It's certainly commendable that Slate is taking as strong a stand as it is on vaccination. The problem is overall pandering: the well-meaning science columnists there like Phil Plait would probably like to take a similar stand against the wall of anti-science, anti-engineering prejudice that has dominated the left since the Seventies, but are afraid of pissing off what the site sees as an important segment of the readership. It almost seems as though they're hoping that taking a strong stand on that one issue will gently remind readers that perhaps they need to rethink other topics in science.
A prime example of 'Slateism': on climate change, Slate's columnists not only demand that we accept the most apocalyptic interpretation of the data as gospel (scientists are not used to using terms like 'believe' and 'denier', but okay, the Maoists take taken over the issue), but that we automatically reject every proposed solution. We're all going to die, because that's the just fate Gaia intends for us as punishment for being fat and eating meat. We can't go nuclear to eliminate carbon! We can't bioengineer better crops! We can't geoengineer for carbon control, even by doing something as mild and self-limiting as seeding deep ocean waters with iron sulfide to promote algal blooms. Even the new California solar plant attracted its own firestorm of opposition.
I have no interest in political conversion here. Left and right are different cultures, each with its own set of values evolved over generations. What I would really like to see is a leftist site that reclaims the spirit of Roosevelt. If we have problems like climate change, energy shortage, war and poverty, let's attack them by building the giant public infrastructure projects that Steinbeck waxed so lyrical about. An energy independence Apollo would address all of these problems at once.
I'm talking about the readership, not the columnists. Yes, Slate readers are the multicelled version of Salon.com readers and yes, Slate's columnists seem to have sensed that the anti-vaxers have crossed a line in their Luddism. But whenever Slate runs an article questioning the anti-vaxers, there is always a healthy (in numbers) contingent of readers flaming the writer as being a pawn of Big Pharma.
When most users measure traffic locally, it's with a router function. But as I said in Parent, a user's router measurement is not going to be trusted by the ISP. There is a need for a single-purpose device that objectively measures traffic independent from router and modem functionality, in the same way that an odometer or electric meter does.
I did omit another item such a device would have to log continuously: the current IP. Matching this with the ISP's records would reveal any attempt to place the odometer 'downstream' of the edge signal. Just detecting internal IPs is not enough, because some ISPs issue these to users as the IPv4 space runs out of addresses.
I suspect that SuddenLink is fudging its usage numbers, but my router doesn't do usage accounting. Even if it did, I'm sure the reaction from the ISP would be "We don't trust a user device to check our figures." What we need an an Internet odometer, a single-purpose traffic counter that plugs into the Ethernet between modem and router, and is sealed so the user can't tamper with it, and which would track the total time it was in-circuit so a user couldn't evade the count by just temporarily disconnecting it while downloading every Simpsons episode.
Does such a device exist, and do any ISPs trust its use as a check on their own accounting?
Neutrino detectors have been around for some time, including a large one at the South Pole. Others are located at Tsukuba, Japan and Lead, SD. What has prevented those detectors from finding solar neutrinos?
Two years ago, my street was torn up between the main highway into town and the CenturyLink switch, so that large-diameter orange cable could be extended to it. Yes, fiber! Fiber that could solve our area's ISP duopoly problem, where our choice is between CenturyLink's poky 10M service and that nice fast SuddenLink 50M service that is near-useless because of a low usage cap.
I checked, and CenturyLink has no intention of using that fiber to offer faster service anytime this century.
The criterion should be: if your geoengineering process can't run away, no problem. A legal procedure would be adding nutrient to areas of the ocean to produce carbon-eating algal blooms; the process runs only until the nutrient is consumed. An illegal procedure might be engineering a plankton organism that eats carbon, feeding on existing oceanic nutrients; such an organism could run away and consume all atmospheric carbon, freezing the world and killing most land plants.
Germany wishes it could start reducing the number of coal plants. To do that, it would have had to keep its nuclear plants open, and eventually build more of them. But in getting "environmentalists" to defend strip mining, and for the dirtiest mineral ever dug up, and in the green hills of a crowded continent that values its open space, and directly in the face of their own fears about carbon-induced warming, I'm not just after neener cred. I'm pointing to a real and emerging problem of energy sprawl.
A high-density energy plant might be controversial to install, but low-density energy occupies a large amount of ground. Replacing a nuclear reactor with windmills means having hundreds of them twirling away across the landscape. Lignite has not much more unit energy than wind, but in the absence of nuclear would be Germany's only 24/7 power source. Photovoltaic can be installed on existing rooftops, but what does a cloudy country without deserts do when that diffuse energy source needs large arrays of ground-mounted panels?
Furthermore, sprawling renewable sources require a whole new generation of transmission lines, routed in different ways than the traditional grid. The transmission lines for Engergiewende are already eliciting protests: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02...
Something tells me that the closure of the rest of the nuclear plants will never take place. The high cost of small-source energy can't be concealed in subsidies forever. At some point the ratepayers and the taxpayers are going to revolt.
Having a TV cable company provide Internet service is a technical natural, with a fast network of last-mile cabling in place, but a legal horror because having one provider for both services represents a conflict of interest. Much usage throttling is prompted by cable companies' fear of cord-cutting. This may require a separate antitrust decision to resolve.
Cable TV is heavily regulated, AND in effect regulated by cable companies themselves. Look what happened to Aereo. It implemented a delivery system all its own, which the SCOTUS ruled was a cable service, after which lower courts prevented it from being the very cable service the SCOTUS mandated it was.
Horror stories like this are what cause people to fear any sort of regulation on the grounds that it will servce some hidden corporate interest. If Net neutrality is to succeed it must be pursued as an individual right. The public WILL support regulation if it increases individual freedom.
This argument does bring up a point: is there a single, clear set of standards that define Net neutrality? Of course there are aspects of it that given people involved in the cause promote more than others, but is there a core set of features that everyone who says "I'm for Net neutrality" agrees on? Many technically oriented people do argue as Parent does, that neutrality would mean that no service may be offered a lower latency than any other service.
Germany is switching its baseload from nuclear to coal, which has meant digging the world's largest strip mine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G... covering 48 square kilometers. Think of it as an anti-nuclear exclusion zone, like Fukushima but getting bigger instead of being cleaned up..
But when all the nukes are phased out, Garzweiler won't be enough. This even bigger lignite pit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H... will top out at 85 sq. km when fully developed. Lignite has the approximate energy value, and pollution profile, of damp firewood.
We can also develop energy uses that can tolerate fluctuations in supply. Have your offshore windfield deliver desalinated water instead of varying amounts of power, and you have near-free local water (after construction costs) for coastal cities, every liter of which is a liter that doesn't have to be delivered from a thousand miles inland.
The best place for solar PV is on our vast acreage of low-rise rooftops in sunny parts of the country. A 2000-sqft home occupied only by a retired couple in the right place can cancel out all its daytime power consumption by using solar. If you have a few children, PV can still mitigate your grid draw.
But now look at a city highrise apartment or office. Its roof area, tiny in comparison to all the people and businesses inside it, cannot hope to generate enough power to service its inhabitants. Then there's the problem of high-energy industries that smelt steel or fab silicon, the industries that provide jobs for thousands of people at once. These all need high-density energy sources. If you want city people to ride transit and drive electric cars, add that to the demand.
It's probably not a typo, but the stupid short title length limit striking again. The limit is guaranteed to be one character less than the title you really want.
Amory Lovins, the Institute for Creation Research of the energy industry. For the uninitiated, opportunity cost means that the capital used to build a nuclear plant producing power at low known rates could have been used to cover several square miles of Environment with its windy-day energy equivalent in wind turbines at a mere ten times the cost per kwh delivered. Deal of the century, clearly.
And because most of us in here are software types, we will carefully extract the car from the wreckage, put new wheels on it, push it back up the hill, close all the windows, and nudge it downhill again so that we can see if it does the same thing again.
No, any more than I will bother reading that sleeping pill you referenced from - I kid you not - the Institute for Energy and Environment at the Vermont Law School. My local nuke happily chugs away producing 6 GW at, last time I checked, 1.63 cents/kwh. For the vaunted Germans to get anywhere near that, they had to revert to burning lignite, the filthiest stuff it is possible to dig out of the ground. And no, America's nukes are not in general experiencing shortened lifetimes. In fact, we keep finding that we cab run them longer than we originally planned.
But all power plants eventually need replacing. And if you liberals turn out to be correct on climate, apocalypse and all, we are going to need to replace all of our baseload plants other than hydro with new, standardized nuclear much earlier than we once thought.. More power to the fusion researchers, for when they do find their Holy Grail they will keep our economy running for billions of years to come. But what we have available right now is standardized fission. The French got it working, and so can we.
The idea is a good one, but I wouldn't make the ad a Red Cross PSA. That would set up an unwanted mental association between the Red Cross and jihadist savagery, which would be counterproductive. Instead, I would mess with the terrorists in the same way the video is designed to mess with us. Oderint, dum metuant as the Romans put it: if they're going to hate us, then let them fear us.
My PSA attached to the video would look more like a military recruiting spot, but instead of the usual "Army strong" patriotism pitch, my voiceover would remind the viewer that this year is the centennial of WW I, behind stock scenes of trench life and graveyards in Flanders. I would then explain that in honor of the centennial, American factories were whipping up millions of tons of mustard gas (footage of refineries and chemical plants in operation, then cut to WW I hospital images of gas victims in dismal monochrome wards). Then cut to foreboding canisters being loaded onto a long row of B-52s. Finish up with military-looking aerials of ISIS positions in Iraq, with explosions blossoming among them.
Slashdot Mirror
It's certainly commendable that Slate is taking as strong a stand as it is on vaccination. The problem is overall pandering: the well-meaning science columnists there like Phil Plait would probably like to take a similar stand against the wall of anti-science, anti-engineering prejudice that has dominated the left since the Seventies, but are afraid of pissing off what the site sees as an important segment of the readership. It almost seems as though they're hoping that taking a strong stand on that one issue will gently remind readers that perhaps they need to rethink other topics in science.
A prime example of 'Slateism': on climate change, Slate's columnists not only demand that we accept the most apocalyptic interpretation of the data as gospel (scientists are not used to using terms like 'believe' and 'denier', but okay, the Maoists take taken over the issue), but that we automatically reject every proposed solution. We're all going to die, because that's the just fate Gaia intends for us as punishment for being fat and eating meat. We can't go nuclear to eliminate carbon! We can't bioengineer better crops! We can't geoengineer for carbon control, even by doing something as mild and self-limiting as seeding deep ocean waters with iron sulfide to promote algal blooms. Even the new California solar plant attracted its own firestorm of opposition.
I have no interest in political conversion here. Left and right are different cultures, each with its own set of values evolved over generations. What I would really like to see is a leftist site that reclaims the spirit of Roosevelt. If we have problems like climate change, energy shortage, war and poverty, let's attack them by building the giant public infrastructure projects that Steinbeck waxed so lyrical about. An energy independence Apollo would address all of these problems at once.
I'm talking about the readership, not the columnists. Yes, Slate readers are the multicelled version of Salon.com readers and yes, Slate's columnists seem to have sensed that the anti-vaxers have crossed a line in their Luddism. But whenever Slate runs an article questioning the anti-vaxers, there is always a healthy (in numbers) contingent of readers flaming the writer as being a pawn of Big Pharma.
CNN would have run the same story as a shaky amateur video with two advertisements bracketing it and no audio.
Or a technology story that didn't pander to their No Nukes anti-vax GMO-free science illiterate readership.
But you could have had you backed up your iOS device to the cloud like everybody else.
When most users measure traffic locally, it's with a router function. But as I said in Parent, a user's router measurement is not going to be trusted by the ISP. There is a need for a single-purpose device that objectively measures traffic independent from router and modem functionality, in the same way that an odometer or electric meter does.
I did omit another item such a device would have to log continuously: the current IP. Matching this with the ISP's records would reveal any attempt to place the odometer 'downstream' of the edge signal. Just detecting internal IPs is not enough, because some ISPs issue these to users as the IPv4 space runs out of addresses.
I suspect that SuddenLink is fudging its usage numbers, but my router doesn't do usage accounting. Even if it did, I'm sure the reaction from the ISP would be "We don't trust a user device to check our figures." What we need an an Internet odometer, a single-purpose traffic counter that plugs into the Ethernet between modem and router, and is sealed so the user can't tamper with it, and which would track the total time it was in-circuit so a user couldn't evade the count by just temporarily disconnecting it while downloading every Simpsons episode.
Does such a device exist, and do any ISPs trust its use as a check on their own accounting?
An example of a phallacy is: "You can tell by looking at his shoe size."
Neutrino detectors have been around for some time, including a large one at the South Pole. Others are located at Tsukuba, Japan and Lead, SD. What has prevented those detectors from finding solar neutrinos?
Two years ago, my street was torn up between the main highway into town and the CenturyLink switch, so that large-diameter orange cable could be extended to it. Yes, fiber! Fiber that could solve our area's ISP duopoly problem, where our choice is between CenturyLink's poky 10M service and that nice fast SuddenLink 50M service that is near-useless because of a low usage cap.
I checked, and CenturyLink has no intention of using that fiber to offer faster service anytime this century.
The criterion should be: if your geoengineering process can't run away, no problem. A legal procedure would be adding nutrient to areas of the ocean to produce carbon-eating algal blooms; the process runs only until the nutrient is consumed. An illegal procedure might be engineering a plankton organism that eats carbon, feeding on existing oceanic nutrients; such an organism could run away and consume all atmospheric carbon, freezing the world and killing most land plants.
Germany wishes it could start reducing the number of coal plants. To do that, it would have had to keep its nuclear plants open, and eventually build more of them. But in getting "environmentalists" to defend strip mining, and for the dirtiest mineral ever dug up, and in the green hills of a crowded continent that values its open space, and directly in the face of their own fears about carbon-induced warming, I'm not just after neener cred. I'm pointing to a real and emerging problem of energy sprawl.
A high-density energy plant might be controversial to install, but low-density energy occupies a large amount of ground. Replacing a nuclear reactor with windmills means having hundreds of them twirling away across the landscape. Lignite has not much more unit energy than wind, but in the absence of nuclear would be Germany's only 24/7 power source. Photovoltaic can be installed on existing rooftops, but what does a cloudy country without deserts do when that diffuse energy source needs large arrays of ground-mounted panels?
Furthermore, sprawling renewable sources require a whole new generation of transmission lines, routed in different ways than the traditional grid. The transmission lines for Engergiewende are already eliciting protests:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02...
Something tells me that the closure of the rest of the nuclear plants will never take place. The high cost of small-source energy can't be concealed in subsidies forever. At some point the ratepayers and the taxpayers are going to revolt.
Having a TV cable company provide Internet service is a technical natural, with a fast network of last-mile cabling in place, but a legal horror because having one provider for both services represents a conflict of interest. Much usage throttling is prompted by cable companies' fear of cord-cutting. This may require a separate antitrust decision to resolve.
Cable TV is heavily regulated, AND in effect regulated by cable companies themselves. Look what happened to Aereo. It implemented a delivery system all its own, which the SCOTUS ruled was a cable service, after which lower courts prevented it from being the very cable service the SCOTUS mandated it was.
Horror stories like this are what cause people to fear any sort of regulation on the grounds that it will servce some hidden corporate interest. If Net neutrality is to succeed it must be pursued as an individual right. The public WILL support regulation if it increases individual freedom.
This argument does bring up a point: is there a single, clear set of standards that define Net neutrality? Of course there are aspects of it that given people involved in the cause promote more than others, but is there a core set of features that everyone who says "I'm for Net neutrality" agrees on? Many technically oriented people do argue as Parent does, that neutrality would mean that no service may be offered a lower latency than any other service.
Germany is switching its baseload from nuclear to coal, which has meant digging the world's largest strip mine:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
covering 48 square kilometers. Think of it as an anti-nuclear exclusion zone, like Fukushima but getting bigger instead of being cleaned up..
But when all the nukes are phased out, Garzweiler won't be enough. This even bigger lignite pit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
will top out at 85 sq. km when fully developed. Lignite has the approximate energy value, and pollution profile, of damp firewood.
We can also develop energy uses that can tolerate fluctuations in supply. Have your offshore windfield deliver desalinated water instead of varying amounts of power, and you have near-free local water (after construction costs) for coastal cities, every liter of which is a liter that doesn't have to be delivered from a thousand miles inland.
The best place for solar PV is on our vast acreage of low-rise rooftops in sunny parts of the country. A 2000-sqft home occupied only by a retired couple in the right place can cancel out all its daytime power consumption by using solar. If you have a few children, PV can still mitigate your grid draw.
But now look at a city highrise apartment or office. Its roof area, tiny in comparison to all the people and businesses inside it, cannot hope to generate enough power to service its inhabitants. Then there's the problem of high-energy industries that smelt steel or fab silicon, the industries that provide jobs for thousands of people at once. These all need high-density energy sources. If you want city people to ride transit and drive electric cars, add that to the demand.
It's probably not a typo, but the stupid short title length limit striking again. The limit is guaranteed to be one character less than the title you really want.
Amory Lovins, the Institute for Creation Research of the energy industry. For the uninitiated, opportunity cost means that the capital used to build a nuclear plant producing power at low known rates could have been used to cover several square miles of Environment with its windy-day energy equivalent in wind turbines at a mere ten times the cost per kwh delivered. Deal of the century, clearly.
Methane may be 23 x more effective as a greenhouse gas than CO2, but it's also much shorter lived. Which is really worse?
As the Chinese motivational speaker always says, there's no 'a' in "teeming".
And because most of us in here are software types, we will carefully extract the car from the wreckage, put new wheels on it, push it back up the hill, close all the windows, and nudge it downhill again so that we can see if it does the same thing again.
No, any more than I will bother reading that sleeping pill you referenced from - I kid you not - the Institute for Energy and Environment at the Vermont Law School. My local nuke happily chugs away producing 6 GW at, last time I checked, 1.63 cents/kwh. For the vaunted Germans to get anywhere near that, they had to revert to burning lignite, the filthiest stuff it is possible to dig out of the ground. And no, America's nukes are not in general experiencing shortened lifetimes. In fact, we keep finding that we cab run them longer than we originally planned.
But all power plants eventually need replacing. And if you liberals turn out to be correct on climate, apocalypse and all, we are going to need to replace all of our baseload plants other than hydro with new, standardized nuclear much earlier than we once thought.. More power to the fusion researchers, for when they do find their Holy Grail they will keep our economy running for billions of years to come. But what we have available right now is standardized fission. The French got it working, and so can we.
The idea is a good one, but I wouldn't make the ad a Red Cross PSA. That would set up an unwanted mental association between the Red Cross and jihadist savagery, which would be counterproductive. Instead, I would mess with the terrorists in the same way the video is designed to mess with us. Oderint, dum metuant as the Romans put it: if they're going to hate us, then let them fear us.
My PSA attached to the video would look more like a military recruiting spot, but instead of the usual "Army strong" patriotism pitch, my voiceover would remind the viewer that this year is the centennial of WW I, behind stock scenes of trench life and graveyards in Flanders. I would then explain that in honor of the centennial, American factories were whipping up millions of tons of mustard gas (footage of refineries and chemical plants in operation, then cut to WW I hospital images of gas victims in dismal monochrome wards). Then cut to foreboding canisters being loaded onto a long row of B-52s. Finish up with military-looking aerials of ISIS positions in Iraq, with explosions blossoming among them.