>>The problem is that breeder reactors (at least the early models) can be used to obtain weapon grade plutonium. They are also much, much more expensive than traditional ones.
I've never found the fact that they could be used to make weapons grade plutonium particularly convincing. Our nuclear plants are about the most well-guarded parts of our national infrastructure, and the modern breeder designs (like the IFR Clinton killed) keep everything on-site, or even better, do it all inside the reactor such as with Bill Gates' TWR design. They're not that expensive, actually - the optimal way for building them out is to combine Type III+ and Type IV reactors together to create a very efficient nuclear fuel cycle that avoids the expensive of having to deal with nuclear waste.
>>Now with the constant rise in price for nuclear fuel and of course the development of better designs, breeder reactors will most likely become a reality. Of course, that assumes some responsible politicians will avoid knee jerk reactions and that's a big assumption.
Well. Yeah, our politicians are still doing their best to shut down nuclear power here in the Central Valley, even when the benefits for the plant extend well beyond power generation. (http://www.fresnobee.com/2010/12/11/2194699/valley-nuclear-group-tries-ag.html)
Nuclear fuel, though, is only a small part of the total cost of nuclear (20%-ish). Almost all of the cost involves recovering the enormous capital outlays involved in construction.
>>Early breeder reactor designs were inherently unstable, allowing situations where there could be a runaway reaction.
You mean back in the 1950s when the first breeder reactors were built?:p Sure, I'll grant you that.
The modern Type IV reactors safe(r), and since they get rid of most of the waste that causes most of the political problems with nuclear power, I'd say that it was a pretty bad decision by Clinton to kill the IFR research project.
>>Building one and having it blow its top would have been a far worse setback than the path we did take.
Sure. And if every reactor in the planet exploded right now, that would be bad, too. But if you're looking at risk levels from nuclear vs. other plants, the numbers just aren't there to support the anti-nuclear crowd. If nuclear killed even a hundredth of the people that have died from coal power (while it has been producing about half the power for our nation vs. coal), we'd have panicked and shut down all of the nuclear sites ages ago. We're fundamentally stupid about it.
>>I'd agree completely that what we need need now is solid, proven breeder reactor tech, and the opportunity to get it was wasted. I just wanted to provide an alternative to the "grass is always greener" thinking - it could have been a disaster too.
Sure, and I get what you're saying. But the main reason Carter and Clinton banned breeder reactors was not for safety reasons, but really about concerns over nuclear proliferation. The thinking is that if we had breeder reactors we'd not be able to morally take the high ground when we tried to stop Iran from going nuclear... oh wait. And also certain fears that people could steal the Plutonium coming out of the reactors and turn them into terrorist bombs. (Because, you know, if there's any place in America that is easy to steal from, it's a nuclear plant with all of its barbed wire and armed guards with machine guns.)
Ah, you must live in a state with a SANE energy policy. Yeah, not living in California changes the numbers around a lot.
Should I install solar panels and run my cars from them? Why, or why not?
Two different questions, there: 1) Should I install solar? 2) Should I run my car off electricity?
For 1: If you're a hippie, then sure, yeah, knock yourself out. But there's no economic reason to. Solar will not compete at the 8c/KWH range unless costs come down by a factor of 3 or so. Solar prices *have* fallen significantly (~50%) in the last 5 years or so, so it might not be a bad idea in a decade or so, but right now, it's just not going to make sense unless you live in a third world country like California.
For 2: In California, you get 7 miles to a dollar of power out of a Volt. At 8c/KWH, you'll get about 30 miles per dollar, which is the equivalent of 90MPG assuming 3$ gasoline. (Oh, you probably pay $2.50 where you live, eh?) But Volts are expensive, maybe $35,000 after tax and rebates and all the other stuff. Let's compare it against an Altima Hybrid, which is in the same class (technically if you really want to save the most on a car, an old Civic is your best bet. =) Altima Hybrids with comparable equipment work out to about $28,000 (well, they're sans nav, but up a lot of other features like a moonroof). So you're out $7,000.
So it really works out to how much you drive a year. So assuming you drive 20,000 miles/year (55 miles per day), you will spend about $670 on 'fuel' for your car, compared with about $1818 the Altima Hybrid. So for $7,000 extra investment you get $1,200 back per year, a 17% ROI, which is very good. But if you drive 10,000 miles/year, then it's a 8.5% ROI If you drive 5,000 miles/year, then it's a 4% ROI, and so forth.
So yeah, it looks competitive. But if you had power rates like us, you'd spend more on 'fuel' for your Leaf than a gas-powered hybrid.
A final, compromise route, you might consider is converting a hybrid car to a plug-in system. So if you have a Prius or whatever, you can double its efficiency (sorta) for $4,000 or so, alongside a 10% federal tax credit.
>>Stuxnet Virus Set Back Iran's Nuclear Program by 2 Years...LOIC set Mastercard back 2 hours. Advantage, Stuxnet!
Nah, Jimmy Carter set back the US nuclear program by 30 years by banning breeder reactors. Advantage: Carter, by a long mile. Well, Clinton can take some of the blame too, for killing the IFR over the protests of Dirty Dick Durbin, amazingly enough.
I mean, good thing we never built breeder reactors, right? If we had, Iran might have a nuclear program by now, using stolen American plutonium!
(You know all the political mess we are in over waste products, and how California has banned new nuclear until the waste issue is resolved? Breeder reactors use nuclear 'waste' as fuel, burning over 99% of the fuel, instead of the 1% or so efficiency we get from traditional PWR/BWR reactors. IFRs can also burn depleted uranium, and weapons-grade plutonium.)
>>the Supreme Court, being answerable to nobody and at liberty to interpret the words in the Constitution as it pleases, seems to like it the way it is. At least, the 5 of them anointed by Republican Presidents do.
Ah yes, the famous "living document" Republican judges. Shame we don't have more of those strict constitutionalist Democrat judges on the bench to keep them in check, eh?
While I agree that both parties have judges that take a much more liberal view of the constitution than was originally construed, I think you're pointing your fingers in the wrong direction. Look at how the judges went on Lopez, for example. The Republicans wanted a more restricted version of the commerce clause, whereas the Democrats wanted unlimited power for congress.
Obviously, I disagree. I think there are inherent disadvantages to fuel systems due to: (1) distribution and transportation costs (2) the relative inefficiency of small engines, and (3) the decreased dependence on a limited set of fuels.
Well, IIRC, gasoline is still the most energy dense way of running a car. I suppose you could rig some sort of overhead wire high-voltage system to run cars like buses, but otherwise we're pretty much stuck using gasoline, unless you think the 35 mile all-electric range (which costs 5$ in power here in California) on a Volt is "enough for anyone". =)
Let alone the distribution problems with electricity are even more problematic than gasoline, at least here in California, which has one of the worst power infrastructures in the country. We literally would overload our transmission lines if we switched to electric cars. While our gasoline distribution system is pretty fucked as well (we require special gasoline blends, and don't allow refineries to be built, either), it's basically a solved problem. Given that the Sierra Club and other assholes will shut down anything new - at all - it means that we basically have no alternatives to using existing infrastructure, which means gas, and maybe a little bit of electricity.
In regards to 3, I'm with you that we should be looking to switch to nuclear and small scale renewable plants, but there's not as much vulnerability of relying on gasoline as you'd think - we can always liquefy coal if we need to, at relatively low prices, and our domestic supplies of coal are enough for the foreseeable future. Nuclear displacing coal is a Good Thing (tm) since it would lower the price of coal and thus make gassified coal cheaper, but in states like California where half our energy supply is from natural gas, it's a more complicated issue, since displaced natural gas will end up getting wasted anyway, though it's overall probably a net win, since we're paying up to 50 cents / kilowatt hour here.
A really interesting thing I've discovered recently is that small scale solar is more cost efficient than large-scale solar. While counterintuitive, if you build out small solar plants, they don't have to go through the crippling licensing, lawsuit, and compatibility issues that large scale plants do, let alone the capital costs involving buying of land and such. PG&E is especially dickish about these sorts of things, even going so far as to block compatibility with sites, since they're bullies. Right now, the levelized break-even cost on solar in the US is.36$/KWH, but a company will come to my house, install solar for free, and sell it to me at.26$/KWH today (fully warranteed, no fees or anything else). Given that PG&E charges up to.50$/KWH, I'm expecting this to be the way of the future. The 26 cents price includes a 33% tax subsidy from the state and federal government, but even without the subsidy, it's still cheaper than both large-scale solar and what's coming out of the grid from PG&E.
Pros: 1) Burns in gasoline engines without modification 2) Can be transported in existing gas pipelines (does not emulsify water like ethanol does) 3) Higher energy content per gallon than ethanol, only a little less than gasoline 4) Can be produced in the same manner that ethanol is (ie, fermentation)
Cons: 1) Does not have a farm lobby attached to it
Yeah, so it's probably not going to happen as long as Iowa's caucuses vote first for our presidents.
>>"let me pick your lock with my 256 bit long key"
Actually.... hmm.
It might be worth using his dating profile to see if any sub-phrase or combination of words is the passphrase to his AES-256 key.
Would be a lot faster, obviously, than brute forcing it, and he seems like the kind of arrogant douche to have "ILoveChoppingUpBrains" as a passphrase.
>>THIS, this is what we spend our non existent money on? Giant fricking superguns?
You say that like it's a bad thing. But since the insane awesomeness of a railgun doesn't impress you, let's look at the numbers.
>>(we already have 11 carriers for the love of Pete)
Okay, so you like our carrier fleet?
Railguns are being designed to counter a threat to carriers, namely swarms of cruise missiles. The amount of money they've spent on developing this thing ($211M) is less than one percent of what California spends on K-12 education each year ($36B). Not even counting college education, which is a lot more.
But a carrier... well, that's an expensive investment. If they can protect even a single carrier, it'll have paid for itself. (And if you assume we're NOT going to be having threats from countries that can inexpensively produce lots of cruise missiles, you're crazy.)
Quibble with the article. It said it launched the projectile at 5500 fps, which is... Mach 5, not Mach 8. Based on a rough estimate, I'd say that it'd be Mach 8 only if all 33MJ were translated into kinetic energy at 100% efficiency.
Mach 8 is about 2 to 3 times as fast as a normal bullet, and a 23KG projectile is just insanely large. A.50 BMG is around 50g and flies at between Mach 2 and 3, for a total kinetic energy of 20KJ or so. However, given that it can fire a lot more often than... once per five minutes... it's probably a bit more useful.
>>Co-op is the real king in my book, especially games like Borderlands where you can play the same thing single or in co-op, and the game adjusts the difficulty based on how many people are in the group. I played that both ways, and it was great.
Indeed. RDR had really a great coop experience, but you would exhaust the content waaay too fast. If you could actually play the single player game in coop mode, they would have had something that would have kept my interest in multiplayer through level 50. I did all the available coop till I got sick of it, and I never got past level 30 or so.
The single player was too long, the coop too short.
>>The sad fact is that to reach those high levels, it's not only not a hindrance, it's practically a requirement.
This just isn't true. My family has built a pretty solid model, and while people occasionally do really unethical things to us, we pride ourselves on always acting ethically ourselves.
Will we sue someone if they don't live up to their end of a contract and fail to pay us? Sure.
But you don't get very far in life if people know you're a shyster. Believe it or not, behaving honestly and forthrightly with your partners works better in the long run.
>>I guess you're right, it's the lesser evil. Still, I find it scaring and can't understand what makes a human being work day after day to design and manufacture such an evil device. Clumsy and random, as Obi-Wan would put it.
Maybe it was designed by a bunch of guys who didn't want to see their friends killed and wives raped.
Again Quoting Wiki: In 1992, President George H.W. Bush signed the Housing and Community Development Act of 1992. The Act amended the charter of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to reflect Congress' view that the GSEs "have an affirmative obligation to facilitate the financing of affordable housing for low-income and moderate-income families."
The company are under polictical pressure to cater to "owning > renting". Because some politicians decided it was a political favorable move to establish such the notion of "owning > renting". Why did they make those proposals? Can you truly exclude the real-estate lobbyists?
Right. We all know that policy is all toward promoting home ownership, which in recent years means home ownership for people who couldn't afford it (before). By definition, lowering standards to get more people into homes. My buddy was calculating the costs of each of these decisions, but found that nobody could quantify the benefit of actually having people own homes. It's just a nebulous "good thing".
>>It doesn't matter if Fanny Mae does it. They are required by law to follow the rules, regardless of the cost/benefit of the law.
Hence the insanity of the system that I was talking about.
Nobody can quantitatively say why home ownership is a good thing, and nobody ever did a cost/benefit analysis of the law.
>>loans to black people, I mean "subprime." >>the rich white bankers resold and rebundled these loans to their other rich white friends >>The system collapsed because the rich white people making loans committed fraud when selling those loans.
Keep your racism to yourself, it's disgusting.
The collapse of the housing market was triggered by several things, of which fraud was only a small but important part. The much bigger factor was that we had congress inflating a balloon, and pushing more and more air into the balloon, and then acting surprised when it burst. People defaulted on their loans because they either lost their job and couldn't pay it, or because they were upside down on their mortgage, and it was more logical to walk away from a house than keep paying the mortgage on it.
Far be it for me to defend mortgage securitizations, or banks, or criminal organizations like Goldman-Sachs, or the Fed, as I have a lot of things to say about them (a friend of mine isn't playing video games with me right now since the bank that bought his mortgage is demanding a copy of his taxes or they'll forceclose, even though he hasn't missed a payment - fuck US Bank)... but I wouldn't call an ARM with a 5 year low introductory rate "fraud" as the consumers knew exactly what the terms of the deal were - they just guess incorrectly (like a lot of people) that housing would always go up, so it wouldn't be a big deal.
>>There is a great deal of blatant self-interest that drives those seemly "insane" decisions.
I'm not so sure about that, unless some of these people are hypocrites. The Sierra Club is a great example - they say they're pro-environment, right? But their actions have resulted in locking us down into the status quo, which is decidedly against their own agenda. This is the insanity that I speak of.
I don't see any of those examples being in anyone's best interest (it was the EPA that forced rerouting the highway, not the construction company, for example), except maybe in the case of Feinstein pandering to her base. (Oh, and Feinstein, while manly looking, is not a dude as you suggest.) Fannie Mae derives no benefit from person A owning a house over person B owning a house, and it was quite enlightening that nobody could even say what the benefits for the policies encouraging home ownership should be.
I think a simpler explanation is that people are blind to the fact that the status quo is one of the options we have to pick between. The dilemma is not "A) Kill the tortoises B) Don't kill the tortoises" but rather "A) Kill several tortoises and get solar power or B) Don't kill tortoises but keep us on coal power."
>>His hubris must be punished by way of an Internet meme.
Tai me up?
Tai your shoelaces?
Could probably do something with Tai meaning "Red Snapper" in Japanese, or "Wife" in Chinese, but that might be a bit too highbrow for an internet meme.
In any event, it's not hubris to get excited about something you invented that you didn't know existed before. It's ignorance. I once explained to a CS professor this method I'd found for finding the greatest common divisor of two integers, and he cut me off by saying that Euclid had figured it out 2300 years ago.:p
>>You seem to be implying that only nuclear plants are subject to delays due to local environmental concerns, but you fail to explain why construction of a new coal plant or coal mine could not run into the same legal roadblocks.
Because there's something "scary" about nuclear that sets off the idiot corps of the environmental movement.
But you're right of course, they try to stop everything, and keep us locked into the status quo of using coal - which is rather pointedly NOT good for the environment.
>>I can't quite figure what the problem with bicycle helmets is that you're suggesting.
There have been a number of papers written on the paradoxical effects things like bicycle (and ski) helmets have on people. The causality is debated, but a common hypothesis is that the slight decrease in injury from wearing the helmet is counterbalanced by increased risk taking, cars driving closer to the cyclists, and cycling faster.
The cost does not come from defending the lawsuit or doing the studies. The cost comes because such lawsuits can create delays. Delays mean that an operator may need to buy power from someone else, build other types of plants (like natural gas) or delay the retirement of obsolete plants. All of these actions carry significant costs.
Safety does have a cost. That doesn't mean that it's not absolutely the right thing to do when you're dealing with a technology that's intrinsically hazardous.
Yeah, after lawsuits delayed Diablo Canyon by 12 years in California, PG&E scrapped all nuclear power plant development. In other words, the Greens lost the battle, but won the war.
If by winning the war, you mean "sticking with burning tons of coal every year and dumping radiation, particulate matter, and CO2 into the atmosphere by enormous amounts while killing lots of people mining it" was a victory for the Greens. Because that's what happened.
Slashdot Mirror
>>The problem is that breeder reactors (at least the early models) can be used to obtain weapon grade plutonium. They are also much, much more expensive than traditional ones.
I've never found the fact that they could be used to make weapons grade plutonium particularly convincing. Our nuclear plants are about the most well-guarded parts of our national infrastructure, and the modern breeder designs (like the IFR Clinton killed) keep everything on-site, or even better, do it all inside the reactor such as with Bill Gates' TWR design. They're not that expensive, actually - the optimal way for building them out is to combine Type III+ and Type IV reactors together to create a very efficient nuclear fuel cycle that avoids the expensive of having to deal with nuclear waste.
>>Now with the constant rise in price for nuclear fuel and of course the development of better designs, breeder reactors will most likely become a reality. Of course, that assumes some responsible politicians will avoid knee jerk reactions and that's a big assumption.
Well. Yeah, our politicians are still doing their best to shut down nuclear power here in the Central Valley, even when the benefits for the plant extend well beyond power generation. (http://www.fresnobee.com/2010/12/11/2194699/valley-nuclear-group-tries-ag.html)
Nuclear fuel, though, is only a small part of the total cost of nuclear (20%-ish). Almost all of the cost involves recovering the enormous capital outlays involved in construction.
>>...is that you, General Electric? Or Siemens?
Is that you, shill for the coal mining industry?
>>Early breeder reactor designs were inherently unstable, allowing situations where there could be a runaway reaction.
You mean back in the 1950s when the first breeder reactors were built? :p Sure, I'll grant you that.
The modern Type IV reactors safe(r), and since they get rid of most of the waste that causes most of the political problems with nuclear power, I'd say that it was a pretty bad decision by Clinton to kill the IFR research project.
>>Building one and having it blow its top would have been a far worse setback than the path we did take.
Sure. And if every reactor in the planet exploded right now, that would be bad, too. But if you're looking at risk levels from nuclear vs. other plants, the numbers just aren't there to support the anti-nuclear crowd. If nuclear killed even a hundredth of the people that have died from coal power (while it has been producing about half the power for our nation vs. coal), we'd have panicked and shut down all of the nuclear sites ages ago. We're fundamentally stupid about it.
>>I'd agree completely that what we need need now is solid, proven breeder reactor tech, and the opportunity to get it was wasted. I just wanted to provide an alternative to the "grass is always greener" thinking - it could have been a disaster too.
Sure, and I get what you're saying. But the main reason Carter and Clinton banned breeder reactors was not for safety reasons, but really about concerns over nuclear proliferation. The thinking is that if we had breeder reactors we'd not be able to morally take the high ground when we tried to stop Iran from going nuclear... oh wait. And also certain fears that people could steal the Plutonium coming out of the reactors and turn them into terrorist bombs. (Because, you know, if there's any place in America that is easy to steal from, it's a nuclear plant with all of its barbed wire and armed guards with machine guns.)
Ah, you must live in a state with a SANE energy policy. Yeah, not living in California changes the numbers around a lot.
Two different questions, there:
1) Should I install solar?
2) Should I run my car off electricity?
For 1:
If you're a hippie, then sure, yeah, knock yourself out. But there's no economic reason to. Solar will not compete at the 8c/KWH range unless costs come down by a factor of 3 or so. Solar prices *have* fallen significantly (~50%) in the last 5 years or so, so it might not be a bad idea in a decade or so, but right now, it's just not going to make sense unless you live in a third world country like California.
For 2:
In California, you get 7 miles to a dollar of power out of a Volt. At 8c/KWH, you'll get about 30 miles per dollar, which is the equivalent of 90MPG assuming 3$ gasoline. (Oh, you probably pay $2.50 where you live, eh?) But Volts are expensive, maybe $35,000 after tax and rebates and all the other stuff. Let's compare it against an Altima Hybrid, which is in the same class (technically if you really want to save the most on a car, an old Civic is your best bet. =) Altima Hybrids with comparable equipment work out to about $28,000 (well, they're sans nav, but up a lot of other features like a moonroof). So you're out $7,000.
So it really works out to how much you drive a year.
So assuming you drive 20,000 miles/year (55 miles per day), you will spend about $670 on 'fuel' for your car, compared with about $1818 the Altima Hybrid. So for $7,000 extra investment you get $1,200 back per year, a 17% ROI, which is very good.
But if you drive 10,000 miles/year, then it's a 8.5% ROI
If you drive 5,000 miles/year, then it's a 4% ROI, and so forth.
So yeah, it looks competitive. But if you had power rates like us, you'd spend more on 'fuel' for your Leaf than a gas-powered hybrid.
A final, compromise route, you might consider is converting a hybrid car to a plug-in system. So if you have a Prius or whatever, you can double its efficiency (sorta) for $4,000 or so, alongside a 10% federal tax credit.
>>Stuxnet Virus Set Back Iran's Nuclear Program by 2 Years...LOIC set Mastercard back 2 hours. Advantage, Stuxnet!
Nah, Jimmy Carter set back the US nuclear program by 30 years by banning breeder reactors. Advantage: Carter, by a long mile. Well, Clinton can take some of the blame too, for killing the IFR over the protests of Dirty Dick Durbin, amazingly enough.
I mean, good thing we never built breeder reactors, right? If we had, Iran might have a nuclear program by now, using stolen American plutonium!
(You know all the political mess we are in over waste products, and how California has banned new nuclear until the waste issue is resolved? Breeder reactors use nuclear 'waste' as fuel, burning over 99% of the fuel, instead of the 1% or so efficiency we get from traditional PWR/BWR reactors. IFRs can also burn depleted uranium, and weapons-grade plutonium.)
>>This story is just another example of our disappearing private property rights
Sad to say it, but we need a law or amendment stating that the Right of First Sale shall not be abridged.
The really sad thing is that the Europeans have exactly such a law in their consumer protection acts.
>>the Supreme Court, being answerable to nobody and at liberty to interpret the words in the Constitution as it pleases, seems to like it the way it is. At least, the 5 of them anointed by Republican Presidents do.
Ah yes, the famous "living document" Republican judges. Shame we don't have more of those strict constitutionalist Democrat judges on the bench to keep them in check, eh?
While I agree that both parties have judges that take a much more liberal view of the constitution than was originally construed, I think you're pointing your fingers in the wrong direction. Look at how the judges went on Lopez, for example. The Republicans wanted a more restricted version of the commerce clause, whereas the Democrats wanted unlimited power for congress.
Well, IIRC, gasoline is still the most energy dense way of running a car. I suppose you could rig some sort of overhead wire high-voltage system to run cars like buses, but otherwise we're pretty much stuck using gasoline, unless you think the 35 mile all-electric range (which costs 5$ in power here in California) on a Volt is "enough for anyone". =)
Let alone the distribution problems with electricity are even more problematic than gasoline, at least here in California, which has one of the worst power infrastructures in the country. We literally would overload our transmission lines if we switched to electric cars. While our gasoline distribution system is pretty fucked as well (we require special gasoline blends, and don't allow refineries to be built, either), it's basically a solved problem. Given that the Sierra Club and other assholes will shut down anything new - at all - it means that we basically have no alternatives to using existing infrastructure, which means gas, and maybe a little bit of electricity.
In regards to 3, I'm with you that we should be looking to switch to nuclear and small scale renewable plants, but there's not as much vulnerability of relying on gasoline as you'd think - we can always liquefy coal if we need to, at relatively low prices, and our domestic supplies of coal are enough for the foreseeable future. Nuclear displacing coal is a Good Thing (tm) since it would lower the price of coal and thus make gassified coal cheaper, but in states like California where half our energy supply is from natural gas, it's a more complicated issue, since displaced natural gas will end up getting wasted anyway, though it's overall probably a net win, since we're paying up to 50 cents / kilowatt hour here.
A really interesting thing I've discovered recently is that small scale solar is more cost efficient than large-scale solar. While counterintuitive, if you build out small solar plants, they don't have to go through the crippling licensing, lawsuit, and compatibility issues that large scale plants do, let alone the capital costs involving buying of land and such. PG&E is especially dickish about these sorts of things, even going so far as to block compatibility with sites, since they're bullies. Right now, the levelized break-even cost on solar in the US is .36$/KWH, but a company will come to my house, install solar for free, and sell it to me at .26$/KWH today (fully warranteed, no fees or anything else). Given that PG&E charges up to .50$/KWH, I'm expecting this to be the way of the future. The 26 cents price includes a 33% tax subsidy from the state and federal government, but even without the subsidy, it's still cheaper than both large-scale solar and what's coming out of the grid from PG&E.
Yeah, so it's probably not going to happen as long as Iowa's caucuses vote first for our presidents.
Just search for "WMD" and the difference between foresight and hindsight.
Heh, the funny thing is that I originally wrote the passphrase with spaces, but took them out to make it look more password-y.
>>"let me pick your lock with my 256 bit long key"
Actually.... hmm.
It might be worth using his dating profile to see if any sub-phrase or combination of words is the passphrase to his AES-256 key.
Would be a lot faster, obviously, than brute forcing it, and he seems like the kind of arrogant douche to have "ILoveChoppingUpBrains" as a passphrase.
>>It seems to be that the US government has no credibility left with the whole WMD fiasco
You might want to read this:
http://www.cfr.org/publication/23556/hbo_history_makers_series_with_condoleezza_rice.html
>>THIS, this is what we spend our non existent money on? Giant fricking superguns?
You say that like it's a bad thing. But since the insane awesomeness of a railgun doesn't impress you, let's look at the numbers.
>>(we already have 11 carriers for the love of Pete)
Okay, so you like our carrier fleet?
Railguns are being designed to counter a threat to carriers, namely swarms of cruise missiles. The amount of money they've spent on developing this thing ($211M) is less than one percent of what California spends on K-12 education each year ($36B). Not even counting college education, which is a lot more.
But a carrier... well, that's an expensive investment. If they can protect even a single carrier, it'll have paid for itself. (And if you assume we're NOT going to be having threats from countries that can inexpensively produce lots of cruise missiles, you're crazy.)
Quibble with the article. It said it launched the projectile at 5500 fps, which is... Mach 5, not Mach 8. Based on a rough estimate, I'd say that it'd be Mach 8 only if all 33MJ were translated into kinetic energy at 100% efficiency.
Mach 8 is about 2 to 3 times as fast as a normal bullet, and a 23KG projectile is just insanely large. A .50 BMG is around 50g and flies at between Mach 2 and 3, for a total kinetic energy of 20KJ or so. However, given that it can fire a lot more often than... once per five minutes... it's probably a bit more useful.
>>Co-op is the real king in my book, especially games like Borderlands where you can play the same thing single or in co-op, and the game adjusts the difficulty based on how many people are in the group. I played that both ways, and it was great.
Indeed. RDR had really a great coop experience, but you would exhaust the content waaay too fast. If you could actually play the single player game in coop mode, they would have had something that would have kept my interest in multiplayer through level 50. I did all the available coop till I got sick of it, and I never got past level 30 or so.
The single player was too long, the coop too short.
>>Actually I'm glad it's finished. Finally. I've been waiting for a good single player game to be released for a while now. I just hope it's bug free.
Well, Fallout New Vegas meets your first criterion, but not your second, I'm afraid.
Still worth the price of entry though.
>>The sad fact is that to reach those high levels, it's not only not a hindrance, it's practically a requirement.
This just isn't true. My family has built a pretty solid model, and while people occasionally do really unethical things to us, we pride ourselves on always acting ethically ourselves.
Will we sue someone if they don't live up to their end of a contract and fail to pay us? Sure.
But you don't get very far in life if people know you're a shyster. Believe it or not, behaving honestly and forthrightly with your partners works better in the long run.
>>I guess you're right, it's the lesser evil. Still, I find it scaring and can't understand what makes a human being work day after day to design and manufacture such an evil device. Clumsy and random, as Obi-Wan would put it.
Maybe it was designed by a bunch of guys who didn't want to see their friends killed and wives raped.
Weapons aren't evil when used to defend oneself.
Right. We all know that policy is all toward promoting home ownership, which in recent years means home ownership for people who couldn't afford it (before). By definition, lowering standards to get more people into homes. My buddy was calculating the costs of each of these decisions, but found that nobody could quantify the benefit of actually having people own homes. It's just a nebulous "good thing".
>>It doesn't matter if Fanny Mae does it. They are required by law to follow the rules, regardless of the cost/benefit of the law.
Hence the insanity of the system that I was talking about.
Nobody can quantitatively say why home ownership is a good thing, and nobody ever did a cost/benefit analysis of the law.
>>loans to black people, I mean "subprime."
>>the rich white bankers resold and rebundled these loans to their other rich white friends
>>The system collapsed because the rich white people making loans committed fraud when selling those loans.
Keep your racism to yourself, it's disgusting.
The collapse of the housing market was triggered by several things, of which fraud was only a small but important part. The much bigger factor was that we had congress inflating a balloon, and pushing more and more air into the balloon, and then acting surprised when it burst. People defaulted on their loans because they either lost their job and couldn't pay it, or because they were upside down on their mortgage, and it was more logical to walk away from a house than keep paying the mortgage on it.
Far be it for me to defend mortgage securitizations, or banks, or criminal organizations like Goldman-Sachs, or the Fed, as I have a lot of things to say about them (a friend of mine isn't playing video games with me right now since the bank that bought his mortgage is demanding a copy of his taxes or they'll forceclose, even though he hasn't missed a payment - fuck US Bank)... but I wouldn't call an ARM with a 5 year low introductory rate "fraud" as the consumers knew exactly what the terms of the deal were - they just guess incorrectly (like a lot of people) that housing would always go up, so it wouldn't be a big deal.
>>There is a great deal of blatant self-interest that drives those seemly "insane" decisions.
I'm not so sure about that, unless some of these people are hypocrites. The Sierra Club is a great example - they say they're pro-environment, right? But their actions have resulted in locking us down into the status quo, which is decidedly against their own agenda. This is the insanity that I speak of.
I don't see any of those examples being in anyone's best interest (it was the EPA that forced rerouting the highway, not the construction company, for example), except maybe in the case of Feinstein pandering to her base. (Oh, and Feinstein, while manly looking, is not a dude as you suggest.) Fannie Mae derives no benefit from person A owning a house over person B owning a house, and it was quite enlightening that nobody could even say what the benefits for the policies encouraging home ownership should be.
I think a simpler explanation is that people are blind to the fact that the status quo is one of the options we have to pick between. The dilemma is not "A) Kill the tortoises B) Don't kill the tortoises" but rather "A) Kill several tortoises and get solar power or B) Don't kill tortoises but keep us on coal power."
>>His hubris must be punished by way of an Internet meme.
Tai me up?
Tai your shoelaces?
Could probably do something with Tai meaning "Red Snapper" in Japanese, or "Wife" in Chinese, but that might be a bit too highbrow for an internet meme.
In any event, it's not hubris to get excited about something you invented that you didn't know existed before. It's ignorance. I once explained to a CS professor this method I'd found for finding the greatest common divisor of two integers, and he cut me off by saying that Euclid had figured it out 2300 years ago. :p
>>You seem to be implying that only nuclear plants are subject to delays due to local environmental concerns, but you fail to explain why construction of a new coal plant or coal mine could not run into the same legal roadblocks.
Because there's something "scary" about nuclear that sets off the idiot corps of the environmental movement.
But you're right of course, they try to stop everything, and keep us locked into the status quo of using coal - which is rather pointedly NOT good for the environment.
>>I can't quite figure what the problem with bicycle helmets is that you're suggesting.
There have been a number of papers written on the paradoxical effects things like bicycle (and ski) helmets have on people. The causality is debated, but a common hypothesis is that the slight decrease in injury from wearing the helmet is counterbalanced by increased risk taking, cars driving closer to the cyclists, and cycling faster.
There's similar problems with ABS systems:
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Risk_compensation
Yeah, after lawsuits delayed Diablo Canyon by 12 years in California, PG&E scrapped all nuclear power plant development. In other words, the Greens lost the battle, but won the war.
If by winning the war, you mean "sticking with burning tons of coal every year and dumping radiation, particulate matter, and CO2 into the atmosphere by enormous amounts while killing lots of people mining it" was a victory for the Greens. Because that's what happened.
By "technology that is intrinsically hazardous" you ARE talking about coal, right? When talking about radiation hazards?
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste