An aqueous suspension of thorium dioxide is in no way, shape or a form a "liquid metal". It would be like calling that aqueous suspension of iron oxide (otherwise know as "red house paint") a "liquid metal".
Progressives are under no illusion about the Democrats in general and Obama in particular being corporatist sell-outs. The complete lack of prosecutions of Wall Street by the Obama Administration says all that needs to be said to make that case.
Winning our democracy, our economy, our society back from corporate control is a daunting project, not even begun yet. I know some elements of the Tea Party agree, but are they willing to make common cause on this?
15TW = 15,000 Nuclear Reactors. (Approx. one accident a month.)
Just a comment about your curious sig: what does it mean?
World electrical production averages 2.3TW, 1/7 of the strange number you cite.
Your accident rate is apparently one per 1250 reactor-years. Given that "accident" is undefined your rate could be anything at all, counting worker injury incidents I am sure the rate is far higher than you propose.
If you mean a major accident with serious consequences, the current rate for the 436 power reactors currently in operation appears to be about 12 times less frequent than you cite (around one per 15,000 reactor years), all such accidents that have ever occurred were with old designs that are (or in the case of Fukushima, should have been) retired or upgraded. Restricted to modern reactors (nearly all now in operation), the serious accident rate is unknown, there never having been one.
But 2.3TW = 2,300 Nuclear Reactors. (Approx. one accident >7 years), being roughly 100 times less alarmist doesn't make a catchy sig does it?
Yes indeed. Locally they are monopolies. Nationwide it is an oligopoly, and all cable providers pitch in to maintain it. Owning a money machine beats having to compete. That requires innovation and efficiency, and cuts profit margins. Corporate America hates that.
Ah, the imaginary "third competitor" capitalized at the necessary tens of billions of dollars (to set up a meaningful competitive network) that does not already have highly profitable monopoly turf to defend in an unspoken "gentleman's agreement" with other cable providers. Who would that be, now?
Cable companies are goverment enforced monopolies in most of the country....
In my community the local government is trying to get Verizon FIOS to lay cable and provide service to challenge Charter, but Verizon is not interested.
Cable companies like to claim their monopolies are "enforced" by government, but really cable companies are perfectly happy with having the map carved up into highly profitable monopoly fiefdoms.
Not having insurance does not mean you're using the ER as your insurance. The fix is to repeal that law, not to force others to pay for the freeloaders.
Not having insurance does indeed mean you're using the ER as your insurance. If you believe that this obvious fact is not a fact, you should provide a reason for your belief.
That you feel the appropriate remedy, for what you claim is a non-existent problem, is to repeal the law requiring ER treatment indicates that you do indeed believe people without insurance are using the ER as their insurance.
A few of problems with this proposed remedy:
It means that no one gets treated at an ER unless they can produce proof of insurance on the spot. This has serious implications for the health and safety of every American including the insured (though fine with the "Let 'em die crowd.)
It vaporizes the favorite rationale of Republican politicians for why U.S. health care is just fine and dandy. G.W. Bush (2007): "I mean, people have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room.” Mitt Romney (2012): "If someone has a heart attack, they don’t sit in their apartment and die. We pick them up in an ambulance, and take them to the hospital, and give them care."
It means that people without insurance actually will "just die".
Until fiber optic cable cable to the home is as common as copper it won't be a suitable replacement for POTS.
I *almost* agree. Saying we should keep POTS until it can be replaced with fiber, however, is like saying everyone should stick with driving Yugos until it becomes feasible for everyone to buy a Ferrari. Wireless technologies are a good interim solution until fiber can be deployed ubiquitously, especially in very low density areas.
And I *almost* agree with this. I have this one caveat: that a wireless interim solution actually be implemented before POTS is killed. If the data transmission corporations want to kill POTS they should be eager to cooperate in setting up an adequate replacement in terms of coverage, accessibility and reliability.
No, not At&T chairman, nor even a former At&T chairman. Instead is the former President and CEO of the National Cable Television Association (NCTA) and former President and CEO of the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association (CTIA). Head of both the cable and cell phone industry lobbying groups! What's not to love?
Life expectancy isn't a very good measurement of a healthcare system.........
The world medical community would disagree. What is your real, excellent, true measure of a healthcare system? Number of people with coverage? (Ooh... we don't do well at all there.) Anything else come to mind?
Interesting that you bring up Japan. The life expectancy for Japanese living in the U.S. is greater than the life expectancy of Japan.
Please post a link to back up this claim so that we know you aren't making it up, or grossly distorting the facts.
You tried to pass off an outrageous falsehood farther up this page by claiming (without providing a link, naturally) that US health care inflation started right after Medicare began in 1965, rather than telling the truth that the inflation began 17 years later, a couple of years after Reagan's election and the start of the "corporate greed is good" era.
Given your history of deception, we need to see you link to evidence to believe your statements.
Actually, if you look at medical costs over the long haul you discover an interesting fact. Until 1965 medical costs rose at the same rate as inflation.
Since 1965 medical costs have risen much faster than inflation. In 1965, Medicare and Medicaid were first implemented. The evidence suggests that Medicare and Medicaid are distorting the market for medical care in such a fashion as to disrupt the normal price feedback mechanism of a free market.
Woefully (and inexcusably) misinformed or simply a brazen liar? You be the judge.
The mysterious 17 year lag after Medicare before the health care cost explosion began completely destroys the claim you make. Some other changes in how society functions, beginning, oh, around 1981 perhaps would seem to be the cause. Oh, whatever could that correlate too?
So Attila you going to cop to being grossly in error or a liar? Or you going to recycle this lie again in the future? It is one thing to have a different opinion and real facts to support it, it is quite another to go Fox News on this site and just throw at lies hoping they will stick.
Nope. K-Mart owns Sears. The combined company is called "Sears Holdings" simply because K-Mart thought the historic Sears brand was more valuable. Sears went under and is now a K-Mart division.
The most sour moment for me with my interaction with Blockbuster (other than the time they tried to charge me late fees for a movie I never rented) was with "gift rental coupons". My spouse gave me a sheet of these rental coupons as a gift, a few dozen perhaps, which I used at a rate of one or two a month, until 6 months after I received them when I was told "sorry, these have expired". These coupons weren't gifts from Blockbuster, they weren't discounted in any way, they were full fee rentals that were simply pre-paid. They were being given a free loan by my spouse, and then the defaulted on the principal!
Was there fine print about expiration? Sure, but it was indeed fine print. Their promotion and sales material for the coupons never mentioned their limited lifespan, and who would expect that a full-fee pre-paid service would "expire" in a matter of months before it was used?
Who'd buy a company that's lost money over its entire existence and is only making operating profit on old products that it's about to replace?
Someone who believes that they could manage that line of business profitably.
Profitable business lines sell at a premium. Money losing ones sell at a discount. Lots of entrepreneurial individuals and businesses buy money losing businesses at a discount and turn them around.
Do you believe Microsoft did and is doing the best of all possible strategies and executions with the XBox, and that no one could do better? A buyer would bet that the answer to that is "no".
Here is the scoop on the 70" telescope. Mike Clements purchased a polished but uncoated mirror that is 70" across that was intended for a spy satellite project that was cancelled. A huge uncoated mirror is not a telescope anymore than (car analogy - wait for it...) a V8 engine is a racecar. Building a good performing telescope (collimation tolerances are measured in thousandths of an inch) is a significant task, a huge telescope like this is a major engineering feat. What's more this is a transportable telescope. It is possibly the biggest transportable telescope in the world. This telescope is more powerful than any telescope that existed before 1917 (when the 100" Hooker telescope saw first light).
Successfully silvering the mirror using updated 19th Cedntury mirror coating technology was nifty too.
Google is being helpful in training/educating us not to rely on their free products for anything important.
Google DeskTop search? Downloads were disabled with only a days warning. No really adequate replacement has really come forward since (I would guess Recoll is the best of the lot). The "rationale" offered seems to be white-wash for a decision to "encourage" us to store our data in their cloud.
Then iGoogle. Is so expensive for Google to run iGoogle servers? Really?
All the other services they have turned off are perhaps less significant due to smaller user bases, but they teach their lessons to users also.
Before becoming dependent on a Google service, you need to keep a back-out strategy in your pocket.
An astoundingly false statement. Functional cartels are all around us, raking in excess profits from the restraint of competition.
Two examples: the US Pharmaceutical Industry and the oil refining industry.
Many generic drugs have only a single manufacturer, and thus no price competition what with foreign drug imports effectively banned (those Canadian drugs will kill you I says!). Surely competitors will jump in crank out those generics and bring prices down, no? No. There is a quid pro quo observed in practice not to poach another manufacturers "turf", and "considerations" (payoffs) of various kinds are common to make it worthwhile for a generic manufacturer not to start production of another guys profit center.
Oil refiners are careful to keep net capacity at just barely what is needed to service the normal market. That way every time a plant shuts down due to weather, accident, or even scheduled maintenance, there is a sudden shortage and prices for gasoline shoot up sharply overnight, before slowly returning to normal once the outage is fixed. Ka-ching! For decades the claim is constantly heard: "We can't expand because of those environmentalists I tells you!" despite there being no actions restricting capacity increases, and the fact that oil refiners actually do build new plants when it lowers their costs, they just shut down enough capacity to keep it in short supply.
By and large businesses prefer guaranteed profits to competition and without effective regulation markets naturally tend toward monopolization and cartels. The trusts did not bust themselves.
(I could bring up the Visa/Mastercard payment processing duopoly. And everyone here surely knows about the Microsoft Tax that still exists on most desktops and laptops.)
That sounds unreasonable.
I could understand if you had to pay the US government $1500 or something (5% of 30000).
But why would you have to pay taxes over something someone else has already taxed you on?
Ah, the theory of Immaculate Taxation! That corporate and investment income originates in the sanctified state of "already having been taxed" which frees it from ever having to pay a penny of taxes ever again. Indeed a mere penny of taxation levied on a million dollar revenue stream somewhere along the line makes it immune from ever having to bear taxes again (or at least if holy taxation writ were faithfully observed).
Fusion power has been 20 years away for something like 60 years now. It is progress that we're down to only 15 years away. Hopefully by 2053 we'll be down to just 10 years away.
No, you misunderstand. ITER is not predicting fusion power in 15 years. They are predicting a gigantic laboratory experiment that will: Not. Produce. Any. Electricity. Whatsoever.
ITER declares itself to be a model for a far more expensive fusion prototype power plant called DEMO for which even the conceptual design will not be seen for years, and could not produce grid electricity before the 2040s, which is, wait for it, still more than 25 years away!
Once DEMO has been built and has been put into operation is will be proven that since the capital cost for the breeding blanket alone dwarfs the cost of even fission reactors it will be the most expensive source of electricity in the world, costing more than solar power does today.
Slashdot Mirror
An aqueous suspension of thorium dioxide is in no way, shape or a form a "liquid metal". It would be like calling that aqueous suspension of iron oxide (otherwise know as "red house paint") a "liquid metal".
A bit trollish, yes?
Progressives are under no illusion about the Democrats in general and Obama in particular being corporatist sell-outs. The complete lack of prosecutions of Wall Street by the Obama Administration says all that needs to be said to make that case.
Winning our democracy, our economy, our society back from corporate control is a daunting project, not even begun yet. I know some elements of the Tea Party agree, but are they willing to make common cause on this?
15TW = 15,000 Nuclear Reactors. (Approx. one accident a month.)
Just a comment about your curious sig: what does it mean?
World electrical production averages 2.3TW, 1/7 of the strange number you cite.
Your accident rate is apparently one per 1250 reactor-years. Given that "accident" is undefined your rate could be anything at all, counting worker injury incidents I am sure the rate is far higher than you propose.
If you mean a major accident with serious consequences, the current rate for the 436 power reactors currently in operation appears to be about 12 times less frequent than you cite (around one per 15,000 reactor years), all such accidents that have ever occurred were with old designs that are (or in the case of Fukushima, should have been) retired or upgraded. Restricted to modern reactors (nearly all now in operation), the serious accident rate is unknown, there never having been one.
But 2.3TW = 2,300 Nuclear Reactors. (Approx. one accident >7 years), being roughly 100 times less alarmist doesn't make a catchy sig does it?
Oligopoly not just a fun word to say.
Yes indeed. Locally they are monopolies. Nationwide it is an oligopoly, and all cable providers pitch in to maintain it. Owning a money machine beats having to compete. That requires innovation and efficiency, and cuts profit margins. Corporate America hates that.
Ah, the imaginary "third competitor" capitalized at the necessary tens of billions of dollars (to set up a meaningful competitive network) that does not already have highly profitable monopoly turf to defend in an unspoken "gentleman's agreement" with other cable providers. Who would that be, now?
Cable companies are goverment enforced monopolies in most of the country....
In my community the local government is trying to get Verizon FIOS to lay cable and provide service to challenge Charter, but Verizon is not interested.
Cable companies like to claim their monopolies are "enforced" by government, but really cable companies are perfectly happy with having the map carved up into highly profitable monopoly fiefdoms.
Not having insurance does not mean you're using the ER as your insurance. The fix is to repeal that law, not to force others to pay for the freeloaders.
Not having insurance does indeed mean you're using the ER as your insurance. If you believe that this obvious fact is not a fact, you should provide a reason for your belief.
That you feel the appropriate remedy, for what you claim is a non-existent problem, is to repeal the law requiring ER treatment indicates that you do indeed believe people without insurance are using the ER as their insurance.
A few of problems with this proposed remedy:
G.W. Bush (2007): "I mean, people have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room.”
Mitt Romney (2012): "If someone has a heart attack, they don’t sit in their apartment and die. We pick them up in an ambulance, and take them to the hospital, and give them care."
Until fiber optic cable cable to the home is as common as copper it won't be a suitable replacement for POTS.
I *almost* agree. Saying we should keep POTS until it can be replaced with fiber, however, is like saying everyone should stick with driving Yugos until it becomes feasible for everyone to buy a Ferrari. Wireless technologies are a good interim solution until fiber can be deployed ubiquitously, especially in very low density areas.
And I *almost* agree with this. I have this one caveat: that a wireless interim solution actually be implemented before POTS is killed. If the data transmission corporations want to kill POTS they should be eager to cooperate in setting up an adequate replacement in terms of coverage, accessibility and reliability.
No, not At&T chairman, nor even a former At&T chairman. Instead is the former President and CEO of the National Cable Television Association (NCTA) and former President and CEO of the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association (CTIA). Head of both the cable and cell phone industry lobbying groups! What's not to love?
Life expectancy isn't a very good measurement of a healthcare system.........
The world medical community would disagree. What is your real, excellent, true measure of a healthcare system? Number of people with coverage? (Ooh... we don't do well at all there.) Anything else come to mind?
Interesting that you bring up Japan. The life expectancy for Japanese living in the U.S. is greater than the life expectancy of Japan.
Please post a link to back up this claim so that we know you aren't making it up, or grossly distorting the facts.
You tried to pass off an outrageous falsehood farther up this page by claiming (without providing a link, naturally) that US health care inflation started right after Medicare began in 1965, rather than telling the truth that the inflation began 17 years later, a couple of years after Reagan's election and the start of the "corporate greed is good" era.
Given your history of deception, we need to see you link to evidence to believe your statements.
Actually, if you look at medical costs over the long haul you discover an interesting fact. Until 1965 medical costs rose at the same rate as inflation.
Indeed they did. They also rose at the same rate as inflation from 1965 all the way to 1982!
Since 1965 medical costs have risen much faster than inflation. In 1965, Medicare and Medicaid were first implemented. The evidence suggests that Medicare and Medicaid are distorting the market for medical care in such a fashion as to disrupt the normal price feedback mechanism of a free market.
Woefully (and inexcusably) misinformed or simply a brazen liar? You be the judge.
The mysterious 17 year lag after Medicare before the health care cost explosion began completely destroys the claim you make. Some other changes in how society functions, beginning, oh, around 1981 perhaps would seem to be the cause. Oh, whatever could that correlate too?
So Attila you going to cop to being grossly in error or a liar? Or you going to recycle this lie again in the future? It is one thing to have a different opinion and real facts to support it, it is quite another to go Fox News on this site and just throw at lies hoping they will stick.
Ebionites you say?!
Now the matter is perfectly clear!
You forgot the part about doing it on Friday night after work, and the single long line you had to stand in to conclude your rental.
Don't count Sears out. They own K-Mart now...
Nope. K-Mart owns Sears. The combined company is called "Sears Holdings" simply because K-Mart thought the historic Sears brand was more valuable. Sears went under and is now a K-Mart division.
The most sour moment for me with my interaction with Blockbuster (other than the time they tried to charge me late fees for a movie I never rented) was with "gift rental coupons". My spouse gave me a sheet of these rental coupons as a gift, a few dozen perhaps, which I used at a rate of one or two a month, until 6 months after I received them when I was told "sorry, these have expired". These coupons weren't gifts from Blockbuster, they weren't discounted in any way, they were full fee rentals that were simply pre-paid. They were being given a free loan by my spouse, and then the defaulted on the principal!
Was there fine print about expiration? Sure, but it was indeed fine print. Their promotion and sales material for the coupons never mentioned their limited lifespan, and who would expect that a full-fee pre-paid service would "expire" in a matter of months before it was used?
...I'm surprised Heinlein didn't embrace eugenics while he was sketching out his vainglorious utopia....
His interest in Eugenics shows up in other works. Methuselah's Children, Time Enough for Love, primarily.
Who'd buy a company that's lost money over its entire existence and is only making operating profit on old products that it's about to replace?
Someone who believes that they could manage that line of business profitably.
Profitable business lines sell at a premium. Money losing ones sell at a discount. Lots of entrepreneurial individuals and businesses buy money losing businesses at a discount and turn them around.
Do you believe Microsoft did and is doing the best of all possible strategies and executions with the XBox, and that no one could do better? A buyer would bet that the answer to that is "no".
Here is the scoop on the 70" telescope. Mike Clements purchased a polished but uncoated mirror that is 70" across that was intended for a spy satellite project that was cancelled. A huge uncoated mirror is not a telescope anymore than (car analogy - wait for it...) a V8 engine is a racecar. Building a good performing telescope (collimation tolerances are measured in thousandths of an inch) is a significant task, a huge telescope like this is a major engineering feat. What's more this is a transportable telescope. It is possibly the biggest transportable telescope in the world. This telescope is more powerful than any telescope that existed before 1917 (when the 100" Hooker telescope saw first light).
Successfully silvering the mirror using updated 19th Cedntury mirror coating technology was nifty too.
Google is being helpful in training/educating us not to rely on their free products for anything important.
Google DeskTop search? Downloads were disabled with only a days warning. No really adequate replacement has really come forward since (I would guess Recoll is the best of the lot). The "rationale" offered seems to be white-wash for a decision to "encourage" us to store our data in their cloud.
Then iGoogle. Is so expensive for Google to run iGoogle servers? Really?
All the other services they have turned off are perhaps less significant due to smaller user bases, but they teach their lessons to users also.
Before becoming dependent on a Google service, you need to keep a back-out strategy in your pocket.
Cartels always break down. Think about it.
An astoundingly false statement. Functional cartels are all around us, raking in excess profits from the restraint of competition.
Two examples: the US Pharmaceutical Industry and the oil refining industry.
Many generic drugs have only a single manufacturer, and thus no price competition what with foreign drug imports effectively banned (those Canadian drugs will kill you I says!). Surely competitors will jump in crank out those generics and bring prices down, no? No. There is a quid pro quo observed in practice not to poach another manufacturers "turf", and "considerations" (payoffs) of various kinds are common to make it worthwhile for a generic manufacturer not to start production of another guys profit center.
Oil refiners are careful to keep net capacity at just barely what is needed to service the normal market. That way every time a plant shuts down due to weather, accident, or even scheduled maintenance, there is a sudden shortage and prices for gasoline shoot up sharply overnight, before slowly returning to normal once the outage is fixed. Ka-ching! For decades the claim is constantly heard: "We can't expand because of those environmentalists I tells you!" despite there being no actions restricting capacity increases, and the fact that oil refiners actually do build new plants when it lowers their costs, they just shut down enough capacity to keep it in short supply.
By and large businesses prefer guaranteed profits to competition and without effective regulation markets naturally tend toward monopolization and cartels. The trusts did not bust themselves.
(I could bring up the Visa/Mastercard payment processing duopoly. And everyone here surely knows about the Microsoft Tax that still exists on most desktops and laptops.)
That sounds unreasonable. I could understand if you had to pay the US government $1500 or something (5% of 30000). But why would you have to pay taxes over something someone else has already taxed you on?
Ah, the theory of Immaculate Taxation! That corporate and investment income originates in the sanctified state of "already having been taxed" which frees it from ever having to pay a penny of taxes ever again. Indeed a mere penny of taxation levied on a million dollar revenue stream somewhere along the line makes it immune from ever having to bear taxes again (or at least if holy taxation writ were faithfully observed).
Well, maybe you should try this much more venerable, thorough, and entertaining encyclopedia of unmaintainable code tips. Should make you as immovable as the CEO's firstborn.
He has an unfair advantage in the area of unmaintainable code since he is writing about C/C++.
Not only is Richard F. Post not fictional, but he has a famous (or semi-famous) daughter: the actress Markie Post of "Night Court" fame!
Fusion power has been 20 years away for something like 60 years now. It is progress that we're down to only 15 years away. Hopefully by 2053 we'll be down to just 10 years away.
No, you misunderstand. ITER is not predicting fusion power in 15 years. They are predicting a gigantic laboratory experiment that will: Not. Produce. Any. Electricity. Whatsoever.
ITER declares itself to be a model for a far more expensive fusion prototype power plant called DEMO for which even the conceptual design will not be seen for years, and could not produce grid electricity before the 2040s, which is, wait for it, still more than 25 years away!
Once DEMO has been built and has been put into operation is will be proven that since the capital cost for the breeding blanket alone dwarfs the cost of even fission reactors it will be the most expensive source of electricity in the world, costing more than solar power does today.