Building a reserve inplies an excess to income beyond your expenses. I had a house in one local becuase I was stationed there. While it was rented, the rental market was soft and therefore the rent covered the mortgage and realty agency costs (the house was in Florida, I was in NM....hard to manage from afar). The agency was useless and while I terminated the contract with cause (their failure to collect the rent and notify me of issues violated the contract we had), I was still left with financial hole at the end.
Like I said, welcome to self employment. Depending on many factors, over half fail in the first three years. I'm sorry for your loss, but my parents lost a lot of money due to job shifts(we moved a lot, frequently shortly after buying a home) and the dot com bust. Dad had invested in a mutual fund that was supposed to stay away from those businesses(dad knew trouble was coming), but well, the activly managed fund violated it's preciptus and was trading in those stocks to get better numbers. When the crash hit... Well, the managers were fired and such, but Dad couldn't recover his money. Stuff happens, you deal with it as best you can.
I was a young E-5 at the time. Just promoted a short while prior to that. The lower grades do not get paid much.
Guess what? I'm an E-5 at the moment. I have a very good idea what your pay is like. I also just effectivly paid cash for my first house. Borrowed some money out of my TSP to cover the rest. Now, yes, it's an incredably cheap house, but still structurally sound. As for the rest of your rant... I know your situation. I'm living it. And yes, I have a reserve sitting in my bank account.
As far as minumum wage increasing unemployment and inflation....well, you may want to do some more research.
I have done research, that's how I came to believe that. It's very simple math, actually. When the minimum wage goes up, businesses look to keep their costs down by decreasing employment. They fire people, in other words. Somebody who might be worth employing at $5/hour might not be worth it at $7.50/hour(california minimum). I saw it at the local McDonalds when average labor costs went up. They stopped toasting their buns at the store and went to 'pre-toasted'. You don't see those tiny-tile mosiacs in stalled in buildings anymore. Why? It costs too much in labor to make them.
Inflation increases because where the labor cannot be eliminated or reduced(even if it reduces the quality of the product), but their payroll increases, they usually end up increasing the cost of their products. IE that value-meal costs more. The cost of goods goes up, that's real world inflation.
The real way to increase wealth? Increase productivity. That's the true way to increase our standard of living. Reducing the man-hours required to make a car from over a thousand to under a hundred(to include part creation) is a good start.
Belief is not enough reason to deprive other people. (isn't that what the religious nuts want to do? Require all of us to follwo their beliefs?)
I believe that increasing minimum wage is, overall, an incredibly bad thing to do. It increases unemployment and inflation, increasing the cost of living for the rest of us and load on government services. Heck, for that matter it helps drive businesses overseas. It's all inter-related.
An increase in wages can stimulate spending (bringing down inflation...increasing profits, allowing expansion) by giving people enough money to spend. Even Henry Ford realized that unless workers could afford a Model T, he would not sell very many. His workers were paid a rate that would allow them to be able to afford a car.
Henry Ford, by paying what he did, also got an incredibly skilled, dedicated, and loyal workforce. He could afford to pick the cream of the crop. You should also note that he didn't fuel most of his car sales through his workforce. What happened in that time was a sort of labor shorta
To an extent it also depends on how well funded the city's street painting division is.
I've seen areas with divider lines that was like 'Why'd they bother?'.
Still, there are some areas where they don't bother to paint or place speed signs in residential areas, and that was probably what the original poster was talking about. I'd also imagine that he'd be okay with reductions for construction zones.
Re:Social hack - use "bullfight" for "speed trap".
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Is Your GPS Naive?
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There's no reason any marked road should have a limit lower than 35, nor should a 4+ lane road ever go below 45.
I have no problem with serious residential areas being limited to 25. For areas where houses have their driveways facing four lane roads, or even standard arterial roads, it's time to start buying them out, or putting an access ally in behind them.
Re:Social hack - use "bullfight" for "speed trap".
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Is Your GPS Naive?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
If every on the interstate is going 70 and the posted limit is 55, driving 70 is dangerous.
I think that you meant drive 55 would be dangerous
Studies have shown that differences in speed are more dangerous than high speeds alone.
If everybody else is doing 70, you're safest doing 70 as well.
In too many localities police will usually let a local resident off with a warning while ripping others off.
Not to mention that in many of the smaller communities the cops essentially recognize all the town's cars, thus don't even bother pulling them over for a warning, assuming they aren't stupid speeding (75 in a 45 type stuff). 5-10 mph, not a problem.
From my understanding, it also tends to mess up cell walls, thus making it actually effective enough in killing microbes that 'anti-bacterial' soap isn't really an improvement over the standard stuff.
Sounds like chemical weapon detection paper; it'll false positive on quite a few chemicals.
For example, it's pretty much guarenteed to change color to indicate a nerve agent in the presence of any pesticide, or even the bug repellent DEET.
Of course, most pesticides are a form of nerve agent; they're just effective against bugs instead of mammals.
There are better test systems, but they're orders of magnitude more expensive, require more maintenance and skill to operate, and are slower than the paper.
So they put the paper all over and if any show positive they use the better detector to verify.
Sounds like it might be a good idea to let the officers know that the test tends to false positive on soap. So testing that shampoo bottle is a waste of time, as long as it actually contains shampoo.
I really agree with the original poster. What does it mean to crack a player? Will people be able to make copies of the movies? How? It would have to be something that disables OHCD and allows unencrypted viewing at high resolutions. I suspect that will be more like a box that you add on the outside that has a connection in that negotiates an encrypted channel and a connection out that goes to your media center unencrypted.
From what I understand, it's a big public/private key system. Each DVD has it's own key. Each player has it's own key. There is a lookup table on each DVD with the DVD decrypt code encrypted using the public player keys. The player uses it's private code to decrypt the DVD code, which can then be used to decrypt the DVD video for playback. When they revoke a key it's no longer in the lookup table, thus can't obtain the decrypt code.
Once you have the private player key; whether it's software or hardware, you'd be able to use that key in 'players' that don't conform to the DVD association's rules. Like copying, re-encoding, playing to unencrypted outputs at full resolution.
As for your outside box, yeah, that's a great idea. Of course, the DVD association is likely to go after them like how macrovision went after the v-sync box makers. I think that macrovision ended up loosing(why the boxes are still available) was that the box manufacturers managed to prove that their devices really did clean up the signal and improve the picture by a perceptable amount in a statistically significant amount. It probably didn't help macrovision that there was a population that could tell macrovisioned movies even though it supposably didn't mess up the picture.
Of course what will happen is that some of the keys will be used for illegal software players. What they will do is go after the people using the illegal player probably and not do anything to their clients. Rationalize it that way.
Going after the people using the illegal player would be difficult; there's no need to 'phone home' to allow them to trace it. Though there was the incident where Dish network attempted to sue everybody who bought deloopers from a company that they managed to get sales records from. I believe that they ended up getting slammed hard; they sued a number of people with no dishes and even a few with no TVs.
They're more likely to go after the manufacturers of the device; after all, if you make physical hardware you have to have a manufacturing point, and a way for customers to get ahold of you to exchange money for a device, a mailing address for example. That's how Nintendo and Sony managed to get a few mod chip makers.
Then again they (RIAA/Studios/etc) really are stupid and will force the hardware manufacturers to recall the units or brick them. THAT would be suicide but they have been slowly doing it anyway.
That's where an active hacking community and an open source updatable independant player would be nice. Everytime a key is cracked, they add it to the list that the player can attempt for playing a disc. By clean-rooming the standard and avoiding any relevant patents, the DVD companies actually can't sue. Well, that's probably changed under the DMCA though.
Also, people forget the only people who need a converter box are people who watch TV with rabbit ears. They probably aren't going to spend the extra cash for HD sets.
You're right. I'm a techno-geek, yes, but I'm also an incredible skinflint when it comes to money. I don't have cable, as we have it at work and the gym and I've never been impressed with them enough to be willing to give them $40/month for it. Same deal with satTV.
As for why you're getting the HDTV signals - fairly small market is the ideal. With the big cities you have more target audience; the TV stations can afford to divvy them up more among specialized and competing channels. Yet you also have enough audience to justify going hdtv.
On the other hand - like you said, you have six SD channels to three HD stations. The majority are still SD.
The odds of a hardware player being blacklisted are slim.
This is part of the reason I REALLY want to see some hardware player keys cracked. Preferably for a nice, expensive, popular, non-updateable player.
So that they know that if they blacklist the player, they'll be looking at a lawsuit*, having to perform a recall(expensive), and/or a substantial return rate on the new DVDs because they won't play.
The average Joe (who shops at Wal-Mart) will own an HD television?
You'd be suprised; the local TV section is about 50-50 for HD and SD. The HD section looks to be 2/3rds the TV section, but that's because HDTVs average substantially larger. 50" HDTVs aren't uncommon, and they minimize out at around 20". For STDVs they max out around 36", and min out around 12"(kitchen tubes?).
And I seriously doubt Walmart stocks anything that doesn't sell.
You're correct. Current predictions have the television companies actually not having all HD stations, or even mostly HD stations. It's a matter of marketing and bandwidth. They can fit something like 4-8 regular broadcast stations into the amount of spectrum it takes to broadcast one HDTV signal. Add in that do you really need your news in HDTV, that props*, makeup, and cameras are all cheaper for SDTV, and the huge amount of programming available only in SDTV.
For example, all the new TVs I've looked at walmart now have the digital tuners required for the new signal. Many of them are SDTV in resolution, they'll simply downsample a HD signal if you want to watch one. They're also a quarter of the price of a similiarly sized HDTV set.
The changeover is going to happen in 2009. There are some signs that you may even be able to get the converter box for free with the federal coupons out there. The Billions of dollars made available by selling off the freed frequencies will be the main reason for it to happen. Personally I'm hoping to see some new business and wireless devices spring up to take advantage of the frequencies made available.
*Artifacts such as wires that are invisible in standard definitions can be very visible in HDTV, as well as sloppy makup jobs, etc...
it's all the logistics involved in producing two separate discs
They're already doing that and more. For the foreseeable future all HD releases, whether blueray or HDDVD, will be accompanied with a DVD release, much like the transition to DVD from VHS for a number of years. So you run off a few more thousand DVD discs, and run them over to the assembly line along with the HDDVD discs.
For that matter, the majority of DVDs I buy come in multiples, as I buy mostly seasons. 6 DVDs in one package.
I'll bet that the cost of manufacturing a 2-disc set is significantly higher than producing a single-sided one; personally, I'd rather screw the artwork on the discs and save the money. They're just buckets for bits anyway.
Personally I'd prefer not to have to worry about reading small print in order to identify which side I want down, or to figure out which disc it is in order to put it back in the correct case.
Thing is, to chemically contaminate plutonium is actually pretty difficult; for the amount of power you can still get from it in a IFR type reactor there's some pretty high bars. One method is to mix it with other isotopes of plutonium that aren't as nice for bomb making. An IFR burns those just fine.
But yeah, we're talking future energy sources here. With what's happening in Iran and NKorea, as well as more quietly elsewhere, the nuclear club is expanding. Time to stop worrying so much about proliferation, or to at least take intelligent steps for it. Using as much of the current 'waste' as fuel as possible is a big step towards that.
Just curious, where did you get your figure? Joule is a measurement of energy, just like kw/h. Specifically, 1 joule = 2.7778 ×107 kw/h.
Most figures I've seen place nuclear power at around $1-2/watt for installed capacity. Solar is $10/watt peak capacity Because solar and wind are lucky to produce 50% of their rated power(most solar installs are lucky to get 25%), while nuclear is getting 90-95% of their rated power on average. This means you have to install at least two watts to match nuclear. Making solar ten times as expensive as nuclear, oh yeah, and it doesn't work at night.
The nuclear power industry, by law, pays a fee to the federal government per kw/h produced by nuclear sources in exchange for a promise from the feds that they'll dispose of the waste. And it's no where near infinite; current requirements* are incredibly overkill. For the latter half of the 10k years, the danger of the heavy metals would exceed that of the radioactivity of them, not to mention that we have ash piles from coal plants sitting around that are more radioactive than what the waste will be by that point. Real world, they add some more on top of it for above-ground casks and such because the feds have, so far, failed to dispose of any waste.
Or, to put it another way, $1 invested into a savings account at 5% will turn into $148 in a hundred years. Dump enough money into investments and you can afford to pay for 'continuing care'.
Over the long term, no matter what is determined to be, the cost will always be more than anything else because storage is per year, forever. In 10000 years, we will not even be using a comparable monetary currency anyway, so any attempt at calculation is ridiculous.
Assuming, of course, that we let it sit there for that long. I believe that we're far more likely to haul the stuff back out for reprocessing and additional fuel use within a couple centuries at most. The reactors now in service get ~1% of the possible energy out of the rods. Something like an IFR can use the current 'waste' as fuel, get 99.5% of the possible energy out of it, leaving radioactive remains that are highly radioactive; but will die down to ambient in around 300 years. With the differences in fuel usage, a storage pool** capable of holding 20 years of waste with today's light water reactor would be able to hold well over a thousand years worth of waste for the IFR plant. If/when the plant is shut down, move it to a combined facility or another plant. There'll be room. For the older stuff(>20 years), you can stick it in an aboveground casket for not much money, then pay only minimal attention to it.
*IE no more radioactive than ambient for the ore it was refined from. It's still generally composed of heavy metals, which are chemically toxic. But then, anybody playing that deep should know about that. **Something like an olympic sized swimming pool, but about 10 times as deep.
I still think everything about the Chernobyl disaster was pure idiocy.
I'll agree with that. That's the main reason that I don't include Chernobyl as frequently as possible. I researched it back in high school, reading several reports and watched a multi-hour documentary. For example: how they managed to get pictures of the pile down in the sub-basement was interesting as well as scary. I wouldn't want to get that close to it, not even in extra heavy radiation suits. But the radiation is so bad it kills robots, and the Russian scientists don't have enough money to keep replacing tools. Back on subject, I concluded from that that Chernobyl was an inherently unsafe design, lacked proper secondary containment, the USSR failed to have necessary maintenance and training performed. On top of this, as you noted, they decided to run an experiment where they ran the core in a non-normal mode with half the safety equipment disabled. I generally drop most of this stuff because, well, they've already written many hundreds of multi-hundred page reports on it.
The issue is that it gives a false perception of the operational safety of the reactor itself. When it's the containment structure that's saving us, but people don't realize that, public support for reactors without containment structure allows for the construction of unsafe reactors.
Most of the time it's not the reactor itself that's suffers a penetration, it's the piping for the coolant. We've come a long way since the 70's(when most of our reactors were designed) in our knowledge of flow mechanics and corrosion. The reactor designs(pebble bed) that they propose not having a contaiment vessel for are gas-cooled designs that use a gas that doesn't pick up radioactivity from neutron bombardment like helium. Positive pressure ensures that valves can be closed to prevent any leak from allowing other gasses into the reaction chamber. Still, I'd rather have the building armored, at the least.
A containment breach is the most common type of nuclear accident. The reported safety of the PBMRs is that, if there's a breach, they can be air cooled. That's no comfort, given their use of a graphite moderator.
From my reading, it seems like the definition of a contaiment breach is radioactive materials getting out of their primary containment. It doesn't even have to be at a nuclear plant; it can also happen at reprocessing facilities, for example.
You want truly scary? Look up all the medical radiation accidents.
Besides, I believe that their right in that the linear harm model for radiation is seriously flawed. Given the amount of radiation that people are exposed to all the time simply by enviromental sources, a little extra in rare circumstances aren't bad. It's no different than many hazardous chemicals. Sure, the procedures are different, and the harm model occasionally different, but it ends up being the same. There are chemicals out there that, with a single drop on a hand protected by a latex glove, will still be fatal within a week(read about that incident in Discover, so no web link).
Nuclear reactor safety isn't that great, but even if it was, one disaster is devastating. Not for loss of life -- there's generally plenty of time to relocate people before the dosages become too severe. It's the huge swaths of countryside that it renders unlivable. At least the Chernobyl accident was in a largely rural area (still cost the USSR 16B$), and Chazhma bay in the middle of nowhere.
While they ended up evacuating the city, there are still people living in the exclusion zone of the greater chernobyl area. Studies have shown that they have lower illness rates than similar age groups in the nearby inhabited industrial city.
Besides, didn't you just say that Chernobyl was caused because the USSR was dumber than dumb? I mean TMI was a safer design in comparison, and we've improved since. Our worst case possibility is still far better than Chernobyl.
Like I've been saying: I'd rather trade our real world, continuing deaths due to pollution for the lower than lottery odds of a nuclear power plant disaster coming anywhere near even the death toll of one year of coal power.
A more minor example would be human life expectancy greater than 50 years.
Very good observation. We've developed techniques and alternatives to for pretty much anything we do today; For example we could shift entirely away from oil if we had to.
Still; a major factor for why we haven't is expense. There are plenty of nice clean production methods that aren't used right now because it uses electricity, which even as cheap as it is, is still too expensive to be economical.
Cut the cost of electricity enough and hydrogen starts making sense. Chop the cost enough and electrified rail makes sense in many more areas. Greenhouses become more economical than shipping fruits and vegitables from Mexico and South America to the Northern USA and Canada.
Solar and wind has it's place, but if I could I'd replace every coal plant with a nuclear plant to clean up our baseload power supplies. It's so economical to run constantly that I could easily see them tinkering with off-peak hydrogen production to keep turning a profit by shrinking the difference between base and peak power demands.
Nuclear waste that has to be protected with armed guards from Osama and his boys for 184000 years doesn't come cheap.
I think you need to knock off all the zeros in there. As I've pointed out other times, there are methods to reduce the time needed to around 300 years, in actuality long before that it wouldn't be useful in a dirty bomb. It's 300 years until it reaches the ambient radiation of the original ore it was refined from. At the same time, we'd get 100 times the power from the material.
Armed security guards for that small an amount of material are indeed pretty cheap.
No insurance company has ever agreed to insure a nuclear power plant. A nuclear plant is too risky to insure. Congress had to step in and pass a law that limits the owner's liability
Sure about that? You might want to actually read up on the price-anderson act. It requires plants to carry the maximum insurance offered by private companies. That's currently $300 million.
Also, before the feds step in, there's also a 9.5 billion fund set up by the plant owners themselves. The way the act is structured, that funding goes up if new plants are built(each plant has to contribute 95.8 million to the fund).
Do you realize that your car insurance has limits? Heck, I have the 'premium' car insurance liability. It caps out at $250k medical expenses per person, $500k combined if I cause an accident with injuries. God forbid somebody pulls a farmer's market type accident and hit 50 people. 500k would run out real quick in that case, then who steps up to pay? Generally the state/feds.
Oh, and until very recently the Price-Anderson act was the only 'subsidy' enjoyed by the nuclear power industry. They've also had to pay a fee per kw/h produced for Yucca mountain, but haven't gotten to actually store any waste there so far. There was a subsidy added that's similar to those enjoyed by solar and wind, to help offset the upfront capital and certification costs. They're now planning a number of new reactors at already existing power plants.
Here is the fundamental problem: there is no such thing as a fail-safe system. Sure, better designs can tack on a extra '9' to the statistics before failure - but it *will* fail - and the risk is far greater than other forms of energy. (And the nuclear industry has a string of failures in its history, up to and including critical failure - in case you think nuclear is immune to statistics).
Critical point: The present alternative, coal, is presently blamed for 24k deaths/year in the USA from respitory ailments alone. This is without addressing other safety aspects, failure modes, global warming, etc.
Sure, accidents happen, but the nuclear industry has a very good safety record. Nuclear power currently has the best safety record and lowest injury rate per kw/h produced.
Even solar and wind have potential fatalities, and it adds up when you're talking about millions of wind turbines.
Nuclear power presents trade-offs, none of them good. There is no magic pill with nuclear power, you can shift around some of the downsides, but it still ends up with a *whole lot* of down sides. Don't get me wrong, I think it is interesting science, but a good choice of power it isn't.
No good tradeoffs? How about being essentially carbon-neutral? Non-polluting? Able to provide rated power better than 95% of the time; whenever you want it?
Integral Fast reactors don't change that fact. They switch some failure modes for others (high pressure water for tons of liquid sodium), which sound good until a real one is actually built.
Sure, there's issues. It's a new design. That's why I'd build a test reactor first, preferably somewhere remote where even a truly stupendous failure wouldn't contaminate much affects humans/wildlife.
They output waste that is usable in nuclear weapons (don't be misled, IRF levels of Pu 240 doesn't make the best bombs or the most predictable yields, but it can still make a reasonable bomb good enough for terrorism). IRFs can be used to breed Pu 239 to very high grade if the user or rogue state chooses to as well. And "Proliferation resistant because the waste is so hot", is like calling a bug a feature.
99.5% efficiency. The Pu isn't pulled out on a regular basis, indeed most of it is also 'burned' in the reactor along with the rest of the fuel. For that matter, even light water reactors can be used for weapon production, just not as easily. At this point I feel that proliferation concerns for plants built in the USA and other first world nations to be missing the mark. Some refining and you stick the Pu and such right back into the reactor.
Given the many problems and risks, and poor economy associated with nuclear power it would only be acceptable if there were no other alternatives.
Poor economy? Nuclear power at this point is cheaper than most coal power. The reason it ended up being so expensive was that we didn't have any type certifications, so each station had to start at step 1 for getting permits for permit applications, and we let construction be haulted for practically every little concern expressed in a letter.
The thing is... there are alternatives! Renewables already are building more capacity annually then nuclear worldwide, they have similar economics or are more economical (despite vastly lower subsidies and research funding), have better energy-returns-on-energy-investment, better security, no major safety issues, are decentralizable, etc, etc, etc. Now why would I want to build nuclear power plants?
Nuclear power, properly done, is one of the cheapest per kw/h, easily beating solar. In most locations as well, you have to install at least 3-4 watts of capacity to match 1 watt of nuclear. Right now renewables have better economy because they ARE massivly more subsidized than nuclear and decentralization allows smaller installs. Still, I've read that we'll have massive problems with our infrastructure if solar/wind become more than 5% of our power
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Building a reserve inplies an excess to income beyond your expenses. I had a house in one local becuase I was stationed there. While it was rented, the rental market was soft and therefore the rent covered the mortgage and realty agency costs (the house was in Florida, I was in NM....hard to manage from afar). The agency was useless and while I terminated the contract with cause (their failure to collect the rent and notify me of issues violated the contract we had), I was still left with financial hole at the end.
Like I said, welcome to self employment. Depending on many factors, over half fail in the first three years. I'm sorry for your loss, but my parents lost a lot of money due to job shifts(we moved a lot, frequently shortly after buying a home) and the dot com bust. Dad had invested in a mutual fund that was supposed to stay away from those businesses(dad knew trouble was coming), but well, the activly managed fund violated it's preciptus and was trading in those stocks to get better numbers. When the crash hit... Well, the managers were fired and such, but Dad couldn't recover his money. Stuff happens, you deal with it as best you can.
I was a young E-5 at the time. Just promoted a short while prior to that. The lower grades do not get paid much.
Guess what? I'm an E-5 at the moment. I have a very good idea what your pay is like. I also just effectivly paid cash for my first house. Borrowed some money out of my TSP to cover the rest. Now, yes, it's an incredably cheap house, but still structurally sound. As for the rest of your rant... I know your situation. I'm living it. And yes, I have a reserve sitting in my bank account.
As far as minumum wage increasing unemployment and inflation....well, you may want to do some more research.
I have done research, that's how I came to believe that. It's very simple math, actually. When the minimum wage goes up, businesses look to keep their costs down by decreasing employment. They fire people, in other words. Somebody who might be worth employing at $5/hour might not be worth it at $7.50/hour(california minimum). I saw it at the local McDonalds when average labor costs went up. They stopped toasting their buns at the store and went to 'pre-toasted'. You don't see those tiny-tile mosiacs in stalled in buildings anymore. Why? It costs too much in labor to make them.
Inflation increases because where the labor cannot be eliminated or reduced(even if it reduces the quality of the product), but their payroll increases, they usually end up increasing the cost of their products. IE that value-meal costs more. The cost of goods goes up, that's real world inflation.
The real way to increase wealth? Increase productivity. That's the true way to increase our standard of living. Reducing the man-hours required to make a car from over a thousand to under a hundred(to include part creation) is a good start.
Belief is not enough reason to deprive other people. (isn't that what the religious nuts want to do? Require all of us to follwo their beliefs?)
I believe that increasing minimum wage is, overall, an incredibly bad thing to do. It increases unemployment and inflation, increasing the cost of living for the rest of us and load on government services. Heck, for that matter it helps drive businesses overseas. It's all inter-related.
An increase in wages can stimulate spending (bringing down inflation...increasing profits, allowing expansion) by giving people enough money to spend. Even Henry Ford realized that unless workers could afford a Model T, he would not sell very many. His workers were paid a rate that would allow them to be able to afford a car.
Henry Ford, by paying what he did, also got an incredibly skilled, dedicated, and loyal workforce. He could afford to pick the cream of the crop. You should also note that he didn't fuel most of his car sales through his workforce. What happened in that time was a sort of labor shorta
LZip is not RAR, and I like lossless compression.
I like my programs to work.
Effective in the 'Is this a lethal agent' and 'Do I need to be in MOPP 4?' sense.
If yes, it's a chemical weapon. If it's supposed to prevent malaria by killing all the mosquitos, than it isn't a CW.
Whether it's long term safe for developing children isn't what the paper's for.
Not only that, but you can sacrifice compression to create recovery capability in the case of lost/corrupted data, especially in the newer ones.
Missing part 3 of 10? No problem!
Of course, I'm a holder of a license for Rar from way back when. I like it.
To an extent it also depends on how well funded the city's street painting division is.
I've seen areas with divider lines that was like 'Why'd they bother?'.
Still, there are some areas where they don't bother to paint or place speed signs in residential areas, and that was probably what the original poster was talking about. I'd also imagine that he'd be okay with reductions for construction zones.
There's no reason any marked road should have a limit lower than 35, nor should a 4+ lane road ever go below 45.
I have no problem with serious residential areas being limited to 25. For areas where houses have their driveways facing four lane roads, or even standard arterial roads, it's time to start buying them out, or putting an access ally in behind them.
If every on the interstate is going 70 and the posted limit is 55, driving 70 is dangerous.
I think that you meant drive 55 would be dangerous
Studies have shown that differences in speed are more dangerous than high speeds alone.
If everybody else is doing 70, you're safest doing 70 as well.
In too many localities police will usually let a local resident off with a warning while ripping others off.
Not to mention that in many of the smaller communities the cops essentially recognize all the town's cars, thus don't even bother pulling them over for a warning, assuming they aren't stupid speeding (75 in a 45 type stuff). 5-10 mph, not a problem.
Man, after reading his story on wikipedia and straight dope I'm sorry to have learned that he's died.
It sounds like he would have been really interesting to talk to.
From my understanding, it also tends to mess up cell walls, thus making it actually effective enough in killing microbes that 'anti-bacterial' soap isn't really an improvement over the standard stuff.
Sounds like chemical weapon detection paper; it'll false positive on quite a few chemicals.
For example, it's pretty much guarenteed to change color to indicate a nerve agent in the presence of any pesticide, or even the bug repellent DEET.
Of course, most pesticides are a form of nerve agent; they're just effective against bugs instead of mammals.
There are better test systems, but they're orders of magnitude more expensive, require more maintenance and skill to operate, and are slower than the paper.
So they put the paper all over and if any show positive they use the better detector to verify.
Sounds like it might be a good idea to let the officers know that the test tends to false positive on soap. So testing that shampoo bottle is a waste of time, as long as it actually contains shampoo.
I really agree with the original poster. What does it mean to crack a player? Will people be able to make copies of the movies? How? It would have to be something that disables OHCD and allows unencrypted viewing at high resolutions. I suspect that will be more like a box that you add on the outside that has a connection in that negotiates an encrypted channel and a connection out that goes to your media center unencrypted.
From what I understand, it's a big public/private key system. Each DVD has it's own key. Each player has it's own key. There is a lookup table on each DVD with the DVD decrypt code encrypted using the public player keys. The player uses it's private code to decrypt the DVD code, which can then be used to decrypt the DVD video for playback. When they revoke a key it's no longer in the lookup table, thus can't obtain the decrypt code.
Once you have the private player key; whether it's software or hardware, you'd be able to use that key in 'players' that don't conform to the DVD association's rules. Like copying, re-encoding, playing to unencrypted outputs at full resolution.
As for your outside box, yeah, that's a great idea. Of course, the DVD association is likely to go after them like how macrovision went after the v-sync box makers. I think that macrovision ended up loosing(why the boxes are still available) was that the box manufacturers managed to prove that their devices really did clean up the signal and improve the picture by a perceptable amount in a statistically significant amount. It probably didn't help macrovision that there was a population that could tell macrovisioned movies even though it supposably didn't mess up the picture.
Of course what will happen is that some of the keys will be used for illegal software players. What they will do is go after the people using the illegal player probably and not do anything to their clients. Rationalize it that way.
Going after the people using the illegal player would be difficult; there's no need to 'phone home' to allow them to trace it. Though there was the incident where Dish network attempted to sue everybody who bought deloopers from a company that they managed to get sales records from. I believe that they ended up getting slammed hard; they sued a number of people with no dishes and even a few with no TVs.
They're more likely to go after the manufacturers of the device; after all, if you make physical hardware you have to have a manufacturing point, and a way for customers to get ahold of you to exchange money for a device, a mailing address for example. That's how Nintendo and Sony managed to get a few mod chip makers.
Then again they (RIAA/Studios/etc) really are stupid and will force the hardware manufacturers to recall the units or brick them. THAT would be suicide but they have been slowly doing it anyway.
That's where an active hacking community and an open source updatable independant player would be nice. Everytime a key is cracked, they add it to the list that the player can attempt for playing a disc. By clean-rooming the standard and avoiding any relevant patents, the DVD companies actually can't sue. Well, that's probably changed under the DMCA though.
Also, people forget the only people who need a converter box are people who watch TV with rabbit ears. They probably aren't going to spend the extra cash for HD sets.
You're right. I'm a techno-geek, yes, but I'm also an incredible skinflint when it comes to money. I don't have cable, as we have it at work and the gym and I've never been impressed with them enough to be willing to give them $40/month for it. Same deal with satTV.
As for why you're getting the HDTV signals - fairly small market is the ideal. With the big cities you have more target audience; the TV stations can afford to divvy them up more among specialized and competing channels. Yet you also have enough audience to justify going hdtv.
On the other hand - like you said, you have six SD channels to three HD stations. The majority are still SD.
The odds of a hardware player being blacklisted are slim.
This is part of the reason I REALLY want to see some hardware player keys cracked. Preferably for a nice, expensive, popular, non-updateable player.
So that they know that if they blacklist the player, they'll be looking at a lawsuit*, having to perform a recall(expensive), and/or a substantial return rate on the new DVDs because they won't play.
*Just because
The average Joe (who shops at Wal-Mart) will own an HD television?
You'd be suprised; the local TV section is about 50-50 for HD and SD. The HD section looks to be 2/3rds the TV section, but that's because HDTVs average substantially larger. 50" HDTVs aren't uncommon, and they minimize out at around 20". For STDVs they max out around 36", and min out around 12"(kitchen tubes?).
And I seriously doubt Walmart stocks anything that doesn't sell.
You're correct. Current predictions have the television companies actually not having all HD stations, or even mostly HD stations. It's a matter of marketing and bandwidth. They can fit something like 4-8 regular broadcast stations into the amount of spectrum it takes to broadcast one HDTV signal. Add in that do you really need your news in HDTV, that props*, makeup, and cameras are all cheaper for SDTV, and the huge amount of programming available only in SDTV.
For example, all the new TVs I've looked at walmart now have the digital tuners required for the new signal. Many of them are SDTV in resolution, they'll simply downsample a HD signal if you want to watch one. They're also a quarter of the price of a similiarly sized HDTV set.
The changeover is going to happen in 2009. There are some signs that you may even be able to get the converter box for free with the federal coupons out there. The Billions of dollars made available by selling off the freed frequencies will be the main reason for it to happen. Personally I'm hoping to see some new business and wireless devices spring up to take advantage of the frequencies made available.
*Artifacts such as wires that are invisible in standard definitions can be very visible in HDTV, as well as sloppy makup jobs, etc...
it's all the logistics involved in producing two separate discs
They're already doing that and more. For the foreseeable future all HD releases, whether blueray or HDDVD, will be accompanied with a DVD release, much like the transition to DVD from VHS for a number of years. So you run off a few more thousand DVD discs, and run them over to the assembly line along with the HDDVD discs.
For that matter, the majority of DVDs I buy come in multiples, as I buy mostly seasons. 6 DVDs in one package.
I'll bet that the cost of manufacturing a 2-disc set is significantly higher than producing a single-sided one; personally, I'd rather screw the artwork on the discs and save the money. They're just buckets for bits anyway.
Personally I'd prefer not to have to worry about reading small print in order to identify which side I want down, or to figure out which disc it is in order to put it back in the correct case.
Thing is, to chemically contaminate plutonium is actually pretty difficult; for the amount of power you can still get from it in a IFR type reactor there's some pretty high bars. One method is to mix it with other isotopes of plutonium that aren't as nice for bomb making. An IFR burns those just fine.
But yeah, we're talking future energy sources here. With what's happening in Iran and NKorea, as well as more quietly elsewhere, the nuclear club is expanding. Time to stop worrying so much about proliferation, or to at least take intelligent steps for it. Using as much of the current 'waste' as fuel as possible is a big step towards that.
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It's messed me up before as well.
Just curious, where would the somethings be, or wouldn't they substantially change your wording?
Or did I answer your questions?
Just curious, where did you get your figure? Joule is a measurement of energy, just like kw/h. Specifically, 1 joule = 2.7778 ×107 kw/h.
Most figures I've seen place nuclear power at around $1-2/watt for installed capacity. Solar is $10/watt peak capacity Because solar and wind are lucky to produce 50% of their rated power(most solar installs are lucky to get 25%), while nuclear is getting 90-95% of their rated power on average. This means you have to install at least two watts to match nuclear. Making solar ten times as expensive as nuclear, oh yeah, and it doesn't work at night.
The nuclear power industry, by law, pays a fee to the federal government per kw/h produced by nuclear sources in exchange for a promise from the feds that they'll dispose of the waste. And it's no where near infinite; current requirements* are incredibly overkill. For the latter half of the 10k years, the danger of the heavy metals would exceed that of the radioactivity of them, not to mention that we have ash piles from coal plants sitting around that are more radioactive than what the waste will be by that point.
Real world, they add some more on top of it for above-ground casks and such because the feds have, so far, failed to dispose of any waste.
Or, to put it another way, $1 invested into a savings account at 5% will turn into $148 in a hundred years. Dump enough money into investments and you can afford to pay for 'continuing care'.
Over the long term, no matter what is determined to be, the cost will always be more than anything else because storage is per year, forever. In 10000 years, we will not even be using a comparable monetary currency anyway, so any attempt at calculation is ridiculous.
Assuming, of course, that we let it sit there for that long. I believe that we're far more likely to haul the stuff back out for reprocessing and additional fuel use within a couple centuries at most. The reactors now in service get ~1% of the possible energy out of the rods. Something like an IFR can use the current 'waste' as fuel, get 99.5% of the possible energy out of it, leaving radioactive remains that are highly radioactive; but will die down to ambient in around 300 years. With the differences in fuel usage, a storage pool** capable of holding 20 years of waste with today's light water reactor would be able to hold well over a thousand years worth of waste for the IFR plant. If/when the plant is shut down, move it to a combined facility or another plant. There'll be room. For the older stuff(>20 years), you can stick it in an aboveground casket for not much money, then pay only minimal attention to it.
*IE no more radioactive than ambient for the ore it was refined from. It's still generally composed of heavy metals, which are chemically toxic. But then, anybody playing that deep should know about that.
**Something like an olympic sized swimming pool, but about 10 times as deep.
I still think everything about the Chernobyl disaster was pure idiocy.
I'll agree with that. That's the main reason that I don't include Chernobyl as frequently as possible. I researched it back in high school, reading several reports and watched a multi-hour documentary. For example: how they managed to get pictures of the pile down in the sub-basement was interesting as well as scary. I wouldn't want to get that close to it, not even in extra heavy radiation suits. But the radiation is so bad it kills robots, and the Russian scientists don't have enough money to keep replacing tools. Back on subject, I concluded from that that Chernobyl was an inherently unsafe design, lacked proper secondary containment, the USSR failed to have necessary maintenance and training performed. On top of this, as you noted, they decided to run an experiment where they ran the core in a non-normal mode with half the safety equipment disabled. I generally drop most of this stuff because, well, they've already written many hundreds of multi-hundred page reports on it.
The issue is that it gives a false perception of the operational safety of the reactor itself. When it's the containment structure that's saving us, but people don't realize that, public support for reactors without containment structure allows for the construction of unsafe reactors.
Most of the time it's not the reactor itself that's suffers a penetration, it's the piping for the coolant. We've come a long way since the 70's(when most of our reactors were designed) in our knowledge of flow mechanics and corrosion. The reactor designs(pebble bed) that they propose not having a contaiment vessel for are gas-cooled designs that use a gas that doesn't pick up radioactivity from neutron bombardment like helium. Positive pressure ensures that valves can be closed to prevent any leak from allowing other gasses into the reaction chamber. Still, I'd rather have the building armored, at the least.
A containment breach is the most common type of nuclear accident. The reported safety of the PBMRs is that, if there's a breach, they can be air cooled. That's no comfort, given their use of a graphite moderator.
From my reading, it seems like the definition of a contaiment breach is radioactive materials getting out of their primary containment. It doesn't even have to be at a nuclear plant; it can also happen at reprocessing facilities, for example.
You want truly scary? Look up all the medical radiation accidents.
Besides, I believe that their right in that the linear harm model for radiation is seriously flawed. Given the amount of radiation that people are exposed to all the time simply by enviromental sources, a little extra in rare circumstances aren't bad. It's no different than many hazardous chemicals. Sure, the procedures are different, and the harm model occasionally different, but it ends up being the same. There are chemicals out there that, with a single drop on a hand protected by a latex glove, will still be fatal within a week(read about that incident in Discover, so no web link).
Nuclear reactor safety isn't that great, but even if it was, one disaster is devastating. Not for loss of life -- there's generally plenty of time to relocate people before the dosages become too severe. It's the huge swaths of countryside that it renders unlivable. At least the Chernobyl accident was in a largely rural area (still cost the USSR 16B$), and Chazhma bay in the middle of nowhere.
While they ended up evacuating the city, there are still people living in the exclusion zone of the greater chernobyl area. Studies have shown that they have lower illness rates than similar age groups in the nearby inhabited industrial city.
Besides, didn't you just say that Chernobyl was caused because the USSR was dumber than dumb? I mean TMI was a safer design in comparison, and we've improved since. Our worst case possibility is still far better than Chernobyl.
Like I've been saying: I'd rather trade our real world, continuing deaths due to pollution for the lower than lottery odds of a nuclear power plant disaster coming anywhere near even the death toll of one year of coal power.
A more minor example would be human life expectancy greater than 50 years.
Very good observation. We've developed techniques and alternatives to for pretty much anything we do today; For example we could shift entirely away from oil if we had to.
Still; a major factor for why we haven't is expense. There are plenty of nice clean production methods that aren't used right now because it uses electricity, which even as cheap as it is, is still too expensive to be economical.
Cut the cost of electricity enough and hydrogen starts making sense. Chop the cost enough and electrified rail makes sense in many more areas. Greenhouses become more economical than shipping fruits and vegitables from Mexico and South America to the Northern USA and Canada.
Solar and wind has it's place, but if I could I'd replace every coal plant with a nuclear plant to clean up our baseload power supplies. It's so economical to run constantly that I could easily see them tinkering with off-peak hydrogen production to keep turning a profit by shrinking the difference between base and peak power demands.
Nuclear waste that has to be protected with armed guards from Osama and his boys for 184000 years doesn't come cheap.
I think you need to knock off all the zeros in there. As I've pointed out other times, there are methods to reduce the time needed to around 300 years, in actuality long before that it wouldn't be useful in a dirty bomb. It's 300 years until it reaches the ambient radiation of the original ore it was refined from. At the same time, we'd get 100 times the power from the material.
Armed security guards for that small an amount of material are indeed pretty cheap.
No insurance company has ever agreed to insure a nuclear power plant. A nuclear plant is too risky to insure. Congress had to step in and pass a law that limits the owner's liability
Sure about that? You might want to actually read up on the price-anderson act. It requires plants to carry the maximum insurance offered by private companies. That's currently $300 million.
Also, before the feds step in, there's also a 9.5 billion fund set up by the plant owners themselves. The way the act is structured, that funding goes up if new plants are built(each plant has to contribute 95.8 million to the fund).
Do you realize that your car insurance has limits? Heck, I have the 'premium' car insurance liability. It caps out at $250k medical expenses per person, $500k combined if I cause an accident with injuries. God forbid somebody pulls a farmer's market type accident and hit 50 people. 500k would run out real quick in that case, then who steps up to pay? Generally the state/feds.
Oh, and until very recently the Price-Anderson act was the only 'subsidy' enjoyed by the nuclear power industry. They've also had to pay a fee per kw/h produced for Yucca mountain, but haven't gotten to actually store any waste there so far. There was a subsidy added that's similar to those enjoyed by solar and wind, to help offset the upfront capital and certification costs. They're now planning a number of new reactors at already existing power plants.
Here is the fundamental problem: there is no such thing as a fail-safe system. Sure, better designs can tack on a extra '9' to the statistics before failure - but it *will* fail - and the risk is far greater than other forms of energy. (And the nuclear industry has a string of failures in its history, up to and including critical failure - in case you think nuclear is immune to statistics).
Critical point: The present alternative, coal, is presently blamed for 24k deaths/year in the USA from respitory ailments alone. This is without addressing other safety aspects, failure modes, global warming, etc.
Sure, accidents happen, but the nuclear industry has a very good safety record. Nuclear power currently has the best safety record and lowest injury rate per kw/h produced.
Even solar and wind have potential fatalities, and it adds up when you're talking about millions of wind turbines.
Nuclear power presents trade-offs, none of them good. There is no magic pill with nuclear power, you can shift around some of the downsides, but it still ends up with a *whole lot* of down sides. Don't get me wrong, I think it is interesting science, but a good choice of power it isn't.
No good tradeoffs? How about being essentially carbon-neutral? Non-polluting? Able to provide rated power better than 95% of the time; whenever you want it?
Integral Fast reactors don't change that fact. They switch some failure modes for others (high pressure water for tons of liquid sodium), which sound good until a real one is actually built.
Sure, there's issues. It's a new design. That's why I'd build a test reactor first, preferably somewhere remote where even a truly stupendous failure wouldn't contaminate much affects humans/wildlife.
They output waste that is usable in nuclear weapons (don't be misled, IRF levels of Pu 240 doesn't make the best bombs or the most predictable yields, but it can still make a reasonable bomb good enough for terrorism). IRFs can be used to breed Pu 239 to very high grade if the user or rogue state chooses to as well. And "Proliferation resistant because the waste is so hot", is like calling a bug a feature.
99.5% efficiency. The Pu isn't pulled out on a regular basis, indeed most of it is also 'burned' in the reactor along with the rest of the fuel. For that matter, even light water reactors can be used for weapon production, just not as easily. At this point I feel that proliferation concerns for plants built in the USA and other first world nations to be missing the mark. Some refining and you stick the Pu and such right back into the reactor.
Given the many problems and risks, and poor economy associated with nuclear power it would only be acceptable if there were no other alternatives.
Poor economy? Nuclear power at this point is cheaper than most coal power. The reason it ended up being so expensive was that we didn't have any type certifications, so each station had to start at step 1 for getting permits for permit applications, and we let construction be haulted for practically every little concern expressed in a letter.
The thing is... there are alternatives! Renewables already are building more capacity annually then nuclear worldwide, they have similar economics or are more economical (despite vastly lower subsidies and research funding), have better energy-returns-on-energy-investment, better security, no major safety issues, are decentralizable, etc, etc, etc. Now why would I want to build nuclear power plants?
Nuclear power, properly done, is one of the cheapest per kw/h, easily beating solar. In most locations as well, you have to install at least 3-4 watts of capacity to match 1 watt of nuclear. Right now renewables have better economy because they ARE massivly more subsidized than nuclear and decentralization allows smaller installs. Still, I've read that we'll have massive problems with our infrastructure if solar/wind become more than 5% of our power
Presumably this floating reactor would be built such that the core would remain intact even if it lost bouyancy and sunk.
If nothing else, having an ocean on top of it would help keep cooling up.