You can consider nuclear renewable because 1. the cost of fuel for a nuclear reactor makes up a tiny fraction of its budget, 2. at a higher cost, it becomes possible to extract nuclear fuel from seawater, 3. due to erosion and plate techtonics, minerals in the ocean are replaced.
:p
I'm not a huge fan of renewable though. If it lasts for even a hundred centuries and is clean, I think it is worth it.
It is ironic that you have to site 3 Mile Island as an "unsafe" nuclear reactor.
With the amount of radiation that was vented to the outside, and using the (probably vastly overestimating) linear regression model, it is predicted to result in one death.
There are under a thousand coal power plants in the US. They are estimated to cause about 24,000 deaths a year. That's over 240 deaths per plant per year! But with current technology, almost 22,000 deaths a year would be preventable. Which means that a "good" clean coal plant operating normally would kill over twenty times the people of the 3MI accident. The 3MI site has been running for over thirty years now -- a clean coal plant would have killed 600 people in that time, the average coal power plant has killed thousands of people in that time.
Right now, nuclear is providing about 2/5ths the amount of the power of coal. If we assume 1979-era safety standards, I'll gladly quadruple the amount of nuclear reactors even if that amounts in one death every decade or so from the increased number of reactors.
To be fair, a house tends to be bought used, not new, and some of the ideas you suggest would require a teardown & rebuild.
Even the more minor improvements may not pay for themselves before the house is planned to be sold, and improvements such as a more fuel efficient HVAC system probably doesn't increase the house price enough to offset their cost.
I went to a Jewish International Film Festival one day recently. (I'll admit, I'm a geek.)
The film, while fiction, was based on the writer's experience in the Israeli Defense Force. The movie was about two young women in the IDF. They patrolled one area of the city. What was their task? To approach anyone looking "Arab" and ask to see their papers, then record their information.
Capt. Vasili Borodin:And I will have a pickup truck... maybe even a "recreational vehicle." And drive from state to state. Do they let you do that? Captain Ramius: I suppose. Capt. Vasili Borodin: No papers? Captain Ramius: No papers, state to state.
I was trying to figure out when neural-machine interfaces will become workable.
Consider the space used by a 8GB SDHC card. Tiny enough to fit into a skull, right? If that could be hooked up to your mind in such a way in order to retrieve and write data at even 56k speeds, just think of what that would do for human productivity. Even for *routine* jobs the benefits would be huge -- cabbies and truck drivers with perfect maps of the cities, store clerks that know the price of everything in the store, factory workers who know how to do their job on the first day.
And this is ignoring the daily changes in our lives if we had perfect memory. Even if it was limited to text only, and would have to consciously retrieved/stored, it would be amazing.
How do you come to that conclusion? Have you seen the same ads I have? "I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper" - "Healthcare for everyone". This can only translate into more of my labor going towards strangers.
As opposed to the current system where the ER is often the first, last and only choice for the poor, resulting in increased medical bills that are unpaid and passed onto wealthier hospital patrons who do have insurance?
There are places that capitalism fails. Healthcare looks like it is one of them. Even if doctors could refuse treatment until after they were paid (what a dystopic thought!), the lack of access to healthcare would decrease the total health of the population, resulting in a population that is more prone to infectious diseases and epidemics.
PS: We have the ability to wipe out polio from the world relatively easily. That's due to government, not private practice footing the bill. We also have the ability to eradicate the MMR trio if we are willing to push for an international campaign to do so.
Sure, Obama is popular, but doesn't his popularity come from a demographic that has a horrible voting track record?
Clinton does poll well with older white women, who do tend to vote.
I wouldn't be surprised if Clinton vs McCain would be better for the dems than Obama vs McCain. OTOH, the polls go either way on who is the stronger candidate...
I think you're confusing depression as in "Man, I'm pissed off today" and depression as in the medical condition. "Real" depression is a horrible thing and needs treatment. It's as if you're saying cancer neends no treatment, since the cells grow very naturally.
That's one way to read his comment, but I read it as in the modern world is rather depressing.
Consider exercise. We (and by this, I mean America (the US of), since all slashdotters are American, right?:p) are rather inactive, as a general rule. But exercise has been shown to help depression. One could assume that exercise could also prevent depression, at least mild depression. But when we have a lifestyle that discourages exercise, won't that result in an increase in depression?
It could be a few small factors like that which could create a rise in depression in human beings. Consider sunlight. It can help some forms of depression, especially seasonal depression, but how many of us spend all our waking time out in the sun?
I'm thinking of trying to use an arduino and my home music/movie server PC to make a cheap version of Philips 'Wake up light'. I was thinking of using it to control a stepper motor hooked up to a dimmer switch, but maybe someone here (with real electronics knowledge) can hint at a better way to do this?
Cheap X10 controller, cheap X10 light dimmer switch hooked up to the lamp you want to control (I think the LM465's should work, but I've never used them). Ebay's probably the cheapest source. Ignore the arduino completely, it is overkill.
If the world's biggest military spender only occasionally invades small troublesome third-world nations, and usually only long enough to set up another government, why should the other major nations who can spend proportionally as much of their GDP on defense do so?
If the US was isolationist, and the UK stayed turtle, the military output of a German-occupied France, Germany, and Austria will exceed the military output of the USSR. Usually not good odds, even if Stalin was willing to sacrifice men in order to offset equipment differences between armies.
Assuming that the USSR falls, I wouldn't be too comfortable living in the UK. Sure, in our timeline, the German plans for invading the British Isles are considered to be a failure if attempted. In this alternative timeline, with a German-dominated Europe, no more of an eastern front, and the full military production of France, Germany, Austria, and the USSR, it may be more than enough to offset the defensive advantage of the channel.
Of course, military outcomes aren't as simple as figuring out which side can make more weapons and ammunition, but it is a sizeable factor.
No, they found items containing her blood (sleeping bag), and there was blood samples in Reisers garage.
I really, really wish they'd go into details about this.
The other day, I scratched part of my leg through my jeans. I didn't think about it until that night when I found a quarter-sized stain on my skin (and presumably on my black pants). Congrats, I now have blood-stained pants.
Blood on a sleeping bag seems probable enough. What's the alternative? He put her in a sleeping bag, drove to the middle of nowhere, disposed of the body after taking it out of the sleeping bag, and brought the sleeping bag back? (But did dispose of the car seat, because a missing sleeping bag wouldn't be overlooked, but a car seat would have been?)
Seems odd.
The blood in the garage could also be innocent or damning. Is it a few drops on a workbench? Or is it a few drops leading directly from the house to where the car is normally parked? Of course, the latter has innocent explanations as well (someone going to the ER to get some stitches, someone going to the car to grab a bandage from the car's first aid kit, etc).
12) Television remote with built in homing device and tiny little robot legs. So even if you misplace it, it always finds its way back to where it should be.
I know you were being tongue-in-cheek, but I think this idea would work.
Consider a roomba, it is smart enough to find its base station and recharge itself. Why can't a remote?
The base station could be something as simple as a RFID sticker. Ideally, it would be more complex and have a power source so that the remote would recharge itself, but an RFID tag would work.
The hardest thing would be to give the remote an effective movement ability. But it should be possible.
When the remote finds it isn't next to the base, it uses triangulation to find where it should be then attempts to get as close as possible. When it is near to the base station (or as close as possible) it shuts down.
A button on the base station and a small buzzing speaker could help find severely misplaced remotes.
The only flaw that I could see is that robots tend to be poor at climbing up table legs. This could be solved by having a base station about the size of a stand-alone floor ash tray, with a tiny little elevator in it. All the remote has to do is find its way to the floor, then to the base of the base station.
Shouldn't a list of the greatest engineering challenges be written by someone who understands the issues?
I'd like to see the reasoning behind why they are promoting theoretical fusion designs over working, proven fission designs. It better not be based on the fallacy that fusion doesn't result in radioactive waste.
No offense intended to your reasoning, but perhaps terrorism is the major threat right now because the US Army is so adept at fighting a "conventional" war.
Forced Korean or Chinese unification (S. Korea, Taiwanese invasions) has been discouraged because, in part, the US military would (presumably) be a credible threat against any other nation on earth fighting an old fashioned war.
We aren't worried about any Chinese military gap at this moment. From what I can tell, the Chinese aren't that worried either -- for now, their content to let the US be the 800-lb military gorilla while they spend much more of their resources on growing their economy.
The futuristic weapons are designed to keep the US as the 800-lb gorilla a half-decade down the road. Sure, it doesn't do much against terrorist (although having weapons like rail guns [previous/. story] being able to pulverise an exact target hundreds of miles away for a few thousand dollars a projectile wouldn't be unuseful in Iraq), but it maintains the status quo.
I leave as an exercise for the reader the task of finding in the Constitution language that grants the federal government the power to establish Social Security and other forms of welfare, the Federal Reserve, the Food and Drug Administration, and so on.
Supposedly, there are breeder reactor fuel cycles that make isotopes that are far from optimal for nuclear weapons.
OTOH, if you are looking at nuclear waste, the most effective use of it from a terrorist's perspective would probably be a dirty bomb. Quick, easy to make, and it still gets the local news blabbering about radiation, plus it makes cleanup a PITA. However, non-powerplant sources of radiation are probably easier to acquire than powerplant sources.
Interestingly, the trend for non-breeder reactors seems to be for reactors that breed a significant amount of fuel in-situ while they are running. For example, current commercial designs can produce half their power output from materials bred while the plant is running.
That's valid C but invalid C++, as a quick test shows:
[dasunt:/tmp/slashdot]$ gcc -std=c99 -Wall test.c test.c: In function 'main': test.c:3: warning: unused variable 'a'
[dasunt:/tmp/slashdot]$ g++ -std=c++98 -Wall test.c test.c: In function 'int main()': test.c:3: error: initializer-string for array of chars is too long test.c:3: warning: unused variable 'a'
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You can consider nuclear renewable because 1. the cost of fuel for a nuclear reactor makes up a tiny fraction of its budget, 2. at a higher cost, it becomes possible to extract nuclear fuel from seawater, 3. due to erosion and plate techtonics, minerals in the ocean are replaced.
I'm not a huge fan of renewable though. If it lasts for even a hundred centuries and is clean, I think it is worth it.
It is ironic that you have to site 3 Mile Island as an "unsafe" nuclear reactor.
With the amount of radiation that was vented to the outside, and using the (probably vastly overestimating) linear regression model, it is predicted to result in one death.
There are under a thousand coal power plants in the US. They are estimated to cause about 24,000 deaths a year. That's over 240 deaths per plant per year! But with current technology, almost 22,000 deaths a year would be preventable. Which means that a "good" clean coal plant operating normally would kill over twenty times the people of the 3MI accident. The 3MI site has been running for over thirty years now -- a clean coal plant would have killed 600 people in that time, the average coal power plant has killed thousands of people in that time.
Right now, nuclear is providing about 2/5ths the amount of the power of coal. If we assume 1979-era safety standards, I'll gladly quadruple the amount of nuclear reactors even if that amounts in one death every decade or so from the increased number of reactors.
Does anyone have the numbers for heavy metal pollution from the manufacture & disposal of PVs?
To be fair, a house tends to be bought used, not new, and some of the ideas you suggest would require a teardown & rebuild.
Even the more minor improvements may not pay for themselves before the house is planned to be sold, and improvements such as a more fuel efficient HVAC system probably doesn't increase the house price enough to offset their cost.
I've seen a few real estate agents who are interested in cell-modems just for the ability to hop online.
Of course, a $600 Dell laptop + the modem card will work well for that.
I went to a Jewish International Film Festival one day recently. (I'll admit, I'm a geek.)
The film, while fiction, was based on the writer's experience in the Israeli Defense Force. The movie was about two young women in the IDF. They patrolled one area of the city. What was their task? To approach anyone looking "Arab" and ask to see their papers, then record their information.
Capt. Vasili Borodin:And I will have a pickup truck... maybe even a "recreational vehicle." And drive from state to state. Do they let you do that?
Captain Ramius: I suppose.
Capt. Vasili Borodin: No papers?
Captain Ramius: No papers, state to state.
I was trying to figure out when neural-machine interfaces will become workable.
Consider the space used by a 8GB SDHC card. Tiny enough to fit into a skull, right? If that could be hooked up to your mind in such a way in order to retrieve and write data at even 56k speeds, just think of what that would do for human productivity. Even for *routine* jobs the benefits would be huge -- cabbies and truck drivers with perfect maps of the cities, store clerks that know the price of everything in the store, factory workers who know how to do their job on the first day.
And this is ignoring the daily changes in our lives if we had perfect memory. Even if it was limited to text only, and would have to consciously retrieved/stored, it would be amazing.
As opposed to the current system where the ER is often the first, last and only choice for the poor, resulting in increased medical bills that are unpaid and passed onto wealthier hospital patrons who do have insurance?
There are places that capitalism fails. Healthcare looks like it is one of them. Even if doctors could refuse treatment until after they were paid (what a dystopic thought!), the lack of access to healthcare would decrease the total health of the population, resulting in a population that is more prone to infectious diseases and epidemics.
PS: We have the ability to wipe out polio from the world relatively easily. That's due to government, not private practice footing the bill. We also have the ability to eradicate the MMR trio if we are willing to push for an international campaign to do so.
Is Clinton the easier candidate to beat?
Sure, Obama is popular, but doesn't his popularity come from a demographic that has a horrible voting track record?
Clinton does poll well with older white women, who do tend to vote.
I wouldn't be surprised if Clinton vs McCain would be better for the dems than Obama vs McCain. OTOH, the polls go either way on who is the stronger candidate...
Is there another practicing Hindu on mainstream American television?
This is a serious question, I can't think of one, but I don't watch much TV...
That's one way to read his comment, but I read it as in the modern world is rather depressing.
Consider exercise. We (and by this, I mean America (the US of), since all slashdotters are American, right? :p) are rather inactive, as a general rule. But exercise has been shown to help depression. One could assume that exercise could also prevent depression, at least mild depression. But when we have a lifestyle that discourages exercise, won't that result in an increase in depression?
It could be a few small factors like that which could create a rise in depression in human beings. Consider sunlight. It can help some forms of depression, especially seasonal depression, but how many of us spend all our waking time out in the sun?
Cheap X10 controller, cheap X10 light dimmer switch hooked up to the lamp you want to control (I think the LM465's should work, but I've never used them). Ebay's probably the cheapest source. Ignore the arduino completely, it is overkill.
If the world's biggest military spender only occasionally invades small troublesome third-world nations, and usually only long enough to set up another government, why should the other major nations who can spend proportionally as much of their GDP on defense do so?
If the US was isolationist, and the UK stayed turtle, the military output of a German-occupied France, Germany, and Austria will exceed the military output of the USSR. Usually not good odds, even if Stalin was willing to sacrifice men in order to offset equipment differences between armies.
Assuming that the USSR falls, I wouldn't be too comfortable living in the UK. Sure, in our timeline, the German plans for invading the British Isles are considered to be a failure if attempted. In this alternative timeline, with a German-dominated Europe, no more of an eastern front, and the full military production of France, Germany, Austria, and the USSR, it may be more than enough to offset the defensive advantage of the channel.
Of course, military outcomes aren't as simple as figuring out which side can make more weapons and ammunition, but it is a sizeable factor.
I really, really wish they'd go into details about this.
The other day, I scratched part of my leg through my jeans. I didn't think about it until that night when I found a quarter-sized stain on my skin (and presumably on my black pants). Congrats, I now have blood-stained pants.
Blood on a sleeping bag seems probable enough. What's the alternative? He put her in a sleeping bag, drove to the middle of nowhere, disposed of the body after taking it out of the sleeping bag, and brought the sleeping bag back? (But did dispose of the car seat, because a missing sleeping bag wouldn't be overlooked, but a car seat would have been?)
Seems odd.
The blood in the garage could also be innocent or damning. Is it a few drops on a workbench? Or is it a few drops leading directly from the house to where the car is normally parked? Of course, the latter has innocent explanations as well (someone going to the ER to get some stitches, someone going to the car to grab a bandage from the car's first aid kit, etc).
I know you were being tongue-in-cheek, but I think this idea would work.
Consider a roomba, it is smart enough to find its base station and recharge itself. Why can't a remote?
The base station could be something as simple as a RFID sticker. Ideally, it would be more complex and have a power source so that the remote would recharge itself, but an RFID tag would work.
The hardest thing would be to give the remote an effective movement ability. But it should be possible.
When the remote finds it isn't next to the base, it uses triangulation to find where it should be then attempts to get as close as possible. When it is near to the base station (or as close as possible) it shuts down.
A button on the base station and a small buzzing speaker could help find severely misplaced remotes.
The only flaw that I could see is that robots tend to be poor at climbing up table legs. This could be solved by having a base station about the size of a stand-alone floor ash tray, with a tiny little elevator in it. All the remote has to do is find its way to the floor, then to the base of the base station.
> Provide energy from fusion
Shouldn't a list of the greatest engineering challenges be written by someone who understands the issues?
I'd like to see the reasoning behind why they are promoting theoretical fusion designs over working, proven fission designs. It better not be based on the fallacy that fusion doesn't result in radioactive waste.
There are bacteria that can survive being frozen in liquid nitrogen (about -200C).
They won't show activity AFAIK, but warm them up and they will grow again.
No offense intended to your reasoning, but perhaps terrorism is the major threat right now because the US Army is so adept at fighting a "conventional" war.
Forced Korean or Chinese unification (S. Korea, Taiwanese invasions) has been discouraged because, in part, the US military would (presumably) be a credible threat against any other nation on earth fighting an old fashioned war.
We aren't worried about any Chinese military gap at this moment. From what I can tell, the Chinese aren't that worried either -- for now, their content to let the US be the 800-lb military gorilla while they spend much more of their resources on growing their economy.
The futuristic weapons are designed to keep the US as the 800-lb gorilla a half-decade down the road. Sure, it doesn't do much against terrorist (although having weapons like rail guns [previous /. story] being able to pulverise an exact target hundreds of miles away for a few thousand dollars a projectile wouldn't be unuseful in Iraq), but it maintains the status quo.
I'm assuming that it is the interestate commerce clause, since SCOTUS has already decided that it is so broad to cover growing food on your own land for your own consumption.
Supposedly, there are breeder reactor fuel cycles that make isotopes that are far from optimal for nuclear weapons.
OTOH, if you are looking at nuclear waste, the most effective use of it from a terrorist's perspective would probably be a dirty bomb. Quick, easy to make, and it still gets the local news blabbering about radiation, plus it makes cleanup a PITA. However, non-powerplant sources of radiation are probably easier to acquire than powerplant sources.
Interestingly, the trend for non-breeder reactors seems to be for reactors that breed a significant amount of fuel in-situ while they are running. For example, current commercial designs can produce half their power output from materials bred while the plant is running.
And absolutely no report on which platform runs nethack better. :p
The big list of incompatibilities.
I prefer this example:
That's valid C but invalid C++, as a quick test shows: