Even if price of Netflix was zero, what would be the point of filling up forms and watching ads, when you can get better quality from some torrent or DD site?
Most people have a conscience. There is a threshold level of social responsibility that, if not overcome by unreasonable terms, will cause people to suffer a level of inconvenience for the sake of legitimacy. I don't know anybody who downloads anything from The Pirate Bay which is also available on Hulu, for example.
Of course, as long as movie studios are screwing us over with high prices, bought-and-paid-for legislation and draconian DRM, people will fail to feel sorry for them when they download movies without paying for them.
I guess we're supposed to forget that they're a multi-billion dollar advertising company with a history of violating privacy rights
Google gets plenty of shit for privacy violations, and most of it is well deserved.
But most of the anti-Google propaganda, isn't. The WiFi data collection thing is a perfect example. The real privacy problems Google has are to do with collecting everything you do with their services, but all their main competitors do exactly the same thing so they have no room to complain. But as soon as Google does something that isn't anywhere near as serious, like capturing unencrypted WiFi traffic on unlicensed spectrum, all of a sudden there is this huge investigation -- because their competitors (mainly Microsoft) can point to something that Google did that they haven't, so they can complain about it without fearing that the investigation will get turned around and end up focusing on their own practices.
I also think a lot of the pro-Google comments come because the things people attack Google for are so inane, and you get lots of people defending them because the attacks are such blatant frivolous astroturf and sour grapes from competitors. Like the stories we keep getting from Florian Mueler, e.g. that they're distributing stripped Linux headers and claiming they aren't copyrightable so they're going to be in trouble, except that if you ask the free software people whose copyrights are allegedly being infringed they say that what Google is doing is not a violation and is common practice.
google just needs to announce whatever they patent without patenting it
The problem is that not all patents can be easily invalidated. If Microsoft sues Google over the FAT32 patents, Google isn't going to have any internal prior art -- they didn't even exist when Microsoft filed for that patent. But if they patent a bunch of search-related stuff, Bing will be infringing it. So then if Microsoft comes after them for FAT32, they can go after Microsoft for Bing, and in the end it all cancels out. And since both companies know that, they don't generally sue each other. But if Google didn't file for patents, they wouldn't be able to cancel out their competitors' patents and they would be in trouble -- unless we got rid of software patents, in which case all of these companies could fire their armies of patent lawyers, stop wasting engineers' time with patent filings and save everyone a huge pile of money.
I'm sure you know that the objection was to the software (apparently intentionally) breaking the equivalent Google API, not to its being created or shipped on actual phones.
I just can't imagine not carrying my flash drive because I have a 10" tablet. I wouldn't loan an iPad, but would leave a flash drive in someone's computer. Also, now I need a cable. I just don't see how an iPad replaces a flash drive in any way what-so-ever, and I don't think software was the limiting factor.
It doesn't replace a flash drive in every possible circumstance you would possibly want to use a flash drive. It replaces a flash drive when you don't already have a flash drive. When I'm about to walk out the door with my iPad to see my buddy and he calls and tells me to bring that zip file with me, I don't want to have to go to the store and buy a flash drive and then come back home and put the file on it.
I guess... but that's only half true. If you have any of the apps that exist to share/store files, they can expose themselves through iTunes to allow you to move files in and out from a PC. GoodReader, for example, is a great app that does just this. So iTunes CAN do this, but Apple provides no default app to do this on the iPad itself.
OK, sure. I concede the point.
I'm not really that interested in the specific instance here. My intent was to make the point that as a general rule, the attitude of "you're a geek, no one should care about you" is ridiculous and myopic. Making life difficult for the early adopters and the people everyone goes to for help is rarely a winning strategy. And it goes as much for Motorola and AT&T and everyone else as it does for Apple.
Haven't we been over this? Parts of Android are licensed under the GPL (mostly the Linux kernel) but most is under the Apache license. They've released the modifications to the GPL bits as required and the Apache license doesn't require them to release the rest.
Of course, what they really ought to do is just release the whole thing under the GPL in the meantime. Then the open source people are happy but it keeps the manufacturers from making immature devices because they don't want to distribute their modified versions and in so doing be required to publish the source to the changes, so they'll want for the "official, final" release under the Apache license.
Because locked phones piss off customers and they might decide to use some other OS instead.
The thing with Android at this point is that as long as there is customer demand for it, the carriers and manufacturers will supply it, because if they don't their competitors will. At least until AT&T finishes buying T-Mobile so that Verizon can buy Sprint and then AT&T-Mobile can merge with Sprizon and stop worrying about that whole competition thing.
It's kind of ironic how the problem seems to have been created by Google (and really, Android before them) choosing the Apache license rather than the GPL. The manufacturers keep installing all of their crapware because they think it makes their devices distinct so that they can compete on something other than price. Or at least get some money from spammers for putting their spam on your phone. If they had to distribute their modifications then they wouldn't have the incentive to fork for the sake of forking, and the community would have a spam-free version of any positive modifications running in about 30 seconds.
1) There are dozens and dozens of apps that will allow you to store files. Air Sharing is the one I use. There are MANY, and they all support a variety of ways to connect to your Mac, PC or Linux box. Plus there's DropBox and all the online ones with iPad native clients.
DrXym is complaining that iTunes can't do it when it trivially could, not that it isn't possible. To which danaris claims that there is no reason to want to do that anyway. Well, there is. Which is why those apps exist.
2) Seriously? A $500 to $900 iPad is the portable device that's really screaming to be used to transport files from one physical place to another? Maybe a $20 USB stick or a 50 cent DVD or a $1 BluRay or a free DropBox accounts might be an efficient way to go on this one.
Yes, obviously no one will buy an iPad when all they need is a flash drive. But if you already have an iPad, it would be nice if it could obviate the need for also having a flash drive.
What would they do with a zip file or a copy of their Civ 5 saved game on it, anyway?
Use it to transport the file from one place to another, since the portable device is portable?
This whole concept of "it doesn't matter what you want because you know what you're doing" is complete crap. Even if your average fool can't figure out how to do something useful, everybody knows a geek. When they see the geek do something useful with the device, they get wowed and ask how to do it. If the device is not intentionally designed to get in the geek's way, the answer will end up being something like "click on this and drag that there" and the fool will be able to wrote memorize it and use it in the future. If the device is intentionally designed to get in the geek's way, the answer will start with "jailbreak your device" and proceed to involve a command line and disassembling part of the device. You can't tell me the latter is an advantage for the non-geek.
Here in Germany the liberal-conservative govt extended the running time to keep the 7 oldest plants online even though we have enough power surplus to shut down 9 nuke plants before we need to import any power.
The idea that you have 9 plants worth of surplus capacity sounds extremely suspicious to me. My intuition is that you export the extra power to neighboring countries. Do they have enough enough capacity that you can shut down the plants? Just because you have enough for your own country doesn't mean you want to cause a regional shortage or instigate a diplomatic incident by cutting off electricity to neighboring countries that don't have alternative sources.
You have failed to improve the efficiency of a space heater. All you've done is add a second energy source. A heat pump needs a heat source. If you count the energy required to warm the heat source then the efficiency is the same: 100%. In some cases this can bring about a cost savings, because the heat source is provided by an energy source less expensive than electricity (e.g. the sun), but it isn't an efficiency improvement.
More significantly, in important cases there is no trivial heat source available. You usually want a heater because it's cold. But if everything is cold, where is your heat source? There is a reason most buildings in cold climates don't use heat pumps for heating.
Also, the stuff we have sitting in cooling pools was dug out of the ground at some point. Just because it is ready to go now doesn't mean that there aren't death statistics associated with it.
Right, but the cost has already been paid. Building plants to use the fuel we already have won't cause additional mining deaths because it won't cause additional mining. We could build newer reactors, run them for their entire e.g. 50 year lifespan and still not have run out of the U-238 that we already have.
I'm not sure how material the distinction is. The difference in energy content is still measured in orders of magnitude.
Also, the mining thing is a bit of a red herring anyway. We have tons and tons of U-238 sitting in cooling pools next to older reactors and plutonium from decommissioned bombs that we need to get rid of. We can build new reactors that run on the waste from older reactors without having to dig anything new out of the ground.
My analysis of the situation was covered in a different post [slashdot.org] in this thread.
That stuff is just speculative efficiency improvements. Sure, you take what you can get, but that's not always enough and you can't just count on a black swan event occurring without any assurance that it will.
Moreover, there are some things that you just can't make significantly more efficient. Good luck trying to improve the efficiency of a space heater. And it's not like demand for energy goes down when efficiency goes up anyway -- try making engines more efficient and see what happens. You might get some small reduction in demand, but really people just buy bigger cars and put more miles on them.
It's even possible in some cases for efficiency improvements to cause actual total energy consumption to go up. Suppose there are two ways of doing something, but one is labor intensive and the other is energy intensive. Hardly anyone uses the energy intensive method because it's very energy intensive and the labor intensive method is slightly cheaper. Now you improve the energy efficiency of the energy intensive method by some amount which is enough to make it cheaper than the labor intensive method. So you've got e.g. a 20% reduction in energy consumption per unit, but you're immediately doing 5000% more units because a relatively small efficiency improvement can cause a massive spike in demand when you cross the threshold of being cheaper than a substitute.
Something I think deserves more attention is the lock-in phenomenon: once you have an infrastructure around a certain technology, it's very difficult to change to something else, even if it's significantly better. Uranium vs. thorium is one such example...
It's definitely real, but it's not like it's just a cognitive bias that we need to get over. There are reasons for it. Making a car that runs on gasoline and is 20% more efficient than existing cars is way better than making a car that runs on methane or hydrogen and is 20% more efficient than existing cars. If existing cars ran on methane or hydrogen the reverse would be true.
The problem isn't just that people are accustomed to existing technologies (although that's part of it), the bigger issue is that conversions are extremely expensive. You have to retrofit fueling stations, mechanics have to buy new tools and go back to school, manufacturers have to retool their plants, we need a new distribution network, etc. So in order for a new, different technology to be adopted over improvements to the existing technology, it has to be not only better but a lot better -- enough to exceed the (substantial) conversion costs. And most aren't.
Why would they operate a reactor at lower capacity just because it's going to be shut down soon? You shut it down when it comes time to shut it down. It's not like they were decommissioning it because it could no longer generate at design capacity.
Moreover, the extensions are exactly what I'm talking about -- you have to replace the generating capacity before you can shut down old plants. If more newer plants were being built then the extensions would be unnecessary.
I guess buying a modern, safe nuclear reactor wasn't really on the top of his to do list, and mothballing the Fukushima reactors before the quake would have been unthinkable, they provided about 20% of the total power used in northern Honshu.
The first reactor was scheduled to be shut down on march 26th 2011., the others over the next decade. You can't do it all at once because you need time to build new plants to replace the capacity.
Which, incidentally, is the main reason that so many old reactors are still running. Nobody will let them build new ones, so how can you shut down the old ones?
OK, so when we get [cold fusion|hot fusion|dyson sphere|perpetual motion] working at a commercial scale then we'll use that. Any suggestions for the meantime?
The energy content in one ton of uranium using 1960s reactors is roughly equivalent to 16,000 tons of coal. Using newer reactors that consume U-238 as well as U-235, a ton of uranium will produce more energy than a million tons of coal.
Assuming coal mining kills 5000 people a year and uranium mining kills as many people per ton, to produce the same amount of electricity you're looking at less than one mining death every 3 years for 1960s plants and one death every 200 years with newer plants.
Actually there are almost none. Pretty much every iPad app that also has an iPhone version has a very different layout on the iPad.
You've got some serious selection bias going on. The apps that someone has bothered to write a separate version of are the ones that benefit from having a separate version.
First, that the United States will default on treasury bonds, those IOUs you suggested are worthless, unpayable "loans". If that happens, we'll have a much bigger problem than people not getting social security checks.
The problem isn't that they're going to default on the debt, the problem is what they'll have to do to avoid defaulting. It causes the opposite of what happened when the baby boomers were paying in: Instead of there being a huge debt sink to absorb borrowing, you have the social security trust dumping bonds on the market, which sucks money out of the general fund when they get redeemed and makes it very expensive to issue more bonds to cover the shortfall.
Congress would have to raise taxes while cutting spending just to break even. Which is a high-efficiency method for committing economic suicide.
Second, that the baby boomer-caused depletion of the fund is permanent, which it is not. That generation has started to collect and will generally follow a bell curve as their population ages and dies off (end of the boom was 1964, SS is projected as solvent at least until 2040, perhaps 2050, making the very last of the boomers 76, or just under current life expectancy) . The following retiring generation is far less populous and will allow the fund to stabilize.
The value of bonds in the fund is actually a red herring. There is no difference between the social security fund paying checks by redeeming bonds with the treasury which pays the bonds with money out of the general fund, and the social security trust running out of bonds so that the treasury has to pay the money out of the general fund. The real question is, where does the treasury get the money?
The problem, at the end of the day, is this: Add up the money you pay in social security tax and the money you pay in other taxes that go toward paying principle and interest on bonds redeemed by the social security trust in a given year. Call this the effective social security tax rate.
The effective tax rate is going up.
And it's worse than people think, because intuition is to count from zero and look at how many bonds they're redeeming, but that won't get you a fair picture of the year-over-year increase in the effective cost of social security. In past years they were buying bonds. If you want to compare today and tomorrow with yesterday you have to look at the number of bonds they're going to sell and add in the number of bonds that they're not buying anymore, and you get a very not small number.
It's a temporary and manageable crisis, not the "pyramid scheme" politicians will lie to you about so that you get scared into supporting the privatized accounts which their donors desire.
The Republicans are idiots. Privatized accounts would be a monstrous catastrophe. The social security trust would have to sell a truly epic number of bonds from the trust on the open market in order to get the money to buy the private securities. It would certainly be good for the stock market, but at the cost of inducing a bankruptcy of the federal government. That amount of dumping of bonds would cause the interest rate for new federal debt to explode. You think it's bad now when they're paying $400B in interest on the debt every year, see what happens when it's double that.
I'm more than happy to discuss adjusting my tax rate upwards if it makes sense, and I've never said there's no such thing an an unreasonable benefit cut.
Raising (presumably social security) taxes doesn't really fix it. It's just trading one tax for another. You have to find a way to make the ratio of total social security outlays to GDP go back to what it was before, even though there is now going to be a higher ratio of retirees to GDP.
I don't see where you've shown a causal relationship.There are a thousand things pushing against little sites like that. The popularity of Amazon as one-stop shopping for everything. Resistance of merchants to sites that promote price competition. Groupon. The "go big or go home" phenomenon where if you don't have money you can't advertise to get users so you don't have money, regardless of what competitors do.
And yet pricewatch.com is still there. If they can do it, why can't all these butthurt losers who are allegedly going out of business?
I suspect the problem is that Microsoft wants a Microsoft YouTube client so that Google can pay for the video bandwidth and Microsoft can collect the ad revenue.
So why doesn't Microsoft just do the same thing? Start scanning a bunch of books, wait until the Author's Guild or whoever sues them, then settle on the same terms.
The toolbar reported home that people were searching for a certain string and this was added to the search results.
The toolbar reported home the Google search results that people clicked on when searching for a certain string and this was added to the search results.
How is that not "Bing is copying Google search results"? I don't think you win much by saying that they only copy the results people click on.
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Even if price of Netflix was zero, what would be the point of filling up forms and watching ads, when you can get better quality from some torrent or DD site?
Most people have a conscience. There is a threshold level of social responsibility that, if not overcome by unreasonable terms, will cause people to suffer a level of inconvenience for the sake of legitimacy. I don't know anybody who downloads anything from The Pirate Bay which is also available on Hulu, for example.
Of course, as long as movie studios are screwing us over with high prices, bought-and-paid-for legislation and draconian DRM, people will fail to feel sorry for them when they download movies without paying for them.
I guess we're supposed to forget that they're a multi-billion dollar advertising company with a history of violating privacy rights
Google gets plenty of shit for privacy violations, and most of it is well deserved.
But most of the anti-Google propaganda, isn't. The WiFi data collection thing is a perfect example. The real privacy problems Google has are to do with collecting everything you do with their services, but all their main competitors do exactly the same thing so they have no room to complain. But as soon as Google does something that isn't anywhere near as serious, like capturing unencrypted WiFi traffic on unlicensed spectrum, all of a sudden there is this huge investigation -- because their competitors (mainly Microsoft) can point to something that Google did that they haven't, so they can complain about it without fearing that the investigation will get turned around and end up focusing on their own practices.
I also think a lot of the pro-Google comments come because the things people attack Google for are so inane, and you get lots of people defending them because the attacks are such blatant frivolous astroturf and sour grapes from competitors. Like the stories we keep getting from Florian Mueler, e.g. that they're distributing stripped Linux headers and claiming they aren't copyrightable so they're going to be in trouble, except that if you ask the free software people whose copyrights are allegedly being infringed they say that what Google is doing is not a violation and is common practice.
google just needs to announce whatever they patent without patenting it
The problem is that not all patents can be easily invalidated. If Microsoft sues Google over the FAT32 patents, Google isn't going to have any internal prior art -- they didn't even exist when Microsoft filed for that patent. But if they patent a bunch of search-related stuff, Bing will be infringing it. So then if Microsoft comes after them for FAT32, they can go after Microsoft for Bing, and in the end it all cancels out. And since both companies know that, they don't generally sue each other. But if Google didn't file for patents, they wouldn't be able to cancel out their competitors' patents and they would be in trouble -- unless we got rid of software patents, in which case all of these companies could fire their armies of patent lawyers, stop wasting engineers' time with patent filings and save everyone a huge pile of money.
I'm sure you know that the objection was to the software (apparently intentionally) breaking the equivalent Google API, not to its being created or shipped on actual phones.
I just can't imagine not carrying my flash drive because I have a 10" tablet. I wouldn't loan an iPad, but would leave a flash drive in someone's computer. Also, now I need a cable. I just don't see how an iPad replaces a flash drive in any way what-so-ever, and I don't think software was the limiting factor.
It doesn't replace a flash drive in every possible circumstance you would possibly want to use a flash drive. It replaces a flash drive when you don't already have a flash drive. When I'm about to walk out the door with my iPad to see my buddy and he calls and tells me to bring that zip file with me, I don't want to have to go to the store and buy a flash drive and then come back home and put the file on it.
I guess... but that's only half true. If you have any of the apps that exist to share/store files, they can expose themselves through iTunes to allow you to move files in and out from a PC. GoodReader, for example, is a great app that does just this. So iTunes CAN do this, but Apple provides no default app to do this on the iPad itself.
OK, sure. I concede the point.
I'm not really that interested in the specific instance here. My intent was to make the point that as a general rule, the attitude of "you're a geek, no one should care about you" is ridiculous and myopic. Making life difficult for the early adopters and the people everyone goes to for help is rarely a winning strategy. And it goes as much for Motorola and AT&T and everyone else as it does for Apple.
Haven't we been over this? Parts of Android are licensed under the GPL (mostly the Linux kernel) but most is under the Apache license. They've released the modifications to the GPL bits as required and the Apache license doesn't require them to release the rest.
Of course, what they really ought to do is just release the whole thing under the GPL in the meantime. Then the open source people are happy but it keeps the manufacturers from making immature devices because they don't want to distribute their modified versions and in so doing be required to publish the source to the changes, so they'll want for the "official, final" release under the Apache license.
Because locked phones piss off customers and they might decide to use some other OS instead.
The thing with Android at this point is that as long as there is customer demand for it, the carriers and manufacturers will supply it, because if they don't their competitors will. At least until AT&T finishes buying T-Mobile so that Verizon can buy Sprint and then AT&T-Mobile can merge with Sprizon and stop worrying about that whole competition thing.
It's kind of ironic how the problem seems to have been created by Google (and really, Android before them) choosing the Apache license rather than the GPL. The manufacturers keep installing all of their crapware because they think it makes their devices distinct so that they can compete on something other than price. Or at least get some money from spammers for putting their spam on your phone. If they had to distribute their modifications then they wouldn't have the incentive to fork for the sake of forking, and the community would have a spam-free version of any positive modifications running in about 30 seconds.
1) There are dozens and dozens of apps that will allow you to store files. Air Sharing is the one I use. There are MANY, and they all support a variety of ways to connect to your Mac, PC or Linux box. Plus there's DropBox and all the online ones with iPad native clients.
DrXym is complaining that iTunes can't do it when it trivially could, not that it isn't possible. To which danaris claims that there is no reason to want to do that anyway. Well, there is. Which is why those apps exist.
2) Seriously? A $500 to $900 iPad is the portable device that's really screaming to be used to transport files from one physical place to another? Maybe a $20 USB stick or a 50 cent DVD or a $1 BluRay or a free DropBox accounts might be an efficient way to go on this one.
Yes, obviously no one will buy an iPad when all they need is a flash drive. But if you already have an iPad, it would be nice if it could obviate the need for also having a flash drive.
What would they do with a zip file or a copy of their Civ 5 saved game on it, anyway?
Use it to transport the file from one place to another, since the portable device is portable?
This whole concept of "it doesn't matter what you want because you know what you're doing" is complete crap. Even if your average fool can't figure out how to do something useful, everybody knows a geek. When they see the geek do something useful with the device, they get wowed and ask how to do it. If the device is not intentionally designed to get in the geek's way, the answer will end up being something like "click on this and drag that there" and the fool will be able to wrote memorize it and use it in the future. If the device is intentionally designed to get in the geek's way, the answer will start with "jailbreak your device" and proceed to involve a command line and disassembling part of the device. You can't tell me the latter is an advantage for the non-geek.
Here in Germany the liberal-conservative govt extended the running time to keep the 7 oldest plants online even though we have enough power surplus to shut down 9 nuke plants before we need to import any power.
The idea that you have 9 plants worth of surplus capacity sounds extremely suspicious to me. My intuition is that you export the extra power to neighboring countries. Do they have enough enough capacity that you can shut down the plants? Just because you have enough for your own country doesn't mean you want to cause a regional shortage or instigate a diplomatic incident by cutting off electricity to neighboring countries that don't have alternative sources.
You have failed to improve the efficiency of a space heater. All you've done is add a second energy source. A heat pump needs a heat source. If you count the energy required to warm the heat source then the efficiency is the same: 100%. In some cases this can bring about a cost savings, because the heat source is provided by an energy source less expensive than electricity (e.g. the sun), but it isn't an efficiency improvement.
More significantly, in important cases there is no trivial heat source available. You usually want a heater because it's cold. But if everything is cold, where is your heat source? There is a reason most buildings in cold climates don't use heat pumps for heating.
Also, the stuff we have sitting in cooling pools was dug out of the ground at some point. Just because it is ready to go now doesn't mean that there aren't death statistics associated with it.
Right, but the cost has already been paid. Building plants to use the fuel we already have won't cause additional mining deaths because it won't cause additional mining. We could build newer reactors, run them for their entire e.g. 50 year lifespan and still not have run out of the U-238 that we already have.
I'm not sure how material the distinction is. The difference in energy content is still measured in orders of magnitude.
Also, the mining thing is a bit of a red herring anyway. We have tons and tons of U-238 sitting in cooling pools next to older reactors and plutonium from decommissioned bombs that we need to get rid of. We can build new reactors that run on the waste from older reactors without having to dig anything new out of the ground.
My analysis of the situation was covered in a different post [slashdot.org] in this thread.
That stuff is just speculative efficiency improvements. Sure, you take what you can get, but that's not always enough and you can't just count on a black swan event occurring without any assurance that it will.
Moreover, there are some things that you just can't make significantly more efficient. Good luck trying to improve the efficiency of a space heater. And it's not like demand for energy goes down when efficiency goes up anyway -- try making engines more efficient and see what happens. You might get some small reduction in demand, but really people just buy bigger cars and put more miles on them.
It's even possible in some cases for efficiency improvements to cause actual total energy consumption to go up. Suppose there are two ways of doing something, but one is labor intensive and the other is energy intensive. Hardly anyone uses the energy intensive method because it's very energy intensive and the labor intensive method is slightly cheaper. Now you improve the energy efficiency of the energy intensive method by some amount which is enough to make it cheaper than the labor intensive method. So you've got e.g. a 20% reduction in energy consumption per unit, but you're immediately doing 5000% more units because a relatively small efficiency improvement can cause a massive spike in demand when you cross the threshold of being cheaper than a substitute.
Something I think deserves more attention is the lock-in phenomenon: once you have an infrastructure around a certain technology, it's very difficult to change to something else, even if it's significantly better. Uranium vs. thorium is one such example...
It's definitely real, but it's not like it's just a cognitive bias that we need to get over. There are reasons for it. Making a car that runs on gasoline and is 20% more efficient than existing cars is way better than making a car that runs on methane or hydrogen and is 20% more efficient than existing cars. If existing cars ran on methane or hydrogen the reverse would be true.
The problem isn't just that people are accustomed to existing technologies (although that's part of it), the bigger issue is that conversions are extremely expensive. You have to retrofit fueling stations, mechanics have to buy new tools and go back to school, manufacturers have to retool their plants, we need a new distribution network, etc. So in order for a new, different technology to be adopted over improvements to the existing technology, it has to be not only better but a lot better -- enough to exceed the (substantial) conversion costs. And most aren't.
Why would they operate a reactor at lower capacity just because it's going to be shut down soon? You shut it down when it comes time to shut it down. It's not like they were decommissioning it because it could no longer generate at design capacity.
Moreover, the extensions are exactly what I'm talking about -- you have to replace the generating capacity before you can shut down old plants. If more newer plants were being built then the extensions would be unnecessary.
I guess buying a modern, safe nuclear reactor wasn't really on the top of his to do list, and mothballing the Fukushima reactors before the quake would have been unthinkable, they provided about 20% of the total power used in northern Honshu.
The first reactor was scheduled to be shut down on march 26th 2011., the others over the next decade. You can't do it all at once because you need time to build new plants to replace the capacity.
Which, incidentally, is the main reason that so many old reactors are still running. Nobody will let them build new ones, so how can you shut down the old ones?
OK, so when we get [cold fusion|hot fusion|dyson sphere|perpetual motion] working at a commercial scale then we'll use that. Any suggestions for the meantime?
The energy content in one ton of uranium using 1960s reactors is roughly equivalent to 16,000 tons of coal. Using newer reactors that consume U-238 as well as U-235, a ton of uranium will produce more energy than a million tons of coal.
Assuming coal mining kills 5000 people a year and uranium mining kills as many people per ton, to produce the same amount of electricity you're looking at less than one mining death every 3 years for 1960s plants and one death every 200 years with newer plants.
Actually there are almost none. Pretty much every iPad app that also has an iPhone version has a very different layout on the iPad.
You've got some serious selection bias going on. The apps that someone has bothered to write a separate version of are the ones that benefit from having a separate version.
First, that the United States will default on treasury bonds, those IOUs you suggested are worthless, unpayable "loans". If that happens, we'll have a much bigger problem than people not getting social security checks.
The problem isn't that they're going to default on the debt, the problem is what they'll have to do to avoid defaulting. It causes the opposite of what happened when the baby boomers were paying in: Instead of there being a huge debt sink to absorb borrowing, you have the social security trust dumping bonds on the market, which sucks money out of the general fund when they get redeemed and makes it very expensive to issue more bonds to cover the shortfall.
Congress would have to raise taxes while cutting spending just to break even. Which is a high-efficiency method for committing economic suicide.
Second, that the baby boomer-caused depletion of the fund is permanent, which it is not. That generation has started to collect and will generally follow a bell curve as their population ages and dies off (end of the boom was 1964, SS is projected as solvent at least until 2040, perhaps 2050, making the very last of the boomers 76, or just under current life expectancy) . The following retiring generation is far less populous and will allow the fund to stabilize.
The value of bonds in the fund is actually a red herring. There is no difference between the social security fund paying checks by redeeming bonds with the treasury which pays the bonds with money out of the general fund, and the social security trust running out of bonds so that the treasury has to pay the money out of the general fund. The real question is, where does the treasury get the money?
The problem, at the end of the day, is this: Add up the money you pay in social security tax and the money you pay in other taxes that go toward paying principle and interest on bonds redeemed by the social security trust in a given year. Call this the effective social security tax rate.
The effective tax rate is going up.
And it's worse than people think, because intuition is to count from zero and look at how many bonds they're redeeming, but that won't get you a fair picture of the year-over-year increase in the effective cost of social security. In past years they were buying bonds. If you want to compare today and tomorrow with yesterday you have to look at the number of bonds they're going to sell and add in the number of bonds that they're not buying anymore, and you get a very not small number.
It's a temporary and manageable crisis, not the "pyramid scheme" politicians will lie to you about so that you get scared into supporting the privatized accounts which their donors desire.
The Republicans are idiots. Privatized accounts would be a monstrous catastrophe. The social security trust would have to sell a truly epic number of bonds from the trust on the open market in order to get the money to buy the private securities. It would certainly be good for the stock market, but at the cost of inducing a bankruptcy of the federal government. That amount of dumping of bonds would cause the interest rate for new federal debt to explode. You think it's bad now when they're paying $400B in interest on the debt every year, see what happens when it's double that.
I'm more than happy to discuss adjusting my tax rate upwards if it makes sense, and I've never said there's no such thing an an unreasonable benefit cut.
Raising (presumably social security) taxes doesn't really fix it. It's just trading one tax for another. You have to find a way to make the ratio of total social security outlays to GDP go back to what it was before, even though there is now going to be a higher ratio of retirees to GDP.
Most of the shopping sites have been killed off.
I don't see where you've shown a causal relationship.There are a thousand things pushing against little sites like that. The popularity of Amazon as one-stop shopping for everything. Resistance of merchants to sites that promote price competition. Groupon. The "go big or go home" phenomenon where if you don't have money you can't advertise to get users so you don't have money, regardless of what competitors do.
And yet pricewatch.com is still there. If they can do it, why can't all these butthurt losers who are allegedly going out of business?
I suspect the problem is that Microsoft wants a Microsoft YouTube client so that Google can pay for the video bandwidth and Microsoft can collect the ad revenue.
So why doesn't Microsoft just do the same thing? Start scanning a bunch of books, wait until the Author's Guild or whoever sues them, then settle on the same terms.
The toolbar reported home that people were searching for a certain string and this was added to the search results.
The toolbar reported home the Google search results that people clicked on when searching for a certain string and this was added to the search results.
How is that not "Bing is copying Google search results"? I don't think you win much by saying that they only copy the results people click on.