowa makes no mention of his dark comet research.
The guy is no lightweight. He worked with James Van Allen and co-wrote with him several papers describing what we now know as the Van Allen radiation belts that circle the Earth. Is he about to be vindicated?
Microsoft dominance has nothing to do with ease-of-use or installation, and it never has. It has everything to do with marketing and the leverage of it's market share to brutally squash the competition. Anybody who has recently installed both Linux and Windows can vouch for the fact that Windows is seriously lagging in the ease-of-installation department. My 14-year-old son recently installed Linux Mandrake and Windows on separate partitions on the same machine. With the exception of some help with partitioning he installed Linux on his own. The Linux install took all of about 45 mins, including the partition formatting, and managed to detect and install 2 NICs, a printer, and an SB Live! sound card without a hitch. Christ, the install had the network configured and was d/l'ing crypto packages before the first and only reboot! By comparison, the Win 98 SE install was unable to successfully install even one NIC during the installation. The Win 98 partition eventually had to be reformatted, Windows was reinstalled without the NICs present, and the NICs were manually installed later, for a total of over 3 hours and about 8 reboots. The poor kid was so frustrated and disgusted with the Windows install that he still hasn't bothered trying to install the printer and the sound card - he just cancels past the "Add New Hardware Wizard" when he boots into Win98. The only things he uses Windows for are school projects that require the use of Office 2000. His Windows printing is done across the network via Samba. He's talking now about repartitioning the HDD to give more room to Linux, but he's still frightened at the prospect of having to reinstall Windows.
speaking of stupidity...any instructor of software development that still doesn't know about the GPL should probably NOT be teaching software development. this is a person who doesn't care enough about the subject to stay abreast of the latest in her field, and the GPL is by no means a late-breaking development. the GPL and open source in general is such a hot topic these days that there is absolutely no excuse for her ignorance. unfortunately, this only underscores the difficulty you will have convincing your school to invest in Linux. BTW, for those who insist that Linux is harder to install than Windows: i installed Mandrake 7 over the weekend. the install detected and installed drivers for both NICs and had me connected to the Internet to download crypto packages before the install was even finished. exactly one reboot later my network was up and running, my SB Live! was working, and I was printing. one reboot. period.