I think it's pretty funny that people are so excited about living on Mars. If life on Mars sounds good, I've got some land in Antarctica to sell you. If life on a Moon base sounds good, I've got a whole lot of ocean bed to sell you where you can bring your own air, and put on a suit whenever you want to go outside. Every time we dig up a rare element on the Earth's surface, people die... lead, arsenic, mercury, and so on. Even 1% carbon dioxide would kill us. We evolved over billions of years to be exactly fit to live in a particular zone of the Earth's surface, and the odds of finding another suitable planet are as likely as Captain Kirk finding beautiful alien women who speak English.
I think it's far more likely that machines we create will be the creatures that make it on other planets, or travel to nearby stars. It possibly could be massively genetically modified human-like creatures, or machine/human hybrids, but either way, it's going to be a lot simpler to modify life forms to fit a new world than the other way around.
Android apps don't run on Chromebooks. They don't even normally (without hacking) run Java, like Chrome does in Windows. I bought one from BestBuy for my 10-year-old son for Xmas, since he needs a light cheap laptop at school for editing/printing some simple docs. I think it will fill that need well, but my son is "mad at me" still for getting him a lame laptop. So, should I bother installing Ubuntu and see if he's happier? For one thing, he already knows how to use Libre Office.
Thanks! Both to you and the others who replied. These comments are quite useful, and exactly what I was hoping for. First, I really am focusing on authentication of small messages. If encryption is needed, I expect the communication channel to be secured using existing mechanisms. My basic P2P protocol does not address secrecy, and is meant to be ISP friendly. In short, I'm hoping to build a Ripple based system for exchange of value, though that's just part of the P2P platform, which I intend to be a rapid application development tool for high performance P2P apps. While secrecy is an aim of Ripple, it's not one of my aims, and users of the system may request the state of any or all of the Ripple network. I also intend the system to be IRS friendly, and frankly, Ripple becomes much simpler if you have access to the whole network.
Based on you're guys feedback, I'm thinking SipHash sounds like an excellent fit, but I'll provide a software switch to the P2P server to switch to HMAC-SHA2. I'll include a message sequence number between each pair of peers which are never reused in a session. Is there anything else I need to do?
Authenticating messages between peers who already have a shared key is code I'm writing now, so thanks for the instant feedback. For signing Ripple money, and key exchange, I'll need a proven public key crypto system. BitCoin uses an elliptic curve system, which considerably reduces the size the transaction history. Do you guys have any advice for choice of e-money signing systems? There's no really hurry here, I'm just looking for initial advice. An important consideration is that I wish to support micro-transactions as small as 0.01 cent. The typical cost of computation and bandwidth for such transactions needs to be far less than this, say 0.0001 cents or lower.
No, his point was valid. You can always make a slow hash algorithm out of a fast one, for example by rehashing over and over again a 100K times. Speed in a hashing algorithm is always a good thing, so long as its used properly, which unfortunately often not the case. I'm hoping to avoid making a mistake myself. I'm considering using a blake2 64-bit authentication has in P2P messages. Any good reasons not to?
I happen to be at the point in writing a P2P application framework where I need to select a hash function for authenticating messages. Of course, I'll make it selectable in the future, but I need to choose a default hash. I was about to settle on SHA-2. However, I'm not happy with the performance of SHA-2 and SHA-3 compared to SHA-1, and frankly I need MD5 speed. Blake2p sounds like it fits the bill. I've downloaded the code and it seem simple enough to include in my project. I'm very tempted to start using it, at least for now.
The scheme I'm thinking of using is to do a standard key exchange so both peers share a secret key, and then to append the shared secret key to each message, take a 64-bit cryptographic hash of the whole thing, and append that to the message (without the shared secret key). The other peer can easily verify the hash, which should make random errors virtually impossible to get through, compared to the 16-bit CRC in TCP/IP packets, which I've seen fail plenty of times. 64-bits isn't enough to use as a document signature, but but for P2P message authentication, is there any reason to use a longer hash? Are there any good reasons other than the obvious (blake2 is not well battle tested) to avoid blake2?
The value of transactions over this protocol I expect to be credit-card sized purchases and small bank account values, rather than military grade secrets. If the PSK is long, say 512 bits, I don't see how guessing will get anywhere. Am I missing some attacks? Thanks in advance.
Thanks for the informative reply! I was hoping a well informed geek out there would save me the trouble of finding projects like f-droid and BotBrew. These sound like two projects I'll have to take seriously.
I was going to reply with something along the same lines... GNU GPL won. The world runs on GNU as well as other respected FOSS licenses. You're point that Linux is becoming the world's most used OS is quite relevant. Linus continues to make software easier to write and share, with tools like git. However, the most popular GNU/Linux distros went the other way - binary incompatibility, complex and out dated package managers, and gate-keepers who revere the stability of their distro to the detriment of progress. With Android, Google wiped GNU off of Linux and started over, with a far simpler. more secure, and stable computing model. Then they opened it to developers who could publish any crappy app they like. The result is hundreds of thousands of apps, most of which are useful to someone.
Free software developers like me need a new home, where we can share code and apps as easily as people sell binary-only apps on Android. Computing continues forward, but GNU/Linux lags behind. Last night, I watched my daughter using an iPad with a keyboard, and I had the sudden realization that I was watching the future of computing: touch screens with keyboards where all the software is rewritten or massively customized for this environment. She was moving her hands like lightning, zooming and panning, and then hammering out text on the keyboard, faster than any keyboard/mouse combo could allow. With the Minecraft PE app, she showed that creating 3D content on a tablet is faster than the best desktop environment, and even first-person-shooters are more natural. I remain pessimistic that we can build successful free software tablet environment starting with GNOME or KDE. A free (as in freedom) software app store for Android would be awesome. I'd love to see a free software Android fork with a modern package manager and native development tools.
The comments below seem no more relevant than this "slightly off topic" thread... I find that unfortunate. Of people who have made the world a better place, I list RMS near the top. He's done so in a selfless manner that makes me proud to be human. Sure, I don't agree with him half the time, but if I could trade my life for one where I could do as much good as he's done, yeah... I'd do it. Have you ever heard of Gandhi? Ever read about that flake? He slept (as in sleeping - not sex) naked with young girls to prove to himself he could control his animal impulses. Yet few argue about what Gandhi did for the world. It kills me to hear about people complaining about RMS's views on C++, on which he happens to be mostly right, and even if you disagree this is not naked girl territory. We should acknowledge the outcome of his life's effort: the world runs on free software. Standing ovation for RMS! Imagine how much harder it would be to write awesome code if we didn't have all this free stuff!
That said, RMS both promotes and harms the goals of the free software movement. As the "Cathedral and the Bazaar" pointed out, RMS brings a central control view to free software that is counter to the whole environment that made GNU/Linux awesome. Debian, IMO, epitomizes this flaw. Rather than helping young new programmer share code and ideas, you have to pray to the Debian Gods and hope they take pity on your pitiful new package before it can be share across the Debian universe. Sure, Debian has it's place... deep in the innards of server racks where 99.9% up time is required, but not on a bright young programmer's desktop. If you want to be part of the new innovative group of coders, go learn about programming for Android.
I hope this message can finally be heard by RMS and those most central to the free software movement: we volunteer programmers are sick and tired of dealing with the wall of red tape you've built. Please get out of the way and let us do our thing. But you're right about C++.
Don't confuse molten salt reactors with molten metal reactors. Most of the fast breeders Nixon funded used liquid sodium, and the result was we proved using a substance that burns when exposed to air, and explodes in water, as a nuclear power coolant is a bad idea.
Now molten sodium salt is literally the stuff you sprinkle on your food, just made real hot. It's not very dangerous on it's own, other than being really hot. The lithium salts used in LFTR style reactors have very low vapor pressure, so you don't need a high pressure containment dome. Solubility in water is very low, and the fluid simply solidifies and cools down if there is a leak. It doesn't burn or even vent toxic steam when exposed to air, and simply solidifies when in contact with water. This is a big part of what makes molten salt reactors a promising way to increase safety while lowering costs.
A couple posters above point out some big issues: there's a lot of engineering needed to make LFTRs real. Even if the molten Lithium-Beryllium salts wont dissolve much in water, there's nasty byproducts in the mixture that love water. The complaint about having complex and dangerous on-site reprocessing seems valid, but at the same time, we get rid of most of the really nasty waste, so I'm not sure if on-site reprocessing is a benefit or liability.
So, I'll repeat that we should fund the heck out of the R&D, and see if we can overcome the challenges. It kills me that we're handing over all our research for free to China to exploit while sitting on the sidelines doing nothing to commercialize this technology we invented.
Other than the anger at environmentalists, I agree with you. However, to answer TFA, NO. The world hasn't yet built anything more sophisticated as the original 10 MWt molten salt reactor from the 60's, and a real LFFR needs a lot of R&D. China's doing promising work, but we're looking at several years before they can start construction on a utility scale plant. Fund the heck out of this R&D! But, no, it's not "ready for prime time."
This is why I love my job. Managers *hate* projects with fuzzy schedules and unknown resource requirements. On the other hand, geeks like me love creating new stuff. This creates a never ending tension. I'm lucky to be at a company that is willing to let me fail or miss a deadline along the way to creating something cool.
There's also a natural tendency for entrepreneurs to be massively optimistic by nature. Most people who are more realistic realize that their effort is most likely going to fail, and will be a lot harder than it seems to succeed. Those people don't bother to jump in and commit to making something new. I suspect 84% being late is probably about the right number for startup efforts in general. This is partly why VCs love to see a seasoned team of people who've built companies before, and why they like to bring in such people when they don't see them.
Thanks for the informative post. I googled, and can confirm the author of TFA is infamous for absurd attacks on climate science and climate scientists. However, according to IPCC's schedule, a 2013 "second order draft" is circulating now to governments, who could be leaking them. While TFA downplays a 1 meter rise in ocean levels by 2100, that number is double it's previous estimate. Given a recent study claims oceans are rising over 3mm per year, even 1 meter may be low. How bad will it be if we see a 3 meter rise?
While the author is a wing nut, I'm encouraged to see these guys shifting away from "the Earth is not warming" to a discussion of how bad the impact will be. If I were Canadian, I could see plenty of upside to global warming. It's not 100% bad, just mostly bad... Shifting to a discussion of the impact would be a huge step forward.
No... there's a real measurable difference in modern R vs D. For example, 58% of R believe the Earth is less than 10,000 years old, while 41% of D feel that way. It's scary for both parties, but at least the rational majority in D get to set policies taking into account reality, while R makes a practice of selling scientifically proven false ideas to it's own people. R is not just ignorant about climate change. They're ignorant about evolution, and are continuing to push for it to be removed from our science classes. This level of "true conservative" group think is almost a new religion. Go look at who R puts on the House Science Committee. Good grief!
The really scary thing about global warming is how Republicans have group-thinked themselves into a scientifically idiotic shared point of view. Now, when they group think themselves into being anti-gay, pro-gun, anti-abortion, anti-Mexican, pro-death penalty, anti-poor and pro-rich, at least they didn't have to ignore laws of nature to group-think themselves into those positions. Attacking logic itself is way over the line.
Agreed. Reprocessing makes the most sense. We'd have to make some sort of deal with Russia, and maybe both reprocess our waste and produce more MOX fuel from the resulting weapons grade material.
I'd sleep better if we simply shipped all the waste to Yucca Mountain! Here's my dumb idea: Offer $1B to any appropriate small town in America that is willing to accept the nations nuclear waste. Split it up among the 1000 residents. Then, as quickly as possible, build a secure temporary storage facility there for all of our waste. Protecting a single site has to be a lot easier and more secure than protecting sites spread all over the country. Then, take a few years to determine the final solution for spent fuel. If it's glass logs, fine, but reprocessing reduces waste and recycles most of the material, which could be used in future reactors.
This is partly why I've been intrigued by the recent Internet enabled trend of funding candidates $50 at a time. When Obama broke all the funding records in 2008, he had big donors that I'm sure expect something from him. However, most of the money was from people like me who didn't donate enough to deserve a thank you call from a staff member. Of course, the Supreme Court ruling that corporations and rich people can donate unlimited funds to super-pacs undid any good that could have come from that. I guess the Supreme Court is also bought and paid for by somebody.
It's seriously nice to hear from a well informed person, and thanks for the info. Do you have any opinion on the right way to deal with nuclear waste? Am I wrong in believing that we've got poorly defended waste pools all over the country, any of which could catch fire and spew radioactive waste over thousands of square miles if for some reason the pumps failed and we could not respond quickly enough to provide cooling? Are we prepared for a terrorist attack during a hurricane? What if a terrorist crashes a 767 jet into the waste pools at Sharon Harris, or any of the other waste pools? I'm sure that after 9/11 and Japan's crisis, these are things that are being considered, but are we ready? Thanks in advance.
Increasing maturity of fast-breeder rectors? To date all large scale FBRs have been liquid sodium cooled. We have repeatedly proven that using liquid metal that explodes when in contact with water, and burns in contact with air, is a poor choice for a reactor coolant. They have all been shut down. They were all failures. Then there's the reason we abandoned them: a plutonium fuel cycle is a massive nuclear weapons proliferation risk.
Now to be fair, Gen IV FBR architectures have considerable promise (as do other next-gen reactors... molten salt anyone?), but we haven't yet built anything that's functional, cost effective, and safe. I'm all for doing rapid research and development, but in the meantime, we should secure our existing nuclear waste. If we want to recycle it, then reprocess the stuff. Otherwise, do the glass log thing Yucca Mountain style. Not dealing with our nuclear waste is possibly the single dumbest political decision our country has made during my lifetime.
To finally solve our nuclear waste storage problem safely, I'd pay my share of that $67B. What we do now is the dumbest possible plan: keep all nuclear waste in short-term storage pools throughout the country. These various waste pools invite terrorist attacks, and any one of them could go Chernobyl on us if nothing worse happens than the water pumps fail. Just guessing, but if during heavy rains and flooding, Jordan lake's dam broke (as has happened to other dams in NC recently), could all that water could flood the Sharon Harris plant? Would it be different than what happened in Japan?
Eventually, one of our temporary waste polls may go Chernobyl, and a lot of Americans could die. If that happens, all our bickering over Yucca Mountain is going to seem painfully stupid.
Imagine what it's like in a poorly educated democratic country like India. I fear for the new Arab democracies for similar reasons. However, we're all stupid about most things, even we geniuses here on slashdot. I've managed to kill plants accidentally in hilariously stupid ways... I'd make the country's worst farmer. At the same time, most people are actually quite good at something, even all our stupid voters. The problem is that few of us are smart about picking good leaders. I shudder to think what the country would be like if only slashdot wonks could vote.
So the challenge is figuring out a better way to choose leaders than the current popularity contest for the stupid public. My answer: Just elect me God Emperor for Life. I'll take good care of you. Trust Me.
Brilliant proposal. In September, when Obama was at 80% on Intrade, I asked on a blog why betters were so confident, given the likelihood of an "October surprise." The best answer was from a guy who said he was "hedging his bets" buying Obama stock. If Obama wins, he said his taxes would go up, but at least he'd make money on Intrade.
I doubt there's a better way to get rich than buying up land (or other assets), and then paying politicians to make it more valuable. You can do it in towns all across America. It's almost entirely legal. I mean, why wouldn't you contribute to the guy who's in favor of the development you seek? Why wouldn't you throw a fundraiser for him, and why would anyone think less of you for doing so? Many towns wind up with a greedy combination of politicians and developers running the place.
Another interesting thing on Intrade was watching the guy who was trying to manipulate the market dump around $2M selling Obama stock. For several days before the election he repeatedly dumped many thousands of dollars all at once, tanking the market back down to about 60%, and then let it recover. The fact that he did it so consistently, every half hour to an hour, made it clear to anyone watching trades that there would be plenty of future opportunities to buy Obama stock at $6. So why did it rapidly recover every time? Two theories: first, it's possible and maybe even likely that most betters were not watching carefully, and were simply paying whatever the price happened to be when they logged on. Second, it's possible that a pro-Obama manipulator was constantly buying through small trades, regardless of the price. I'd love to know what actually happened.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's pretty funny that people are so excited about living on Mars. If life on Mars sounds good, I've got some land in Antarctica to sell you. If life on a Moon base sounds good, I've got a whole lot of ocean bed to sell you where you can bring your own air, and put on a suit whenever you want to go outside. Every time we dig up a rare element on the Earth's surface, people die... lead, arsenic, mercury, and so on. Even 1% carbon dioxide would kill us. We evolved over billions of years to be exactly fit to live in a particular zone of the Earth's surface, and the odds of finding another suitable planet are as likely as Captain Kirk finding beautiful alien women who speak English.
I think it's far more likely that machines we create will be the creatures that make it on other planets, or travel to nearby stars. It possibly could be massively genetically modified human-like creatures, or machine/human hybrids, but either way, it's going to be a lot simpler to modify life forms to fit a new world than the other way around.
Android apps don't run on Chromebooks. They don't even normally (without hacking) run Java, like Chrome does in Windows. I bought one from BestBuy for my 10-year-old son for Xmas, since he needs a light cheap laptop at school for editing/printing some simple docs. I think it will fill that need well, but my son is "mad at me" still for getting him a lame laptop. So, should I bother installing Ubuntu and see if he's happier? For one thing, he already knows how to use Libre Office.
I agree. I'm planing to use SipHash and having a switch to use HMAC-SHA2. Thanks for the advice.
Thanks! Both to you and the others who replied. These comments are quite useful, and exactly what I was hoping for. First, I really am focusing on authentication of small messages. If encryption is needed, I expect the communication channel to be secured using existing mechanisms. My basic P2P protocol does not address secrecy, and is meant to be ISP friendly. In short, I'm hoping to build a Ripple based system for exchange of value, though that's just part of the P2P platform, which I intend to be a rapid application development tool for high performance P2P apps. While secrecy is an aim of Ripple, it's not one of my aims, and users of the system may request the state of any or all of the Ripple network. I also intend the system to be IRS friendly, and frankly, Ripple becomes much simpler if you have access to the whole network.
Based on you're guys feedback, I'm thinking SipHash sounds like an excellent fit, but I'll provide a software switch to the P2P server to switch to HMAC-SHA2. I'll include a message sequence number between each pair of peers which are never reused in a session. Is there anything else I need to do?
Authenticating messages between peers who already have a shared key is code I'm writing now, so thanks for the instant feedback. For signing Ripple money, and key exchange, I'll need a proven public key crypto system. BitCoin uses an elliptic curve system, which considerably reduces the size the transaction history. Do you guys have any advice for choice of e-money signing systems? There's no really hurry here, I'm just looking for initial advice. An important consideration is that I wish to support micro-transactions as small as 0.01 cent. The typical cost of computation and bandwidth for such transactions needs to be far less than this, say 0.0001 cents or lower.
No, his point was valid. You can always make a slow hash algorithm out of a fast one, for example by rehashing over and over again a 100K times. Speed in a hashing algorithm is always a good thing, so long as its used properly, which unfortunately often not the case. I'm hoping to avoid making a mistake myself. I'm considering using a blake2 64-bit authentication has in P2P messages. Any good reasons not to?
I need some good crypto advice.
I happen to be at the point in writing a P2P application framework where I need to select a hash function for authenticating messages. Of course, I'll make it selectable in the future, but I need to choose a default hash. I was about to settle on SHA-2. However, I'm not happy with the performance of SHA-2 and SHA-3 compared to SHA-1, and frankly I need MD5 speed. Blake2p sounds like it fits the bill. I've downloaded the code and it seem simple enough to include in my project. I'm very tempted to start using it, at least for now.
The scheme I'm thinking of using is to do a standard key exchange so both peers share a secret key, and then to append the shared secret key to each message, take a 64-bit cryptographic hash of the whole thing, and append that to the message (without the shared secret key). The other peer can easily verify the hash, which should make random errors virtually impossible to get through, compared to the 16-bit CRC in TCP/IP packets, which I've seen fail plenty of times. 64-bits isn't enough to use as a document signature, but but for P2P message authentication, is there any reason to use a longer hash? Are there any good reasons other than the obvious (blake2 is not well battle tested) to avoid blake2?
The value of transactions over this protocol I expect to be credit-card sized purchases and small bank account values, rather than military grade secrets. If the PSK is long, say 512 bits, I don't see how guessing will get anywhere. Am I missing some attacks? Thanks in advance.
Thanks for the informative reply! I was hoping a well informed geek out there would save me the trouble of finding projects like f-droid and BotBrew. These sound like two projects I'll have to take seriously.
I was going to reply with something along the same lines... GNU GPL won. The world runs on GNU as well as other respected FOSS licenses. You're point that Linux is becoming the world's most used OS is quite relevant. Linus continues to make software easier to write and share, with tools like git. However, the most popular GNU/Linux distros went the other way - binary incompatibility, complex and out dated package managers, and gate-keepers who revere the stability of their distro to the detriment of progress. With Android, Google wiped GNU off of Linux and started over, with a far simpler. more secure, and stable computing model. Then they opened it to developers who could publish any crappy app they like. The result is hundreds of thousands of apps, most of which are useful to someone.
Free software developers like me need a new home, where we can share code and apps as easily as people sell binary-only apps on Android. Computing continues forward, but GNU/Linux lags behind. Last night, I watched my daughter using an iPad with a keyboard, and I had the sudden realization that I was watching the future of computing: touch screens with keyboards where all the software is rewritten or massively customized for this environment. She was moving her hands like lightning, zooming and panning, and then hammering out text on the keyboard, faster than any keyboard/mouse combo could allow. With the Minecraft PE app, she showed that creating 3D content on a tablet is faster than the best desktop environment, and even first-person-shooters are more natural. I remain pessimistic that we can build successful free software tablet environment starting with GNOME or KDE. A free (as in freedom) software app store for Android would be awesome. I'd love to see a free software Android fork with a modern package manager and native development tools.
The comments below seem no more relevant than this "slightly off topic" thread... I find that unfortunate. Of people who have made the world a better place, I list RMS near the top. He's done so in a selfless manner that makes me proud to be human. Sure, I don't agree with him half the time, but if I could trade my life for one where I could do as much good as he's done, yeah... I'd do it. Have you ever heard of Gandhi? Ever read about that flake? He slept (as in sleeping - not sex) naked with young girls to prove to himself he could control his animal impulses. Yet few argue about what Gandhi did for the world. It kills me to hear about people complaining about RMS's views on C++, on which he happens to be mostly right, and even if you disagree this is not naked girl territory. We should acknowledge the outcome of his life's effort: the world runs on free software. Standing ovation for RMS! Imagine how much harder it would be to write awesome code if we didn't have all this free stuff!
That said, RMS both promotes and harms the goals of the free software movement. As the "Cathedral and the Bazaar" pointed out, RMS brings a central control view to free software that is counter to the whole environment that made GNU/Linux awesome. Debian, IMO, epitomizes this flaw. Rather than helping young new programmer share code and ideas, you have to pray to the Debian Gods and hope they take pity on your pitiful new package before it can be share across the Debian universe. Sure, Debian has it's place... deep in the innards of server racks where 99.9% up time is required, but not on a bright young programmer's desktop. If you want to be part of the new innovative group of coders, go learn about programming for Android.
I hope this message can finally be heard by RMS and those most central to the free software movement: we volunteer programmers are sick and tired of dealing with the wall of red tape you've built. Please get out of the way and let us do our thing. But you're right about C++.
They also start really nice fires.
Don't confuse molten salt reactors with molten metal reactors. Most of the fast breeders Nixon funded used liquid sodium, and the result was we proved using a substance that burns when exposed to air, and explodes in water, as a nuclear power coolant is a bad idea.
Now molten sodium salt is literally the stuff you sprinkle on your food, just made real hot. It's not very dangerous on it's own, other than being really hot. The lithium salts used in LFTR style reactors have very low vapor pressure, so you don't need a high pressure containment dome. Solubility in water is very low, and the fluid simply solidifies and cools down if there is a leak. It doesn't burn or even vent toxic steam when exposed to air, and simply solidifies when in contact with water. This is a big part of what makes molten salt reactors a promising way to increase safety while lowering costs.
A couple posters above point out some big issues: there's a lot of engineering needed to make LFTRs real. Even if the molten Lithium-Beryllium salts wont dissolve much in water, there's nasty byproducts in the mixture that love water. The complaint about having complex and dangerous on-site reprocessing seems valid, but at the same time, we get rid of most of the really nasty waste, so I'm not sure if on-site reprocessing is a benefit or liability.
So, I'll repeat that we should fund the heck out of the R&D, and see if we can overcome the challenges. It kills me that we're handing over all our research for free to China to exploit while sitting on the sidelines doing nothing to commercialize this technology we invented.
Other than the anger at environmentalists, I agree with you. However, to answer TFA, NO. The world hasn't yet built anything more sophisticated as the original 10 MWt molten salt reactor from the 60's, and a real LFFR needs a lot of R&D. China's doing promising work, but we're looking at several years before they can start construction on a utility scale plant. Fund the heck out of this R&D! But, no, it's not "ready for prime time."
This is why I love my job. Managers *hate* projects with fuzzy schedules and unknown resource requirements. On the other hand, geeks like me love creating new stuff. This creates a never ending tension. I'm lucky to be at a company that is willing to let me fail or miss a deadline along the way to creating something cool.
There's also a natural tendency for entrepreneurs to be massively optimistic by nature. Most people who are more realistic realize that their effort is most likely going to fail, and will be a lot harder than it seems to succeed. Those people don't bother to jump in and commit to making something new. I suspect 84% being late is probably about the right number for startup efforts in general. This is partly why VCs love to see a seasoned team of people who've built companies before, and why they like to bring in such people when they don't see them.
Thanks for the informative post. I googled, and can confirm the author of TFA is infamous for absurd attacks on climate science and climate scientists. However, according to IPCC's schedule, a 2013 "second order draft" is circulating now to governments, who could be leaking them. While TFA downplays a 1 meter rise in ocean levels by 2100, that number is double it's previous estimate. Given a recent study claims oceans are rising over 3mm per year, even 1 meter may be low. How bad will it be if we see a 3 meter rise?
While the author is a wing nut, I'm encouraged to see these guys shifting away from "the Earth is not warming" to a discussion of how bad the impact will be. If I were Canadian, I could see plenty of upside to global warming. It's not 100% bad, just mostly bad... Shifting to a discussion of the impact would be a huge step forward.
No... there's a real measurable difference in modern R vs D. For example, 58% of R believe the Earth is less than 10,000 years old, while 41% of D feel that way. It's scary for both parties, but at least the rational majority in D get to set policies taking into account reality, while R makes a practice of selling scientifically proven false ideas to it's own people. R is not just ignorant about climate change. They're ignorant about evolution, and are continuing to push for it to be removed from our science classes. This level of "true conservative" group think is almost a new religion. Go look at who R puts on the House Science Committee. Good grief!
The really scary thing about global warming is how Republicans have group-thinked themselves into a scientifically idiotic shared point of view. Now, when they group think themselves into being anti-gay, pro-gun, anti-abortion, anti-Mexican, pro-death penalty, anti-poor and pro-rich, at least they didn't have to ignore laws of nature to group-think themselves into those positions. Attacking logic itself is way over the line.
Agreed. Reprocessing makes the most sense. We'd have to make some sort of deal with Russia, and maybe both reprocess our waste and produce more MOX fuel from the resulting weapons grade material.
I'd sleep better if we simply shipped all the waste to Yucca Mountain! Here's my dumb idea: Offer $1B to any appropriate small town in America that is willing to accept the nations nuclear waste. Split it up among the 1000 residents. Then, as quickly as possible, build a secure temporary storage facility there for all of our waste. Protecting a single site has to be a lot easier and more secure than protecting sites spread all over the country. Then, take a few years to determine the final solution for spent fuel. If it's glass logs, fine, but reprocessing reduces waste and recycles most of the material, which could be used in future reactors.
This is partly why I've been intrigued by the recent Internet enabled trend of funding candidates $50 at a time. When Obama broke all the funding records in 2008, he had big donors that I'm sure expect something from him. However, most of the money was from people like me who didn't donate enough to deserve a thank you call from a staff member. Of course, the Supreme Court ruling that corporations and rich people can donate unlimited funds to super-pacs undid any good that could have come from that. I guess the Supreme Court is also bought and paid for by somebody.
It's seriously nice to hear from a well informed person, and thanks for the info. Do you have any opinion on the right way to deal with nuclear waste? Am I wrong in believing that we've got poorly defended waste pools all over the country, any of which could catch fire and spew radioactive waste over thousands of square miles if for some reason the pumps failed and we could not respond quickly enough to provide cooling? Are we prepared for a terrorist attack during a hurricane? What if a terrorist crashes a 767 jet into the waste pools at Sharon Harris, or any of the other waste pools? I'm sure that after 9/11 and Japan's crisis, these are things that are being considered, but are we ready? Thanks in advance.
Increasing maturity of fast-breeder rectors? To date all large scale FBRs have been liquid sodium cooled. We have repeatedly proven that using liquid metal that explodes when in contact with water, and burns in contact with air, is a poor choice for a reactor coolant. They have all been shut down. They were all failures. Then there's the reason we abandoned them: a plutonium fuel cycle is a massive nuclear weapons proliferation risk.
Now to be fair, Gen IV FBR architectures have considerable promise (as do other next-gen reactors... molten salt anyone?), but we haven't yet built anything that's functional, cost effective, and safe. I'm all for doing rapid research and development, but in the meantime, we should secure our existing nuclear waste. If we want to recycle it, then reprocess the stuff. Otherwise, do the glass log thing Yucca Mountain style. Not dealing with our nuclear waste is possibly the single dumbest political decision our country has made during my lifetime.
To finally solve our nuclear waste storage problem safely, I'd pay my share of that $67B. What we do now is the dumbest possible plan: keep all nuclear waste in short-term storage pools throughout the country. These various waste pools invite terrorist attacks, and any one of them could go Chernobyl on us if nothing worse happens than the water pumps fail. Just guessing, but if during heavy rains and flooding, Jordan lake's dam broke (as has happened to other dams in NC recently), could all that water could flood the Sharon Harris plant? Would it be different than what happened in Japan?
Eventually, one of our temporary waste polls may go Chernobyl, and a lot of Americans could die. If that happens, all our bickering over Yucca Mountain is going to seem painfully stupid.
Imagine what it's like in a poorly educated democratic country like India. I fear for the new Arab democracies for similar reasons. However, we're all stupid about most things, even we geniuses here on slashdot. I've managed to kill plants accidentally in hilariously stupid ways... I'd make the country's worst farmer. At the same time, most people are actually quite good at something, even all our stupid voters. The problem is that few of us are smart about picking good leaders. I shudder to think what the country would be like if only slashdot wonks could vote.
So the challenge is figuring out a better way to choose leaders than the current popularity contest for the stupid public. My answer: Just elect me God Emperor for Life. I'll take good care of you. Trust Me.
Brilliant proposal. In September, when Obama was at 80% on Intrade, I asked on a blog why betters were so confident, given the likelihood of an "October surprise." The best answer was from a guy who said he was "hedging his bets" buying Obama stock. If Obama wins, he said his taxes would go up, but at least he'd make money on Intrade.
I doubt there's a better way to get rich than buying up land (or other assets), and then paying politicians to make it more valuable. You can do it in towns all across America. It's almost entirely legal. I mean, why wouldn't you contribute to the guy who's in favor of the development you seek? Why wouldn't you throw a fundraiser for him, and why would anyone think less of you for doing so? Many towns wind up with a greedy combination of politicians and developers running the place.
Another interesting thing on Intrade was watching the guy who was trying to manipulate the market dump around $2M selling Obama stock. For several days before the election he repeatedly dumped many thousands of dollars all at once, tanking the market back down to about 60%, and then let it recover. The fact that he did it so consistently, every half hour to an hour, made it clear to anyone watching trades that there would be plenty of future opportunities to buy Obama stock at $6. So why did it rapidly recover every time? Two theories: first, it's possible and maybe even likely that most betters were not watching carefully, and were simply paying whatever the price happened to be when they logged on. Second, it's possible that a pro-Obama manipulator was constantly buying through small trades, regardless of the price. I'd love to know what actually happened.