The half life of U-235 is 704 million years. Tf it had a short enough half life to be gone in 150 years it would be gone already. The planet hasn't received any new supplies of uranium since it coalesced from interstellar dust four billion years ago. Hell, even if you believe the earth is flat and was created by the Almighty 6000 years ago like it says in the Bible, it would be gone already with a half life that short.
We may use it up in 150 years, but there are ways around that too, like fast breeder reactors, which can produce more fuel than they consume.
The real problem with this and other biofuels is that it is not sustainable. to grow enough to be commercially viable will require huge amounts of fertilizer. most fertilizer for large scale farming is based on ammonium nitrate. almost all ammonium nitrate is produced directly from natural gas. so it would really just be converting petroleum to biofuel, which doesn't make sense, as the petroleum is a perfectly good fuel as it is. if the worry is running out of petroleum, the current common sense best solution is nuclear power, but common sense rarely prevails when discussing nuclear energy. replacing petroleum with renewable energy sources is a pipe dream. i think once the situation gets critical, people will be a lot more open to the nuclear option, but things will probably have to get awful bad first.
it's the government that's keeping ram prices high. they've been imposing draconian tariffs on most of the korean manufacturers that were selling the cheap stuff for a while now.
that may have been true 20 years ago, but there has since been an explosion of smaller breweries, microbrews and local brews. we went from having a choice amongst 10-20 american and canadian light lagers brewed with rice that all taste the same, to an incredible variety of different styles, including many traditional american styles that had all but died out during prohibition. before that though we were limited to imports, most of which were as close in style to budweiser as the big breweries doing the importing could find. like that horrible aussie fosters crap, and not-so-horrible-but-bland-by-comparison-to-the-mic robrew-styles-available-now stuff like heineken and becks. there is as much variety in america now as there is in germany, though perhaps not as much as in england since the real ale movement took off there. although in baltimore there is a bar that has 30 different varieties of hand pulled real ale on tap at all times. as for strength we have some beers that stand up nicely to stronger stuff like german dopplebock even. sierra nevada celebration ale i think is 9.5% alcohol, and even mass produced sam adams has lagers and ales approaching 7-8%. we've come a long way since we could be convinced to pay a premium for piss like fosters.
a few years back i used to do tech support for word perfect, they were up to 9 by the time i left, but we constantly had lawyers and legal secretaries calling about wp 5. they had to pay extra for support for it, and they couldn't get replacements for the keyboard templates, which uspet them to no end, but they would not give it up. the justice department was one of our biggest customers back then too, a good percentage of our calls came from them. there were plenty that were using 8 and 9 too. they have a lot of template and macros for legal docs built in, and they integrate with lawyer stuff like westlaw and hotdocs. we even had a legal edition available. and yeah, you can do some crazy stuff with the built in macro language.
I work in a call center and we can listen to and record any call that we want. A few years ago a customer unhappy with the performance of the software we support and our inability to perform miracles called back several times, threatening to bomb our call center and threatening the lives of several of our agents and their families and pets. We recorded at least 3 of his calls and we had his address, which we were able to verify thanks to the ANI system we use to id incoming calls. The angry caller was prosecuted in federal court on several felony counts of harrassment and making terrorist threats.
The nightvision system does not interfere with the view of the road because it is a view of the road. My point was that better technology already exists for a HUD. The whole point of a HUD is so the driver does not have to look away from the road. If you are going to put in an LCD panel, it might as well be on the dashboard, because the driver still has to look away from the road.
This would be a really lousy way to make a head-up display for a car. The driver would have to shift focus between the road and the windshield display. Current head-up displays use reflection for a reason. When the display is reflected by a piece of glass at a 90 angle it appears as thought the information is being projected in the distance in front of the vehicle, so the driver does not have to shift his focus between far and near to read the information, it looks like it is projected on whatever he is looking at at the time. An LCD display built into the window would hardly be better than one built into the dashboard, the driver would still have to take his eyes off the road to view the display.
America definitely does not need toilets that require tech support. I would hate to be the one taking those calls.
I was to Tokyo 18 years ago and the toilets were already insanely complicated back then. The ones that weren't just holes in the floor anyway. I took a dump on one in a hotel and it had 2 different keypads with about 20 buttons on each of its dual armrests. Of course, they were labeled only in kana and like any self respecting american, i had not bothered to learn a word of japanese before my trip, so it took me quite a while to figure out how to flush the damned thing. one of the buttons cause some kind of strange mechanical robot noise to come out of the bowl and when i leapt up to see what it was i was squirted in the face with warm water from the automatic asswasher feature. if i recall correctly it also had an automatic ass-blowdryer built in. that was not mentioned in any of the tourist literature. I would hate to see what the new, advanced models are capable of doing to unsuspecting foreigners.
To treat evolution as a teleological process like this is just insane. It's not like someone in the past came up with evolution to make a species better. Darwin's theory explains how things got to be the way they are, it is not a plan for improving the human species; the nazis treated it like that and the results were less than optimal. Species that are able to adapt well enough to survive changes to their enviornment carry on, the ones that don't die out. There is no more of a goal to it than there is to quantum electrodynamics. The paradigm not that the fittest that survive, it's the fit enough. There is no goal at the end, despite what Nietzsche or Hitler had to say.
The incidence of Type 1 diabetes, the one with a strong genetic component, has not been increasing. It's Type 2, for which the main risk factors are diet and obesity, that has been skyrocketing. Type 2 also usually develops later in life, after the age at which most people have children, so treating it does not decrease the fitness of the population as a whole.
whatever the iPod is, it isn't ugly. Design goes a long way toward selling just about everything apple makes. maybe these other companies should think about hiring some decent industrial designers.
So you're saying Kerry lost because gay marriage supporters voted against him? Because he has repeatedly stated that he does not support gay marriage, so that must be what you mean.
You can get used to the cold, just like anything else. Hypothermia is an absurd myth perpetuated by the heating and clothing companies to sell you their expensive and unnecessary products.
Don't you understand? Terrorism is an unimpeachable justification for anything these days. When it comes to Terrorism, there can be no non-sequiturs after 9/11!
Ah yes, we all know anecdotal evidence is the best kind, and personal hunches come in a close second.
The point of my original post was that comparing things like cigarettes and coffee to things like heroin and crack is akin to comparing apples to oranges. I will grant that a lot of people do genuinely have trouble quitting smoking and a lot of people genuinely do have trouble quitting crack, but the similarity ends there. Despite the almost universal complaints of smokers, cigarettes are relatively cheap and readily available. The social stigma and health consequences of smoking tobacco pale in comparison to those of smoking crack or shooting heroin. Heroin and crack are somewhat difficult and dangerous to aquire, and quite expensive. A single dose of crack or heroin can cost $10-$20, more if you've built up a tolerance. I am fairly certain that if the price of a single cigarette were raised to that level, there would be far fewer chain smokers than we have today. But the funny thing about cocaine and opiates is that addicts will go to almost any length and pay almost any price to get them. It can be difficult to quit smoking, and people who do can be anxious and irritable for a while, but not very many of them experience the extended severe depression and anhedonia that almost every cocaine and heroin addict does when they quit. It may take a lot of willpower to quit smoking, as it does to stop doing anything you like, but the willpower it takes to stop using something that is really addictive like heroin is rather like the willpower it would take to starve yourself to death when food is readily available.
Although quoting things out of context is a time-honored rhetorical device, it makes little sense to do it when the original quote is right above your own. I was talking specifically about opiates, cocaine and amphetamines. Of those three categories, the only one that produces a severe physical withdrawl syndrome is the opiates. I believe my post was pretty clear about that.
I will grant that alcohol is potentially addictive, but the physical withdrawl syndrome has nothing to do with it. People do not drink to prevent the "DTs", they drink for the effect of alcohol on the brain's reward circuitry. In fact, the symptoms of alcohol withdrawl are easily treated with benzodiazapines, which are far less impairing than alcohol itself. Despite this, alcoholics generally cannot be treated successfuly by prescribing benzodiazapines for them. They still want to get drunk, because the drugs do not activate the brain's reward system and alcohol does.
Even still, alcohol's effects on the reward mechanism are far weaker than the three specific classes of drugs I was talking about, and therefore a much smaller percentage of drinkers become addicted to alcohol than say the percentage of crack smokers who become addicted to cocaine.
What is irresponsible is the way the popular press throws around terms like addiction. The article describes at best a minor physical dependency on caffeine which results in some unpleasant symptoms if it is suddenly withdrawn. One can demonstrate dependencies like this with a lot of things, including laxatives and decongestant nasal sprays. The picture of addiction that most people have in mind is one of the heroin user who has to steal to support his habit, or the crack user who sells her body on the street to support hers. The word addiction is derived from the Latin addictus. In Roman times a writ of addictus was a document bonding a person to servitude or slavery. Addiction has no precise scientific meaning and there is no classification of any disorder as addiction in the DSM, but if the word is to mean anything it should describe an extreme state that resembles enslavement to a substance. To conflate dependence on caffeine with addiction to heroin or cocaine is completely inaccurate and irresponsible.
Drugs which are truly addictive are those which strongly affect the reward mechanisms in the brain, such as opiates, cocaine, and amphetamines. Of these, only the opiates produce a severe physical withdrawl syndrome. If overcoming the physical symptoms of withdrawl were the only problem, then we would have no heroin addicts. The solution would simply be to lock them away for a few weeks until the withdrawl sickness subsided, and after that they would have to be a fool to return to using the drug. Of course many addicts do return to using so there must be some other reason than preventing withdrawl symptoms.
Truly addictive substances like cocaine and heroin affect the brain's reward mechanisms so strongly that they can subvert these mechanisms to the point where they can become not just a desire but a drive. At that point suggesting a person quit using the drug is like suggesting he stop eating or drinking or having sex. The body simply will not allow it. In fact the reward the brain receives from drug use is so strong that it tends to trump all other drives so that a person will worry more about where his next fix is coming from than his next meal. A person in this state really does have very little control over his actions. True, he had a choice of whether or not to use the drug in the first place, and he is responsible for that poor decision, but in a state of addiction, his body's needs are in control. That is why it makes sense to restrict the use of such substances; they do, in a very real sense, take away an individual's responsiblility for his actions.
Animal studies show that animals will self-administer cocaine and heroin with enthusiasm. In fact they will do so to the exclusion of all other activities, including eating, drinking, and sex. When given the choice between cocaine and food, cocaine wins. They will stick with the cocaine lever until they starve. If allowed to, many will administer the drugs until the point of death. In contrast, it is difficult to get an animal to self-administer caffeine at all. Same goes for nicotine by the way. Animals do not even show a preference for caffeine laced sugar water over plain sugar water. Indeed, in double-blind studies, not many human subjects show a preference for caffeine over a placebo.
The word addiction is primarily a political term. The negative image of crack and heroin addicts is so strongly ingrained in peoples' heads that any group seeking to discourage use of a substance can only help their cause by finding some evidence that it is "addictive", but such usage, when it describes only physical withdrawl symptoms, especially very minor ones like the caffeine studies show, completely misrepresents the facts. People keep drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes because they like to. Junkies and crackheads keep using because they have to. It's not the same thing.
There are plenty of people at risk from decaying hydroelectric infrastructure. Dams don't last forever and when they fail the results can be catastrophic. The Chernobyl accident killed 32 people. With the exception of an increase in thyroid cancers, the dire predictions of a massive epidemic of cancers and leukemia have largely failed to materialize. Now consider the Johnstown flood of 1889. More than 2200 people were killed outright as the result of a dam breach. In more recent times, nearly 10,000 people were killed in 1973 in China alone as the result of dam failures. Huge, expensive hydroelectric dams in the U.S. are in danger of being rendered useless as a result of silting, many after a service life of only 50 years or less, and the problem is nearly impossible to fix without breaching the dam and starting over. Hydroelectric dams are responsible for depleting fish stocks and generally wreaking havoc on both down and upstream ecosystems. Hydropower is hardly environmentally benign nor is it entirely safe for communities near large projects. Hydropower has killed more people than nuclear energy (not counting, of course, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) has or is ever likely to, but I guess people just feel more comfortable being killed by something familiar that they can see, like a 50 foot wall of water than by a mysterious, invisible force like nuclear radiation, even if the former is far more likely.
To prevent people from breaking into my car, i leave it unlocked, and make sure nothing of value is left inside. Unless you have unbreakable windows locking the doors is only going to get you a broken window if someone really wants to get in and look around. An alarm might scare a thief away, but i wouldn't count on it, every time an alarm goes off in my neighborhood, it seems to take several hours for the car owner to react to it. There are things like the club and gas cutoffs to prevent someone from actually taking the car.
Slashdot Mirror
uranium may not be renewable, but the supply of fissionable uranium can be increased greatly by using breeder reactors.
The half life of U-235 is 704 million years. Tf it had a short enough half life to be gone in 150 years it would be gone already. The planet hasn't received any new supplies of uranium since it coalesced from interstellar dust four billion years ago. Hell, even if you believe the earth is flat and was created by the Almighty 6000 years ago like it says in the Bible, it would be gone already with a half life that short.
We may use it up in 150 years, but there are ways around that too, like fast breeder reactors, which can produce more fuel than they consume.
The real problem with this and other biofuels is that it is not sustainable. to grow enough to be commercially viable will require huge amounts of fertilizer. most fertilizer for large scale farming is based on ammonium nitrate. almost all ammonium nitrate is produced directly from natural gas. so it would really just be converting petroleum to biofuel, which doesn't make sense, as the petroleum is a perfectly good fuel as it is. if the worry is running out of petroleum, the current common sense best solution is nuclear power, but common sense rarely prevails when discussing nuclear energy. replacing petroleum with renewable energy sources is a pipe dream. i think once the situation gets critical, people will be a lot more open to the nuclear option, but things will probably have to get awful bad first.
it's the government that's keeping ram prices high. they've been imposing draconian tariffs on most of the korean manufacturers that were selling the cheap stuff for a while now.
that may have been true 20 years ago, but there has since been an explosion of smaller breweries, microbrews and local brews. we went from having a choice amongst 10-20 american and canadian light lagers brewed with rice that all taste the same, to an incredible variety of different styles, including many traditional american styles that had all but died out during prohibition. before that though we were limited to imports, most of which were as close in style to budweiser as the big breweries doing the importing could find. like that horrible aussie fosters crap, and not-so-horrible-but-bland-by-comparison-to-the-mic robrew-styles-available-now stuff like heineken and becks. there is as much variety in america now as there is in germany, though perhaps not as much as in england since the real ale movement took off there. although in baltimore there is a bar that has 30 different varieties of hand pulled real ale on tap at all times. as for strength we have some beers that stand up nicely to stronger stuff like german dopplebock even. sierra nevada celebration ale i think is 9.5% alcohol, and even mass produced sam adams has lagers and ales approaching 7-8%. we've come a long way since we could be convinced to pay a premium for piss like fosters.
wouldn't those windows get awfully hot with all that light trapped inside? plus it would suck having opaque windows for the first 10 years.
a few years back i used to do tech support for word perfect, they were up to 9 by the time i left, but we constantly had lawyers and legal secretaries calling about wp 5. they had to pay extra for support for it, and they couldn't get replacements for the keyboard templates, which uspet them to no end, but they would not give it up. the justice department was one of our biggest customers back then too, a good percentage of our calls came from them. there were plenty that were using 8 and 9 too. they have a lot of template and macros for legal docs built in, and they integrate with lawyer stuff like westlaw and hotdocs. we even had a legal edition available. and yeah, you can do some crazy stuff with the built in macro language.
I work in a call center and we can listen to and record any call that we want. A few years ago a customer unhappy with the performance of the software we support and our inability to perform miracles called back several times, threatening to bomb our call center and threatening the lives of several of our agents and their families and pets. We recorded at least 3 of his calls and we had his address, which we were able to verify thanks to the ANI system we use to id incoming calls. The angry caller was prosecuted in federal court on several felony counts of harrassment and making terrorist threats.
Maybe "Infectious Medical Waste" or "Pauly Shore Movie Collection". People like pizza.
all that means is that they were wrong about the time. it's a zero sum game. eventually we will hit a wall.
The nightvision system does not interfere with the view of the road because it is a view of the road. My point was that better technology already exists for a HUD. The whole point of a HUD is so the driver does not have to look away from the road. If you are going to put in an LCD panel, it might as well be on the dashboard, because the driver still has to look away from the road.
This would be a really lousy way to make a head-up display for a car. The driver would have to shift focus between the road and the windshield display. Current head-up displays use reflection for a reason. When the display is reflected by a piece of glass at a 90 angle it appears as thought the information is being projected in the distance in front of the vehicle, so the driver does not have to shift his focus between far and near to read the information, it looks like it is projected on whatever he is looking at at the time. An LCD display built into the window would hardly be better than one built into the dashboard, the driver would still have to take his eyes off the road to view the display.
America definitely does not need toilets that require tech support. I would hate to be the one taking those calls.
I was to Tokyo 18 years ago and the toilets were already insanely complicated back then. The ones that weren't just holes in the floor anyway. I took a dump on one in a hotel and it had 2 different keypads with about 20 buttons on each of its dual armrests. Of course, they were labeled only in kana and like any self respecting american, i had not bothered to learn a word of japanese before my trip, so it took me quite a while to figure out how to flush the damned thing. one of the buttons cause some kind of strange mechanical robot noise to come out of the bowl and when i leapt up to see what it was i was squirted in the face with warm water from the automatic asswasher feature. if i recall correctly it also had an automatic ass-blowdryer built in. that was not mentioned in any of the tourist literature. I would hate to see what the new, advanced models are capable of doing to unsuspecting foreigners.
To treat evolution as a teleological process like this is just insane. It's not like someone in the past came up with evolution to make a species better. Darwin's theory explains how things got to be the way they are, it is not a plan for improving the human species; the nazis treated it like that and the results were less than optimal. Species that are able to adapt well enough to survive changes to their enviornment carry on, the ones that don't die out. There is no more of a goal to it than there is to quantum electrodynamics. The paradigm not that the fittest that survive, it's the fit enough. There is no goal at the end, despite what Nietzsche or Hitler had to say.
The incidence of Type 1 diabetes, the one with a strong genetic component, has not been increasing. It's Type 2, for which the main risk factors are diet and obesity, that has been skyrocketing. Type 2 also usually develops later in life, after the age at which most people have children, so treating it does not decrease the fitness of the population as a whole.
Dickie Cheney has also spoken out in support of civil unions. Bush has given them at least tacit support.
whatever the iPod is, it isn't ugly. Design goes a long way toward selling just about everything apple makes. maybe these other companies should think about hiring some decent industrial designers.
So you're saying Kerry lost because gay marriage supporters voted against him? Because he has repeatedly stated that he does not support gay marriage, so that must be what you mean.
You can get used to the cold, just like anything else. Hypothermia is an absurd myth perpetuated by the heating and clothing companies to sell you their expensive and unnecessary products.
Don't you understand? Terrorism is an unimpeachable justification for anything these days. When it comes to Terrorism, there can be no non-sequiturs after 9/11!
Ah yes, we all know anecdotal evidence is the best kind, and personal hunches come in a close second.
The point of my original post was that comparing things like cigarettes and coffee to things like heroin and crack is akin to comparing apples to oranges. I will grant that a lot of people do genuinely have trouble quitting smoking and a lot of people genuinely do have trouble quitting crack, but the similarity ends there. Despite the almost universal complaints of smokers, cigarettes are relatively cheap and readily available. The social stigma and health consequences of smoking tobacco pale in comparison to those of smoking crack or shooting heroin. Heroin and crack are somewhat difficult and dangerous to aquire, and quite expensive. A single dose of crack or heroin can cost $10-$20, more if you've built up a tolerance. I am fairly certain that if the price of a single cigarette were raised to that level, there would be far fewer chain smokers than we have today. But the funny thing about cocaine and opiates is that addicts will go to almost any length and pay almost any price to get them. It can be difficult to quit smoking, and people who do can be anxious and irritable for a while, but not very many of them experience the extended severe depression and anhedonia that almost every cocaine and heroin addict does when they quit. It may take a lot of willpower to quit smoking, as it does to stop doing anything you like, but the willpower it takes to stop using something that is really addictive like heroin is rather like the willpower it would take to starve yourself to death when food is readily available.
Although quoting things out of context is a time-honored rhetorical device, it makes little sense to do it when the original quote is right above your own. I was talking specifically about opiates, cocaine and amphetamines. Of those three categories, the only one that produces a severe physical withdrawl syndrome is the opiates. I believe my post was pretty clear about that.
I will grant that alcohol is potentially addictive, but the physical withdrawl syndrome has nothing to do with it. People do not drink to prevent the "DTs", they drink for the effect of alcohol on the brain's reward circuitry. In fact, the symptoms of alcohol withdrawl are easily treated with benzodiazapines, which are far less impairing than alcohol itself. Despite this, alcoholics generally cannot be treated successfuly by prescribing benzodiazapines for them. They still want to get drunk, because the drugs do not activate the brain's reward system and alcohol does.
Even still, alcohol's effects on the reward mechanism are far weaker than the three specific classes of drugs I was talking about, and therefore a much smaller percentage of drinkers become addicted to alcohol than say the percentage of crack smokers who become addicted to cocaine.
What is irresponsible is the way the popular press throws around terms like addiction. The article describes at best a minor physical dependency on caffeine which results in some unpleasant symptoms if it is suddenly withdrawn. One can demonstrate dependencies like this with a lot of things, including laxatives and decongestant nasal sprays. The picture of addiction that most people have in mind is one of the heroin user who has to steal to support his habit, or the crack user who sells her body on the street to support hers. The word addiction is derived from the Latin addictus. In Roman times a writ of addictus was a document bonding a person to servitude or slavery. Addiction has no precise scientific meaning and there is no classification of any disorder as addiction in the DSM, but if the word is to mean anything it should describe an extreme state that resembles enslavement to a substance. To conflate dependence on caffeine with addiction to heroin or cocaine is completely inaccurate and irresponsible.
Drugs which are truly addictive are those which strongly affect the reward mechanisms in the brain, such as opiates, cocaine, and amphetamines. Of these, only the opiates produce a severe physical withdrawl syndrome. If overcoming the physical symptoms of withdrawl were the only problem, then we would have no heroin addicts. The solution would simply be to lock them away for a few weeks until the withdrawl sickness subsided, and after that they would have to be a fool to return to using the drug. Of course many addicts do return to using so there must be some other reason than preventing withdrawl symptoms.
Truly addictive substances like cocaine and heroin affect the brain's reward mechanisms so strongly that they can subvert these mechanisms to the point where they can become not just a desire but a drive. At that point suggesting a person quit using the drug is like suggesting he stop eating or drinking or having sex. The body simply will not allow it. In fact the reward the brain receives from drug use is so strong that it tends to trump all other drives so that a person will worry more about where his next fix is coming from than his next meal. A person in this state really does have very little control over his actions. True, he had a choice of whether or not to use the drug in the first place, and he is responsible for that poor decision, but in a state of addiction, his body's needs are in control. That is why it makes sense to restrict the use of such substances; they do, in a very real sense, take away an individual's responsiblility for his actions.
Animal studies show that animals will self-administer cocaine and heroin with enthusiasm. In fact they will do so to the exclusion of all other activities, including eating, drinking, and sex. When given the choice between cocaine and food, cocaine wins. They will stick with the cocaine lever until they starve. If allowed to, many will administer the drugs until the point of death. In contrast, it is difficult to get an animal to self-administer caffeine at all. Same goes for nicotine by the way. Animals do not even show a preference for caffeine laced sugar water over plain sugar water. Indeed, in double-blind studies, not many human subjects show a preference for caffeine over a placebo.
The word addiction is primarily a political term. The negative image of crack and heroin addicts is so strongly ingrained in peoples' heads that any group seeking to discourage use of a substance can only help their cause by finding some evidence that it is "addictive", but such usage, when it describes only physical withdrawl symptoms, especially very minor ones like the caffeine studies show, completely misrepresents the facts. People keep drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes because they like to. Junkies and crackheads keep using because they have to. It's not the same thing.
There are plenty of people at risk from decaying hydroelectric infrastructure. Dams don't last forever and when they fail the results can be catastrophic. The Chernobyl accident killed 32 people. With the exception of an increase in thyroid cancers, the dire predictions of a massive epidemic of cancers and leukemia have largely failed to materialize. Now consider the Johnstown flood of 1889. More than 2200 people were killed outright as the result of a dam breach. In more recent times, nearly 10,000 people were killed in 1973 in China alone as the result of dam failures. Huge, expensive hydroelectric dams in the U.S. are in danger of being rendered useless as a result of silting, many after a service life of only 50 years or less, and the problem is nearly impossible to fix without breaching the dam and starting over. Hydroelectric dams are responsible for depleting fish stocks and generally wreaking havoc on both down and upstream ecosystems. Hydropower is hardly environmentally benign nor is it entirely safe for communities near large projects. Hydropower has killed more people than nuclear energy (not counting, of course, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) has or is ever likely to, but I guess people just feel more comfortable being killed by something familiar that they can see, like a 50 foot wall of water than by a mysterious, invisible force like nuclear radiation, even if the former is far more likely.
To prevent people from breaking into my car, i leave it unlocked, and make sure nothing of value is left inside. Unless you have unbreakable windows locking the doors is only going to get you a broken window if someone really wants to get in and look around. An alarm might scare a thief away, but i wouldn't count on it, every time an alarm goes off in my neighborhood, it seems to take several hours for the car owner to react to it. There are things like the club and gas cutoffs to prevent someone from actually taking the car.