Then why is fear of science and its applications the default position of today's left whenever something new comes along? If fossil sources pollute, why won't you let us have nuclear? If spent nuclear fuel is piling up, why didn't you let us build recycling facilities, as the French did years ago, to make it into new fuel? If nuclear recycling is more expensive than mining under present conditions, why didn't you let us open that storage facility in Nevada, the one we spent $5 billion preparing, so that we can store spent rods safely until we come down the learning curve on recycling?
You want solar, you said? Then why, when California built a solar farm in the emptiest part of the Mojave Desert, did "environmentalists" try to stop it every step of the way, and even now are complaining about the occasional bird that gets fried flying through the tiny concentrator focus next to the collector towers? By imposing delay after delay on the plant with their vacuous lawsuits, they inflated the cost of the project to $2.2 billion - a cost about the same as one of our Arizona nuclear reactors that has three times the power output, and 24/7.
Republicans are interfering with infrastructure projects, you say? They weren't around in 2008, when Obama got $17 trillion to stimulate the economy. But knowing the power of the Luddite lobby, the infrastructure part of his stimulus spending all got piddled away on "shovel ready" street widenings and traffic signals. He had the political capital to go Roosevelt that year, to build something like an energy independence Apollo, but he didn't want to provoke the Greens. So we continue to fight in the Middle East.
The Supreme Court decision was not put Aereo out of business; all it did was rule that in retransmitting broadcasts Aereo should be operating as a cable company. But when Aereo was not allowed to operate as a cable carrier as the SCOTUS directed, that's when we knew that a monopoly was in operation.
Greenwald has an excellent point here: if the current Democratic -majority Senate rejected NSA reform, what's going to happen next year when Republicans assume power? We will get improved privacy rights only when consumers care enough about the subject to choose more secure products.
Want contactless payments? Then consciously go for the most secure implementations. Tired of having your e-mail account hacked while on vacation? Take the trouble to use two-factor authentication. Concerned about the NSA's ability to tap phone calls? Choose and use encrypted VOIP.
It wasn't always this way. In John Steinbeck's day, leftists celebrated the huge infrastructure projects of the New Deal, because they meant construction jobs now and an improved economy later with cheaper transportation, electricity and water. The left chose to turn anti-himan in the Seventies, which is why progress today has to wait until that generation ages out of political relevance. Fortunately for the rest of us, their youthful drug use is catching up with them.
That was then. Today we have settled on standardized new-generation plant designs that avoid this problem.
What's really needed is a change in our legal system to eliminate the disproportionate power that small groups of activists have to disrupt construction. Their strategy is to raise costs by imposing phony legal delays on construction after the initial approval.
Uber stands guilty of being clueless about political correctness. Digging dirt about the private lives of entrepreneurs is called whistleblowing, and will probably earn a biopic made about about your life. Dishing on union satraps or Luddites is "harassment" and therefore evil.
How quickly we forget that Sarah Lacy was herself caught in evil doings just a couple of years ago: http://valleywag.gawker.com/ar...
This is how the British press views the situation: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/com... As Americans we tend to focus on the narrow issue of gun rights as an explanation for the lower home invasion rate in the US (10% of burglaries) vs the 50% rate in the UK, but it's a deeper problem than that. While in the US there is a generally accepted right to self defense, the legal theory in the UK is that fighting crime is the police's job. In Britain, retaliating with a knife or even an incidental household object is likely to result in legal trouble for the homeowner. Thugs know this, which leads to home invasions not being just a problem in bad neighborhoods. The article above refers to an invasion in one of the finest sections of London.
I also have only one eye, so I know what he means. Physical binocular depth perception only works to about thirty feet out, so for driving one eye is as good as two. But when the cashier hands me a bill at the grocery store, in certain light I might miss grabbing it.
In the US, the debate is always over whether the unknown potential of passenger service is worth the cost of a rail project.
But since freight pays the bills on today's slow railroads (which run at a good profit!) why not design and build for high-speed freight instead? Fast transcontinental freight service could reduce the need for containerships and take some long-distance truck congestion off the Interstates. Once this is done, let markets for passenger service in crowded corridors develop naturally. We might be surprised.
When I lived there, "Shinkansen running slow because of wind in Aichi Prefecture" was a common news item. Wind disrupts the schedules, but seldom stops the train.
The wonderful thing about markets is that human activity adjusts to whatever economic reality is out there, just as we adapted over time to any given set of conditions in nature. Whenever some parameter in the economy changes, a constituency somewhere feels pain. If the oil price rises or the oil price falls, someone gets hurt and has to readjust. Every squawk makes the news; people who are happier at the change that just occurred are the ones who keep quiet and enjoy it.
As has been pointed out earlier, RTGs are bigger than you think. The real moral of the Philae story is that robots, especially those operating outside the latency boundary of teleoperator technology, are pathetically unable to adapt to local surprises. It would have been trivially easy for a human traveling with Rosetta to go EVA and position Philae in a sunnier place, or to right it if it had landed upside down or fallen into a gully. Building in the life supports to get a human that far from Earth is a Hard Problem, but stories like this are the reason that one day it will have to be solved.
This illustrates why real space programs, especially those which involve serious risk to human life, are going to have to go private. Any governmental program is bound to get pecked to death by Luddites on one side and agenda-driven single issue warriors like the Shirtstorm crowd. The more global elite billionaires responsible to nothing and no one who get involved in space, the better off we will be.
And how will we measure success? As soon as we start to hear yammering along the lines of "Musk is strip-mining the Moon!" That's when.
Slashdot Mirror
Then why is fear of science and its applications the default position of today's left whenever something new comes along? If fossil sources pollute, why won't you let us have nuclear? If spent nuclear fuel is piling up, why didn't you let us build recycling facilities, as the French did years ago, to make it into new fuel? If nuclear recycling is more expensive than mining under present conditions, why didn't you let us open that storage facility in Nevada, the one we spent $5 billion preparing, so that we can store spent rods safely until we come down the learning curve on recycling?
You want solar, you said? Then why, when California built a solar farm in the emptiest part of the Mojave Desert, did "environmentalists" try to stop it every step of the way, and even now are complaining about the occasional bird that gets fried flying through the tiny concentrator focus next to the collector towers? By imposing delay after delay on the plant with their vacuous lawsuits, they inflated the cost of the project to $2.2 billion - a cost about the same as one of our Arizona nuclear reactors that has three times the power output, and 24/7.
Republicans are interfering with infrastructure projects, you say? They weren't around in 2008, when Obama got $17 trillion to stimulate the economy. But knowing the power of the Luddite lobby, the infrastructure part of his stimulus spending all got piddled away on "shovel ready" street widenings and traffic signals. He had the political capital to go Roosevelt that year, to build something like an energy independence Apollo, but he didn't want to provoke the Greens. So we continue to fight in the Middle East.
The Supreme Court decision was not put Aereo out of business; all it did was rule that in retransmitting broadcasts Aereo should be operating as a cable company. But when Aereo was not allowed to operate as a cable carrier as the SCOTUS directed, that's when we knew that a monopoly was in operation.
Greenwald has an excellent point here: if the current Democratic -majority Senate rejected NSA reform, what's going to happen next year when Republicans assume power? We will get improved privacy rights only when consumers care enough about the subject to choose more secure products.
Want contactless payments? Then consciously go for the most secure implementations. Tired of having your e-mail account hacked while on vacation? Take the trouble to use two-factor authentication. Concerned about the NSA's ability to tap phone calls? Choose and use encrypted VOIP.
It wasn't always this way. In John Steinbeck's day, leftists celebrated the huge infrastructure projects of the New Deal, because they meant construction jobs now and an improved economy later with cheaper transportation, electricity and water. The left chose to turn anti-himan in the Seventies, which is why progress today has to wait until that generation ages out of political relevance. Fortunately for the rest of us, their youthful drug use is catching up with them.
That was then. Today we have settled on standardized new-generation plant designs that avoid this problem.
What's really needed is a change in our legal system to eliminate the disproportionate power that small groups of activists have to disrupt construction. Their strategy is to raise costs by imposing phony legal delays on construction after the initial approval.
Usually people falsely claim to have a degree.
And does it work against putative Nigerian royalty?
"Honey, that's not what I meant by 'cleaning up windows'!"
Uber stands guilty of being clueless about political correctness. Digging dirt about the private lives of entrepreneurs is called whistleblowing, and will probably earn a biopic made about about your life. Dishing on union satraps or Luddites is "harassment" and therefore evil.
How quickly we forget that Sarah Lacy was herself caught in evil doings just a couple of years ago:
http://valleywag.gawker.com/ar...
Not like it's something we could already do 45 years ago, but with a core sample this time.
This is how the British press views the situation:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/com...
As Americans we tend to focus on the narrow issue of gun rights as an explanation for the lower home invasion rate in the US (10% of burglaries) vs the 50% rate in the UK, but it's a deeper problem than that. While in the US there is a generally accepted right to self defense, the legal theory in the UK is that fighting crime is the police's job. In Britain, retaliating with a knife or even an incidental household object is likely to result in legal trouble for the homeowner. Thugs know this, which leads to home invasions not being just a problem in bad neighborhoods. The article above refers to an invasion in one of the finest sections of London.
Don't feel picked on. Our federosaurus steals from Americans as readily as it does from foreigners.
Actually they do, but in the UK it's spelled with a small R and they are considered terrorists.
No, that's because when this happens in Britain, victims are not allowed to shoot back.
I also have only one eye, so I know what he means. Physical binocular depth perception only works to about thirty feet out, so for driving one eye is as good as two. But when the cashier hands me a bill at the grocery store, in certain light I might miss grabbing it.
In the US, the debate is always over whether the unknown potential of passenger service is worth the cost of a rail project.
But since freight pays the bills on today's slow railroads (which run at a good profit!) why not design and build for high-speed freight instead? Fast transcontinental freight service could reduce the need for containerships and take some long-distance truck congestion off the Interstates. Once this is done, let markets for passenger service in crowded corridors develop naturally. We might be surprised.
Yes, country stations are crammed with bicycles during the working day, most of them unlocked.
Attorneys, the most commonly elected profession, are not used to laws they can't plea-bargain away.
When I lived there, "Shinkansen running slow because of wind in Aichi Prefecture" was a common news item. Wind disrupts the schedules, but seldom stops the train.
Michelson designed the machine to run on luminiferous aether.
The wonderful thing about markets is that human activity adjusts to whatever economic reality is out there, just as we adapted over time to any given set of conditions in nature. Whenever some parameter in the economy changes, a constituency somewhere feels pain. If the oil price rises or the oil price falls, someone gets hurt and has to readjust. Every squawk makes the news; people who are happier at the change that just occurred are the ones who keep quiet and enjoy it.
As has been pointed out earlier, RTGs are bigger than you think. The real moral of the Philae story is that robots, especially those operating outside the latency boundary of teleoperator technology, are pathetically unable to adapt to local surprises. It would have been trivially easy for a human traveling with Rosetta to go EVA and position Philae in a sunnier place, or to right it if it had landed upside down or fallen into a gully. Building in the life supports to get a human that far from Earth is a Hard Problem, but stories like this are the reason that one day it will have to be solved.
Especially when escape velocity on a comet is a white guy's jump.
This illustrates why real space programs, especially those which involve serious risk to human life, are going to have to go private. Any governmental program is bound to get pecked to death by Luddites on one side and agenda-driven single issue warriors like the Shirtstorm crowd. The more global elite billionaires responsible to nothing and no one who get involved in space, the better off we will be.
And how will we measure success? As soon as we start to hear yammering along the lines of "Musk is strip-mining the Moon!" That's when.
Nerd challenge: Design an experiment that will determine whether Space Nutter Troll is a bot or a person.