You admit that nukes are more expensive than oil. You point out that oil power is dirty and dangerous.
OK. We should get off oil power, too. We should switch to geothermal power plants for baseload, and increase our consumption efficiency so more intermittent energy sources like wind and solar can cover more consumption. Meanwhile we can develop better energy storage, and improve tidal/wave/current generation along with the wind and solar improvements.
Japan could have retired these reactors that are melting down today and replaced them with safer ones, even if they were without alternatives. But they didn't.
Primarily because the people and orgs running them, their entire culture, is so corrupt and obsessed with the marketing that even the most obvious demonstration of their catastrophic costs cannot stop you from continuing the sales pitch. You cannot be trusted to be realistic, even while a meltdown is happening.
Calling it "hysteria" on the day a chunk of the sky actually falls proves only that your denial is so deep that you're not a worthwhile partner in a reasonable discussion.
You should learn something about geothermal power plants that you failed to even mention. They provide the same class of full-time generating capacity as nuke plants do. Indeed, they're largely the same equipment actually generating electricity: steam pushing turbines driving electric current. But behind that they're fairly simple, very clean, and extremely low risk. They can be built within a few years, rather than the decades to build nuke plants.
Ignoring the clear alternative in geothermal is a sign of nuke fetishism.
Everyone understands the potential benefits of nuke power: "power too cheap to measure", "totally clean power", "no dependence on foreign fuel", "totally safe".
Except those potentials are nothing but marketing hype. Nukes are expensive, dirty, dependent on foreign fuel, and dangerous. Three Mile Island in the late 1970s, Chernobyl in the mid 1980s, and now these. All along since they were invented nuke facilities have been dumping poison in our lands, seas and rivers, whether where the fuel is mined, processed, used, stored, or "disposed" (whatever that is).
"Antis" could see any of their persuasive arguments deleted by actual safety and transparency. The dependence on secrecy that you admit the nuke industry has turned to is counterproductive in every way, and is the fault of the nuke industry for making that choice. Not the fault of the people the nuke industry tries to trick with the secrecy.
We know the potential upsides. We've got over a half century seeing downsides - and knowing that even more are hidden, as those forced into exposure were always attempted to be hidden as long as possible. We're not a congregation of superstitious cowards. We are people protecteting ourselves from the undeniable dangers and damages we get while hoping for the unreachable potential benefits sold us.
And indeed the most obvious sign that we're being sold a scam is the conceit that the nuke sellers are the only ones smart enough to know what's going on.
Thousands of buildings were damaged or destroyed by the earthquake and tsunami. Only a few of them are melting down, or otherwise beginning to release poisons that will kill tens of thousands of people nearby either promptly or just prematurely from disease.
That's not safe. That's too dangerous to do anymore.
What you mean is that it's not credible that their reactors are safe. And more importantly, the people saying they're safe are not credible. Whether the people saying so for the past decades as this earthquake has been coming, or the people now saying anything but "they're too dangerous to tolerate".
The disposal of the waste just makes it an even bigger job for people who can't be trusted.
And if this used car was driven only on Sundays by a little old lady from Pasadena, then it might indeed be as good as new, even though its 300,000 miles odometer reading is certainly a cause for concern, as is the cloud of radioactive steam belching from its tailpipe.
We can't do anything to stop tsunamis and earthquakes.
We can do something to stop using nuke plants.
Even when there's a meltdown in progress in a place where the cause was inevitable (a big earthquake in Japan), you nuke fetishists will play word games to deny that we should stop these intolerable risks that are within our control to stop using.
Which is why no nukes are acceptable. Not just because of the tech risks. But primarily because the people and orgs running them, their entire culture, is so corrupt and obsessed with the marketing that even the most obvious demonstration of their catastrophic costs cannot stop you from continuing the sales pitch. You cannot be trusted to be realistic, even while a meltdown is happening.
So? Most of those responses are wrong. Most of them are simply paid for by the subsidized party, like the banks, the energy corps, the drug corps, the military corps, the telcos... AKA the US Chamber of Commerce. Who cares what responses you get that are wrong?
The government has no business subsidizing education
The public has no business ensuring every child has the minimum education paid for? Why not? Why is "the free market" (whatever that is) qualified to decide that undereducating (some) children is a good thing?
OK, Republican, I want to see your letter to your congressmember pointing out that we can't afford a $TRILLION+ every year spent on war + "intelligence", so it must be cut back to at most $250B a year.
Then we can afford to protect ourselves from earthquakes and tsunamis.
OK, it's now over 24 hours after the tsunami reached California. Please post the precise wave arrival time, actual wave height and the measured extent of inundation for about 50 communities predicted likely to be affected. Please use only data that were available to the public at 20110311-2010/Eastern.
I don't know if a real lake of mercury exists in S America. More like mercury poisoned lakes, like across the US (and everywhere else, from coal exhaust etc).
But if there were, I'd love a (hardshell, for the heavy pressure) scuba rig with an electromagnet jetski. And wicked headphones, since under the surface it's probably unavoidable blindness.
We've already landed on the Moon, evidently about 30 years before you were born. Your feeble efforts at dreaming don't have to limit my imagination, especially when you're unable to imagine Moon colonies that have been imagined for you for generations. Now put the fail pipe down and back away from the keyboard. Take a walk or something.
I hope to some day fly with wings in that low-G chamber when it's pressurized with the air storage for our Moon colony. As per Heinlein's The Menace From Earth (1957).
By sealing an aerogel package in mylar, which makes a very strong material with an even higher R value than "naked" aerogel, with a radiant barrier included for even more energy conservation. And incidentally an even lighter material, as the vacuum replaces heavier air.
You might have noticed that the Earth's surface is not the 10,000F that the Sun's surface is. No one is saying that vacuum insulates from radiation, but it's a perfect insulator from convection and conduction.
It very well might be Oodle, because Oodle is the only other party quoted in the story. But AIM doesn't say who it is - or even that it's anyone in particular, though it is. The report's sponsor is anonymous.
AIM Group doesn't do reports for free, for the public benefit, or for nobody. Some corporation or organization is either paying for this report, or targeted by AIM marketing to buy such research (or just the hypercritical reports). Yet they are as anonymous as the buyers and sellers AIM's report finds to be the root of all Craigslist evil.
I suppose since such anonymous attack marketing is old-fashioned that it's "OK" in some way that Craigslist is not.
Any HW that's so "finicky" that it won't necessarily run properly after a reboot cannot be relied upon, because reboots are sometimes either unpredicted, necessary or both. That machine is not worth "multimillion dollars", unless it's the subject of some kind of major R&D project - which I expect it wasn't. Fire the sysadmin and Sun tech, and replace them with a team that will make a machine that isn't a "high bit" away from failing the entire business.
And I say that as someone whose standards are to reboot Unix/Linux machines only on HW upgrades requiring a power cycle, or a kernel upgrade requiring restarting init.
I thought the Linux community was working on upgrading kernels without rebooting. Just store the new kernel file(s) in the filesystem, and run some code to cut over from the old kernel to the new one. What happened to that?
While the Pentagon might have $BILLIONS to spend on ever bigger lasers, what I'm more interested in is more efficient lasers. What's the most efficient working laser now? Preferably one that outputs over 100W of light, but the most efficient ones in different output power classes are interesting.
Presumably the Pentagon is also interested in efficient lasers of medium power, since just laser targeting or even light duty laser cutting is more reasonable to arm a soldier with if it doesn't require a Humvee full of batteries/fuelcells to power it all day.
Phelps and his gang of Christianist assholes are in the business of provoking angry responses to their hellish displays that Phelps' gang will claim in court violated their rights or damaged them. To blackmail their targets, usually municipalities with the ability to pay, into settling the lawsuit and paying off Phelps rather than pay the extensive legal fees and possibly damages. That's why Phelps' gang is pumped full of lawyers trained at "Liberty" "University", the Christian crusade madrassa.
In this fight, it's Anonymous that's on the side of the angels.
Social Security spending is big because it's the retirement programme for everyone in our entire big country. It pays for itself. It doesn't contribute to any deficit or debt - to the contrary, Social Security is the largest lender to our debt, which is driven by war spending (that never dips, even in "peacetime").
Social Security doesn't need any changes to accommodate retiring Baby Boomers - it was already tweaked to collect enough for them, starting back in the 1980s. There is no projected problems with Social Security until at earliest 2039, which is a lot longer than any other programme. And if we want to fix that, all we have to do is collect Social Security payments on income above $105K, which limit currently makes Social Security a regressive tax.
None of the lies they're telling you to cheat you of your guaranteed retirement plan are true. They're preying on the post-Boomer generations' innuendo that "we'll never get Social Security", because they've been trying to steal it from you your whole life. Don't let them. Make them cut the $TRILLIONS in "defense" and "intelligence" budgets that are mostly waste, corruption and investments in war instead of peace and growth.
No, the rail is more efficient. For one, these railcars should be made of lightweight composites, instead of the ancient keiretsu of steel, rail and coal (generating the electric). For another, metal railcars are already something like 4x+ as efficient as cars, even when they're both loaded (5 passengers in a roadcar). But of course a primary purpose of packet switching is to move only those railcars that have load, and to schedule the traffic for efficiency.
But indeed these railcars should be "on the road", or at least run along (or above, or tunneled below) the medians of existing highways. To replace those highways, especially the clogged commuter arteries that mostly go A to B across at least 15 miles, and especially ones that can bypass clogged city centers.
It's the "high speed bus" that breaks out into "onchip addressing". Bigger overhead, but spread across much larger traffic, for higher efficiency and throughput.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's look at your "caveat":
You admit that nukes are more expensive than oil. You point out that oil power is dirty and dangerous.
OK. We should get off oil power, too. We should switch to geothermal power plants for baseload, and increase our consumption efficiency so more intermittent energy sources like wind and solar can cover more consumption. Meanwhile we can develop better energy storage, and improve tidal/wave/current generation along with the wind and solar improvements.
Japan could have retired these reactors that are melting down today and replaced them with safer ones, even if they were without alternatives. But they didn't.
Primarily because the people and orgs running them, their entire culture, is so corrupt and obsessed with the marketing that even the most obvious demonstration of their catastrophic costs cannot stop you from continuing the sales pitch. You cannot be trusted to be realistic, even while a meltdown is happening.
Calling it "hysteria" on the day a chunk of the sky actually falls proves only that your denial is so deep that you're not a worthwhile partner in a reasonable discussion.
You should learn something about geothermal power plants that you failed to even mention. They provide the same class of full-time generating capacity as nuke plants do. Indeed, they're largely the same equipment actually generating electricity: steam pushing turbines driving electric current. But behind that they're fairly simple, very clean, and extremely low risk. They can be built within a few years, rather than the decades to build nuke plants.
Ignoring the clear alternative in geothermal is a sign of nuke fetishism.
Everyone understands the potential benefits of nuke power: "power too cheap to measure", "totally clean power", "no dependence on foreign fuel", "totally safe".
Except those potentials are nothing but marketing hype. Nukes are expensive, dirty, dependent on foreign fuel, and dangerous. Three Mile Island in the late 1970s, Chernobyl in the mid 1980s, and now these. All along since they were invented nuke facilities have been dumping poison in our lands, seas and rivers, whether where the fuel is mined, processed, used, stored, or "disposed" (whatever that is).
"Antis" could see any of their persuasive arguments deleted by actual safety and transparency. The dependence on secrecy that you admit the nuke industry has turned to is counterproductive in every way, and is the fault of the nuke industry for making that choice. Not the fault of the people the nuke industry tries to trick with the secrecy.
We know the potential upsides. We've got over a half century seeing downsides - and knowing that even more are hidden, as those forced into exposure were always attempted to be hidden as long as possible. We're not a congregation of superstitious cowards. We are people protecteting ourselves from the undeniable dangers and damages we get while hoping for the unreachable potential benefits sold us.
And indeed the most obvious sign that we're being sold a scam is the conceit that the nuke sellers are the only ones smart enough to know what's going on.
Thousands of buildings were damaged or destroyed by the earthquake and tsunami. Only a few of them are melting down, or otherwise beginning to release poisons that will kill tens of thousands of people nearby either promptly or just prematurely from disease.
That's not safe. That's too dangerous to do anymore.
What you mean is that it's not credible that their reactors are safe. And more importantly, the people saying they're safe are not credible. Whether the people saying so for the past decades as this earthquake has been coming, or the people now saying anything but "they're too dangerous to tolerate".
The disposal of the waste just makes it an even bigger job for people who can't be trusted.
And if this used car was driven only on Sundays by a little old lady from Pasadena, then it might indeed be as good as new, even though its 300,000 miles odometer reading is certainly a cause for concern, as is the cloud of radioactive steam belching from its tailpipe.
We just did, from you, in a futile attempt to change the subject with a double-reverse straw man.
Thanks for disqualifying yourself early from any reasonable debate about this extremely grave meltdown unfolding in Japan.
We can't do anything to stop tsunamis and earthquakes.
We can do something to stop using nuke plants.
Even when there's a meltdown in progress in a place where the cause was inevitable (a big earthquake in Japan), you nuke fetishists will play word games to deny that we should stop these intolerable risks that are within our control to stop using.
Which is why no nukes are acceptable. Not just because of the tech risks. But primarily because the people and orgs running them, their entire culture, is so corrupt and obsessed with the marketing that even the most obvious demonstration of their catastrophic costs cannot stop you from continuing the sales pitch. You cannot be trusted to be realistic, even while a meltdown is happening.
So? Most of those responses are wrong. Most of them are simply paid for by the subsidized party, like the banks, the energy corps, the drug corps, the military corps, the telcos... AKA the US Chamber of Commerce. Who cares what responses you get that are wrong?
The public has no business ensuring every child has the minimum education paid for? Why not? Why is "the free market" (whatever that is) qualified to decide that undereducating (some) children is a good thing?
OK, Republican, I want to see your letter to your congressmember pointing out that we can't afford a $TRILLION+ every year spent on war + "intelligence", so it must be cut back to at most $250B a year.
Then we can afford to protect ourselves from earthquakes and tsunamis.
Where's your letter already?
OK, it's now over 24 hours after the tsunami reached California. Please post the precise wave arrival time, actual wave height and the measured extent of inundation for about 50 communities predicted likely to be affected. Please use only data that were available to the public at 20110311-2010/Eastern.
I don't know if a real lake of mercury exists in S America. More like mercury poisoned lakes, like across the US (and everywhere else, from coal exhaust etc).
But if there were, I'd love a (hardshell, for the heavy pressure) scuba rig with an electromagnet jetski. And wicked headphones, since under the surface it's probably unavoidable blindness.
We've already landed on the Moon, evidently about 30 years before you were born. Your feeble efforts at dreaming don't have to limit my imagination, especially when you're unable to imagine Moon colonies that have been imagined for you for generations. Now put the fail pipe down and back away from the keyboard. Take a walk or something.
I hope to some day fly with wings in that low-G chamber when it's pressurized with the air storage for our Moon colony. As per Heinlein's The Menace From Earth (1957).
By sealing an aerogel package in mylar, which makes a very strong material with an even higher R value than "naked" aerogel, with a radiant barrier included for even more energy conservation. And incidentally an even lighter material, as the vacuum replaces heavier air.
You might have noticed that the Earth's surface is not the 10,000F that the Sun's surface is. No one is saying that vacuum insulates from radiation, but it's a perfect insulator from convection and conduction.
It very well might be Oodle, because Oodle is the only other party quoted in the story. But AIM doesn't say who it is - or even that it's anyone in particular, though it is. The report's sponsor is anonymous.
AIM Group doesn't do reports for free, for the public benefit, or for nobody. Some corporation or organization is either paying for this report, or targeted by AIM marketing to buy such research (or just the hypercritical reports). Yet they are as anonymous as the buyers and sellers AIM's report finds to be the root of all Craigslist evil.
I suppose since such anonymous attack marketing is old-fashioned that it's "OK" in some way that Craigslist is not.
Any HW that's so "finicky" that it won't necessarily run properly after a reboot cannot be relied upon, because reboots are sometimes either unpredicted, necessary or both. That machine is not worth "multimillion dollars", unless it's the subject of some kind of major R&D project - which I expect it wasn't. Fire the sysadmin and Sun tech, and replace them with a team that will make a machine that isn't a "high bit" away from failing the entire business.
And I say that as someone whose standards are to reboot Unix/Linux machines only on HW upgrades requiring a power cycle, or a kernel upgrade requiring restarting init.
I thought the Linux community was working on upgrading kernels without rebooting. Just store the new kernel file(s) in the filesystem, and run some code to cut over from the old kernel to the new one. What happened to that?
While the Pentagon might have $BILLIONS to spend on ever bigger lasers, what I'm more interested in is more efficient lasers. What's the most efficient working laser now? Preferably one that outputs over 100W of light, but the most efficient ones in different output power classes are interesting.
Presumably the Pentagon is also interested in efficient lasers of medium power, since just laser targeting or even light duty laser cutting is more reasonable to arm a soldier with if it doesn't require a Humvee full of batteries/fuelcells to power it all day.
Phelps and his gang of Christianist assholes are in the business of provoking angry responses to their hellish displays that Phelps' gang will claim in court violated their rights or damaged them. To blackmail their targets, usually municipalities with the ability to pay, into settling the lawsuit and paying off Phelps rather than pay the extensive legal fees and possibly damages. That's why Phelps' gang is pumped full of lawyers trained at "Liberty" "University", the Christian crusade madrassa.
In this fight, it's Anonymous that's on the side of the angels.
Social Security spending is big because it's the retirement programme for everyone in our entire big country. It pays for itself. It doesn't contribute to any deficit or debt - to the contrary, Social Security is the largest lender to our debt, which is driven by war spending (that never dips, even in "peacetime").
Social Security doesn't need any changes to accommodate retiring Baby Boomers - it was already tweaked to collect enough for them, starting back in the 1980s. There is no projected problems with Social Security until at earliest 2039, which is a lot longer than any other programme. And if we want to fix that, all we have to do is collect Social Security payments on income above $105K, which limit currently makes Social Security a regressive tax.
None of the lies they're telling you to cheat you of your guaranteed retirement plan are true. They're preying on the post-Boomer generations' innuendo that "we'll never get Social Security", because they've been trying to steal it from you your whole life. Don't let them. Make them cut the $TRILLIONS in "defense" and "intelligence" budgets that are mostly waste, corruption and investments in war instead of peace and growth.
No, the rail is more efficient. For one, these railcars should be made of lightweight composites, instead of the ancient keiretsu of steel, rail and coal (generating the electric). For another, metal railcars are already something like 4x+ as efficient as cars, even when they're both loaded (5 passengers in a roadcar). But of course a primary purpose of packet switching is to move only those railcars that have load, and to schedule the traffic for efficiency.
But indeed these railcars should be "on the road", or at least run along (or above, or tunneled below) the medians of existing highways. To replace those highways, especially the clogged commuter arteries that mostly go A to B across at least 15 miles, and especially ones that can bypass clogged city centers.
It's the "high speed bus" that breaks out into "onchip addressing". Bigger overhead, but spread across much larger traffic, for higher efficiency and throughput.