(...) Yahoo! can charge 10x - 20x what other portals can charge, because they can target their ads with great precision.
Believe you me, if my online business offered service in California, Nevada and Arizona, and I were to choose between
Pay $X for 50,000 views of my banner ad by users all over the world, or
Pay $2X for 10,000 views of my banner ad by users from those three states,
the second option would win hands down. This was the great promise of the Internet, remember? Advertising would be targeted so narrowly that we users only get to see stuff that is interesting to us. If Yahoo can offer that and others can't, they win.
Fission is the splitting of large atoms, and the energy is released due to (??? I forget)
In both cases, a little bit of the energy holding the molecules together is released.
The problem with fusion is, that it is not yet feasible as an energy source and will not be for some time. Fission is here, available today. As I see it, the problem with nuclear fission as energy source are largely social. As you state, it's perfectly possible to engineer a nuclear plant to be as safe as we need. The big social issue is twofold:
We can't see nuclear radiation, but we know that it can kill us and/or cause cancer which is one of our society's big collective fears by itself.
Radio-active waste, while perfectly contained, needs a mindbogglingly long time to cool down. Our society can hardly cope with conventional pollution (and I can recall some environmental scandals in my native Netherlands where houses were unknowingly built on industrial waste sites from the 60s and 70s), how are we going to stash something for 10,000 years?
Until we find solutions to both these questions (and probably a lot more that I don't know about), we're not going to have widespread adoption of fission or fusion. Did I mention that fusion is just as dirty and dangerous? It also generates radiation, and the walls of a TOKAMAK are too hot to handle after a couple of years... and what happens if the magnetic confinement of the plasma inside the TOKAMAK fails? Psssssh...
Even better! Africa could leapfrog us by directly going to fiber. Soon, they'll have gigabits on their doorstep while we're still waiting for the ADSL installation persons to show up.
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(...) Yahoo! can charge 10x - 20x what other portals can charge, because they can target their ads with great precision.
Believe you me, if my online business offered service in California, Nevada and Arizona, and I were to choose between
the second option would win hands down. This was the great promise of the Internet, remember? Advertising would be targeted so narrowly that we users only get to see stuff that is interesting to us. If Yahoo can offer that and others can't, they win.
In both cases, a little bit of the energy holding the molecules together is released.
The problem with fusion is, that it is not yet feasible as an energy source and will not be for some time. Fission is here, available today. As I see it, the problem with nuclear fission as energy source are largely social. As you state, it's perfectly possible to engineer a nuclear plant to be as safe as we need. The big social issue is twofold:
Until we find solutions to both these questions (and probably a lot more that I don't know about), we're not going to have widespread adoption of fission or fusion. Did I mention that fusion is just as dirty and dangerous? It also generates radiation, and the walls of a TOKAMAK are too hot to handle after a couple of years... and what happens if the magnetic confinement of the plasma inside the TOKAMAK fails? Psssssh...
Even better! Africa could leapfrog us by directly going to fiber. Soon, they'll have gigabits on their doorstep while we're still waiting for the ADSL installation persons to show up.