I'll let you in on a little secret: do you know what's the single best investment in our small nordic country of Finland? It's not Nokia, it's not huge steel industry, it's not huge paper industry.
It's the first nuclear plant complex we had built. It's followed on that list by second one.
Do you know why? Because nuclear power plants, while costing a lot to build, are extremely reliable and produce large amounts of needed resource. As a result it's easy to secure financing at terms beneficial to the plant operator, and it's even easier to turn huge profits after paying off the debts for decades, because operating the plant is cheap compared to amount of power it will produce. As a result, you do not need subsidies. Your plant will pay for itself very quickly, and turn enormous profits after that. That's why so many power companies want to build nuclear power plants in spite of massive anti-nuclear sentiment and lobby.
And mind you, we have fairly cheap electricity because we have so many nuclear power plants in addition to fairly good country to run lots of hydro plants in the north.
Basically, it's a Fukushima lesson. Their cooling systems were designed for 7 magnitudes, took a 100 times stronger quake, SURVIVED but diesel generators running power for those systems got flooded by tsunami that followed the quake.
So it certainly makes sense to install more flood protection on the generators.
It's right actually. A very unaddressed and unpublicized reality in Germany is that while politicians and press rave about wind... They are building coal plants in numbers that are in higher twenties at any given moment.
Disclosure: I have family member working in a large multinational corp that makes coal power plants. He can't stop being amazed at the hypocrisy of media and politicians in Germany as their business is booming in Germany at the moment due to them building large coal plants to replace all the nuclear that is planned to be shut down and preparing for tenders for new ones that are in early planning stages.
It's also worth noting that Germany largely relies on nuclear power in France for electricity imports.
Geothermal has a widely known and very negative impact on ecology. It's called geothermal depletion and is what happens when you start using geothermal seriously instead of a few showcases.
Geothermal is downright dangerous when used too much (read on geothermal depletion for example). Wind has severe issues with material science, specifically we do not possess materials that are sturdy enough to survive the massive grind of a wind turbine long enough to even pay for themselves, and are enormously work-intensive to maintain. Solar, in addition to obvious problems with "must have Sun visible", "must have as little atmosphere between Sun and panel" and others also suffers from massive problems with material technology as well. We simply do not have material technology to convert sun rays to energy efficiently enough for panels to ever pay for themselves (beyond the manufacture in places where energy and materials are dirt cheap because they're produced on coal/nuclear energy and materials mined in conditions that no one that can afford to buy a panel would ever work in).
Essentially current wind and solar are not only not "cost-effective" but simply lack necessary materials.
The one realistic third option we do have is hydro. Unfortunately it's very location-specific, and in many countries pretty much all places you could make a hydro plant on are already dammed up. So again, we're left with only coal and nuclear for places that can't be reliably supplied by hydro, or are small enough and are sitting in a place where small scale geothermal operation can reliably supply the demand without causing depletion.
Last option is burning various fossil fuels, from oil to natural gas.
There are realistic limitations dictated by material technologies (i.e. laws of physics + sum of current know-how) which name your "energy storage" as even further pipe dream then cold fusion.
Source: current capacitor and battery technology moving in a few percent increments at best, and typically being extremely polluting due to materials used while at it.
It does if you want a doomsday deterrent a la MAD. It also does if you want to quickly wipe out the population of target country/region, and then take it over with your inoculated, immune people.
No, even in linux land, they still call what you're doing "anon trolling". Because the only reason to truly make UAC workable for someone who doesn't have his head up his ass (read: doesn't need added security) is to disable it. Even at minimal settings offered by windows, it still breaks a lot of software by forcing it to run as limited user by default, and still forces you to run essentially all older software as admin and wastes your time on top of it by making you make separate shortcuts for each individual program to be ran in admin mode. It also still whines during installations a lot, and so on. All of this is usability nightmare not worth the added layer of security to someone who isn't dumb enough to catch malware in the first place.
But resistance WAS futile. 7 was a repackaged Vista, that retained most if not all of its flaws. It just offered a slightly different presentation and was repackaged under a different name.
UAC halting your entire system for pretty much everything? Still there. Programs breaking due to admin rights requirements on machine where I specifically fucking want to have admin rights while running it? Still there. Inability to roll back to classic menu? Still there. Incompatibility issues with older software? Still there. Massive memory hog? Still there.
Seven essentially reduced some of the annoyance brought by vista a bit, and people who were used to vista's annoynances jumped on 7. I understand that: if I lived in the poorest country of Africa, Libya would look like heaven to me too. Of course, when you're living in Western country, Libya is a poor shit hole, and moving from XP to seven felt pretty fucking horrible. Still does, after ripping out and disabling pretty much every annoyance I could, including disabling UAC, aero, ripping out most of the new and retarded interface and replacing it with classic shell (props to those guys for doing microsoft's job and as FOSS project to boot) and so on.
I still have to deal with some of the interface stuff they couldn't remove, like huge spacing crap. I also am hamstrung by 7's caching scheme which slowed my daily operations by a very significant margin (I actually asked a friend to time myself on this with old and new machine to see if it was just in my head and it wasn't) with it's absolutely useless "awesome and fast" as microsoft advertised it, caching. Which probably is, when you have well over 4 gigs of RAM and and an SSD. It's just that I have HDDs and just 4 gigs of RAM and I see that I have in fact downgraded in terms of efficiency, in spite of having more RAM, much faster CPU and GPU in the system as well as faster (and obviously bigger) hard drives.
So yes, Vista won. Even really pissed people like me were forced to surrender and switch to Vista 1.1. I rest my case.
We'll likely never replace them in traditional sense. You burn fuel completely and irreversibly in an internal combustion engine, while you have a reversible chemical reaction in Li-ion battery. Reversibility carries a very heavy tag.
That was cringe-worthy. Of we put all our resources (money) on the planet together right now, we couldn't make interstellar travel a reality. This habit of some people to pretend that money solves everything is utterly idiotic.
We do not have material technology, we do not have viable energy sources, etc. We simply do not have them (yet?), and throwing money at the problem will not magically make these into existence any more then throwing money in 1800s would put people on the moon or throwing money at it now would put people into another solar system. It may make these necessary components of interstellar travel appear faster, or it may not, but it will not magically create them just by throwing money at the problem. It will require TIME first and foremost.
But it is. Whatever is not forbidden is allowed. That is one of the base tenets of our (Western) justice system. Law is waaaaay behind on this topic, as most of the ways to track people didn't exist a decade ago.
You seem to think that people who do that stuff for a living are just as stupid about it as average person is about targeted marketing. I have bad news for you - people in that industry work for a living making tap water look worth buying at prices higher then gasoline just because they bottled it and ran an advertising campaign based on nothing but images with no concrete promises.
You seriously expect people like that to buy their own bullshit? They are the masters of it, and will see through your bullshit arguments in a second, understanding them for what they really represent - a massive decline in average consumers that will be seeing their ads, just as you conclude yourself.
How do you "prosecute and fine" companies that don't adhere to standards? If we did that, microsoft would've been bankrupt for IE6.
Standards become standards not because they are mandated, but because they are both mandated and ACCEPTED. Purely mandated, unaccepted standards end up not used at all.
Sometimes I wonder, are some people really so utterly stupid as to believe that a few overblown anomalies that get plastered all over the news for their high sell value are actually norm, and the myriad of normal actions taken by government that have no news value because they do exactly or close to exactly what they are supposed to do are anomalies.
Then we have a poster like one above, and my belief in humanity dies a little more.
You need their cooperation to survive the massive anti-you lobby they will put out. Source: tobacco industry and decades it took for poor bastards trying to study tobacco's adverse effects on health to shake off "sharlatan"-image slapped on them by the said industry.
On the other hand it's actually pretty interesting that we as humans are getting skilled and powerful enough to affect planet in ways that causes earthquakes without having to blow stuff up underground. We've done it with geothermal and apparently this at the very least.
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I'll let you in on a little secret: do you know what's the single best investment in our small nordic country of Finland? It's not Nokia, it's not huge steel industry, it's not huge paper industry.
It's the first nuclear plant complex we had built. It's followed on that list by second one.
Do you know why? Because nuclear power plants, while costing a lot to build, are extremely reliable and produce large amounts of needed resource. As a result it's easy to secure financing at terms beneficial to the plant operator, and it's even easier to turn huge profits after paying off the debts for decades, because operating the plant is cheap compared to amount of power it will produce.
As a result, you do not need subsidies. Your plant will pay for itself very quickly, and turn enormous profits after that. That's why so many power companies want to build nuclear power plants in spite of massive anti-nuclear sentiment and lobby.
And mind you, we have fairly cheap electricity because we have so many nuclear power plants in addition to fairly good country to run lots of hydro plants in the north.
Basically, it's a Fukushima lesson. Their cooling systems were designed for 7 magnitudes, took a 100 times stronger quake, SURVIVED but diesel generators running power for those systems got flooded by tsunami that followed the quake.
So it certainly makes sense to install more flood protection on the generators.
It's right actually. A very unaddressed and unpublicized reality in Germany is that while politicians and press rave about wind... They are building coal plants in numbers that are in higher twenties at any given moment.
Disclosure: I have family member working in a large multinational corp that makes coal power plants. He can't stop being amazed at the hypocrisy of media and politicians in Germany as their business is booming in Germany at the moment due to them building large coal plants to replace all the nuclear that is planned to be shut down and preparing for tenders for new ones that are in early planning stages.
It's also worth noting that Germany largely relies on nuclear power in France for electricity imports.
Geothermal has a widely known and very negative impact on ecology. It's called geothermal depletion and is what happens when you start using geothermal seriously instead of a few showcases.
So, the 99 or so percent of all nuclear power stations?
Geothermal is downright dangerous when used too much (read on geothermal depletion for example). Wind has severe issues with material science, specifically we do not possess materials that are sturdy enough to survive the massive grind of a wind turbine long enough to even pay for themselves, and are enormously work-intensive to maintain.
Solar, in addition to obvious problems with "must have Sun visible", "must have as little atmosphere between Sun and panel" and others also suffers from massive problems with material technology as well. We simply do not have material technology to convert sun rays to energy efficiently enough for panels to ever pay for themselves (beyond the manufacture in places where energy and materials are dirt cheap because they're produced on coal/nuclear energy and materials mined in conditions that no one that can afford to buy a panel would ever work in).
Essentially current wind and solar are not only not "cost-effective" but simply lack necessary materials.
The one realistic third option we do have is hydro. Unfortunately it's very location-specific, and in many countries pretty much all places you could make a hydro plant on are already dammed up. So again, we're left with only coal and nuclear for places that can't be reliably supplied by hydro, or are small enough and are sitting in a place where small scale geothermal operation can reliably supply the demand without causing depletion.
Last option is burning various fossil fuels, from oil to natural gas.
There are realistic limitations dictated by material technologies (i.e. laws of physics + sum of current know-how) which name your "energy storage" as even further pipe dream then cold fusion.
Source: current capacitor and battery technology moving in a few percent increments at best, and typically being extremely polluting due to materials used while at it.
It does if you want a doomsday deterrent a la MAD. It also does if you want to quickly wipe out the population of target country/region, and then take it over with your inoculated, immune people.
No, even in linux land, they still call what you're doing "anon trolling". Because the only reason to truly make UAC workable for someone who doesn't have his head up his ass (read: doesn't need added security) is to disable it. Even at minimal settings offered by windows, it still breaks a lot of software by forcing it to run as limited user by default, and still forces you to run essentially all older software as admin and wastes your time on top of it by making you make separate shortcuts for each individual program to be ran in admin mode.
It also still whines during installations a lot, and so on. All of this is usability nightmare not worth the added layer of security to someone who isn't dumb enough to catch malware in the first place.
No BF3 for you, linux boy! :D
But resistance WAS futile. 7 was a repackaged Vista, that retained most if not all of its flaws. It just offered a slightly different presentation and was repackaged under a different name.
UAC halting your entire system for pretty much everything? Still there. Programs breaking due to admin rights requirements on machine where I specifically fucking want to have admin rights while running it? Still there. Inability to roll back to classic menu? Still there. Incompatibility issues with older software? Still there. Massive memory hog? Still there.
Seven essentially reduced some of the annoyance brought by vista a bit, and people who were used to vista's annoynances jumped on 7. I understand that: if I lived in the poorest country of Africa, Libya would look like heaven to me too.
Of course, when you're living in Western country, Libya is a poor shit hole, and moving from XP to seven felt pretty fucking horrible. Still does, after ripping out and disabling pretty much every annoyance I could, including disabling UAC, aero, ripping out most of the new and retarded interface and replacing it with classic shell (props to those guys for doing microsoft's job and as FOSS project to boot) and so on.
I still have to deal with some of the interface stuff they couldn't remove, like huge spacing crap. I also am hamstrung by 7's caching scheme which slowed my daily operations by a very significant margin (I actually asked a friend to time myself on this with old and new machine to see if it was just in my head and it wasn't) with it's absolutely useless "awesome and fast" as microsoft advertised it, caching. Which probably is, when you have well over 4 gigs of RAM and and an SSD.
It's just that I have HDDs and just 4 gigs of RAM and I see that I have in fact downgraded in terms of efficiency, in spite of having more RAM, much faster CPU and GPU in the system as well as faster (and obviously bigger) hard drives.
So yes, Vista won. Even really pissed people like me were forced to surrender and switch to Vista 1.1. I rest my case.
And they were right, as Vista 1.1, also known as 7 won everyone's hearts.
So in other words, you don't as its impossible. You need completely new legislation for it.
We'll likely never replace them in traditional sense. You burn fuel completely and irreversibly in an internal combustion engine, while you have a reversible chemical reaction in Li-ion battery. Reversibility carries a very heavy tag.
Gasoline pumps didn't appear overnight either to replace stables either. Yet somehow, I'm not seeing stables around...
That was cringe-worthy. Of we put all our resources (money) on the planet together right now, we couldn't make interstellar travel a reality. This habit of some people to pretend that money solves everything is utterly idiotic.
We do not have material technology, we do not have viable energy sources, etc. We simply do not have them (yet?), and throwing money at the problem will not magically make these into existence any more then throwing money in 1800s would put people on the moon or throwing money at it now would put people into another solar system. It may make these necessary components of interstellar travel appear faster, or it may not, but it will not magically create them just by throwing money at the problem. It will require TIME first and foremost.
But it is. Whatever is not forbidden is allowed. That is one of the base tenets of our (Western) justice system. Law is waaaaay behind on this topic, as most of the ways to track people didn't exist a decade ago.
You seem to think that people who do that stuff for a living are just as stupid about it as average person is about targeted marketing. I have bad news for you - people in that industry work for a living making tap water look worth buying at prices higher then gasoline just because they bottled it and ran an advertising campaign based on nothing but images with no concrete promises.
You seriously expect people like that to buy their own bullshit? They are the masters of it, and will see through your bullshit arguments in a second, understanding them for what they really represent - a massive decline in average consumers that will be seeing their ads, just as you conclude yourself.
And there's no way in hell they'll agree to that.
How do you "prosecute and fine" companies that don't adhere to standards? If we did that, microsoft would've been bankrupt for IE6.
Standards become standards not because they are mandated, but because they are both mandated and ACCEPTED. Purely mandated, unaccepted standards end up not used at all.
Problem with this approach is that no one will respect it then, as it will present massive losses to advertisers to respect it.
Sometimes I wonder, are some people really so utterly stupid as to believe that a few overblown anomalies that get plastered all over the news for their high sell value are actually norm, and the myriad of normal actions taken by government that have no news value because they do exactly or close to exactly what they are supposed to do are anomalies.
Then we have a poster like one above, and my belief in humanity dies a little more.
You do realise that IDEALS of French revolution were stated before the revolution actually happened?
Technically your "home country ideals" are actually french. US constitution borrows from ideals of French Revolution extremely heavily.
Are you sure you're not referring to "balance between socialism and capitalism" as it is in Northern Europe at the moment?
You need their cooperation to survive the massive anti-you lobby they will put out. Source: tobacco industry and decades it took for poor bastards trying to study tobacco's adverse effects on health to shake off "sharlatan"-image slapped on them by the said industry.
On the other hand it's actually pretty interesting that we as humans are getting skilled and powerful enough to affect planet in ways that causes earthquakes without having to blow stuff up underground. We've done it with geothermal and apparently this at the very least.