I see this as an insult to America. They're basically saying our process of electing a president is a sham and that we're incapable of being democratic.
When you play cards with friends and they cut the deck after you deal, do you consider it an insult?
If you give a friend a ride in your car and they put on their seatbelt, do you consider it an insult?
It would be nice if the policy for all elections would include observers from outside of the area. I don't consider the US election system deeply flawed, but its always good to have safeguards in place.
Secondly, I do not have any desire to drive a vehicle that is of an age where the occasional breakdown becomes inevitable. My current Subaru has not broken down once since I have owned it. I am now however, starting to wonder how much longer it will be before I do get stranded somewhere.
In Fargo, the flat bottom of the red-river valley, 1" of rain will result in 4-5" of water on the road. When that happens, I take the 25-year old truck out, and routinely see new cars stalled on the road.
As for breakdowns, quite honestly, with decent tuneups, I don't see many unexpected problems that would lead to breakdowns on an older vehicle. Engines tend to lose compression before dying, belts tend to be stretched and cracked, brake pads and shoes wear down at a mostly constant rate, and trannies tend to burn fluid before dying. Thinking about it, the only part I can see not-uncommonly failing without warning would be the fuel pump -- a problem that any vehicle older then a few years seems to be at risk for.
Its not like the new set of brake shoes or belts say to themselves "ooh, I'm on a new car, I better not fail".
Don't forget the other side of the coin -- if you own your vehicle, you need not pay full coverage, and you are not paying interest.
I own a 1979 Dodge D100 pickup and a 1992 Dodge Dakota. So far, the Dakota has cost me roughly $400 in repairs this year, while the D100 has cost me $100.
I once sat down and calculated the cost of the D100 vs a new vehicle. The depreciation of a newer vehicle ended up being more expensive then the D100. Then, for kicks, I calculated the environmental cost of the D100, with its horrible 8 mpg, vs a brand new 40 mpg car, and I discovered that I'd have to drive the new car between 10 - 20 years before the better fuel efficiency would offset the manufacturing pollution of the new car.
As for how an older vehicle drives, a rebuilt engine installed runs less then $2k for many vehicles in many locations. I've seen trannies put in for $1k. The interest on a new car loan tends to run more then that.
However, I do find that if you want to decrease car costs, you need to drive more carefully. Driving like a maniac stresses out the drivetrain and suspension, leading to expensive repairs.
P166 motherboard, a 2 GB throw-away IDE drive, and a (was-new-awhile-ago) 80 GB drive of data. 32M of memory.
Two older ethernet cards in it, no monitor, nor keyboard.
Works fine for splitting a dialup connection, queuing mail, news, printing, and for sharing many gigs of files. The current bottleneck is the IDE controller -- it maxs out at roughly 30 mbps, but, to be honest, most of my home network is slower then that.
I know you are joking, but honestly, computers are used in many situations where they are far from optimal.
If a ledger, calendar, and address book works for a small business, why should they invest time and money into transitioning over to a computer system?
Hell, I know plenty of "business" people who use PDAs when a small $.99 notebook would work just as well.
That is way off, in the area of Texas I am in you can build a new home for about 70-90 per square foot . Plus [800 sq ft] is way small if you plan to have a family.
It may be small, but it isn't too small. I grew up in a house of roughly 1200 sq ft (excluding basement) with four other siblings. My wife grew up in a house of roughly 800 sq ft with two other siblings.
As long as children share bedrooms, and you forgo the formal dining room, family room, media room, and den, it is doable. Why spend money on rooms you aren't going to use? A living room works just as well as media room/family room. A dining room can be formal or informal. Bedrooms are for quiet study and sleeping, they don't need to be the size of aircraft hangers.
As for the housing costs, locations differ. For example, in Texas, where you are at, I'm guessing 2x4 construction is the norm. In Minnesota, where I am at, 2x6 construction is mandated by building code. In Texas, I'm guessing you can get by with a small crawlspace, or slab-on-grade. In Minnesota, the frost line is so deep that by the time you get below it, its trivial to add a basement. Etc, etc.
Still, just letting it sit there and contaminate the fish isn't a good idea.
Depends on the amount of radiation. Its on the bottom of a silty sea floor, isn't it? The background radiation is probably fairly low. The upper levels of the ocean receive more radiation (due to sunlight), and other parts of the ocean floor are also probably more radioactive (due to radioactive isotopes in the ground).
I wouldn't be surprised if the total radiation of the bomb + background radiation is less then some other parts of the ocean.
Is it just me, or is this scarily like the plot of the book (didn't see the film)... I don't mind science-fiction becoming reality (for the most part:-) but I have a real problem with nuclear bombs being unaccounted for. I had thought the whole premise for the book was ridiculous, but....
The United States lost 11 nuclear bombs in accidents during the Cold War that were never recovered, according to the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.
Perhaps you should investigate the numerous nuclear accidents that the US Military has had. One good example is when the US accidentally "dirty bombed" Spain.
What a great idea! How wonderful! How utterly sensible! We all know nobody has a right to operate a computer unless they first verify all code running on it to be secure. It's not the vendor's fault. Just like people who die in airline crashes deserve it because they did not verify the plane would land safely.
I'm not expected to know 100% about my car. But if I avoid doing safety basic precautions (replacing tires when they are bald) and get into trouble (sliding into another car on a rainy night) then a good lawyer is going to rightfully pin part of the blame on me.
Legal precedents could apply in other ways, such as creating an attractive nuisence.
The problem with RFID tags is that if a large number of the goods we buy have them, then it's easy for someone to put RFID readers out there so that when you pass them, they know what you are currently holding, which will likely lead to targetted advertising as you walk down the streets. I.e., if you are the type of person to buy expensive clothing, don't be suprised if you tend to get extra attention while shopping from the sales people.
I hope the RFID tags survive long enough to make it to the thrift stores. I prefer expensive clothing, but have no problem buying it second hand.
I can't wait until I wander through the mall and attract every saleperson there.;)
Yeah, but check this out: I have about 90 gigs of mp3s. Perfectly organized, (artist\album\artist - track number - title.mp3). But there is no way I can find mp3s by genre, year, or even album.
Why not use symlinks/hardlinks? In addition to/mp3s/real/artist/album/mp3s, have/mp3s/albums,/mp3s/year,/mp3s/artist,/mp3s/genre?
A quick script should be able to produce that based on ID3 tag information.
The problem is that for a lot of mp3s, the ID3 tag is not correct. I find that a lot of my indy-music that I download *legally* off the net has horrible ID3 tags, and I spend a lot of time renaming the tags (as well as the file name). But a database filesystem won't fix this.
Since the majority of people who seem to have file-location issues also have file/meta-data naming issues, I don't see where a database filesystem is going to help their organization.
And that's why it's taking so long. Accessing filesystems as SQL data has always been a dream of anyone who has had many files. They just never knew about it.
I don't buy it. I have something like 100k files, last time I checked, on my data share. I can find what I'm looking for because I use a tree hierarchy for most files, and for a few files, use sym/hardlinks for putting them into more then one category.
And the schools lack a curriculum for educating them in the use of the computers, or lack any practical applications of them.
I saw this when I was volunteering at a local school about 18 months ago.
Don't forget the cost issues. I have math, grammer, composition, and spelling textbooks that are over 50 years old and are still relevant. I don't have a usable computer that is over 10 years old. Guess which was more expensive?
With proper teaching, I see a place for some computers in an education setting. However, most learning can be done with a greater degree of success in a traditional classroom, at a lower cost. Computer proficiency is nice, but I wasn't taught typing until junior high (on some rather old IBM typewriters), and I didn't own a computer until sr. high, yet my computer skills haven't suffered.
Well the guy said It causes distress and health problems in many cows though given that you presumably have to take the milk out of the cow to add chemicals to it, I'm not sure how that works...
If you want to continue drinking milk, you do not want to investigate what they put in dairy cattle feed. Nor do you want to know what hormones they inject them with.
Both methods can result in chemicals being in cows' milk.
As for distress and health problems, factory farming has been exempt from many animal-cruelty laws. Dairy cattle don't tend to live long, happy, pain and disease-free lives.
The milk in the US contains a chemical additive that is cancer causing.
And? Oh, wait, I get it. Because one rat out of a group of rats that was fed large amounts of a chemical additive developed cancer, that means that humans ingesting the same additive in miniscule amounts will also get cancer.
Why assume that the relationship is linear? There are many substances that, in a small amount, have little if any negative effects, and in large amounts are rather bad. Take fructose -- in large amounts, it may cause diabetes. In small amounts, its in plenty of foods that form part of a healthy diet.
Personally, I find the amount of additives in my food disturbing, and I try to limit my intake of them. But, scientifically, I can't fault and additive that causes cancer in lab rats without more information about the study.
And if lucky, it might also result in a lot of lives being saved by making both research efficient and drug pricing low.
In the US, there has been claims that the drug companies spend more on advertising then research. While the groups repeating such claims tend to be biased, the drug companies aren't forthcoming with information to disprove these damaging claims.
In addition, US drug companies have been known to chemically change an insignificant portion of a drug in order to recieve a new patent, and then push the "new" drug when the old drug becomes generic.
The Swift Boat Veterans have been outed as a bunch of lying sacks of shit.
Every single one of their statements have been proven untrue.
Please start paying attention in the future.
The amount and quality of the SBV's claims makes me doubt any credibility of the group.
OTOH, even a broken clock is right twice a day. Kerry's Cambodian testimony seems to be inaccurate, at least from a chronological perspective. In addition, one of the wounds that Kerry later recieved a purple heart was under circumstances that may not be inconsistant with a US grenade exploding back upon US troops. (I say "may", because the testimony is rather inconclusive.) Please note, "friendly fire" in combat is still eligible for a purple heart.
Don't get me wrong -- I'm leaning towards voting for Kerry this November, and I consider his military service a lot less questionable then our current sitting president, who can show no documentation that he was even in the Nat'l Guard for a few months.
I'm sure he did promise jobs.. what the government here does is promise jobs too. Except the jobs that ended were high paying middle class jobs, and the jobs that are arriving are $8-12/hr callcenter positions.
By counting call center support jobs as "tech" jobs, North Dakota can state it has a booming tech industry.
Oddly enough, there is a huge problem with college graduates leaving the state.
PS: Election issues this year seem to be concentrating on a heterosexual-only marriage amendment to the state constitution. System sure is working out here.
Now tell me how do we ensure that your method is constrained to the territorial waters of the pollutant country.
Oh no shit Batman, do you mean countries that don't pollute will have to share any risks of nuclear waste as you propose, in spite of them not polluting?
Perhaps you don't understand the current system of power generation. Coal power plant exhaust is radioactive, as well as polluting in other ways, and, last time I checked, doesn't remain in the airspace of the country that generates it.
The infrastructure for wind power? Pollution. Water power? Pollution, and water resource issues. Solar? Pollution. Sorry, but all systems of power generation pollute.
As for non-nuclear countries, they already import from nuclear countries. They are using nuclear power, even if it is indirectly.
But hey, since you are so quick to criticize, show me a system, with working technology now, that will scale to power a world of 9.2 billion people (projected 2050 population) that is growing more and more developed, and thus requires more and more power.
Then show me how that working system will result in less disease and deaths then nuclear power.
That doesn't leave much hope. Face reality, there is no hope in the near future for clean energy. Nuclear isn't it. There is no easy answer to the radioactive waste problem. You're just shifting the problem to a different context. Fossil-fuel waste polutes the air and nuclear waste polutes the water (eventually).
Please understand the concept -- right now, the volume of the earth's oceans are 1.4 billion cubic kilometers of water in volume, according to google.
In natural radioactive potassium alone, there is
3.8 x 10^11 Ci alone of radioactivity. Long form, that is 380,000,000,000 curies, or 380 billion curies. ( http://www.physics.isu.edu/radinf/natural.htm )
With current plants, the amount of nuclear waste in the world is about 1/10th that number -- and this is including short-term materials that have a dangerous life of just over a century or two.
Its possible to dump a lot of nuclear material into the oceans without even doubling radioactivity levels, assuming all containers are pulverized and spread equally throughout the oceans. In reality, for a world-wide disposal method, one finds a geologically inactive part of the ocean floor, bind the radioactive materials in some sort of container (probably ceramic) and dump them overboard.
"Radioactive" is a term, it does not have to strike fear in people. That big burning ball of fusion overhead creates radioactivity. Soil is radioactive. Rays from deep space are radioactive. Those fancy granite counter tops are radioactive.
I would recommend sitting back, and running the numbers one day. Consider the lifetime of certain rock formations on land, and on the sea floor. Consider the radioactivity released by a coal power plant as opposed to a nuclear power plant. Consider the environmental destruction done by dams. Consider the storage solutions needed for wind power. Consider the coastal damage required for tidal power. Consider the manufacturing process needed for solar cells.
[ PS: Look up the elevation that you are at, calculate the radioactivity, and compare it to the radioactivity you receive at sea level. ]
Most of the waste we are talking about here isn't uranium, its plutonium and a host of other exotic metals and isotopes. Plutonium is lethal in extremely small quantities, and with reprocessing its highly sought after to produce nuclear weapons or dirty bombs. You can't just dump it back in a whole in the ground.
But if the highly radioactive materials are diffused enough, the radioactivity won't be detectable above background radiation.
With the right processing, its possible to diffuse radioactive waste into the ocean.
The UK used to do it before some environmental wackos became upset.
PS: I'm all for environmentalism, and consider myself an environmentalist. Which is why I'm for nuclear power -- it is the only technology that exists today, is mature, and can handle the world's increasing energy demands. Wind can't. Hydroelectric can't (and hydroelectric has environmental issues). Solar is a joke, ne'ermind the problems with storage and toxic materials produced in the creation of most solar systems.
Face the truth -- nuclear is the best hope for clean energy.
It's as inexpensive as a IBM clone and worth more in value.
$1299 gets me: 17 LCD (nice), 1.6Ghz G5, 256MB memory, 80GB ATA HDD, and a 64MB GeForce 5200 video card.
From Dell, it appears that I can get a similar package for under $1099. I know that if I looked around, I could find a similar setup for under a grand. Perhaps
Apple has advantages, but price isn't one of them.
Slashdot Mirror
I see this as an insult to America. They're basically saying our process of electing a president is a sham and that we're incapable of being democratic.
When you play cards with friends and they cut the deck after you deal, do you consider it an insult?
If you give a friend a ride in your car and they put on their seatbelt, do you consider it an insult?
It would be nice if the policy for all elections would include observers from outside of the area. I don't consider the US election system deeply flawed, but its always good to have safeguards in place.
Secondly, I do not have any desire to drive a vehicle that is of an age where the occasional breakdown becomes inevitable. My current Subaru has not broken down once since I have owned it. I am now however, starting to wonder how much longer it will be before I do get stranded somewhere.
In Fargo, the flat bottom of the red-river valley, 1" of rain will result in 4-5" of water on the road. When that happens, I take the 25-year old truck out, and routinely see new cars stalled on the road.
As for breakdowns, quite honestly, with decent tuneups, I don't see many unexpected problems that would lead to breakdowns on an older vehicle. Engines tend to lose compression before dying, belts tend to be stretched and cracked, brake pads and shoes wear down at a mostly constant rate, and trannies tend to burn fluid before dying. Thinking about it, the only part I can see not-uncommonly failing without warning would be the fuel pump -- a problem that any vehicle older then a few years seems to be at risk for.
Its not like the new set of brake shoes or belts say to themselves "ooh, I'm on a new car, I better not fail".
Don't forget the other side of the coin -- if you own your vehicle, you need not pay full coverage, and you are not paying interest.
I own a 1979 Dodge D100 pickup and a 1992 Dodge Dakota. So far, the Dakota has cost me roughly $400 in repairs this year, while the D100 has cost me $100.
I once sat down and calculated the cost of the D100 vs a new vehicle. The depreciation of a newer vehicle ended up being more expensive then the D100. Then, for kicks, I calculated the environmental cost of the D100, with its horrible 8 mpg, vs a brand new 40 mpg car, and I discovered that I'd have to drive the new car between 10 - 20 years before the better fuel efficiency would offset the manufacturing pollution of the new car.
As for how an older vehicle drives, a rebuilt engine installed runs less then $2k for many vehicles in many locations. I've seen trannies put in for $1k. The interest on a new car loan tends to run more then that.
However, I do find that if you want to decrease car costs, you need to drive more carefully. Driving like a maniac stresses out the drivetrain and suspension, leading to expensive repairs.
My "server":
P166 motherboard, a 2 GB throw-away IDE drive, and a (was-new-awhile-ago) 80 GB drive of data. 32M of memory.
Two older ethernet cards in it, no monitor, nor keyboard.
Works fine for splitting a dialup connection, queuing mail, news, printing, and for sharing many gigs of files. The current bottleneck is the IDE controller -- it maxs out at roughly 30 mbps, but, to be honest, most of my home network is slower then that.
Why should I upgrade?
I know you are joking, but honestly, computers are used in many situations where they are far from optimal.
If a ledger, calendar, and address book works for a small business, why should they invest time and money into transitioning over to a computer system?
Hell, I know plenty of "business" people who use PDAs when a small $.99 notebook would work just as well.
Compared to Europeans, Americans live in -huge- houses, which have to be heated/cooled/cleaned, etc.
But if we had smaller houses, we'd have to get rid of some of the junk we never use!
That is way off, in the area of Texas I am in you can build a new home for about 70-90 per square foot . Plus [800 sq ft] is way small if you plan to have a family.
It may be small, but it isn't too small. I grew up in a house of roughly 1200 sq ft (excluding basement) with four other siblings. My wife grew up in a house of roughly 800 sq ft with two other siblings.
As long as children share bedrooms, and you forgo the formal dining room, family room, media room, and den, it is doable. Why spend money on rooms you aren't going to use? A living room works just as well as media room/family room. A dining room can be formal or informal. Bedrooms are for quiet study and sleeping, they don't need to be the size of aircraft hangers.
As for the housing costs, locations differ. For example, in Texas, where you are at, I'm guessing 2x4 construction is the norm. In Minnesota, where I am at, 2x6 construction is mandated by building code. In Texas, I'm guessing you can get by with a small crawlspace, or slab-on-grade. In Minnesota, the frost line is so deep that by the time you get below it, its trivial to add a basement. Etc, etc.
Still, just letting it sit there and contaminate the fish isn't a good idea.
Depends on the amount of radiation. Its on the bottom of a silty sea floor, isn't it? The background radiation is probably fairly low. The upper levels of the ocean receive more radiation (due to sunlight), and other parts of the ocean floor are also probably more radioactive (due to radioactive isotopes in the ground).
I wouldn't be surprised if the total radiation of the bomb + background radiation is less then some other parts of the ocean.
Is it just me, or is this scarily like the plot of the book (didn't see the film)... I don't mind science-fiction becoming reality (for the most part :-) but I have a real problem with nuclear bombs being unaccounted for. I had thought the whole premise for the book was ridiculous, but ....
The United States lost 11 nuclear bombs in accidents during the Cold War that were never recovered, according to the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.
Perhaps you should investigate the numerous nuclear accidents that the US Military has had. One good example is when the US accidentally "dirty bombed" Spain.
What a great idea! How wonderful! How utterly sensible! We all know nobody has a right to operate a computer unless they first verify all code running on it to be secure. It's not the vendor's fault. Just like people who die in airline crashes deserve it because they did not verify the plane would land safely.
I'm not expected to know 100% about my car. But if I avoid doing safety basic precautions (replacing tires when they are bald) and get into trouble (sliding into another car on a rainy night) then a good lawyer is going to rightfully pin part of the blame on me.
Legal precedents could apply in other ways, such as creating an attractive nuisence.
The problem with RFID tags is that if a large number of the goods we buy have them, then it's easy for someone to put RFID readers out there so that when you pass them, they know what you are currently holding, which will likely lead to targetted advertising as you walk down the streets. I.e., if you are the type of person to buy expensive clothing, don't be suprised if you tend to get extra attention while shopping from the sales people.
I hope the RFID tags survive long enough to make it to the thrift stores. I prefer expensive clothing, but have no problem buying it second hand.
I can't wait until I wander through the mall and attract every saleperson there. ;)
Sounds like the Coda or Intermezzo filesystems to me.
I was just thinking AFS.
Unison is another option.
With a combination of unison, AFS/Coda/Whatever and/or a local partition, I could see doing this under linux.
Yeah, but check this out: I have about 90 gigs of mp3s. Perfectly organized, (artist\album\artist - track number - title.mp3). But there is no way I can find mp3s by genre, year, or even album.
Why not use symlinks/hardlinks? In addition to /mp3s/real/artist/album/mp3s, have /mp3s/albums, /mp3s/year, /mp3s/artist, /mp3s/genre?
A quick script should be able to produce that based on ID3 tag information.
The problem is that for a lot of mp3s, the ID3 tag is not correct. I find that a lot of my indy-music that I download *legally* off the net has horrible ID3 tags, and I spend a lot of time renaming the tags (as well as the file name). But a database filesystem won't fix this.
Since the majority of people who seem to have file-location issues also have file/meta-data naming issues, I don't see where a database filesystem is going to help their organization.
And that's why it's taking so long. Accessing filesystems as SQL data has always been a dream of anyone who has had many files. They just never knew about it.
I don't buy it. I have something like 100k files, last time I checked, on my data share. I can find what I'm looking for because I use a tree hierarchy for most files, and for a few files, use sym/hardlinks for putting them into more then one category.
It works for me.
Damn simple too.
And the schools lack a curriculum for educating them in the use of the computers, or lack any practical applications of them.
I saw this when I was volunteering at a local school about 18 months ago.
Don't forget the cost issues. I have math, grammer, composition, and spelling textbooks that are over 50 years old and are still relevant. I don't have a usable computer that is over 10 years old. Guess which was more expensive?
With proper teaching, I see a place for some computers in an education setting. However, most learning can be done with a greater degree of success in a traditional classroom, at a lower cost. Computer proficiency is nice, but I wasn't taught typing until junior high (on some rather old IBM typewriters), and I didn't own a computer until sr. high, yet my computer skills haven't suffered.
Well the guy said It causes distress and health problems in many cows though given that you presumably have to take the milk out of the cow to add chemicals to it, I'm not sure how that works ...
If you want to continue drinking milk, you do not want to investigate what they put in dairy cattle feed. Nor do you want to know what hormones they inject them with.
Both methods can result in chemicals being in cows' milk.
As for distress and health problems, factory farming has been exempt from many animal-cruelty laws. Dairy cattle don't tend to live long, happy, pain and disease-free lives.
The milk in the US contains a chemical additive that is cancer causing.
And? Oh, wait, I get it. Because one rat out of a group of rats that was fed large amounts of a chemical additive developed cancer, that means that humans ingesting the same additive in miniscule amounts will also get cancer.
Why assume that the relationship is linear? There are many substances that, in a small amount, have little if any negative effects, and in large amounts are rather bad. Take fructose -- in large amounts, it may cause diabetes. In small amounts, its in plenty of foods that form part of a healthy diet.
Personally, I find the amount of additives in my food disturbing, and I try to limit my intake of them. But, scientifically, I can't fault and additive that causes cancer in lab rats without more information about the study.
And if lucky, it might also result in a lot of lives being saved by making both research efficient and drug pricing low.
In the US, there has been claims that the drug companies spend more on advertising then research. While the groups repeating such claims tend to be biased, the drug companies aren't forthcoming with information to disprove these damaging claims.
In addition, US drug companies have been known to chemically change an insignificant portion of a drug in order to recieve a new patent, and then push the "new" drug when the old drug becomes generic.
The Swift Boat Veterans have been outed as a bunch of lying sacks of shit. Every single one of their statements have been proven untrue. Please start paying attention in the future.
The amount and quality of the SBV's claims makes me doubt any credibility of the group.
OTOH, even a broken clock is right twice a day. Kerry's Cambodian testimony seems to be inaccurate, at least from a chronological perspective. In addition, one of the wounds that Kerry later recieved a purple heart was under circumstances that may not be inconsistant with a US grenade exploding back upon US troops. (I say "may", because the testimony is rather inconclusive.) Please note, "friendly fire" in combat is still eligible for a purple heart.
Don't get me wrong -- I'm leaning towards voting for Kerry this November, and I consider his military service a lot less questionable then our current sitting president, who can show no documentation that he was even in the Nat'l Guard for a few months.
I'm sure he did promise jobs.. what the government here does is promise jobs too. Except the jobs that ended were high paying middle class jobs, and the jobs that are arriving are $8-12/hr callcenter positions.
By counting call center support jobs as "tech" jobs, North Dakota can state it has a booming tech industry.
Oddly enough, there is a huge problem with college graduates leaving the state.
PS: Election issues this year seem to be concentrating on a heterosexual-only marriage amendment to the state constitution. System sure is working out here.
Now tell me how do we ensure that your method is constrained to the territorial waters of the pollutant country.
Oh no shit Batman, do you mean countries that don't pollute will have to share any risks of nuclear waste as you propose, in spite of them not polluting?
Perhaps you don't understand the current system of power generation. Coal power plant exhaust is radioactive, as well as polluting in other ways, and, last time I checked, doesn't remain in the airspace of the country that generates it.
The infrastructure for wind power? Pollution. Water power? Pollution, and water resource issues. Solar? Pollution. Sorry, but all systems of power generation pollute.
As for non-nuclear countries, they already import from nuclear countries. They are using nuclear power, even if it is indirectly.
But hey, since you are so quick to criticize, show me a system, with working technology now, that will scale to power a world of 9.2 billion people (projected 2050 population) that is growing more and more developed, and thus requires more and more power.
Then show me how that working system will result in less disease and deaths then nuclear power.
That doesn't leave much hope. Face reality, there is no hope in the near future for clean energy. Nuclear isn't it. There is no easy answer to the radioactive waste problem. You're just shifting the problem to a different context. Fossil-fuel waste polutes the air and nuclear waste polutes the water (eventually).
Please understand the concept -- right now, the volume of the earth's oceans are 1.4 billion cubic kilometers of water in volume, according to google.
In natural radioactive potassium alone, there is 3.8 x 10^11 Ci alone of radioactivity. Long form, that is 380,000,000,000 curies, or 380 billion curies. ( http://www.physics.isu.edu/radinf/natural.htm )
With current plants, the amount of nuclear waste in the world is about 1/10th that number -- and this is including short-term materials that have a dangerous life of just over a century or two.
Its possible to dump a lot of nuclear material into the oceans without even doubling radioactivity levels, assuming all containers are pulverized and spread equally throughout the oceans. In reality, for a world-wide disposal method, one finds a geologically inactive part of the ocean floor, bind the radioactive materials in some sort of container (probably ceramic) and dump them overboard.
"Radioactive" is a term, it does not have to strike fear in people. That big burning ball of fusion overhead creates radioactivity. Soil is radioactive. Rays from deep space are radioactive. Those fancy granite counter tops are radioactive.
I would recommend sitting back, and running the numbers one day. Consider the lifetime of certain rock formations on land, and on the sea floor. Consider the radioactivity released by a coal power plant as opposed to a nuclear power plant. Consider the environmental destruction done by dams. Consider the storage solutions needed for wind power. Consider the coastal damage required for tidal power. Consider the manufacturing process needed for solar cells.
[ PS: Look up the elevation that you are at, calculate the radioactivity, and compare it to the radioactivity you receive at sea level. ]
Most of the waste we are talking about here isn't uranium, its plutonium and a host of other exotic metals and isotopes. Plutonium is lethal in extremely small quantities, and with reprocessing its highly sought after to produce nuclear weapons or dirty bombs. You can't just dump it back in a whole in the ground.
But if the highly radioactive materials are diffused enough, the radioactivity won't be detectable above background radiation.
With the right processing, its possible to diffuse radioactive waste into the ocean.
The UK used to do it before some environmental wackos became upset.
PS: I'm all for environmentalism, and consider myself an environmentalist. Which is why I'm for nuclear power -- it is the only technology that exists today, is mature, and can handle the world's increasing energy demands. Wind can't. Hydroelectric can't (and hydroelectric has environmental issues). Solar is a joke, ne'ermind the problems with storage and toxic materials produced in the creation of most solar systems.
Face the truth -- nuclear is the best hope for clean energy.
Do these people also make their own padlocks in their basement because every manufacturer has a master key?
Warning: Geek nit-picking ahead!
I have taken a few padlocks apart, and have never seen the pins have more then one break. That means that there is no master key for the padlock.
I'm not saying that it is impossible to have a padlock with a master-key, but that every padlock that I've seen has no master key.
It's as inexpensive as a IBM clone and worth more in value.
$1299 gets me: 17 LCD (nice), 1.6Ghz G5, 256MB memory, 80GB ATA HDD, and a 64MB GeForce 5200 video card.
From Dell, it appears that I can get a similar package for under $1099. I know that if I looked around, I could find a similar setup for under a grand. Perhaps
Apple has advantages, but price isn't one of them.