.For example, a typical onshore well may cost $2-3 million to drill and complete in a 14-30 day time period, but only cost around $2,000/month to operate after completion.
But don't those cost estimates fail to reflect the pro-rated costs of a leak? That is, shouldn't you add in ($50 billion multiplied by the percent chance of another DeepWater Horizon style accident) to get the most accurate average costs?
Well, what did we really expect when the Copyright Czar position was created?
I read somewhere (I can't remember where now) that when the US realizes that a problem is un-solvable, its final response is to appoint a Czar to take the blame for the problem remaining unsolved.
Should the legitimate need arise to break a law or subvert the government, corrupt individuals will have power to stop people even more easily.
Indeed... I think there is an opportunity here to design systems that are resistant to government misuse.
For example, imagine a system where the standard "camera on every street corner" has limited or no networking capability, and only records an encrypted record of what it sees/hears to local storage in a 48-hour loop. Such a camera wouldn't help police catch criminals in the act, of course, but after a crime had been committed, the police could go and physically retrieve the storage unit from the camera(s) at the scene of the crime as evidence. The police would need to get a search warrant that included the decryption key for the storage units, otherwise the data would do them no good even if they surreptitiously gathered the physical drives.
Something like that might make improper use of the surveillance footage more difficult, and therefore less likely.
Because metal wreckage in the ocean isn't polluting at all either.
Correct, it's not (well, except for the machine oil, which is pretty insignificant in the case of a windmill). The Navy sinks (cleaned-up) ships to make artificial reefs on a regular basis, and they provide an excellent home for sea life.
The idea that my data is on the "cloud" and I have to pay a monthly fee (or watch some ads) to access it is really not very interesting to me.
I see your point, but it's not like maintaining your own physical computer is free either. Instead of paying service fees, you have to pay money to purchase the computer, spend time and/or money to keep it running, make sure your data is backed up, pay for electricity, deal with it if it gets stolen or damaged, etc.
The trade-offs may be worth it for you, but other people like the freedom of not having to be an amateur sysadmin/hardware wrangler.
No, the wealth would spread around to anyone who was willing to take a risk and was successful.
And who is it who has the excess resources necessary to take a risk? Oh yeah, the rich. If they risk a lot of money, and lose it, they can fall back on their reserves and try again next year. The rest of us can't afford to risk very much, since failure would cost us our livelihood. That's why the rich tend to get richer, and the poor tend to stay poor.
You should read up on the free market. What we have is not a free market. All the regulations you support are there to attempt to fix problems caused by yet other regulations.
This argument is just silly. A regulation-free market is just another name for anarchy. You wish you had more money than that other trader? No problem, shoot him and take his money, or kidnap his kids and slit their throats unless he agrees to buy them back from you. Don't want something similar to happen to you? No problem, hire a private army of mercenaries to protect yourself. One of your mercenaries is getting a bit ambitious, and sneaking into your room to murder you in the night? Tough, you should have hired a more reliable mercenary.
Regulations are there so that people can conduct their business with at least some confidence that they won't be completely screwed over by every other actor in the market at the first opportunity. Without that confidence, people simply wouldn't trade -- they'd keep all of their money in a locked box in their basement, and spend it mainly on armed guards, and there would be no market, "free" or otherwise.
Yes, some regulations are no doubt unnecessary. But to say that all regulations are only "there to attempt to fix the problems caused by yet other regulations" is to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
So, what's wrong with this picture? You buy/sell things that you expect to move by 1% in the next 20 minutes, and you then magically trade out of them after 20 minutes?
Time to start writing my meta-bot:
Watch what the article's bot does
Wait exactly 20 minutes
Buy/sell as appropriate to take advantage of the article's bot's predictable return transactions
That ought to net me at least an Audi or two, before someone thwarts me with a meta-meta-bot...
Only in the imagination of right-wingers who have decided that environmentalists are The Enemy, and use every possible opportunity to try and misrepresent and discredit them. As TFA notes, the concerns with ITER were about its budget, not its environmental effects.
The tragic thing about it is that all of the knee-jerk anti-environmentalists out there live on Earth as well, and they will suffer along with everyone else as the environmental damage builds up. Through their refusal to ever take any environmental concerns seriously, they are digging their own graves as well as everyone else's.
Greens (the so-called '350' crowd) need to shut down the world's economy for at least 20 years (back to agrarian levels) to achieve their AGW-related goals.
Of course they don't. What they want is to reduce the world's carbon output. There are ways to do that other than shutting down the world's economy. Oil is a great energy source, but it isn't the only one.
Then they (Clinton, Kerry, Gore) got into power and killed our research into the safe kind of reactor that cleans up our nuclear waste.
Well, no, they didn't just "get into power", they were voted into power by the American public. If the American public doesn't like nuclear power, it's their right to express their preference through their votes, just as it is your right to support nuclear power through your own vote. You think the American public is a bunch of idiots for not supporting nuclear power? Fine, you may be right. If you want their support, you'll have to convince them though; and if you can't, too bad, that's democracy.
All you have to do is wipe out 90% of the human population and the whole energy-problem goes away... for a few decades at least
Morally unacceptable, and as you point out, only a temporary solution anyway.
So, what's the deal with that? Irrational fear or nuclear energy, or just a general hatred for humanity?
Perhaps they are just holding out for a less problematic solution. Just because you think the problems with nuclear fission are tractable doesn't mean they are.
The purpose of the Green movement isn't to create economical and sustainable energy
Well, perhaps you can fill me in then... I'm a person who is interested in the creation of economical and sustainable energy, and also is preserving the natural environment. If I'm not a "green", then what should I call myself?
I can't live without water. And guess which one's disappearing faster?
Oil is. The planet is 75% covered in water, and always will be, and all of that water is at least theoretically drinkable, assuming you have the necessary energy to desalinate or otherwise process it. Of course the problem of how best to obtain that energy brings up back to the beginning of this discussion.
Looks as though someone's been paid off to get the ball rolling.
Looks like someone is making accusations without offering any evidence to back them up. If you know something, let's hear it. Otherwise your cynical speculations are pointless.
Ah, the truth gets out JUST as quickly, if not more so.
"A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes" -- Mark Twain
... and the reason that is true, even in the Internet Age, is because the speed at which a story travels is proportional to how interesting it is, not how true it is. The truth is sometimes interesting, but often boring; whereas a well-crafted lie will always be interesting, and thus always propagate quickly.
Show me the reference where algae-based biodiesel plants will produce cheaper per-mile fuel than oil.
Who said anything about cheaper? Why should a replacement technology that doesn't benefit from the trillions of dollars of in-place oil infrastructure, economies of scale (yet), or millions of years of natural pre-processing be required to be cheaper to be considered viable? Of course it won't be cheaper. The correct question to ask is, will it be cheap enough?
In any case, our oil addiction isn't going to be solved this decade, perhaps not even this century. But it will need to be solved, and the sooner we start moving in that direction, the better.
He's talking about California and the East Coast, where there are deposits close to shore that have been NIMBY'd out of accessibility.
... and it's pretty clear at this point that the NIMBYism was well-founded. If only the gulf coast states had shown a little more NIMBYism, they wouldn't be in the soup now.
Slashdot Mirror
.For example, a typical onshore well may cost $2-3 million to drill and complete in a 14-30 day time period, but only cost around $2,000/month to operate after completion.
But don't those cost estimates fail to reflect the pro-rated costs of a leak? That is, shouldn't you add in ($50 billion multiplied by the percent chance of another DeepWater Horizon style accident) to get the most accurate average costs?
Well, what did we really expect when the Copyright Czar position was created?
I read somewhere (I can't remember where now) that when the US realizes that a problem is un-solvable, its final response is to appoint a Czar to take the blame for the problem remaining unsolved.
Works for me!
Should the legitimate need arise to break a law or subvert the government, corrupt individuals will have power to stop people even more easily.
Indeed... I think there is an opportunity here to design systems that are resistant to government misuse.
For example, imagine a system where the standard "camera on every street corner" has limited or no networking capability, and only records an encrypted record of what it sees/hears to local storage in a 48-hour loop. Such a camera wouldn't help police catch criminals in the act, of course, but after a crime had been committed, the police could go and physically retrieve the storage unit from the camera(s) at the scene of the crime as evidence. The police would need to get a search warrant that included the decryption key for the storage units, otherwise the data would do them no good even if they surreptitiously gathered the physical drives.
Something like that might make improper use of the surveillance footage more difficult, and therefore less likely.
I know a guy who made a car that also works as a boat.
Therefore cars are boats. Anyone who says differently is lying,
Is when it matters, otherwise it's just a curiosity.
You're absolutely right. If only there was some sort of "News for Nerds" web site where such technical curiosities could be posted...
Because metal wreckage in the ocean isn't polluting at all either.
Correct, it's not (well, except for the machine oil, which is pretty insignificant in the case of a windmill). The Navy sinks (cleaned-up) ships to make artificial reefs on a regular basis, and they provide an excellent home for sea life.
Another issue is that offshore windmills are much more easily attacked by an enemy.
How many windmills would have to be destroyed to make a significant dent in power production? How long would it take to destroy that many windmills?
The idea that my data is on the "cloud" and I have to pay a monthly fee (or watch some ads) to access it is really not very interesting to me.
I see your point, but it's not like maintaining your own physical computer is free either. Instead of paying service fees, you have to pay money to purchase the computer, spend time and/or money to keep it running, make sure your data is backed up, pay for electricity, deal with it if it gets stolen or damaged, etc.
The trade-offs may be worth it for you, but other people like the freedom of not having to be an amateur sysadmin/hardware wrangler.
No, the wealth would spread around to anyone who was willing to take a risk and was successful.
And who is it who has the excess resources necessary to take a risk? Oh yeah, the rich. If they risk a lot of money, and lose it, they can fall back on their reserves and try again next year. The rest of us can't afford to risk very much, since failure would cost us our livelihood. That's why the rich tend to get richer, and the poor tend to stay poor.
You should read up on the free market. What we have is not a free market. All the regulations you support are there to attempt to fix problems caused by yet other regulations.
This argument is just silly. A regulation-free market is just another name for anarchy. You wish you had more money than that other trader? No problem, shoot him and take his money, or kidnap his kids and slit their throats unless he agrees to buy them back from you. Don't want something similar to happen to you? No problem, hire a private army of mercenaries to protect yourself. One of your mercenaries is getting a bit ambitious, and sneaking into your room to murder you in the night? Tough, you should have hired a more reliable mercenary.
Regulations are there so that people can conduct their business with at least some confidence that they won't be completely screwed over by every other actor in the market at the first opportunity. Without that confidence, people simply wouldn't trade -- they'd keep all of their money in a locked box in their basement, and spend it mainly on armed guards, and there would be no market, "free" or otherwise.
Yes, some regulations are no doubt unnecessary. But to say that all regulations are only "there to attempt to fix the problems caused by yet other regulations" is to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
So, what's wrong with this picture? You buy/sell things that you expect to move by 1% in the next 20 minutes, and you then magically trade out of them after 20 minutes?
Time to start writing my meta-bot:
That ought to net me at least an Audi or two, before someone thwarts me with a meta-meta-bot...
Do those actually exist?
Only in the imagination of right-wingers who have decided that environmentalists are The Enemy, and use every possible opportunity to try and misrepresent and discredit them. As TFA notes, the concerns with ITER were about its budget, not its environmental effects.
The tragic thing about it is that all of the knee-jerk anti-environmentalists out there live on Earth as well, and they will suffer along with everyone else as the environmental damage builds up. Through their refusal to ever take any environmental concerns seriously, they are digging their own graves as well as everyone else's.
Greens (the so-called '350' crowd) need to shut down the world's economy for at least 20 years (back to agrarian levels) to achieve their AGW-related goals.
Of course they don't. What they want is to reduce the world's carbon output. There are ways to do that other than shutting down the world's economy. Oil is a great energy source, but it isn't the only one.
Then they (Clinton, Kerry, Gore) got into power and killed our research into the safe kind of reactor that cleans up our nuclear waste.
Well, no, they didn't just "get into power", they were voted into power by the American public. If the American public doesn't like nuclear power, it's their right to express their preference through their votes, just as it is your right to support nuclear power through your own vote. You think the American public is a bunch of idiots for not supporting nuclear power? Fine, you may be right. If you want their support, you'll have to convince them though; and if you can't, too bad, that's democracy.
All you have to do is wipe out 90% of the human population and the whole energy-problem goes away... for a few decades at least
Morally unacceptable, and as you point out, only a temporary solution anyway.
So, what's the deal with that? Irrational fear or nuclear energy, or just a general hatred for humanity?
Perhaps they are just holding out for a less problematic solution. Just because you think the problems with nuclear fission are tractable doesn't mean they are.
The purpose of the Green movement isn't to create economical and sustainable energy
Well, perhaps you can fill me in then... I'm a person who is interested in the creation of economical and sustainable energy, and also is preserving the natural environment. If I'm not a "green", then what should I call myself?
I can't live without water. And guess which one's disappearing faster?
Oil is. The planet is 75% covered in water, and always will be, and all of that water is at least theoretically drinkable, assuming you have the necessary energy to desalinate or otherwise process it. Of course the problem of how best to obtain that energy brings up back to the beginning of this discussion.
Looks as though someone's been paid off to get the ball rolling.
Looks like someone is making accusations without offering any evidence to back them up. If you know something, let's hear it. Otherwise your cynical speculations are pointless.
So why do we keep electing these bozos?
Douglas Adams explains it much better than I ever could.
Unless I'm missing something, I don't get what the fuss is all about.
It wasn't the video itself that was painful, it was the subsequent bullying that the video precipitated.
About one out of every three people who contract measles die.
That's actually a low estimate... it turns out that three out of every three people who contract measles die.
On a slow dialup, 30 minutes wasn't enough to download anything (like another tcp stack without such limitations.
Probably that was deliberate...
Ah, the truth gets out JUST as quickly, if not more so.
"A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes" -- Mark Twain
Where do I get my Fluxbox inspired word processor, with non cryptic integrated overlay command line?
One of these might suit you... or there's always emacs or vi. :^)
Show me the reference where algae-based biodiesel plants will produce cheaper per-mile fuel than oil.
Who said anything about cheaper? Why should a replacement technology that doesn't benefit from the trillions of dollars of in-place oil infrastructure, economies of scale (yet), or millions of years of natural pre-processing be required to be cheaper to be considered viable? Of course it won't be cheaper. The correct question to ask is, will it be cheap enough?
In any case, our oil addiction isn't going to be solved this decade, perhaps not even this century. But it will need to be solved, and the sooner we start moving in that direction, the better.
He's talking about California and the East Coast, where there are deposits close to shore that have been NIMBY'd out of accessibility.