...we spending the most money, on the dumbest researchers?
Hardly, as many of the world's brightest researchers end up in the US.
A more interesting question is how much all that patent business is increasing the costs of R&D in the US and the West in general. Because one of the unlucky consequences of patents is that once a wheel is patented, it has to be reinvented 20 times, carefully treading around the patent each time.
Listing the imperfections of renewable energy sources, while important, doesn't make nuclear power any cleaner than it is.
A dam may create a lasting danger of breach and flooding, but a nuclear reactor creates a lasting danger of radiation leak and widespread contamination.
The difference is that a dam doesn't produce waste that has a half-life of thousands of years, or hundreds of years, or any half-life at all, which then needs to be transported in lead containers and buried where nobody complains.
We are all aware that there is no such thing as a free lunch. This doesn't make a radioactive lunch any tastier.
When the CO2 was captured isn't really relevant -- there's no real difference between burning trees and releasing X tons of CO2 and leaving those trees on the ground, with the CO2 captured, and instead burning enough coal and oil to release the same tons of CO2. All that really matters is the global production of CO2 compared to the global uptake of CO2.
If you replace cut trees with new ones, as is the case is most of Europe, and probably other places too, then a part of this CO2 is spent on growing new trees, so the effect is far less damaging than coal.
I am not a coastal engineer, but I did translate several publications in that field (needed the money), and I understand that fish pathways are standard features of new dams, enabling the fish to travel up- and downstream, bypassing the dam.
I'm not claiming that hydro, geothermal, tidal, wind and solar energy are perfectly clean. There are obviously big issues with all of them.
My point is that they are "greener" than a nuclear reactor, especially if planned sensibly.
Dams can upset the ecosystem of rivers, but they can also prevent flooding. Nuclear reactors also harm the ecosystem of rivers (by raising the water temperature by several degrees), but they don't prevent flooding. And they produce nuclear waste, require expensive radioactivity shielding, etc. And these issues remain even with sensible planning.
Nuclear energy is not "by far the cleanest energy source", like that one poster claimed.
I agree with you, don't get me wrong, but there are still far cleaner sources of energy than nuclear.
As far as energy production goes, nuclear is one of the least clean sources of energy, right behind burning coal and petrol.
The challenge is to cover all our energy needs with renewable sources which are either limited (hydro), intermittent (wind, solar) or not ripe for large-scale usage (geothermal, tidal).
I mean, it kills the dumb birds, hopefully before they reproduce. Eventually, you get a new species of high IQ birds who instinctly know that it's not a good thing to fly into a rotating wind turbine. ahahaha...
I, for one, welcome our new high-IQ bird overlords!
They had incredible maintenance issues with the turbines and electronics, due to the harsh environment with salt water. In fact, they cite 75,000 maintenance trips -- each requiring an engineer to be lowered down from a helicopter onto a turbine's nacelle platform -- in the first 1.5 years of operation.
That's 150 trips per day.
For 80 turbines.
So each turbine had to be serviced twice every day for 1.5 years, and each one of these involved a helicopter trip.
I disagree about that "the transition from book to movie was made clumsily". The only thing I really object to, although I understand it, is the cinematic differentiation of replicants from humans displayed by Leon removing an egg from boiling water. If you can stick a replicant's hand in boiling water without hurting them, then the VK test is kind of pointless.
Not really, since the VK test is designed to tell replicants apart from humans. If you don't know whether somebody is a replicant or not, you can't simply stick their hand into boiling water. What if you're wrong?
I am certainly not one of those KDE fanboys who will jump at every opportunity to berate GNOME, I am simply a bit confused with how certain things have been handled.
Software freedom is something very important to me, as well as you, and I don't see how supporting an obfuscated, potentially patent-infested format designed not to be interoperable with anything, will do anything other than strengthen the position of the monopolist who is one of the main obstacles for more widespread adoption of Free Software in the first place. I say support here because the OOXML format will be far more powerful if it is certified as an open standard, and I understand that the GNOME Foundation is a part of this process.
The way I see it, the idea of forcing Microsoft to create a nice and well documented standard is a noble, but ultimately hopeless endeavour. But it does have real effect of giving legitimacy to the whole process and the OOXML format.
So what we may end up with is a somewhat less obfuscated format which is still too complex for anyone to implement to perfection, which is considered open because even the GNOME Foundation worked on its development/refinement. At the moment where governments and companies are increasingly standardising on ODF because they want truly open formats, the last thing we want is to have a Microsoft-created format with 6000 pages of documentation to be adopted instead, creating another lockin.
Only the reference implementation will load/save perfectly, and the reference implementation is proprietary software. The users of Free software would be better served, IMHO of course, if ODF and other truly open formats became more widespread, than if OOXML became accepted internationally as an open standard, with better documentation.
Without trying to stir up a flamewar, it is things like this one that bug me, and have always bugged me about the GNOME project. Far more than the technical issues, as the project has clearly been producing a lot of high-quality software.
I see no reason why a project which was started as a direct response to another project perceived not to be completely Free (which was quite justified at that time) should have anything to do with certifying obfuscated formats made by monopolists or support their proprietary software platforms (see Mono) and pushes by some people within GNOME to make them a central part of the GNOME infrastructure. I don't understand experiments like Eazel, with big industry hotshots coming in to design proper interfaces for the masses who don't understand them, and there are other confusing examples. GNOME was originally a project with a political goal, so I don't understand how its politics have become so bizarre.
As an external observer who doesn't use much GNOME technology, but values the contributions that the project has done to the Free Software landscape, I have to wonder what the hell some people in there are thinking. I realise that there are many different viewpoints within the GNOME project and that this issue is likely not as grave as some are trying to make it, but there is simply no excuse for supporting OOXML in my eyes. None.
Nobody is saying that it is EQUALLY impressive as the original Moon missions were.
Nobody is saying that China is EQUALLY advanced in space travel now.
But, even today, sending a man into space is a huge feat, a feat that vast majority of countries out there simply cannot do. It's not as impressive as it was in the 1960s, but it is still impressive.
When Pakistan and India went nuclear, it was huge news. It wasn't as huge as when the first A-bomb was built. It wasn't as challenging or as impressive. Nevertheless, it was far more interesting and politically important than when Russia builds another 20 nukes on top of their existing 20,000. Because now there were two more countries capable of wielding nuclear power. And that has consequences.
The fact that the US, Europe and the USSR have done it countless times and China hasn't is exactly the reason why this is seen as important news.
It means that China is catching up very fast with the other space powers. It means China is capable of launching satelites without help, which has military consequences.
It means their technology is catching up with the West's, which has all sorts of impact on the society. Remember the outsourcing woes where cheap jobs are lost to the third world? If China becomes a technology superpower instead of just a cheap labour superpower, this will have great economic consequences. These projects clearly show that there are people in there capable of great technological feats.
It also opens possibilities for scientific cooperation in the future, like the one between the NASA and the ESA.
It could also affect the funding of NASA, ESA, etc, more than their own (interesting and scientifically relevant) missions can.
There are many reasons why this is interesting. For one, when the first lunar missions were taking place, China was a mostly illiterate country barely subsisting on farming, with no industry to speak of. Now they're sending people into space. There is a new kid on the block, and that is interesting.
I'd argue that rock stars don't WANT to shill t-shirts, or they'd be in a t-shirt company.
And I'd argue that rock stars don't want to sell CDs, or they'd be in the distribution business or logistics.
I'd argue that rock stars want to do rock star stuff -- play live concerts, screw groupies, give interviews, party, be adored by the fans, and all that rock stuff.
And an open music model doesn't take any of that away. Perhaps some changes would be there, but times are changing.
Just about everyone outside the US views libertarianism as some sort of extreme anarcho-capitalism being economically far right, and socially conservative (Small government).
Actually, this is the US definition of Libertarianism, in line with the Libertarian Party (capital 'L'). Small government, laissez-faire capitalism. In fact, the founder of the US Libertarian Party, Murray Rothbard, was also the person who invented "anarcho-capitalism".
In Europe, libertarianism has always meant anarchism. It still does. This has traditionally meant opposition to capitalism, and still does. People most likely to call themselves "libertarian" in Europe are, in my experience, punks, environmentalists, political activists, squatters, etc. No anarcho-capitalism. If you find a "libertarian centre" in Spain or Germany, you'll almost certainly find anarcho-syndicalists and anti-globalists in there, and not entrepreneurs and investors.
Do you think "genocide" is too harsh a word to describe Franco's slaughter of unionists or Pinochet's reforms? Do you think the assembly line and sweatshop labour are a display of individualism? Is "slavery" too harsh a word to describe the conditions of colonies during Europe's industrial expansion?
In truth, capitalism is anti-individual and thus evil ideology which deserves to be utterly destroyed. I demand nothing less thant complete and unconditional surrender from it.
If you hate individualism, then you'll probably see my last comment as somewhat extreme. In that case, you would be a prime candidate for reading Ayn Rand.
It is really beautiful, and the surrounding village of Bran is extremely nice. The caste is quite small, but very nice, with small corridors, winding stairs, inner terraces and balconies, even a secret passage from Queen's room to King's room. All asymmetric, you can easily get lost in there. The entire thing is in mint condition, but heating in the winter must be a bitch.
As can traffic. A few hours after we left, the whole village got snowed in, and thousands of tourists couldn't leave as the roads were buried in half a metre of snow.
I like the idea about a Romulan-based series/movie, as I do love Romulans the best, but after seeing the mess they made of "Nemesis", I'm not sure I'd like to see it.:(
Slashdot Mirror
Hardly, as many of the world's brightest researchers end up in the US.
A more interesting question is how much all that patent business is increasing the costs of R&D in the US and the West in general. Because one of the unlucky consequences of patents is that once a wheel is patented, it has to be reinvented 20 times, carefully treading around the patent each time.
Listing the imperfections of renewable energy sources, while important, doesn't make nuclear power any cleaner than it is.
A dam may create a lasting danger of breach and flooding, but a nuclear reactor creates a lasting danger of radiation leak and widespread contamination.
The difference is that a dam doesn't produce waste that has a half-life of thousands of years, or hundreds of years, or any half-life at all, which then needs to be transported in lead containers and buried where nobody complains.
We are all aware that there is no such thing as a free lunch. This doesn't make a radioactive lunch any tastier.
If you replace cut trees with new ones, as is the case is most of Europe, and probably other places too, then a part of this CO2 is spent on growing new trees, so the effect is far less damaging than coal.
You can't turn vacuum tubes into nuclear weapons.
I can go and purchase a vacuum tube right now, but if I tried purchasing enriched Uranium, I'd probably end up in Guantanamo.
I am not a coastal engineer, but I did translate several publications in that field (needed the money), and I understand that fish pathways are standard features of new dams, enabling the fish to travel up- and downstream, bypassing the dam.
I'm not claiming that hydro, geothermal, tidal, wind and solar energy are perfectly clean. There are obviously big issues with all of them.
My point is that they are "greener" than a nuclear reactor, especially if planned sensibly.
Dams can upset the ecosystem of rivers, but they can also prevent flooding. Nuclear reactors also harm the ecosystem of rivers (by raising the water temperature by several degrees), but they don't prevent flooding. And they produce nuclear waste, require expensive radioactivity shielding, etc. And these issues remain even with sensible planning.
Nuclear energy is not "by far the cleanest energy source", like that one poster claimed.
Since when did uptime of my PC determine what's "green" energy?
I agree with you, don't get me wrong, but there are still far cleaner sources of energy than nuclear.
As far as energy production goes, nuclear is one of the least clean sources of energy, right behind burning coal and petrol.
The challenge is to cover all our energy needs with renewable sources which are either limited (hydro), intermittent (wind, solar) or not ripe for large-scale usage (geothermal, tidal).
Good luck purchasing the enriched uranium needed to run your private building block reactor.
Or operating the thing yourself.
It's an interesting technology, but the chances of having one of these for your apartment are not very good.
There are many cleaner ways to generate electricity than nuclear. Hydro, geothermal, tidal and wave, wind and solar energy are all cleaner.
That actually sounds great.
What I'm worried about is "Hobbit vs. Predator. In the dark!", made by Uwe Boll.
I mean, it kills the dumb birds, hopefully before they reproduce. Eventually, you get a new species of high IQ birds who instinctly know that it's not a good thing to fly into a rotating wind turbine. ahahaha...
I, for one, welcome our new high-IQ bird overlords!
They had incredible maintenance issues with the turbines and electronics, due to the harsh environment with salt water. In fact, they cite 75,000 maintenance trips -- each requiring an engineer to be lowered down from a helicopter onto a turbine's nacelle platform -- in the first 1.5 years of operation.
That's 150 trips per day.
For 80 turbines.
So each turbine had to be serviced twice every day for 1.5 years, and each one of these involved a helicopter trip.
Are you sure about this?
I disagree about that "the transition from book to movie was made clumsily". The only thing I really object to, although I understand it, is the cinematic differentiation of replicants from humans displayed by Leon removing an egg from boiling water. If you can stick a replicant's hand in boiling water without hurting them, then the VK test is kind of pointless.
Not really, since the VK test is designed to tell replicants apart from humans. If you don't know whether somebody is a replicant or not, you can't simply stick their hand into boiling water. What if you're wrong?
Thanks for your clarifications, I appreciate them.
I am certainly not one of those KDE fanboys who will jump at every opportunity to berate GNOME, I am simply a bit confused with how certain things have been handled.
Software freedom is something very important to me, as well as you, and I don't see how supporting an obfuscated, potentially patent-infested format designed not to be interoperable with anything, will do anything other than strengthen the position of the monopolist who is one of the main obstacles for more widespread adoption of Free Software in the first place. I say support here because the OOXML format will be far more powerful if it is certified as an open standard, and I understand that the GNOME Foundation is a part of this process.
The way I see it, the idea of forcing Microsoft to create a nice and well documented standard is a noble, but ultimately hopeless endeavour. But it does have real effect of giving legitimacy to the whole process and the OOXML format.
So what we may end up with is a somewhat less obfuscated format which is still too complex for anyone to implement to perfection, which is considered open because even the GNOME Foundation worked on its development/refinement. At the moment where governments and companies are increasingly standardising on ODF because they want truly open formats, the last thing we want is to have a Microsoft-created format with 6000 pages of documentation to be adopted instead, creating another lockin.
Only the reference implementation will load/save perfectly, and the reference implementation is proprietary software. The users of Free software would be better served, IMHO of course, if ODF and other truly open formats became more widespread, than if OOXML became accepted internationally as an open standard, with better documentation.
Without trying to stir up a flamewar, it is things like this one that bug me, and have always bugged me about the GNOME project. Far more than the technical issues, as the project has clearly been producing a lot of high-quality software.
I see no reason why a project which was started as a direct response to another project perceived not to be completely Free (which was quite justified at that time) should have anything to do with certifying obfuscated formats made by monopolists or support their proprietary software platforms (see Mono) and pushes by some people within GNOME to make them a central part of the GNOME infrastructure. I don't understand experiments like Eazel, with big industry hotshots coming in to design proper interfaces for the masses who don't understand them, and there are other confusing examples. GNOME was originally a project with a political goal, so I don't understand how its politics have become so bizarre.
As an external observer who doesn't use much GNOME technology, but values the contributions that the project has done to the Free Software landscape, I have to wonder what the hell some people in there are thinking. I realise that there are many different viewpoints within the GNOME project and that this issue is likely not as grave as some are trying to make it, but there is simply no excuse for supporting OOXML in my eyes. None.
Nobody is saying that it is EQUALLY impressive as the original Moon missions were.
Nobody is saying that China is EQUALLY advanced in space travel now.
But, even today, sending a man into space is a huge feat, a feat that vast majority of countries out there simply cannot do. It's not as impressive as it was in the 1960s, but it is still impressive.
When Pakistan and India went nuclear, it was huge news. It wasn't as huge as when the first A-bomb was built. It wasn't as challenging or as impressive. Nevertheless, it was far more interesting and politically important than when Russia builds another 20 nukes on top of their existing 20,000. Because now there were two more countries capable of wielding nuclear power. And that has consequences.
The fact that the US, Europe and the USSR have done it countless times and China hasn't is exactly the reason why this is seen as important news.
It means that China is catching up very fast with the other space powers. It means China is capable of launching satelites without help, which has military consequences.
It means their technology is catching up with the West's, which has all sorts of impact on the society. Remember the outsourcing woes where cheap jobs are lost to the third world? If China becomes a technology superpower instead of just a cheap labour superpower, this will have great economic consequences. These projects clearly show that there are people in there capable of great technological feats.
It also opens possibilities for scientific cooperation in the future, like the one between the NASA and the ESA.
It could also affect the funding of NASA, ESA, etc, more than their own (interesting and scientifically relevant) missions can.
There are many reasons why this is interesting. For one, when the first lunar missions were taking place, China was a mostly illiterate country barely subsisting on farming, with no industry to speak of. Now they're sending people into space. There is a new kid on the block, and that is interesting.
I'd argue that rock stars don't WANT to shill t-shirts, or they'd be in a t-shirt company.
And I'd argue that rock stars don't want to sell CDs, or they'd be in the distribution business or logistics.
I'd argue that rock stars want to do rock star stuff -- play live concerts, screw groupies, give interviews, party, be adored by the fans, and all that rock stuff.
And an open music model doesn't take any of that away. Perhaps some changes would be there, but times are changing.
Just about everyone outside the US views libertarianism as some sort of extreme anarcho-capitalism being economically far right, and socially conservative (Small government).
Actually, this is the US definition of Libertarianism, in line with the Libertarian Party (capital 'L'). Small government, laissez-faire capitalism. In fact, the founder of the US Libertarian Party, Murray Rothbard, was also the person who invented "anarcho-capitalism".
In Europe, libertarianism has always meant anarchism. It still does. This has traditionally meant opposition to capitalism, and still does. People most likely to call themselves "libertarian" in Europe are, in my experience, punks, environmentalists, political activists, squatters, etc. No anarcho-capitalism. If you find a "libertarian centre" in Spain or Germany, you'll almost certainly find anarcho-syndicalists and anti-globalists in there, and not entrepreneurs and investors.
Do you think "genocide" is too harsh a word to describe Franco's slaughter of unionists or Pinochet's reforms? Do you think the assembly line and sweatshop labour are a display of individualism? Is "slavery" too harsh a word to describe the conditions of colonies during Europe's industrial expansion?
In truth, capitalism is anti-individual and thus evil ideology which deserves to be utterly destroyed. I demand nothing less thant complete and unconditional surrender from it.
If you hate individualism, then you'll probably see my last comment as somewhat extreme. In that case, you would be a prime candidate for reading Ayn Rand.
...a week ago.
It is really beautiful, and the surrounding village of Bran is extremely nice. The caste is quite small, but very nice, with small corridors, winding stairs, inner terraces and balconies, even a secret passage from Queen's room to King's room. All asymmetric, you can easily get lost in there. The entire thing is in mint condition, but heating in the winter must be a bitch.
As can traffic. A few hours after we left, the whole village got snowed in, and thousands of tourists couldn't leave as the roads were buried in half a metre of snow.
I like the idea about a Romulan-based series/movie, as I do love Romulans the best, but after seeing the mess they made of "Nemesis", I'm not sure I'd like to see it. :(
There are countries outside the US, and they also suffer from domestic terrorism.
For example, the number of people who died in terrorist attacks in Iraq in the last month alone is far larger than the number of WTC victims.
The Tamil Tigers have recently been involved in killing a bus full of passengers, for example.