Clean burning fossil fuel plants don't solve the main problem with fossil fuels - finite supply. What good is clean burning if you've got nothing to burn?
The studies I've read suggest the U.S. has sufficient coal reserves to meet all of its projected energy needs for the next 300-500 years. This is plenty long for my needs and should provide enough time for perfection of alternate energy sources.
By comparison reserves of fissionable material are only sufficient to supply the U.S. energy needs for less than 100 years, although breeder technology could possibly extend this somewhat.
Of course fossil fuels do face other problems including environmental damage from extraction and possibly global warming, so I would favor increased development of nuclear power as well as other power sources.
People are wondering about increased cases of cancer and other such health problems in modern
industrialized society, and I have to think--isn't it just a very real possibility that the problem is this utterly pervasive low-energy radiation?
Or maybe more 70 year olds are dying of cancer today because they didn't die of polio when they were 5 or pneumonia when they were 18 or of that heart attack they had when they were 50.
Besides people have been bombarded by various forms of radiation from natural sources since the first human, don't you think mother nature has developed some defenses against mutations in that time. Guess what she has. Your body has a number of defenses against the harmful effects of low level radiation. That is not to say noone ever suffers any harmful effects, but the incidence is quite low.
Would you really propose to eliminate all of the modern benefits of electricity, radio & television, computers, cell phones, etc... to eliminate a 1 in 10-100 million chance that they could harm you at some point in your life. If so, you should certainly stay far away from any automobiles, since your risk of bodily harm from these is much higher.
And hydro power leaves waste, too. The environment around hydro plants is wasted.
I guess that depends on your definition of wasted. Prior to the large-scale construction of hydroelectric dams on the Columbia and Snake Rivers in Washington, Oregon and Idaho, the Columbia basin was largely considered a vast "wasteland". This region was largely considered uninhabitable and supported only sparse vegitation and limitted wildlife populations.
After construction of the dams and the ensuing irrigation systems, the region has become one of the most productive in the world, supplying significant portions of the world's potato and apple supplies. Wheat, Corn, Barley, hops, beans, and alfalfa are other important crops. The human population has increased significantly, as have many animal populations both domestic and otherwise. Bird populations have thrived in the increased wetlands produced by the dams. In general the area has blossomed.
I understand dust can get radiated too - don't they get inhaled into the body?
It's relatively difficult to make a non-radioactive material radioactive. In general this only occurs in a nuclear reactor, where materials are exposed to large quantities of neutrons with the appropriate energies. The "radioactive dust" or fallout consists of trace amounts of the original radioactive material that may get mixed in with normal, harmless dust.
When the radioactive material is inhaled this is a problem and can lead to lung cancer or other such problems. To some degree the problem depends on the particulate sizes, since particulates larger than ~10 microns are easily removed from the body by mucus, but smaller particles can remained trapped indefinitely. Fortunately, the body has defenses and can actually heal from some levels of radiation exposure. After all, radiation is not only found in nuclear reactors, but is constantly all around us. Brick buildings, pollution from coal-fired power plants, dirt, rocks, and dust, and even the air we breath (in the form of Carbon-14 in CO2) all contain trace amounts of radioactive materials. The danger is when the levels of radioactive materials are higher than our body's defenses are capable of dealing with. The concentration, rather than the presence or absense of radioactive material is what is most important.
Of course the concentration level of exposure is difficult to assess, since some materials tend to segregate and remain in certain organs in the body. This means that even though a person is only exposed to very low levels of say, radioactive iodine, the iodine can collect in the thyroid and reach a relatively high concentration there.
I suspect the results from the current study are due to the accumulation of some radioactive material in or near the parents' reproductive organs. The decrease in mutations with time since the parents lived near Chernobyl, suggests that the radioactive material is slowly being removed from their bodies, which is often the case for heavy elements.
This is a much different case than Hiroshima, since the type of radioactive material from a nuclear reactor is much different than that from a bomb. Also, the quantity of radioactive material is likely to be much larger and localized to a smaller geographic area, since for the case of a bomb a large portion of the radioactive material will be blown into the jetstream and diluted over the whole planet.
> Do you really think that in the absense of religion things would have been any better?
Yes. Immensely. All the nasty things that happened without religion would still have happened, but the ones dependant on religion wouldn't have.
Do you honestly believe that in the absence of the pope or other religious leaders, the lives of the peasants would have been any better? The peasants were already slaves to the feudal lords, whose abuse may have been even more severe without the church's tenuous check on the feudal lords ultimate power.
Furthermore, without the uniting and stabilizing influence of the church, Western Europe would likely have been even more war torn that it was, as various Kings, Lords, and Nobles battled to establish or defend their own empires. Such wars would have increased the levels of pain and suffering of the peasants, since they would have been called on to be the expendible pawns of the armies.
I'm not so naive as to claim that the catholic church or the pope did not commit some horrible atrocities, but I think there is a very real possibility that in the absence of religious influence equally horrific or even worse atrocities might have been committed in the name of some other cause. Obviously, we will never know.
At times? How is it good to have a corrupt power structure dictating to people how they should live their lives? Don't even bother trying to claim that religious leaders aren't corrupt. They try to convince people of obvious untruths (just read any holy book) and use that to control people.
You're using a very broad brush. If one religious power structure is corrupt or even if 99.999% of all religious power structures are corrupt, that doesn't preclude the possibility of the existance of one non-corrupt religious organization. Each organization must be evaluated on its own merits. There can be no "guilt by association" even among religions.
If they had some grand truth, it would be evident without power structures and orders.
But without some structure and order, how would the grand truth be disseminated? Even scientific pursuits are organized into various power structures (e.g. ACS, MRS, AICHE, APS, etc...). Sometimes even these become corrupted. How can you expect more when the "grand truth" is so much more complicated and is at times subject to misinterpretation, and when there are those who could profit by twisting the truth to their own means.
That someone could twist the truth for their own gain doesn't mean that the original truth does not exist or is not valuable, just that someone has a corrupted version of it.
Many religious people have helped others. Sure. But those people would have helped others without the whole organized religion.
How? Any large scale operations to help people require some kind of organization. Disabled people often require more long-term help than individuals are capable of providing. An organization is required to provide relief to disaster victims. Many social services require an organization. Sure the government can provide these services, but it is terribly inefficient. Non-religious charitable organizations also can provide such services, but they often do not receive the same levels of support as are available to a religious organization that teaches the importance of helping your fellow man.
Religions exist to gain power for the leaders. Helping people doesn't serve that, thus religions as a whole don't help people.
If this is true, why are many religious leaders relatively poor? Why do they spend so much time volunteering their services? These don't seem like the acts of someone primarily interested in power and financial gain.
What a lie. The mormon church is rapidly rising in the list of richest organizations in the world.
He had these notions about Jews, rather akin to Hitler's, but without the "Master Race" crap. I don't think we'll *ever* know how many of them he killed (not personally, mind) but I've heard estimates as high as 54 million.
While it is believed that Stalin killed tens of millions of people most of these were not Jews. In fact the entire Jewish population of the Soviet Union at the time was much less than 54 million.
History calls this massive organized murder "The Pogroms", and they were a very major part of Stalin's domestic policy, along with collectivization and the endless series of Five-Year Plans.
Once again, I believe you are incorrect. I could be mistaken (someone please post a link), but I'm fairly certain that the "Pogroms" were an anti-semitic movement that swept Eastern Europe prior to the Soviet Revolution (1881-1917).
They essentially amounted to conspiracy theories and misinformation about the Jews. As a result local villagers and peasants rose up against the Jews and drove them out, killing some and forcing a mass exodus westward. Although, the central government did not organize the Pogroms, they did little or nothing to prevent them and after-the-fact investigations were slow or non-existant, giving implicit support to the movement.
While persecution of the Jews no doubt continued after the Soviet revolution, the "Pogroms" preceded the Soviet era and cannot be attributed to Stalin.
There's *NOTHING* good in the world which can be attributed to religion, which could/would not have happened without it.
FUD! There are many cases of religious institutions and religious people helping others. Your statement is just plain rediculous.
But there are many bad things which nobody would have been driven to do without power-mad popes and other religious figures forcing them to do.
Do you really think that in the absense of religion things would have been any better? If so how do you explain the extermination of Millions in Stalin's USSR or the atrocities after the French Revolution or human rights violations in China? Even without religion the same abuses of power occured as have occured throughout history. The fault does not lie with religion, but within human nature.
Yes, religion does have power to influence people and at times that power has been abused, but for the most part, christianity has a greater potential of influencing people for good than for evil.
Members of especially damaging religions should be tried for crimes. I'd especially love to grab a few mormon elders and try them for extortion (tithe or I'll tell your wife to leave you, our religion-influenced government will take your children away, and your mormon boss will fire you.) Ditto with JWs and scientologists.
FUD!!!
While tithing is important in the mormon faith, it pales in comparison to the importance of the family. You would be hard pressed to find a religious official in the mormon church that would counsel a wife to leave her husband, except in cases of abuse, regardless of how far the husband strayed from the church's teachings.
Besides with its membership accounting for ~2% of the US population, I hardly think the mormon church has a significant influence over the government
I'm not 100% comfortable myself with the bashing of religion around here, but on the other hand, I've seen too many people damaged by religion.
Damaged by religion or by the abuse of some religious beliefs?
I've seen people who are genuinely helped out of a dark place in their life by religion, yes
Me too.
- but many more who are put in that dark place by religion. Many more who find religion a convenient excuse to do what they were gonna do anyway (like hate people and stay indoors).
Is this any different than people who use scientific principles (e.g. survival of the fittest, eugenics) to justify hating people? Does abuse and misinterpretation of the principles make the underlying principles incorrect?
Many who use religion as a mind control device, so they can extract money, power, and allegiance from others - and MANY, MANY more who are victims of the above.
Once again, is this any different than using non-religious principles (e.g. Nationalism, Fascism, Communism, etc...) for the same purpose? I'm not saying that use of religion for these purposes is acceptable. Instead I'm just trying to point out that history teaches us that there will be those who try to take advantage of others, regardless of whether they use religion or some other belief system to accomplish their goal. You can't blame religion for the abuses of men. Eliminating religion would not prevent them!
For religion to serve a useful purpose for us as human beings, it should enable us to become more than what we are, and I don't mean after we die.
I completely agree, but are you sure it hasn't enabled many to become more than they would have been?
Personally, I have seen many cases where because of religion people have become more sensitive to the needs of those around them. I have seen members of a congregation rally around sick or terminally ill members. I have seen families helping other families when the father has lost his employment or when the mother has been committed to bed rest because of complications with a pregnancy. I have seen youth paint the house of an elderly couple. I have been involved in hundreds of other examples, which were the direct result of organized religion. If this isn't enabling man to overcome his selfish desires and elevating him to a higher level, then I don't know what is.
Instead it tends to make us LESS than we are - it tends to make us stop thinking, stop asking questions, and turn off the detectors in our head that light up when we hear bullshit and rhetoric.
To the contrary, religion has helped me to think more and to ask questions which science can't even hope to answer (at least during my lifetime). It has lead me to ponder on the nature of man and of life and drawn me to conclusions that help me lead a more fulfilling life. Sure, there are questions that it doesn't answer and there are apparent conflicts with some current scientific theories, however, this just helps me to realize how little I really understand about the world and encourages me to learn more.
It gives people an irrefutable authority to do whatever they want - if they can find a way to say "but the Bible says" or "but God says" - often without even having to justify it to themselves the way the godless heathens have to do.:-)
People with small minds will always find a way to convince themselves that their arguments are irrefutable and they are correct in what they do. The religious do not have a monopoly on rationalization.
Religion has tended to draw people into a state where they disbelieve what they see in favor of what they've been told - thus they gradually come to live in a world that bears no resemblance to reality. I've been there.
It's illegal to make exclusionary or preferential deals on the OS, if you have a
monopoly on the OS.
Has anyone else tried to actually buy a copy of Windows without buying a computer system? I don't mean an upgrade package, which requires that you already own Windows. MS will not sell the average consumer an original license for Windows. You can only purchase such a license from an OEM with a computer system. This means that if you were to buy a system with another OS, you could not "upgrade/downgrade" to Windows on that system. You would instead need to purchase a new system. This forces the consumer to buy a system with Windows pre-installed if they think they might ever want to change to Windows. This sure seems like restraint of trade to me! It essentially forces them to buy Windows even if they don't want it, increasing the cost of the system and clearly harming the consumer.
I think that is a stupid user issue. I have never needed to use office for anything. I can read most.doc files with other word processors and I can write all the documents I want in other word processors and just save them as a different format. And guess what? Other people can read them too because I save them in a format that nearly everyone has.
Try the following, create a Word document including some common formatting, such as tables, text boxes, equations and figures. Save it as a Word Document and import it to WordPerfect. You will notice that a great deal of the formatting has been lost. Now edit the file and save as a Word document and open it again in Word. Do this a few times and you will have a mess.*
*Note: the last version of WordPerfect I tried this with was version 6.1. Perhaps things have improved in the last few years, though I doubt it.
Actually, many heavy industrial polluters simply include pollution files in their normal operating cost budget. So I guess it is OK for the rich to pollute.
Only poor people need to stay clean.
Actually, with truly market driven anti-pollution laws, an enterprising poor person could stay very clean and then sell his pollution credits to the rich. In this way the clean person would be compensated for his efforts.
0xA. Star Raiders. (the first, 1st person shooter, or was that Tail Gunner?)
0x9. Pitfall. The first scrolling run and jump game.
0x8. Wolfenstein 3D. The first 1st person 3D shooter.
0x7. Pac-Man. The father of maze games.
0x6. Donkey Kong. The first platform game. Note: All sequels and anything else Mario sucked.
0x5. Tempest. Truly one of a kind genius. Nothing ever compared to this.
0x4: Tetris. Stunning simple and brilliant.
0x3: Missile Command. The epitome of cold war era games. If you didn't live back then or see "The Day After", you'll never understand.
0x2: Asteroids. First vector game and first to let best players enter their initials.
0x1: Pong! What more needs to be said?
Don't forget:
Space invaders & it's descendents (aka galaga)
Defender
Lode Runner
Lemmings
Rogue, Hack, Nethack, Amulet of Yendor
Castle
Cavequest
And a truly great game for it's day:
Empire - Text-based strategy game for the TRS-80 model 1. Does anyone else remember this game?
Other notables of yesteryear:
Oregon Trail
Cannon - The one where you input the angle and strength of your cannon shot and try to hit your opponents cannon before he hits yours. Later incarnations included such things as wind speeds (Probably the first physics based modeling game).
So my guess is that they were planning to bring the P IV out in 2002, but the Athlon + inability to crank up the P III as far as they expected unexpectedly put them in second place as far as speed goes....
...So they rushed a half-finished design out to production...
I agree, it seems that the PIV is really a half finished product that was rushed to market to prevent a massive loss of market share.
Engineers and geeks know that will only make things worse, but marketing and many other management pukes were raised on "The Little Engine that Could." They think that if you just try hard enough the impossible will happen.
I disagree. Sure, the PIV is not an Athlon killer in terms of performance, but there are plenty of clueless pointy-haired bosses and Joe six-packs out there that will never know that they shipped out a truckload of cash for only a marginal improvement in performance. After all most of their applications won't need that kind of performance anyway.
Grabbing the MHz crown (if not the actual performance crown) is a stroke of marketing genius. It buys Intel a little time to come out with an improved PIV that really is an Athlon killer.
He's not taking the Intel engineers to task. He's taking the Intel marketing people to task. What, you don't think the Intel engineers didn't want a larger L1 cache, more execution units, etc? Of course they did. But more silicon=higher costs so you can bet that it's the marketing guys who lopped off all that extra silicon.
I don't think it was so much a matter of cost as a matter of time to market. More silicon==lower yields==longer development time to get a manufacturable process. Intel could have included many of the axed features in the design, but it would have resulted in an extra 6 months to a year before the product could be released. Meanwhile, the Athlon would have been wiping the floor with the Pentium III and gaining market share like crazy. Intel couldn't let AMD have both the performance crown and the MHz crown.
The current Pentium IV is more of a stop-gap measure, just watch in a year or so intel will release a revised version with a larger cache and some fixes for the other problems mentioned in the article.
P.S. Will the next Pentium be a P5 or a P8 (or perhaps a Sexium)?
Hey is that where they make Cobalt-50? I know my school imports Co-50 from Canada for the gamma cell in our nuclear lab. (About 10000 Curies' worth every 10 years or so!).
Are you sure you don't mean Cobalt-60? The chart of the nuclides doesn't show anything below cobalt-54 and that only has a half-life of 0.19s. Cobalt-60 is relatively stable. Personally, I used to use Cobalt-57 as a gamma source for Mossbauer spectroscopy.
The reason is not primarily environmental protests, but economics. Nuclear power plants have not been profitable to operate. The extreme complexity of the systems makes them difficult and expensive to maintain, and they are often offline as a result. Also, the cost of constantly upgrading safety systems to the latest standards was economically ruinous.
While it is true that nuclear power generation in the US is currently not very economical, this is largely due to high regulatory costs. Basically, some of the environmentalists figured out that the easiest way to prevent construction of more nuclear power plants was to increase the cost of building and operating such a plant.
They accomplished this by lobbying government agencies to increase the regulatory requirements. They also lobbied the government to place some unreasonable demands on the requirements for selecting new sites for nuclear power plants. Finally, they had their lawyers sue companies to prevent them from building new plants. This effectively drove up costs.
If you don't believe me, then how come nuclear power is economical in France where 70% of the electricity generation is from nuclear power?
Yes, NG, or even LP is expensive today, but we also have alternative fuel vehicles emerging. This *should* help to bring the cost of NG down, due to supply and demand and all that.
O.K. let me see if I've got this straight. Increase the supply of alternative fuel vehicles, which in turn increases the demand for LP and NG. The increased demand causes an increase in price...Now how was this supposed to help?
If it weren't for all the left wing lawyers who get rich on challenging nuclear plant permits, we would have so much cheap nuclear generated electricity that you wouldn't have to meter it. You would pay a flat monthly rate, no matter how much you used.
I think your exagerating just a bit. Nuclear plants cost $billions to build, so the cost must be recovered somehow. Furthermore, Uranium reserves are not unlimited. Last I heard the US reserves would only last about 25 years if they were our only source of electricity. Switching to breeder reactors and reprocessing spent fuel could extend this significantly, but good luck getting that to happen.
but then you started bashing the democrats, the
environmentalists, the "green" people...that's bonehead.
Funny I don't recall mentioning democrats, environmentalists, or "green" people.
Nuclear reactors ain't safe...Chernobyl!
Let's see, your only example is a 40 year old reactor design that was rejected in the US because it was considered unsafe and that didn't include many of the safety features that are mandatory in the US. Using your logic, we should ban all automobiles, since Ford Pintos have a tendency to explode when rear-ended due to a poor design.
Furthermore, the safety mechanisms that did exist at Chernobyl were bypassed. The accident that happened at Chernobyl could have been avoided. Also, modern reactors are not capable of having the same type of accident as occured at Chernobyl because of their design.
all you need is one slimey run power nuclear company boss to screw it up.
That is why you have government regulation. Is there still risk? Of course. Is the risk greater than that posed by other industries (i.e. chemical companies producing toxic chemicals, shipping of petroleum and subsequent oil spills, the leaking gasoline tank at your neighborhood service stations that contaminates your water supply exposing you to high levels of carcinogens)? I don't think so.
So what? They can be used as a cheap storage system to suck up excess electricity during low demand periods and release it during peak demands.
You have a good point and I don't disagree. I've just seen to many to many blockheaded media reports alleging that fuel cells are the answer to all of the world's energy needs, since our oceans are filled with hydrogen. The truth is that fuel cells are only part of the solution. Furthermore, it may be a while before fuel cell efficiencies (including the efficiency of generating and storing hydrogen) are sufficient to justify their use as a storage system.
I think the fundamental problem is that so many factories have been built in California in the last twent years, much more than was anticipated by the short-sighted elctricity companies.
Not just in California, but in the neighboring states (Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington). These states have grown like crazy in the last decade and so are using the excess capacity, which they used to sell to California.
Why can't the US government step in and force importation of electricity to California from elsewhere in the US or Canada?
Just where do you propose they get it from? It's winter, so the northern states are using most of their power to heat their homes. Nevada and Arizona are already selling power to California. Maybe we should have intel shut down their fabs in Oregon, so they can keep their fabs running in northern California?
I just don't understand, as a Brit, how they can let their economic gem be threatened in this way.
Obviously, being a socialist country prevented any disruptions in the UK a few months ago when worldwide petroleum supplies were low.
Yes! Mod up the above post, it's not a troll, it's the truth.
In the early 1990's more than 20% of the electricity in the US was generated by nuclear power. However, because of the no-nukes crowd, no new nuclear power plants have been commisioned since the mid-80's. Currently, many of the older plants have reached the end of their intended lifetimes and are scheduled to shut down in the near future.
The only viable alternatives for replacing these nuclear power plants are fossil fuel based plants. At the present time renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power are not sufficient to meet the nation's (or even California's) energy needs. Furthermore they are unreliable (no solar on cloudy days or at night). Hydrogen fuel cells are not a viable solution because it requires more energy to produce the Hydrogen than can be produced from the hydrogen.
The problem with replacing nuclear power plants with fossil fuel based power plants is that the fossil fuel based plants are killing the environment. All contribute to global warming. Coal based plants produce acid rain, NOx, SOx and particulates. Even the cleanest natural gas based plants contribute to global warming.
Also, natural gas is relatively expensive compared to other fossil fuels and natural gas reserves are limitted. In fact California's current electricity supply problems are partially due to the limitted supply of natural gas.
Basically, by replacing nuclear power plants with fossil fuel based plants we are exchanging a safe source of power for a dangerous source of power. That's right! Fossil fuel based power is destroying the world. Nuclear power is relatively safe by comparison. In the US there have been no significant nuclear accidents that have threatened the lives and health of the surrounding population even after 40 years of nuclear power generation. By contrast thousands and possibly hundreds of thousands of people living near coal-fired power plants have suffered from asthma and other lung-diseases due to the pollution.
Of course there have been accidents at nuclear facilities, including severe accidents in some foreign countries. However, in all cases the nuclear accidents resulted from inherently flawed reactor designs and negligence. Nuclear reactors can be operated safely and the wastes, which are relatively small can be disposed of safely. Over 40 years of safe production of nuclear power in the US proves that we should not allow the scare-tactics of a vocal minority to scare us away from nuclear power.
I forgot to mention, my previous post has nothing to do with the Ozone layer, but is discussing the greenhouse effect, which is a completely different issue.
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Clean burning fossil fuel plants don't solve the main problem with fossil fuels - finite supply. What good is clean burning if you've got nothing to burn?
The studies I've read suggest the U.S. has sufficient coal reserves to meet all of its projected energy needs for the next 300-500 years. This is plenty long for my needs and should provide enough time for perfection of alternate energy sources.
By comparison reserves of fissionable material are only sufficient to supply the U.S. energy needs for less than 100 years, although breeder technology could possibly extend this somewhat.
Of course fossil fuels do face other problems including environmental damage from extraction and possibly global warming, so I would favor increased development of nuclear power as well as other power sources.
People are wondering about increased cases of cancer and other such health problems in modern industrialized society, and I have to think--isn't it just a very real possibility that the problem is this utterly pervasive low-energy radiation?
Or maybe more 70 year olds are dying of cancer today because they didn't die of polio when they were 5 or pneumonia when they were 18 or of that heart attack they had when they were 50.
Besides people have been bombarded by various forms of radiation from natural sources since the first human, don't you think mother nature has developed some defenses against mutations in that time. Guess what she has. Your body has a number of defenses against the harmful effects of low level radiation. That is not to say noone ever suffers any harmful effects, but the incidence is quite low.
Would you really propose to eliminate all of the modern benefits of electricity, radio & television, computers, cell phones, etc... to eliminate a 1 in 10-100 million chance that they could harm you at some point in your life. If so, you should certainly stay far away from any automobiles, since your risk of bodily harm from these is much higher.
And hydro power leaves waste, too. The environment around hydro plants is wasted.
I guess that depends on your definition of wasted. Prior to the large-scale construction of hydroelectric dams on the Columbia and Snake Rivers in Washington, Oregon and Idaho, the Columbia basin was largely considered a vast "wasteland". This region was largely considered uninhabitable and supported only sparse vegitation and limitted wildlife populations.
After construction of the dams and the ensuing irrigation systems, the region has become one of the most productive in the world, supplying significant portions of the world's potato and apple supplies. Wheat, Corn, Barley, hops, beans, and alfalfa are other important crops. The human population has increased significantly, as have many animal populations both domestic and otherwise. Bird populations have thrived in the increased wetlands produced by the dams. In general the area has blossomed.
I understand dust can get radiated too - don't they get inhaled into the body?
It's relatively difficult to make a non-radioactive material radioactive. In general this only occurs in a nuclear reactor, where materials are exposed to large quantities of neutrons with the appropriate energies. The "radioactive dust" or fallout consists of trace amounts of the original radioactive material that may get mixed in with normal, harmless dust.
When the radioactive material is inhaled this is a problem and can lead to lung cancer or other such problems. To some degree the problem depends on the particulate sizes, since particulates larger than ~10 microns are easily removed from the body by mucus, but smaller particles can remained trapped indefinitely. Fortunately, the body has defenses and can actually heal from some levels of radiation exposure. After all, radiation is not only found in nuclear reactors, but is constantly all around us. Brick buildings, pollution from coal-fired power plants, dirt, rocks, and dust, and even the air we breath (in the form of Carbon-14 in CO2) all contain trace amounts of radioactive materials. The danger is when the levels of radioactive materials are higher than our body's defenses are capable of dealing with. The concentration, rather than the presence or absense of radioactive material is what is most important.
Of course the concentration level of exposure is difficult to assess, since some materials tend to segregate and remain in certain organs in the body. This means that even though a person is only exposed to very low levels of say, radioactive iodine, the iodine can collect in the thyroid and reach a relatively high concentration there.
I suspect the results from the current study are due to the accumulation of some radioactive material in or near the parents' reproductive organs. The decrease in mutations with time since the parents lived near Chernobyl, suggests that the radioactive material is slowly being removed from their bodies, which is often the case for heavy elements.
This is a much different case than Hiroshima, since the type of radioactive material from a nuclear reactor is much different than that from a bomb. Also, the quantity of radioactive material is likely to be much larger and localized to a smaller geographic area, since for the case of a bomb a large portion of the radioactive material will be blown into the jetstream and diluted over the whole planet.
> Do you really think that in the absense of religion things would have been any better?
Yes. Immensely. All the nasty things that happened without religion would still have happened, but the ones dependant on religion wouldn't have.
Do you honestly believe that in the absence of the pope or other religious leaders, the lives of the peasants would have been any better? The peasants were already slaves to the feudal lords, whose abuse may have been even more severe without the church's tenuous check on the feudal lords ultimate power.
Furthermore, without the uniting and stabilizing influence of the church, Western Europe would likely have been even more war torn that it was, as various Kings, Lords, and Nobles battled to establish or defend their own empires. Such wars would have increased the levels of pain and suffering of the peasants, since they would have been called on to be the expendible pawns of the armies.
I'm not so naive as to claim that the catholic church or the pope did not commit some horrible atrocities, but I think there is a very real possibility that in the absence of religious influence equally horrific or even worse atrocities might have been committed in the name of some other cause. Obviously, we will never know.
At times? How is it good to have a corrupt power structure dictating to people how they should live their lives? Don't even bother trying to claim that religious leaders aren't corrupt. They try to convince people of obvious untruths (just read any holy book) and use that to control people.
You're using a very broad brush. If one religious power structure is corrupt or even if 99.999% of all religious power structures are corrupt, that doesn't preclude the possibility of the existance of one non-corrupt religious organization. Each organization must be evaluated on its own merits. There can be no "guilt by association" even among religions.
If they had some grand truth, it would be evident without power structures and orders.
But without some structure and order, how would the grand truth be disseminated? Even scientific pursuits are organized into various power structures (e.g. ACS, MRS, AICHE, APS, etc...). Sometimes even these become corrupted. How can you expect more when the "grand truth" is so much more complicated and is at times subject to misinterpretation, and when there are those who could profit by twisting the truth to their own means.
That someone could twist the truth for their own gain doesn't mean that the original truth does not exist or is not valuable, just that someone has a corrupted version of it.
Many religious people have helped others. Sure. But those people would have helped others without the whole organized religion.
How? Any large scale operations to help people require some kind of organization. Disabled people often require more long-term help than individuals are capable of providing. An organization is required to provide relief to disaster victims. Many social services require an organization. Sure the government can provide these services, but it is terribly inefficient. Non-religious charitable organizations also can provide such services, but they often do not receive the same levels of support as are available to a religious organization that teaches the importance of helping your fellow man.
Religions exist to gain power for the leaders. Helping people doesn't serve that, thus religions as a whole don't help people.
If this is true, why are many religious leaders relatively poor? Why do they spend so much time volunteering their services? These don't seem like the acts of someone primarily interested in power and financial gain.
What a lie. The mormon church is rapidly rising in the list of richest organizations in the world.
He had these notions about Jews, rather akin to Hitler's, but without the "Master Race" crap. I don't think we'll *ever* know how many of them he killed (not personally, mind) but I've heard estimates as high as 54 million.
While it is believed that Stalin killed tens of millions of people most of these were not Jews. In fact the entire Jewish population of the Soviet Union at the time was much less than 54 million.
History calls this massive organized murder "The Pogroms", and they were a very major part of Stalin's domestic policy, along with collectivization and the endless series of Five-Year Plans.
Once again, I believe you are incorrect. I could be mistaken (someone please post a link), but I'm fairly certain that the "Pogroms" were an anti-semitic movement that swept Eastern Europe prior to the Soviet Revolution (1881-1917).
They essentially amounted to conspiracy theories and misinformation about the Jews. As a result local villagers and peasants rose up against the Jews and drove them out, killing some and forcing a mass exodus westward. Although, the central government did not organize the Pogroms, they did little or nothing to prevent them and after-the-fact investigations were slow or non-existant, giving implicit support to the movement.
While persecution of the Jews no doubt continued after the Soviet revolution, the "Pogroms" preceded the Soviet era and cannot be attributed to Stalin.
There's *NOTHING* good in the world which can be attributed to religion, which could/would not have happened without it.
FUD! There are many cases of religious institutions and religious people helping others. Your statement is just plain rediculous.
But there are many bad things which nobody would have been driven to do without power-mad popes and other religious figures forcing them to do.
Do you really think that in the absense of religion things would have been any better? If so how do you explain the extermination of Millions in Stalin's USSR or the atrocities after the French Revolution or human rights violations in China? Even without religion the same abuses of power occured as have occured throughout history. The fault does not lie with religion, but within human nature.
Yes, religion does have power to influence people and at times that power has been abused, but for the most part, christianity has a greater potential of influencing people for good than for evil.
Members of especially damaging religions should be tried for crimes. I'd especially love to grab a few mormon elders and try them for extortion (tithe or I'll tell your wife to leave you, our religion-influenced government will take your children away, and your mormon boss will fire you.) Ditto with JWs and scientologists.
FUD!!!
While tithing is important in the mormon faith, it pales in comparison to the importance of the family. You would be hard pressed to find a religious official in the mormon church that would counsel a wife to leave her husband, except in cases of abuse, regardless of how far the husband strayed from the church's teachings.
Besides with its membership accounting for ~2% of the US population, I hardly think the mormon church has a significant influence over the government
I think you have to actully be good at something to be a "geek".
Actually, if I recall correctly a "geek" is a street performer who bites the heads off of live chickens.
On the other hand maybe I need a more recent dictionary.
I'm not 100% comfortable myself with the bashing of religion around here, but on the other hand, I've seen too many people damaged by religion.
:-)
:-)
Damaged by religion or by the abuse of some religious beliefs?
I've seen people who are genuinely helped out of a dark place in their life by religion, yes
Me too.
- but many more who are put in that dark place by religion. Many more who find religion a convenient excuse to do what they were gonna do anyway (like hate people and stay indoors).
Is this any different than people who use scientific principles (e.g. survival of the fittest, eugenics) to justify hating people? Does abuse and misinterpretation of the principles make the underlying principles incorrect?
Many who use religion as a mind control device, so they can extract money, power, and allegiance from others - and MANY, MANY more who are victims of the above.
Once again, is this any different than using non-religious principles (e.g. Nationalism, Fascism, Communism, etc...) for the same purpose? I'm not saying that use of religion for these purposes is acceptable. Instead I'm just trying to point out that history teaches us that there will be those who try to take advantage of others, regardless of whether they use religion or some other belief system to accomplish their goal. You can't blame religion for the abuses of men. Eliminating religion would not prevent them!
For religion to serve a useful purpose for us as human beings, it should enable us to become more than what we are, and I don't mean after we die.
I completely agree, but are you sure it hasn't enabled many to become more than they would have been?
Personally, I have seen many cases where because of religion people have become more sensitive to the needs of those around them. I have seen members of a congregation rally around sick or terminally ill members. I have seen families helping other families when the father has lost his employment or when the mother has been committed to bed rest because of complications with a pregnancy. I have seen youth paint the house of an elderly couple. I have been involved in hundreds of other examples, which were the direct result of organized religion. If this isn't enabling man to overcome his selfish desires and elevating him to a higher level, then I don't know what is.
Instead it tends to make us LESS than we are - it tends to make us stop thinking, stop asking questions, and turn off the detectors in our head that light up when we hear bullshit and rhetoric.
To the contrary, religion has helped me to think more and to ask questions which science can't even hope to answer (at least during my lifetime). It has lead me to ponder on the nature of man and of life and drawn me to conclusions that help me lead a more fulfilling life. Sure, there are questions that it doesn't answer and there are apparent conflicts with some current scientific theories, however, this just helps me to realize how little I really understand about the world and encourages me to learn more.
It gives people an irrefutable authority to do whatever they want - if they can find a way to say "but the Bible says" or "but God says" - often without even having to justify it to themselves the way the godless heathens have to do.
People with small minds will always find a way to convince themselves that their arguments are irrefutable and they are correct in what they do. The religious do not have a monopoly on rationalization.
Religion has tended to draw people into a state where they disbelieve what they see in favor of what they've been told - thus they gradually come to live in a world that bears no resemblance to reality. I've been there.
Religion, I thought it was public education?
Right On! Somebody moderate up the parent post!
It's illegal to make exclusionary or preferential deals on the OS, if you have a monopoly on the OS.
Has anyone else tried to actually buy a copy of Windows without buying a computer system? I don't mean an upgrade package, which requires that you already own Windows. MS will not sell the average consumer an original license for Windows. You can only purchase such a license from an OEM with a computer system. This means that if you were to buy a system with another OS, you could not "upgrade/downgrade" to Windows on that system. You would instead need to purchase a new system. This forces the consumer to buy a system with Windows pre-installed if they think they might ever want to change to Windows. This sure seems like restraint of trade to me! It essentially forces them to buy Windows even if they don't want it, increasing the cost of the system and clearly harming the consumer.
I think that is a stupid user issue. I have never needed to use office for anything. I can read most .doc files with other word processors and I can write all the documents I want in other word processors and just save them as a different format. And guess what? Other people can read them too because I save them in a format that nearly everyone has.
Try the following, create a Word document including some common formatting, such as tables, text boxes, equations and figures. Save it as a Word Document and import it to WordPerfect. You will notice that a great deal of the formatting has been lost. Now edit the file and save as a Word document and open it again in Word. Do this a few times and you will have a mess.*
*Note: the last version of WordPerfect I tried this with was version 6.1. Perhaps things have improved in the last few years, though I doubt it.
Actually, many heavy industrial polluters simply include pollution files in their normal operating cost budget. So I guess it is OK for the rich to pollute.
Only poor people need to stay clean.
Actually, with truly market driven anti-pollution laws, an enterprising poor person could stay very clean and then sell his pollution credits to the rich. In this way the clean person would be compensated for his efforts.
0xA. Star Raiders. (the first, 1st person shooter, or was that Tail Gunner?)
0x9. Pitfall. The first scrolling run and jump game.
0x8. Wolfenstein 3D. The first 1st person 3D shooter.
0x7. Pac-Man. The father of maze games.
0x6. Donkey Kong. The first platform game. Note: All sequels and anything else Mario sucked.
0x5. Tempest. Truly one of a kind genius. Nothing ever compared to this.
0x4: Tetris. Stunning simple and brilliant.
0x3: Missile Command. The epitome of cold war era games. If you didn't live back then or see "The Day After", you'll never understand.
0x2: Asteroids. First vector game and first to let best players enter their initials.
0x1: Pong! What more needs to be said?
Don't forget:
Space invaders & it's descendents (aka galaga)
Defender
Lode Runner
Lemmings
Rogue, Hack, Nethack, Amulet of Yendor
Castle
Cavequest
And a truly great game for it's day:
Empire - Text-based strategy game for the TRS-80 model 1. Does anyone else remember this game?
Other notables of yesteryear:
Oregon Trail
Cannon - The one where you input the angle and strength of your cannon shot and try to hit your opponents cannon before he hits yours. Later incarnations included such things as wind speeds (Probably the first physics based modeling game).
Snake, Worm - Don't hit yourself!
Sabotage
Ah, the memories!
So my guess is that they were planning to bring the P IV out in 2002, but the Athlon + inability to crank up the P III as far as they expected unexpectedly put them in second place as far as speed goes....
...So they rushed a half-finished design out to production...
I agree, it seems that the PIV is really a half finished product that was rushed to market to prevent a massive loss of market share.
Engineers and geeks know that will only make things worse, but marketing and many other management pukes were raised on "The Little Engine that Could." They think that if you just try hard enough the impossible will happen.
I disagree. Sure, the PIV is not an Athlon killer in terms of performance, but there are plenty of clueless pointy-haired bosses and Joe six-packs out there that will never know that they shipped out a truckload of cash for only a marginal improvement in performance. After all most of their applications won't need that kind of performance anyway.
Grabbing the MHz crown (if not the actual performance crown) is a stroke of marketing genius. It buys Intel a little time to come out with an improved PIV that really is an Athlon killer.
He's not taking the Intel engineers to task. He's taking the Intel marketing people to task. What, you don't think the Intel engineers didn't want a larger L1 cache, more execution units, etc? Of course they did. But more silicon=higher costs so you can bet that it's the marketing guys who lopped off all that extra silicon.
I don't think it was so much a matter of cost as a matter of time to market. More silicon==lower yields==longer development time to get a manufacturable process. Intel could have included many of the axed features in the design, but it would have resulted in an extra 6 months to a year before the product could be released. Meanwhile, the Athlon would have been wiping the floor with the Pentium III and gaining market share like crazy. Intel couldn't let AMD have both the performance crown and the MHz crown.
The current Pentium IV is more of a stop-gap measure, just watch in a year or so intel will release a revised version with a larger cache and some fixes for the other problems mentioned in the article.
P.S. Will the next Pentium be a P5 or a P8 (or perhaps a Sexium)?
you can drink water from a well within 100 feet of a coal-burning plant.
I wouldn't be so sure:
US to cut mercury emissions from coal-fired plants
O.K. you can probably drink water from a well, just don't eat any fish from within a few hundred miles.
Hey is that where they make Cobalt-50? I know my school imports Co-50 from Canada for the gamma cell in our nuclear lab. (About 10000 Curies' worth every 10 years or so!).
Are you sure you don't mean Cobalt-60? The chart of the nuclides doesn't show anything below cobalt-54 and that only has a half-life of 0.19s. Cobalt-60 is relatively stable. Personally, I used to use Cobalt-57 as a gamma source for Mossbauer spectroscopy.
The reason is not primarily environmental protests, but economics. Nuclear power plants have not been profitable to operate. The extreme complexity of the systems makes them difficult and expensive to maintain, and they are often offline as a result. Also, the cost of constantly upgrading safety systems to the latest standards was economically ruinous.
While it is true that nuclear power generation in the US is currently not very economical, this is largely due to high regulatory costs. Basically, some of the environmentalists figured out that the easiest way to prevent construction of more nuclear power plants was to increase the cost of building and operating such a plant.
They accomplished this by lobbying government agencies to increase the regulatory requirements. They also lobbied the government to place some unreasonable demands on the requirements for selecting new sites for nuclear power plants. Finally, they had their lawyers sue companies to prevent them from building new plants. This effectively drove up costs.
If you don't believe me, then how come nuclear power is economical in France where 70% of the electricity generation is from nuclear power?
Yes, NG, or even LP is expensive today, but we also have alternative fuel vehicles emerging. This *should* help to bring the cost of NG down, due to supply and demand and all that.
O.K. let me see if I've got this straight. Increase the supply of alternative fuel vehicles, which in turn increases the demand for LP and NG. The increased demand causes an increase in price...Now how was this supposed to help?
If it weren't for all the left wing lawyers who get rich on challenging nuclear plant permits, we would have so much cheap nuclear generated electricity that you wouldn't have to meter it. You would pay a flat monthly rate, no matter how much you used.
I think your exagerating just a bit. Nuclear plants cost $billions to build, so the cost must be recovered somehow. Furthermore, Uranium reserves are not unlimited. Last I heard the US reserves would only last about 25 years if they were our only source of electricity. Switching to breeder reactors and reprocessing spent fuel could extend this significantly, but good luck getting that to happen.
but then you started bashing the democrats, the environmentalists, the "green" people...that's bonehead.
Funny I don't recall mentioning democrats, environmentalists, or "green" people.
Nuclear reactors ain't safe...Chernobyl!
Let's see, your only example is a 40 year old reactor design that was rejected in the US because it was considered unsafe and that didn't include many of the safety features that are mandatory in the US. Using your logic, we should ban all automobiles, since Ford Pintos have a tendency to explode when rear-ended due to a poor design.
Furthermore, the safety mechanisms that did exist at Chernobyl were bypassed. The accident that happened at Chernobyl could have been avoided. Also, modern reactors are not capable of having the same type of accident as occured at Chernobyl because of their design.
all you need is one slimey run power nuclear company boss to screw it up.
That is why you have government regulation. Is there still risk? Of course. Is the risk greater than that posed by other industries (i.e. chemical companies producing toxic chemicals, shipping of petroleum and subsequent oil spills, the leaking gasoline tank at your neighborhood service stations that contaminates your water supply exposing you to high levels of carcinogens)? I don't think so.
So what? They can be used as a cheap storage system to suck up excess electricity during low demand periods and release it during peak demands.
You have a good point and I don't disagree. I've just seen to many to many blockheaded media reports alleging that fuel cells are the answer to all of the world's energy needs, since our oceans are filled with hydrogen. The truth is that fuel cells are only part of the solution. Furthermore, it may be a while before fuel cell efficiencies (including the efficiency of generating and storing hydrogen) are sufficient to justify their use as a storage system.
I think the fundamental problem is that so many factories have been built in California in the last twent years, much more than was anticipated by the short-sighted elctricity companies.
Not just in California, but in the neighboring states (Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington). These states have grown like crazy in the last decade and so are using the excess capacity, which they used to sell to California.
Why can't the US government step in and force importation of electricity to California from elsewhere in the US or Canada?
Just where do you propose they get it from? It's winter, so the northern states are using most of their power to heat their homes. Nevada and Arizona are already selling power to California. Maybe we should have intel shut down their fabs in Oregon, so they can keep their fabs running in northern California?
I just don't understand, as a Brit, how they can let their economic gem be threatened in this way.
Obviously, being a socialist country prevented any disruptions in the UK a few months ago when worldwide petroleum supplies were low.
Yes! Mod up the above post, it's not a troll, it's the truth.
In the early 1990's more than 20% of the electricity in the US was generated by nuclear power. However, because of the no-nukes crowd, no new nuclear power plants have been commisioned since the mid-80's. Currently, many of the older plants have reached the end of their intended lifetimes and are scheduled to shut down in the near future.
The only viable alternatives for replacing these nuclear power plants are fossil fuel based plants. At the present time renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power are not sufficient to meet the nation's (or even California's) energy needs. Furthermore they are unreliable (no solar on cloudy days or at night). Hydrogen fuel cells are not a viable solution because it requires more energy to produce the Hydrogen than can be produced from the hydrogen.
The problem with replacing nuclear power plants with fossil fuel based power plants is that the fossil fuel based plants are killing the environment. All contribute to global warming. Coal based plants produce acid rain, NOx, SOx and particulates. Even the cleanest natural gas based plants contribute to global warming.
Also, natural gas is relatively expensive compared to other fossil fuels and natural gas reserves are limitted. In fact California's current electricity supply problems are partially due to the limitted supply of natural gas.
Basically, by replacing nuclear power plants with fossil fuel based plants we are exchanging a safe source of power for a dangerous source of power. That's right! Fossil fuel based power is destroying the world. Nuclear power is relatively safe by comparison. In the US there have been no significant nuclear accidents that have threatened the lives and health of the surrounding population even after 40 years of nuclear power generation. By contrast thousands and possibly hundreds of thousands of people living near coal-fired power plants have suffered from asthma and other lung-diseases due to the pollution.
Of course there have been accidents at nuclear facilities, including severe accidents in some foreign countries. However, in all cases the nuclear accidents resulted from inherently flawed reactor designs and negligence. Nuclear reactors can be operated safely and the wastes, which are relatively small can be disposed of safely. Over 40 years of safe production of nuclear power in the US proves that we should not allow the scare-tactics of a vocal minority to scare us away from nuclear power.
I forgot to mention, my previous post has nothing to do with the Ozone layer, but is discussing the greenhouse effect, which is a completely different issue.