Nuclear power could be the future, but I think that everybody's going about it the wrong way.
There are four big risks with nuclear power: accidents, waste disposal, terrorist attacks and weapons proliferation. People tend to argue over the first two issues, but they may actually the most manageable. The other two risks are so bad that it's a no-brainer that you don't want hundreds of nuclear power plants sprinkled about in dozens of countries.
Terrorist threats mean that I don't want a nuke plant anywhere near me where some bozo can crash a plane into the spent fuel storage pond. Proliferation threats mean I don't want every two-bit country to have their own nuclear plants.
What to do about this? I'll propose some radical thoughts:
I think an answer would be to put the nuclear plants far away from any people. Imagine building huge artificial islands in the middle of the ocean, thousands of miles from any populated areas. On those islands, put the most massive clusters of nuclear power plants that can be built. Instead of generating electricity, have the plants generate hydrogen which is piped to consumer countries.
Now, if there's an accident or someone manages to blow up a reactor, the damage would be minimal. Instead of permanently destroying the real-estate value of an area the size of several counties, you would have diffuse global contamination no worse than that deliberately released by the massive weapons tests of the 1950s (a large so-called "hydrogen" bomb actually could contain literally tons of uranium in a fissionable tamper).
What to do with the waste? One theory I've seen for effective waste management is to simply cram it deep into stable ocean sediment. Maybe the scheme would eventually fail, but at least the contamination would be highly diluted before it got near anybody, and it's certainly not in anyone's immediate back yard. (Some recent biological evidence suggests that radiation exposure risks are nonlinear; low doses from a diluted release may not be enough overwhelm standard cellular error correction mechanisms, and therefore cause little or no damage.)
The weapons proliferation problem would be minimized by having coalitions of "respectable" countries running the islands. International treaties would guarantee any country the right to buy energy produced by the plants at a fair price; this would eliminate the argument that every country needs its own nuclear industry. The reactors could be breeder reactors, and islands could contain their own fuel reprecessing plants. Since the fuel never leaves the island unless it's disposed of in the seabed, the risks of losing track of weapons-grade materials is minimized.
Operating costs could be lower because with the reduced exposure to the population, some of the extreme safety measures could be eased up a bit. Economies of scale would also help. Security would be improved with just a few sites to keep track of; actual military forces could be used instead of the current handful of corporate rent-a-cops at each nuclear plant. Obviously, it would be cheap to implement a cooling solution.
While I could support an isolated nuclear power scheme such as I've described, I think that all current nuclear power plants should be shut down as soon as possible.
What's the half life of CO2? It's trillions of years, it effectively lasts forever.
The CO2 would last forever if it were isolated. Howver, we're talking about CO2 *in the atmosphere*. This CO2 does have a half life as natural processes chemically convert it and sequester the carbon back in the earth.
There are a large number of complex pathways in the planet's carbon cycle, but the net overall effect is that within a certain time (IIRC, hundreds of years maybe?) half of the excess CO2 ends up in sediment at the bottom of the ocean which eventually gets converted to limestone.
Please explain what would stop someone from taking a GPLd work, sticking their name on it, compiling it, claiming it was there own and selling it if there where no copyrights?
You can do that now with a GPLd program, except for claiming that you wrote it (since you have to retain the original copyright notices when you redistribute).
It's too late to remove copyright laws now (anybody who proposed such a thing would be accused of being some kind of communist). However, it would be interesting to go back to the late 18th century when the utility of copyrights was still under debate. If one could inform the people formulating these laws how much feature creep and freedom-restricting expansions the copyright concept would experience over the next 250 years, I wonder if they wouldn't put a clause in the constitution prohibiting copyrights.
In its place, very strong laws prohibiting false claims of authorship might have been put in place. (This would address the "claiming it as their own" problem you mentioned, and almost nobody would object to such a statute because it's basically fair.) Additionally, only the actual author or his licensees could produce copies labeled as "genuine". Other than that, anybody could produce copies of anything, as long as they weren't billed as genuine.
I would bet that over the centuries, this kind of copyrightless scheme would have supported plenty of content creation. It would tend to favor high quality works since people tend pay extra for genuine copies of the things that they enjoy most. The media industries would be smaller than they are today, but that's no real loss since 90% of everything put out right now is crap.
As I explained above, it would be much more than double the price.
People who would pay this price are already saving more time end-to-end than an SST airliner would save. They do it by flying private business jets on their own schedule between small airports which are uncongested and near their destinations.
It is felt that the SST movement (i.e. concorde) was derailed by the american plane maker (i.e. Boeing) which got enough lawmakers to say that the concorde could not fly over the USA (i.e NY to LA) because of the sonic boom.
Getting 1/4 of the MPG per passenger compared to a subsonic plane also had something to do with it. The extra cost for fuel alone is going to double the price of most airline tickets.
That means you're in a niche market, which reduces the number of customers and impacts economy of scale. This increases maintenence costs and R&D and manufacturing overhead to very high levels. That's how you get $10,000 one-way fares across the Atlantic on the Concorde.
To compound the problem, most domestic flights just aren't that long. If you take a 1500-mile trip that needs a connection (as many do with the hub-and-spoke system), it can easily take you 9 hours to get from your home to your destination address, and only about 3 of those hours is in the air. An SST would cut that trip down to 7-1/2 or 8 hours at the cost of 4X the fuel usage. It just doesn't make any sense on the vast majority of flights.
Not that I don't agree, but it's interesting to note the possibility that there may be *no* plutonium or other heavy elements whatsoever within the gas giant planets - not one atom. So there might be infinitely more next month.
Given that Jupiter is the largest gravitational vacuum cleaner in the solar system aside from the sun itself, that is highly unlikely. I'm sure that in 4 billion years of sucking up copious quantities of asteroids, comets, space dust, stray moons and other assorted junk, that far more than 34 pounds of highly toxic heavy metal isotopes have been mixed in.
Jupiter probably does only contain trace amounts of plutonium because it has no naturally stable isotopes. Any plutonium that Jupiter does have now is probably due to things like recent chance encounters between uranium atoms and stray neutrons. Howver, the current amount is certainly not zero.
Within a few thousand years all of the space probe's plutonium will have transformed into other elements, so Jupiter's actual plutonium content will return to exactly what it is today.
Do you realize what kind of frame rate you can get in Doom 1 with a 3GHz machine? Hundreds of megabytes of bloated 32-bit OS would only serve to bog things down. Don't need it.
I read that article back when it came out, and it made perfect sense to me. Then by chance I stumbled across the entry for the cancelled Big Gemini project on astronautix.com.
Seeing that kind of pissed me off. Way back in 1967 McDonnell Douglas had created a dirt cheap space taxi solution for up to 10 crew just by sticking an extension on a standard Gemini capsule. However, the focus on the Apollo missions and later the Space Shuttle pushed aside any non-glamorous low cost solutions such as this one. Now our government is planning to spend countless billions to build from scratch a new space system that will probably have less capability than what Big Gemini could have provided 35 years ago.
If the Soviet Union (notorious for the poor quality control of its industries), could build a capsule-based space system with a reliability matching the U.S. shuttle system, then that tells met that capsules are inherently far safer than a space plane. Also note that in contrast to the shuttle, the fatal accidents happened in the 60s and early 70s, and there have been no fatalities since that time.
MS is doing everything they can to keep people using updated software.
Not quite. What they should do every time they make a critical patch is mail a CD to the owners of every single licensed copy of Windows that conains both the patch and an updated full Windows install image.
That way, dial up users won't have to tie up their phone lines for hours to retrieve these updates, and whenever people reinstall Windows from scratch, they aren't forced to put a bug-riddled version of the OS on the Internet to get dozens of megabytes of patches then wait through 4 extra reboot cycles.
Whenever they find a critical flaw, it means that their product is dangerously broken. In any other industry, it would be considered grounds for a product recall at the expense of the manufacturer. The least they could do in this case is mail out a 50 cent CD to replace the users' defective $199 product.
If I were billing $250 per hour to sort papers, I wouldn't use a computer either. In fact, I would put on a pair of oven mitts. (We wouldn't want to get a paper cut, after all.)
Once again, I think at that "30 or 40 years ago" there was no IT INDUSTRY !!!
There's been an IT INDUSTRY!!! since the late 1800's. Go look up the history of tabulating and sorting machines and mechanical calculators, along with companies like NCR and IBM. These were large companies providing means to use technology to manipulate information. Even the first half of the 20th century the economy would have been severely hobbled without the help of automated information processing equipment.
I don't see why you mock the same thing with software. if you have money to throw in new machines every 3 to 5 years, I prefer using my investment for as long as I can.
Well, judging from the "Buy It Now" prices on ebay, your "investment" has depreciated to the $39 range. I have a couple similar systems, but instead of punishing myself by continuing to use them interactively with today's software, I use them for cheap offline backup storage. Every week or so: turn on, boot, rsync, turn off.
CDs are dirt cheap. That's why AOL has been able to afford mailing me dozens of them over the years in a vain attempt to sell me Internet dialup.
OTOH, at a record store you are paying ($15.00 minus $0.25) for the pattern of bits recorded on a CD. In a world where the fundamental cost of creating and distributing digital media is dropping rapidly every year, that's not a good deal.
The bulbs are certainly not designed for looks... and while I tried putting them into a 5 light chandelier in our foyer, my wife quickly objected.
I have seen a few "designer" compact flourescent bulbs. They basically enclose the standard spiral tube inside a frosted plastic shell. I've seen globes and teardrop shaped models. I use a few flourescent floodlights that also have plastic shells.
No matter what, though, you're not going to get the same look as those clear incandescent chandelier bulbs with the visible filaments.
and what miracle of science contains the lighter than air substance within the air frame once the covering is gone????!
Unlike modern blimps, the gas in a dirigible was contained in multiple internal gas bags mounted within the rigid metal frame. The outer fabric served only as an aerodynamic shell.
AFAIK, the internal bags did not have this powdered metallic coating.
Microsoft paid $135M for 25% of the shares, so Vector Capital paying $124M for 100% stake looks like a pretty good deal.
If you've think that's a good deal, I've got some great deals on stock. I'll sell you shares of pets.com, PanAm airlines, 3dfx, and hundreds of others for a mere fraction of what they used to cost! You can't go wrong!
It has to do with plate tectonics. If it's a large thickened section of the earth's crust "floating" on the mantle, and it moves around as a single independent unit, then it's a continent.
What if the warez site put up a binary diff against the actual CD, and the guy downloaded only that. The end state would be exactly the same: the guy has a legal CD on his bookshelf and a cracked copy on his hard drive. The only difference would be that he did not transfer an "illicit" copy over the Net. Would he now be in the clear?
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There are four big risks with nuclear power: accidents, waste disposal, terrorist attacks and weapons proliferation. People tend to argue over the first two issues, but they may actually the most manageable. The other two risks are so bad that it's a no-brainer that you don't want hundreds of nuclear power plants sprinkled about in dozens of countries.
Terrorist threats mean that I don't want a nuke plant anywhere near me where some bozo can crash a plane into the spent fuel storage pond. Proliferation threats mean I don't want every two-bit country to have their own nuclear plants.
What to do about this? I'll propose some radical thoughts:
I think an answer would be to put the nuclear plants far away from any people. Imagine building huge artificial islands in the middle of the ocean, thousands of miles from any populated areas. On those islands, put the most massive clusters of nuclear power plants that can be built. Instead of generating electricity, have the plants generate hydrogen which is piped to consumer countries.
Now, if there's an accident or someone manages to blow up a reactor, the damage would be minimal. Instead of permanently destroying the real-estate value of an area the size of several counties, you would have diffuse global contamination no worse than that deliberately released by the massive weapons tests of the 1950s (a large so-called "hydrogen" bomb actually could contain literally tons of uranium in a fissionable tamper).
What to do with the waste? One theory I've seen for effective waste management is to simply cram it deep into stable ocean sediment. Maybe the scheme would eventually fail, but at least the contamination would be highly diluted before it got near anybody, and it's certainly not in anyone's immediate back yard. (Some recent biological evidence suggests that radiation exposure risks are nonlinear; low doses from a diluted release may not be enough overwhelm standard cellular error correction mechanisms, and therefore cause little or no damage.)
The weapons proliferation problem would be minimized by having coalitions of "respectable" countries running the islands. International treaties would guarantee any country the right to buy energy produced by the plants at a fair price; this would eliminate the argument that every country needs its own nuclear industry. The reactors could be breeder reactors, and islands could contain their own fuel reprecessing plants. Since the fuel never leaves the island unless it's disposed of in the seabed, the risks of losing track of weapons-grade materials is minimized.
Operating costs could be lower because with the reduced exposure to the population, some of the extreme safety measures could be eased up a bit. Economies of scale would also help. Security would be improved with just a few sites to keep track of; actual military forces could be used instead of the current handful of corporate rent-a-cops at each nuclear plant. Obviously, it would be cheap to implement a cooling solution.
While I could support an isolated nuclear power scheme such as I've described, I think that all current nuclear power plants should be shut down as soon as possible.
The CO2 would last forever if it were isolated. Howver, we're talking about CO2 *in the atmosphere*. This CO2 does have a half life as natural processes chemically convert it and sequester the carbon back in the earth.
There are a large number of complex pathways in the planet's carbon cycle, but the net overall effect is that within a certain time (IIRC, hundreds of years maybe?) half of the excess CO2 ends up in sediment at the bottom of the ocean which eventually gets converted to limestone.
You can do that now with a GPLd program, except for claiming that you wrote it (since you have to retain the original copyright notices when you redistribute).
It's too late to remove copyright laws now (anybody who proposed such a thing would be accused of being some kind of communist). However, it would be interesting to go back to the late 18th century when the utility of copyrights was still under debate. If one could inform the people formulating these laws how much feature creep and freedom-restricting expansions the copyright concept would experience over the next 250 years, I wonder if they wouldn't put a clause in the constitution prohibiting copyrights.
In its place, very strong laws prohibiting false claims of authorship might have been put in place. (This would address the "claiming it as their own" problem you mentioned, and almost nobody would object to such a statute because it's basically fair.) Additionally, only the actual author or his licensees could produce copies labeled as "genuine". Other than that, anybody could produce copies of anything, as long as they weren't billed as genuine.
I would bet that over the centuries, this kind of copyrightless scheme would have supported plenty of content creation. It would tend to favor high quality works since people tend pay extra for genuine copies of the things that they enjoy most. The media industries would be smaller than they are today, but that's no real loss since 90% of everything put out right now is crap.
People who would pay this price are already saving more time end-to-end than an SST airliner would save. They do it by flying private business jets on their own schedule between small airports which are uncongested and near their destinations.
Getting 1/4 of the MPG per passenger compared to a subsonic plane also had something to do with it. The extra cost for fuel alone is going to double the price of most airline tickets.
That means you're in a niche market, which reduces the number of customers and impacts economy of scale. This increases maintenence costs and R&D and manufacturing overhead to very high levels. That's how you get $10,000 one-way fares across the Atlantic on the Concorde.
To compound the problem, most domestic flights just aren't that long. If you take a 1500-mile trip that needs a connection (as many do with the hub-and-spoke system), it can easily take you 9 hours to get from your home to your destination address, and only about 3 of those hours is in the air. An SST would cut that trip down to 7-1/2 or 8 hours at the cost of 4X the fuel usage. It just doesn't make any sense on the vast majority of flights.
If a computer does the marking though what do they do?
Change Billy's term paper grade to an A-, HAL.
>> I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.
Given that Jupiter is the largest gravitational vacuum cleaner in the solar system aside from the sun itself, that is highly unlikely. I'm sure that in 4 billion years of sucking up copious quantities of asteroids, comets, space dust, stray moons and other assorted junk, that far more than 34 pounds of highly toxic heavy metal isotopes have been mixed in.
Jupiter probably does only contain trace amounts of plutonium because it has no naturally stable isotopes. Any plutonium that Jupiter does have now is probably due to things like recent chance encounters between uranium atoms and stray neutrons. Howver, the current amount is certainly not zero.
Within a few thousand years all of the space probe's plutonium will have transformed into other elements, so Jupiter's actual plutonium content will return to exactly what it is today.
Do you realize what kind of frame rate you can get in Doom 1 with a 3GHz machine? Hundreds of megabytes of bloated 32-bit OS would only serve to bog things down. Don't need it.
Seeing that kind of pissed me off. Way back in 1967 McDonnell Douglas had created a dirt cheap space taxi solution for up to 10 crew just by sticking an extension on a standard Gemini capsule. However, the focus on the Apollo missions and later the Space Shuttle pushed aside any non-glamorous low cost solutions such as this one. Now our government is planning to spend countless billions to build from scratch a new space system that will probably have less capability than what Big Gemini could have provided 35 years ago.
If the Soviet Union (notorious for the poor quality control of its industries), could build a capsule-based space system with a reliability matching the U.S. shuttle system, then that tells met that capsules are inherently far safer than a space plane. Also note that in contrast to the shuttle, the fatal accidents happened in the 60s and early 70s, and there have been no fatalities since that time.
Not quite. What they should do every time they make a critical patch is mail a CD to the owners of every single licensed copy of Windows that conains both the patch and an updated full Windows install image.
That way, dial up users won't have to tie up their phone lines for hours to retrieve these updates, and whenever people reinstall Windows from scratch, they aren't forced to put a bug-riddled version of the OS on the Internet to get dozens of megabytes of patches then wait through 4 extra reboot cycles.
Whenever they find a critical flaw, it means that their product is dangerously broken. In any other industry, it would be considered grounds for a product recall at the expense of the manufacturer. The least they could do in this case is mail out a 50 cent CD to replace the users' defective $199 product.
If I were billing $250 per hour to sort papers, I wouldn't use a computer either. In fact, I would put on a pair of oven mitts. (We wouldn't want to get a paper cut, after all.)
There's been an IT INDUSTRY!!! since the late 1800's. Go look up the history of tabulating and sorting machines and mechanical calculators, along with companies like NCR and IBM. These were large companies providing means to use technology to manipulate information. Even the first half of the 20th century the economy would have been severely hobbled without the help of automated information processing equipment.
Well, judging from the "Buy It Now" prices on ebay, your "investment" has depreciated to the $39 range. I have a couple similar systems, but instead of punishing myself by continuing to use them interactively with today's software, I use them for cheap offline backup storage. Every week or so: turn on, boot, rsync, turn off.
This makes me imagine a bad movie based on a cross between Westworld and Jurassic Park.
CDs are dirt cheap. That's why AOL has been able to afford mailing me dozens of them over the years in a vain attempt to sell me Internet dialup.
OTOH, at a record store you are paying ($15.00 minus $0.25) for the pattern of bits recorded on a CD. In a world where the fundamental cost of creating and distributing digital media is dropping rapidly every year, that's not a good deal.
Unless your computer monitor and your TV are both LCD, you probably stare at the ass-end of a big vacuum tube for a good portion of each day.
I'm kind of surprised that the Texas constitution doesn't proscribe foreigners like Bush from being governor.
I have seen a few "designer" compact flourescent bulbs. They basically enclose the standard spiral tube inside a frosted plastic shell. I've seen globes and teardrop shaped models. I use a few flourescent floodlights that also have plastic shells.
No matter what, though, you're not going to get the same look as those clear incandescent chandelier bulbs with the visible filaments.
Unlike modern blimps, the gas in a dirigible was contained in multiple internal gas bags mounted within the rigid metal frame. The outer fabric served only as an aerodynamic shell.
AFAIK, the internal bags did not have this powdered metallic coating.
If you've think that's a good deal, I've got some great deals on stock. I'll sell you shares of pets.com, PanAm airlines, 3dfx, and hundreds of others for a mere fraction of what they used to cost! You can't go wrong!
It has to do with plate tectonics. If it's a large thickened section of the earth's crust "floating" on the mantle, and it moves around as a single independent unit, then it's a continent.
#include <dos.h>
outp(0x61, inp(0x61) ^ 1);
What if the warez site put up a binary diff against the actual CD, and the guy downloaded only that. The end state would be exactly the same: the guy has a legal CD on his bookshelf and a cracked copy on his hard drive. The only difference would be that he did not transfer an "illicit" copy over the Net. Would he now be in the clear?