Yeah, and the "wiser" 9/11 morons only claim that "we need a new investigation", not that George Bush blew up the WTC with super-nano-thermite so that the CIA could destroy paperwork, the military could steal 500 quintillion dollars in gold, and Larry Silverstein could collect an insurance policy.
Okay, so you've decided that some questions aren't worth asking, fair enough. Where do you draw the line, though, since the asking of questions is absolutely vital to human growth? You only approve of questions within the boundaries of established science? How then is established science going to grow? Sometimes real discoveries are made entirely by accident, flying in from the wings, a phenomenon also known as serendipity. I don't know, in my opinion the more questions that are asked the better.
Mostly I come to slashdot to read the commentary, the actual summary isn't bothering me that much. In fact this just makes it harder to read. I'd be a lot more concerned that I can't click on links in threaded posts because the site now wants to just open every post in the thread above it first - stop that please! The KISS principle applie shere.
There are many, many more that come in under the 100MW mark. Like wind and solar power, even tidal power, its a process of transition from natural gas/coal/etc and improving technology over time. In a century, our descendants will look at fossil fuel energy generation in the same way we look at steam trains. An interesting example is the European supergrid concept, which envisions the whole of Europe's energy needs being supplied by wind power - technically this is feasable, and even financially doable as well, using HVDC and a combination of storage methods to ensure constant supplies of power. Top that off with the likes of DESERTEC and you're done.
Nuclear is nice and I definetely think we should keep researching it, but at $6 to $8 per watt final cost (and even higher) it's waaaay too expensive. The only way you can make that competitive is if you pay your workers slave labour rates and don't care about capital costs, health and safety, insurance and waste disposal, ie in China.
How many of these storage devices have been made or even planned?
Thousands, and the Chinese among others are rolling them out as fast as they can. It's called pumped storage hydro. Then there's on-grid storage, and several other macro storage solutions.
Okay, so belief in ghosts pretty much requires a belief in the supernatural, including various God concepts, right?
Not really, there are a whole lot of belief structures out there. You don't need to believe in gods to believe in spirits, or at least the kind of gods that created everything. Various tribal traditions work along those lines, where powerful spirits were more of a result of natural forces than the cause of them. An all powerful deity is just handier if you want to control people and take all their money. I'd say this is different to "ghost hunters" though, lots of them genuinely believe what they are peddling, and don't particularly seem to want to form a hierarchy of control. Relatively harmless.
Most of Asia would starve to death if they tried to live on potatoes They grow a third as many potatoes per acre in China as they do in Ireland, and a sixth in Vietnam. In Vietnam an acre of potatoes will not feed a family of four, but rice will easily. Milk is a stupid way to get Vitamin A you would need 2.2 liters per day to get the RDA, and the family of four would need milk from 1/4 cow and 1.25 additional acres for the 1/4 cow to graze on. Admit it, you don't know what you are talking about you Irish troll.
Actually upon rechecking the details, potato skins contain high amounts of vitamin A. As for troll, ah the perennial cry of the pwned.:D
Actually prior to 2000, per capita Irish alcohol intake was lower than the European average. Even now its not exceptional. You have to wonder why it is that these stereotypes keep getting pushed.
Heh, Ireland has one of the wettest climates in Europe. It's also typical for farmers to leave the potatoes in the ground over the winter in some areas.
"The chairmen, porters, and coalheavers in London, and those unfortunate women who live by prostitution, the strongest men and the most beautiful women perhaps in the British dominions, are said to be the greater part of them from the lowest rank of people in Ireland, who are generally fed with this root. No food can afford a more decisive proof of its nourishing quality, or of its being peculiarly suitable to the health of the human constitution."
"what the Board of Agriculture mentions as a fact of the greatest importance, that potatoes and water alone, with common salt, can nourish men completely"
"The potato, which in some points of view, may justly be regarded as one of the greatest blessings to our species, is capable of operating the greatest calamities, when it exclusively furnishes the food on which a community is content to exist"
"The small farmers live on potatoes and milk. It is considered that he is a very fortunate man if he has milk for his family. He sells his butter and never uses oatmeal in his house."
Eh that was the point - there was a huge overdependence on one crop, which enabled massive population growth, even with low tech farming methods. The crop was very good, very healthy, and very abundant. They weren't prepared for the blight, which was a kind of fungus I believe..
I think you may have missed the point I was making - factually, the Irish population exploded due to potatoes, and they were healthier and better fed than on any sort of grain. Japanese soldiers could not survive on that amount of rice per day, they had to supplement it with all sorts of other food, rice is not "potatoes but smaller and harder". The lack of vitamin A was why I mentioned milk. Here's an interesting site:
You could feed a family of four from an acre. Most of Asia uses rice because they've been doing it that way for a long, long time, and the spud has only relatively recently entered into eastern/western civilisation.
Rice has 4.8 times as many calories as potatoes by weight so it produces 3 times as many calories from the same piece of land. So they could plant 2/3 of their cropland with other crops to makeup for the nutritional deficiencies of rice and still have more calories and a more varied diet than if they planted only potatoes.
But if calories were all that mattered, we could just dine on beer and ice cream all day. As a metric for nutrition, it's not great. What potatoes provide is a lot more minerals and vitamins, hence the population explosion in Ireland pre-great famine. Also you only need look at the nutritional problems run into by the Japanese army towards the end of world war 2 to see the problems with rice. I think to a great extent rice is widely cultivated in Asia and South Asia because of cultural inertia more than anything else.
For those whom don't know anything about nutrition, I'll help explain that he's kidding.
Not at all, I personally know people who live perfectly happily on potatoes and eggs. The Irish potato famine was so severe because you had twice the population of modern day Ireland living on basically pre-industrialised farming method potato crops, and not much else, and the population was rapidly growing. The humble spud really is a superfood.
Healthy, well fed people tend to have a notable dislike for dictators however, its hard to rise up when you're starving to death. Thus feeding developing countries increases the likelihood of them solving the real problem for themselves.
In fact, the GP was correct - in general, increasing the numbers of freeways will tend to increase traffic because there is an increased flow over a wider area per unit time.
Nope, in most cases the roads in question are ring roads around populated areas. So what happens is the ring road becomes the new "outer limit" for useful urban development, and hence traffic increases as populations move there to take advantage of the infrastructure. The roads themselves do exactly what they say on the tin - reduce traffic. Some might say it's not a permanent solution, but unless you ban all growth and development, there is no permanent solution, just constantly shifting fixes.
We have access to almost limitless energy - covering 2% of the unpopulated areas of the Sahara with photovoltaic cells would supply 100% of the energy needs of the world. I'm not saying that's neccessarily a good idea (although DESERTEC are working on something similar), but the reality is we're drowning in energy, at various sites and from various sources around the world.
GM hybrid rice promises to increase 15% beyond the best variety currently available. The modification is pretty benign, the male flower is sterile so self pollination does not occur, and a hybrid can be generated. GM does not automatically mean bad, but there are a number of transgenic ones that are dubious value.
I never got this fascination with rice. All in all its a pretty poor staple foodstuff. What you want are potatoes, which contain most of the vitamins and minerals you need to stay alive. Indeed, people have thrived on just potatoes and milk, maybe with an odd egg or fish thrown in. Also the volume of food produced per area planted is enormous, and there should be zero problem with blight in this day and age. Then there's the way they are actually tasty - mashed potatoes, french fries, potato salad, waffles, its a neverending cascade of deliciousness.:D
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Yeah, and the "wiser" 9/11 morons only claim that "we need a new investigation", not that George Bush blew up the WTC with super-nano-thermite so that the CIA could destroy paperwork, the military could steal 500 quintillion dollars in gold, and Larry Silverstein could collect an insurance policy.
Okay, so you've decided that some questions aren't worth asking, fair enough. Where do you draw the line, though, since the asking of questions is absolutely vital to human growth? You only approve of questions within the boundaries of established science? How then is established science going to grow? Sometimes real discoveries are made entirely by accident, flying in from the wings, a phenomenon also known as serendipity. I don't know, in my opinion the more questions that are asked the better.
Mostly I come to slashdot to read the commentary, the actual summary isn't bothering me that much. In fact this just makes it harder to read. I'd be a lot more concerned that I can't click on links in threaded posts because the site now wants to just open every post in the thread above it first - stop that please! The KISS principle applie shere.
There are many, many more that come in under the 100MW mark. Like wind and solar power, even tidal power, its a process of transition from natural gas/coal/etc and improving technology over time. In a century, our descendants will look at fossil fuel energy generation in the same way we look at steam trains. An interesting example is the European supergrid concept, which envisions the whole of Europe's energy needs being supplied by wind power - technically this is feasable, and even financially doable as well, using HVDC and a combination of storage methods to ensure constant supplies of power. Top that off with the likes of DESERTEC and you're done.
Nuclear is nice and I definetely think we should keep researching it, but at $6 to $8 per watt final cost (and even higher) it's waaaay too expensive. The only way you can make that competitive is if you pay your workers slave labour rates and don't care about capital costs, health and safety, insurance and waste disposal, ie in China.
How many of these storage devices have been made or even planned?
Thousands, and the Chinese among others are rolling them out as fast as they can. It's called pumped storage hydro. Then there's on-grid storage, and several other macro storage solutions.
Nuclear is more heavly subisidised by far than wind or solar. You can find some interesting info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_new_nuclear_power_plants#Recent_construction_cost_estimates
Ongoing maintenance costs for onshore wind are actually lower than for nuclear.
Nuclear costs about two or three times as much as onshore wind, in terms of produced watts.
There's also pumped storage hydro, which is in wide use globally.
Okay, so belief in ghosts pretty much requires a belief in the supernatural, including various God concepts, right?
Not really, there are a whole lot of belief structures out there. You don't need to believe in gods to believe in spirits, or at least the kind of gods that created everything. Various tribal traditions work along those lines, where powerful spirits were more of a result of natural forces than the cause of them. An all powerful deity is just handier if you want to control people and take all their money. I'd say this is different to "ghost hunters" though, lots of them genuinely believe what they are peddling, and don't particularly seem to want to form a hierarchy of control. Relatively harmless.
Hey they just crossed ninjas with robots.
There is no bad here.
Most of Asia would starve to death if they tried to live on potatoes They grow a third as many potatoes per acre in China as they do in Ireland, and a sixth in Vietnam. In Vietnam an acre of potatoes will not feed a family of four, but rice will easily. Milk is a stupid way to get Vitamin A you would need 2.2 liters per day to get the RDA, and the family of four would need milk from 1/4 cow and 1.25 additional acres for the 1/4 cow to graze on. Admit it, you don't know what you are talking about you Irish troll.
Actually upon rechecking the details, potato skins contain high amounts of vitamin A. As for troll, ah the perennial cry of the pwned. :D
Actually prior to 2000, per capita Irish alcohol intake was lower than the European average. Even now its not exceptional. You have to wonder why it is that these stereotypes keep getting pushed.
Heh, Ireland has one of the wettest climates in Europe. It's also typical for farmers to leave the potatoes in the ground over the winter in some areas.
I think you'll find this article/video interesting:
http://180degreehealth.blogspot.com/2010/08/rice-vs-potatoes-rvp.html
"The chairmen, porters, and coalheavers in London, and those unfortunate women who live by prostitution, the strongest men and the most beautiful women perhaps in the British dominions, are said to be the greater part of them from the lowest rank of people in Ireland, who are generally fed with this root. No food can afford a more decisive proof of its nourishing quality, or of its being peculiarly suitable to the health of the human constitution."
"what the Board of Agriculture mentions as a fact of the greatest importance, that potatoes and water alone, with common salt, can nourish men completely"
"The potato, which in some points of view, may justly be regarded as one of the greatest blessings to our species, is capable of operating the greatest calamities, when it exclusively furnishes the food on which a community is content to exist"
"The small farmers live on potatoes and milk. It is considered that he is a very fortunate man if he has milk for his family. He sells his butter and never uses oatmeal in his house."
Eh that was the point - there was a huge overdependence on one crop, which enabled massive population growth, even with low tech farming methods. The crop was very good, very healthy, and very abundant. They weren't prepared for the blight, which was a kind of fungus I believe..
I think you may have missed the point I was making - factually, the Irish population exploded due to potatoes, and they were healthier and better fed than on any sort of grain. Japanese soldiers could not survive on that amount of rice per day, they had to supplement it with all sorts of other food, rice is not "potatoes but smaller and harder". The lack of vitamin A was why I mentioned milk. Here's an interesting site:
http://www.irishcentral.com/roots/Ancient-Irish-secret--Potatoes-are-the-original-super-food--SEE-RECIPES-107437443.html
You could feed a family of four from an acre. Most of Asia uses rice because they've been doing it that way for a long, long time, and the spud has only relatively recently entered into eastern/western civilisation.
Their diet will change anyway, with modern farming and distribution methods. May as well change for the better.
Rice has 4.8 times as many calories as potatoes by weight so it produces 3 times as many calories from the same piece of land. So they could plant 2/3 of their cropland with other crops to makeup for the nutritional deficiencies of rice and still have more calories and a more varied diet than if they planted only potatoes.
But if calories were all that mattered, we could just dine on beer and ice cream all day. As a metric for nutrition, it's not great. What potatoes provide is a lot more minerals and vitamins, hence the population explosion in Ireland pre-great famine. Also you only need look at the nutritional problems run into by the Japanese army towards the end of world war 2 to see the problems with rice. I think to a great extent rice is widely cultivated in Asia and South Asia because of cultural inertia more than anything else.
For those whom don't know anything about nutrition, I'll help explain that he's kidding.
Not at all, I personally know people who live perfectly happily on potatoes and eggs. The Irish potato famine was so severe because you had twice the population of modern day Ireland living on basically pre-industrialised farming method potato crops, and not much else, and the population was rapidly growing. The humble spud really is a superfood.
Healthy, well fed people tend to have a notable dislike for dictators however, its hard to rise up when you're starving to death. Thus feeding developing countries increases the likelihood of them solving the real problem for themselves.
In fact, the GP was correct - in general, increasing the numbers of freeways will tend to increase traffic because there is an increased flow over a wider area per unit time.
Nope, in most cases the roads in question are ring roads around populated areas. So what happens is the ring road becomes the new "outer limit" for useful urban development, and hence traffic increases as populations move there to take advantage of the infrastructure. The roads themselves do exactly what they say on the tin - reduce traffic. Some might say it's not a permanent solution, but unless you ban all growth and development, there is no permanent solution, just constantly shifting fixes.
http://overpopulationisamyth.com/
Malthus wanted to kill the poor so the rich could remain rich. Seriously.
We have access to almost limitless energy - covering 2% of the unpopulated areas of the Sahara with photovoltaic cells would supply 100% of the energy needs of the world. I'm not saying that's neccessarily a good idea (although DESERTEC are working on something similar), but the reality is we're drowning in energy, at various sites and from various sources around the world.
GM hybrid rice promises to increase 15% beyond the best variety currently available. The modification is pretty benign, the male flower is sterile so self pollination does not occur, and a hybrid can be generated. GM does not automatically mean bad, but there are a number of transgenic ones that are dubious value.
I never got this fascination with rice. All in all its a pretty poor staple foodstuff. What you want are potatoes, which contain most of the vitamins and minerals you need to stay alive. Indeed, people have thrived on just potatoes and milk, maybe with an odd egg or fish thrown in. Also the volume of food produced per area planted is enormous, and there should be zero problem with blight in this day and age. Then there's the way they are actually tasty - mashed potatoes, french fries, potato salad, waffles, its a neverending cascade of deliciousness. :D
Have you ever tried it in Ireland or the UK? Guinness travels really badly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_new_nuclear_power_plants#Recent_construction_cost_estimates