Bullshit. The richer deposits are already playing out, and while I'm sure there's a goodly quantity of U ore somewhere in the earth's crust, it will take more and more energy to retrieve it.
Well, given that we're not even bothering to recycle the fuel we've got, uranium mines are busy shutting down and the rest, it's a lot more true than you think. One current estimate using known reserves and recycling waste is ~3000 years. Throw in thorium conversion and that goes up. That's just the current known reserves: go to seawater extraction and you get figures closer to ~7 million years for the entire earth's power needs.
Remember, uranium has incredible energy density: sifting tons of rock for a few grams is worth it.
Utter bullshit. 2nd Law of Thermodynamics trumps S&D every time.
When the _energy_ cost to obtain a unit of energy is more than that energy, it doesn't matter where the price goes - you're done.
True, but utterly irrelevant. Uranium has such a staggering energy density that the 2nd law has no effect on us at all, at least where fission is concerned.
I'm sorry, but as the father to one Adam Lewis Remy, I'm afraid you are infringing on my trademark.
You have 30 days to alter the name to something that will not be confusing to any person in the human race, or I will sic my battalion of trained attack weas^H^H^H^Hlawyers on you.
In the same sense that the Sun's energy is finite. We'll have evolved to another species before we run out of U, Th and other fissionables.
Not only is population growing, but huge segments of the existing population are trying their damnedest to live like Americans. We don't need cars that get 10 more mpg, we need to rethink the whole damned paradigm.
Supply and demand will take care of this nicely. We have lots and lots of energy availble, just at a price. The days of monster SUVs are numbered.
Other than SUVs, virtually everything we use today is vastly more efficient than what existed 30 years ago. My old house was built from R18 styrofoam panels: the folks down the street paid a bit more for R30 ones. My new fridge takes less than half the power of my parent's, but it's a lot bigger. My in-laws house is freezing during the winter since their electric heat is so expensive: our heat pumps do fine. LCD computer screens and LED lights (coming soon: check your local traffic signals) sip power compared to the alternatives.
I think you underestimate how clever we can be when needed. As prices rise (and they will) folks will adjust, either by conserving or by getting new sources of power. My personal thoughts: a hydrogen economy, generated by electrolysis of water using nuke breeder plants+ wind/geothermal/solar where appropriate. No global warming. No more smog (Drink your exhaust!), or much pollution at all: virtually all the fuel can be reused. What little is left can be vitrified and tossed into oceanic subduction zones.
Coupled with much more efficient devices such as hybrid/fuel cell power cars, LED-based lighting and better-built homes, we could survive in this economy almost forever with virtually no disruption to our current lives.
Have you ever heard of a place called THREE MILE ISLAND?
I lived downwind during the accident. Number of deaths: 0 Number of injuries: 0
CHERNOBYL?
A bad reactor design that exists in only one place in the US (Hanford), now shut down. No containment vessel, and the accident was the result of utter stupidity on the parts of the operators.
Yes, we do need to be an informed public. That does not mean we need to blatantly disregard the very real dangers of nuclear energy.
Fine. What's your solution to the need for power?
Fossil fuels? Dirty, cause global warming+acid rain, spreads radioactivity (Coal contains various radioisotopes), etc. Don't forget the *huge* number of deaths and injuries due to coal mining every year.
Hydro? We've dammed every river we can, destroys wilderness
Wind, geothermal, tide? Great for the 5% of the world where you can use them.
Timothy, you do every day. What would/. be without the daily "M$ sucks! Lets all post about how horrible M$ is!" story to increase those page loads?
Why,/. might actually have to talk about things of interest to geeks!
Re:In all seriousness, random libs *suck*
on
Pet Bugs?
·
· Score: 2
Oh? Do you have some information on weaknesses in Java's SecureRandom class
I was doing this in about 1997. I don't think SecureRandom was available then.
As far as the random() generator then in use, it was quite a shock to me to see my simulation run for a few thousand timesteps and suddenly have all of the particles line up on a neat grid. Wait a few thousand more steps and it would happen again.
It wasn't anything critical, just a little simulator for teaching purposes, but I just couldn't believe they didn't use a decent random from the very start.
In all seriousness, random libs *suck*
on
Pet Bugs?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
random() only returns 666 if you use a demon seed!
My favorite "bugs" are the truly horrible random number functions in almost every single language library on earth. They're usually linear congruential generators: fast, but utterly useless for any work that requires serious "randomness" such as Monte Carlo simulations. They have very short recurrence times, strong sequential correlation, etc.
Back in grad school, I had to substitute the Knuth ran3 routine for the supplied C library functions in both gcc and xlc since they were just awful.
Fast forward 8 years. I made the stupid assumption that since Java was a new language and that horrible problems with random number generators were well known that Sun would actually provide a decent RNG. Nope: just as badly flawed as the C one.
I suspect this is simply something to give up tilting at windmills about: random() is good enough for simple games and anyone doing real work knows to stay the hell away.
Good ol' Sen. Stevens...priming the pork-pump, count on it.
<senator> My fellow Alaskans, I continue to support drilling for oil in ANWR. How else will we get the energy to cool our homes during the blazing Fairbanks summers? </senator>
You simply cannot have the expectation that software will *NEVER* crash.
Umm, the aircraft and space industries certainly do.
You don't work in either, do you?
Certainly, they crash *less*, but they most certainly do crash (literally, in some cases), fail, give wrong outputs, etc. Flip through a few articles on the RISKs digest. Here's a few examples I found after a brief search
Mariner 1 was destroyed by range safety because the ground computers had a bug in the radar tracking system
The first Venus mission was blown up because of a missing hyphen in the code
The first
Ariane 5 launch failed due to a bug in converting FP to integer.
The Patriot missile missed virtually every target in the Gulf War due to incorrect compensation for clock drift
A Lauda Air 767 disintigrated in mid-air when a thrust reverser was accidentally deployed, either by computer malfunction or when the computers failed to prevent it.
That's the result of less than 5 minutes checking: have fun filling in more horror stories.
Software bugs happen: they always will. Testing can make them much less common, but anything more complicated than Hello World is probably going to have bugs.
Jon and Jen use Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio to make their DVDs for clients. They use MPEG4 to stream content using an approach like you outlined here. Then the couple's kid uses iMovie to make presentations for her class project.
And then they can make a few amateur pornos and sell them to put the kid through college...
And to further congratulate LockMart on their wise design choice, consider that this is a combat aircraft, and in a world full of people trying to kill you and/or break your airplane, it's comforting to note that an electrical bus can have holes blown through it and chunks blasted off of it and still probably work. One little hole in a hydraulic system and it's Pull The Black-and-Yellow-Striped Handle Time, if you're lucky enough to be able to.
Well, not really. You just need redundant hydraulics, plus an additional cable run- for example the A-10 can take amazing punishment, having been designed to work down low and slow.
The problem is that all this adds weight: a second set of hydraulics weighs a lot more than a second run of wire.
The criteria asked for was "Usefulness". My wife has a dual degree in Religion and Linguistics. She's semi-fluent in Old English and can discuss the differences between various Buddhist philosophies easily.
Useful? Not in the job market. She could triple her earning potential overnight by getting an MCSE, or getting a contractors license for that matter. Those are certainly more *useful* than being able to read Beowulf in the original.
As a side note, virtually no CS grads can do calculus or even begin to understand it. Few majors in any field, even technical ones, can. (I'm speaking as one who has taught junior-senior level PChem courses at Virginia Tech.) Sure, they can do a textbook problem if you give them long enough, but they do not even begin to understand *why* Calc is important or how to apply it to problems that aren't straight out of a book.
Sure, nobody really supports OpenNIC names. But if you try and fork the kernel, it's not going to have any support from the big names either. In either case, it's going to take serious abuse on ICANN or Linus' part to make an alternative viable.
The price today to produce a barrel of Syncrude Sweet blend synthetic crude is about $7 a barrel, and sells for about $32USD a barrel.
In other words, $7 more per barrel than the current market price for oil.
So whay again does the US kiss Saudi tush, and ignores it friends to the north?
$7 per barrel. Don't forget, it's not just the Saudis we buy from: we get oil from just about all of the Arabian peninsula. The Saudis dominate the region, so kissing up to them keeps the rest of the oil rich states somewhat happy with us.
And seeing as how we're buying lots of oil from Canada already, we're hardly ignoring it.
We've got lots and lots and lots of oil. The problem comes in how much it costs to get that oil.
We live in a world of cheap oil because Arabia is sitting on a lake of crude- drill a hole and oil appears. We can get it from lots of other places, but the price begins to creep up.
Case in point: ANWR. ANWR oil is going to cost more than Arabian oil, a fact that Bush+Co don't like to point out. The USGS assessment is that there is *no* oil in ANWR that is recoverable for less than $15/barrel. $20/barrel lets you extract maybe a 3rd of the reserve. Get up to $30/barrel and you can get most of it.
How much does it cost Saudi Arabia to get that same barrel? About 2 dollars.
(Current spot price is about $25/barrel due to mideast tension, but it's been as low as $17.5 earlier this year.)
We aren't going to run out of oil anytime soon. What will happen is that the price will go up as we use up the easy stuff.
My guess is that the Military/CIA etc would be better advised to simply get people to learn the languages and to train others in using day to day expressions.
They do- it's called the Defense Language Institute out in Monterey. They teach dozens of languages in immersion programs. (My brother-in-law was slotted for Hebrew.) Probably one of the nicest military posts in the world as well.
The problem comes in that it's very expensive to do it this way. DLI ranks languages by difficulty on a 1-4 scale. A "1" isn't too bad, but for a "4" like Chinese (and I believe Arabic) expect to be there for well over a year and you probably still won't be fluent. That's a year+ of doing nothing else- no training for your actual job, just language.
The president of Kazaa complaining that people are pirating their software by using programs like KazaaLite?
All I have to say is BWAHAHAWHAHWHAW!
Re:Mozilla/Netscape usage & anti-Netscape sent
on
Mozilla RC3 Released
·
· Score: 2
This is not intended as flamebait by any means, but does anyone know what sort of browser share Mozilla/Netscape have?
While not hard numbers, check out the Google Zeitgeist, which has graphs of both the types of browsers visiting Google and the OS used.
Netscape 4 has been on a steady decline for the last year: it's well below all of MSIE 5, 5.5 and 6- totalling those 3 would indicate that Netscape 4's share is pretty minimal. Mozilla isn't even broken out: it's lumped with "Other".
No idea of the exact algorithm used to determine this, so it's always possible folks have altered their browser ID string to mimic IE to fool sites that won't work otherwise.
(One other neat observation: note that the % of searches in English has been steadily dropping for the past year. The web is becoming more global by the day.)
OT: Linux on the desktop
on
KDE 3.0.1 Ships
·
· Score: 2, Redundant
I work on a 95% W2K campus, with the remainder being Mac. I've been gently pushing folks here to consider various Unix solutions. I even occasionally joke with my only-slightly-pointy-haired boss about replacing W2K and Office with Linux/OpenOffice whenever MS licensing costs come up.
I love Linux. I've got the only Linux box here since I don't feel like porting a bunch of CGI Perl I wrote to IIS. But I hear people talk all the time about how Linux is ready for the desktop and that KDE is just as easy as Windows.
And then I see the above post, and realize just how detached that view is from reality...
It was Sociology, wasn't it. Nobody wants to admit to a sociology degree. Stupid, stupid social science majors.
One of my college's courses in Sociology was entitled "Studies of a Contemporary American Subculture." It was a six credit 400 level course that met all summer.
The actual content: the students followed the Grateful Dead for six weeks, then wrote a paper about it.
I'm still convinced this is the single greatest course in all of college history: not only for the actual "Be a Deadhead" bit, but they got *six* credits for it.
I'm no longer convinced soc majors are dumb at all.
So she brings a new life into the world, and she brings joy to parents who may not have otherwise been able to have a child. She sees something genuinely good come out of what would have otherwise been a senseless tragedy.
Very true. I'm glad to see a few folks out there are willing to look the issues in the eye and do something about them. The problem comes when you eliminate abortions: there simply are not enough adoptive parents out there to handle the flood of children that will appear. Many of these children will be "difficult to place", to use a weasel term for "darker, handicapped and older."
Folks who hear the stats about the tremendous numbers of potential adoptive parents and the multi-year waits for a child don't realize one ugly reality about that stat: the wait is for healthy white infants. Shortly after we adopted our son, our agency had a beautiful baby boy available. Newborn and healthy, you'd think that one of the ~25 couples on the waiting list would have wanted him. None did- our social worker had to make dozens of calls to try and place him. Why? His birth father was black. (We couldn't adopt him since our agency requires 1-year seperation between kids.)
There are tons of kids sitting in foster homes across the country even as we speak. Nobody's willing to adopt them. How do you think dumping another ~1million kids per year into the system will affect things? (IIRC, there are roughly a million abortions/year: feel free to correct me.)
Adoption is not an easy process. It's expensive (although Clinton and Bush have done a good job with extending tax credits to make it easier.), very slow and *extremely* intrusive. (BTW: I agree with the intrusiveness. Somebody is going to give you a *child*- you better damn well be ready and capable.) Most people can't do it.
Until I see the pro-life folks standing up and admitting it's going to cost billions to handle the new flood of children, I have a problem with them just saying "Adoption works". It does, and it's a wonderful thing, but it's simply not going to solve this problem.
Why are they assuming some sort of uber-hackers are doing this? There are a lot of people who could do it better.
They're called Sprint engineers. Anyone who thinks that every single one of these folks is incorruptable is nuts- an extra $10k here and there and I bet you could get 20% to come to the dark side.
Slashdot Mirror
Bullshit. The richer deposits are already playing out, and while I'm sure there's a goodly quantity of U ore somewhere in the earth's crust, it will take more and more energy to retrieve it.
Well, given that we're not even bothering to recycle the fuel we've got, uranium mines are busy shutting down and the rest, it's a lot more true than you think. One current estimate using known reserves and recycling waste is ~3000 years. Throw in thorium conversion and that goes up. That's just the current known reserves: go to seawater extraction and you get figures closer to ~7 million years for the entire earth's power needs.
Remember, uranium has incredible energy density: sifting tons of rock for a few grams is worth it.
Utter bullshit. 2nd Law of Thermodynamics trumps S&D every time. When the _energy_ cost to obtain a unit of energy is more than that energy, it doesn't matter where the price goes - you're done.
True, but utterly irrelevant. Uranium has such a staggering energy density that the 2nd law has no effect on us at all, at least where fission is concerned.
I'm announcing a new project, ADAM 2.0.
I'm sorry, but as the father to one Adam Lewis Remy, I'm afraid you are infringing on my trademark.
You have 30 days to alter the name to something that will not be confusing to any person in the human race, or I will sic my battalion of trained attack weas^H^H^H^Hlawyers on you.
The supply of Uranium is finite, too!
In the same sense that the Sun's energy is finite. We'll have evolved to another species before we run out of U, Th and other fissionables.
Not only is population growing, but huge segments of the existing population are trying their damnedest to live like Americans. We don't need cars that get 10 more mpg, we need to rethink the whole damned paradigm.
Supply and demand will take care of this nicely. We have lots and lots of energy availble, just at a price. The days of monster SUVs are numbered.
Other than SUVs, virtually everything we use today is vastly more efficient than what existed 30 years ago. My old house was built from R18 styrofoam panels: the folks down the street paid a bit more for R30 ones. My new fridge takes less than half the power of my parent's, but it's a lot bigger. My in-laws house is freezing during the winter since their electric heat is so expensive: our heat pumps do fine. LCD computer screens and LED lights (coming soon: check your local traffic signals) sip power compared to the alternatives.
I think you underestimate how clever we can be when needed. As prices rise (and they will) folks will adjust, either by conserving or by getting new sources of power. My personal thoughts: a hydrogen economy, generated by electrolysis of water using nuke breeder plants+ wind/geothermal/solar where appropriate. No global warming. No more smog (Drink your exhaust!), or much pollution at all: virtually all the fuel can be reused. What little is left can be vitrified and tossed into oceanic subduction zones.
Coupled with much more efficient devices such as hybrid/fuel cell power cars, LED-based lighting and better-built homes, we could survive in this economy almost forever with virtually no disruption to our current lives.
Have you ever heard of a place called THREE MILE ISLAND?
I lived downwind during the accident. Number of deaths: 0 Number of injuries: 0
CHERNOBYL?
A bad reactor design that exists in only one place in the US (Hanford), now shut down. No containment vessel, and the accident was the result of utter stupidity on the parts of the operators.
Yes, we do need to be an informed public. That does not mean we need to blatantly disregard the very real dangers of nuclear energy.
Fine. What's your solution to the need for power?
Yeah, nukes aren't 100% safe. Nothing is.
Will I ever get the bang for my MS buck?
Timothy, you do every day. What would /. be without the daily "M$ sucks! Lets all post about how horrible M$ is!" story to increase those page loads?
Why, /. might actually have to talk about things of interest to geeks!
Oh? Do you have some information on weaknesses in Java's SecureRandom class
I was doing this in about 1997. I don't think SecureRandom was available then.
As far as the random() generator then in use, it was quite a shock to me to see my simulation run for a few thousand timesteps and suddenly have all of the particles line up on a neat grid. Wait a few thousand more steps and it would happen again.
It wasn't anything critical, just a little simulator for teaching purposes, but I just couldn't believe they didn't use a decent random from the very start.
random() only returns 666 if you use a demon seed!
My favorite "bugs" are the truly horrible random number functions in almost every single language library on earth. They're usually linear congruential generators: fast, but utterly useless for any work that requires serious "randomness" such as Monte Carlo simulations. They have very short recurrence times, strong sequential correlation, etc.
Back in grad school, I had to substitute the Knuth ran3 routine for the supplied C library functions in both gcc and xlc since they were just awful.
Fast forward 8 years. I made the stupid assumption that since Java was a new language and that horrible problems with random number generators were well known that Sun would actually provide a decent RNG. Nope: just as badly flawed as the C one.
I suspect this is simply something to give up tilting at windmills about: random() is good enough for simple games and anyone doing real work knows to stay the hell away.
Good ol' Sen. Stevens...priming the pork-pump, count on it.
<senator> My fellow Alaskans, I continue to support drilling for oil in ANWR. How else will we get the energy to cool our homes during the blazing Fairbanks summers? </senator>
You simply cannot have the expectation that software will *NEVER* crash.
Umm, the aircraft and space industries certainly do.
You don't work in either, do you?
Certainly, they crash *less*, but they most certainly do crash (literally, in some cases), fail, give wrong outputs, etc. Flip through a few articles on the RISKs digest. Here's a few examples I found after a brief search
That's the result of less than 5 minutes checking: have fun filling in more horror stories.
Software bugs happen: they always will. Testing can make them much less common, but anything more complicated than Hello World is probably going to have bugs.
Jon and Jen use Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio to make their DVDs for clients. They use MPEG4 to stream content using an approach like you outlined here. Then the couple's kid uses iMovie to make presentations for her class project.
And then they can make a few amateur pornos and sell them to put the kid through college...
Eric
And to further congratulate LockMart on their wise design choice, consider that this is a combat aircraft, and in a world full of people trying to kill you and/or break your airplane, it's comforting to note that an electrical bus can have holes blown through it and chunks blasted off of it and still probably work. One little hole in a hydraulic system and it's Pull The Black-and-Yellow-Striped Handle Time, if you're lucky enough to be able to.
Well, not really. You just need redundant hydraulics, plus an additional cable run- for example the A-10 can take amazing punishment, having been designed to work down low and slow.
The problem is that all this adds weight: a second set of hydraulics weighs a lot more than a second run of wire.
Won't work. Step 2 fails on our campus network: between our firewall and Packeteer. My guess is that most schools aren't too different.
Weighs 16 pounds. I take it out sometimes and throw it at some wooden pins at the end of alley to see what number I get.
Useful? Not in the job market. She could triple her earning potential overnight by getting an MCSE, or getting a contractors license for that matter. Those are certainly more *useful* than being able to read Beowulf in the original.
As a side note, virtually no CS grads can do calculus or even begin to understand it. Few majors in any field, even technical ones, can. (I'm speaking as one who has taught junior-senior level PChem courses at Virginia Tech.) Sure, they can do a textbook problem if you give them long enough, but they do not even begin to understand *why* Calc is important or how to apply it to problems that aren't straight out of a book.
They claim that MCSE's are more useful than a college degree
Umm, in a lot of cases they are. We've got MCSEs here that make a lot more than the college-degreed folks in other departments.
Hell, they make more than the PhD adjunct professors.
Now, you can claim that college degree usefulness is not measured in dollars, but what other measureable metric do you propose?
Sure, nobody really supports OpenNIC names. But if you try and fork the kernel, it's not going to have any support from the big names either. In either case, it's going to take serious abuse on ICANN or Linus' part to make an alternative viable.
The price today to produce a barrel of Syncrude Sweet blend synthetic crude is about $7 a barrel, and sells for about $32USD a barrel.
In other words, $7 more per barrel than the current market price for oil.
So whay again does the US kiss Saudi tush, and ignores it friends to the north?
$7 per barrel. Don't forget, it's not just the Saudis we buy from: we get oil from just about all of the Arabian peninsula. The Saudis dominate the region, so kissing up to them keeps the rest of the oil rich states somewhat happy with us.
And seeing as how we're buying lots of oil from Canada already, we're hardly ignoring it.
Eric
Case in point: ANWR. ANWR oil is going to cost more than Arabian oil, a fact that Bush+Co don't like to point out. The USGS assessment is that there is *no* oil in ANWR that is recoverable for less than $15/barrel. $20/barrel lets you extract maybe a 3rd of the reserve. Get up to $30/barrel and you can get most of it.
How much does it cost Saudi Arabia to get that same barrel? About 2 dollars .
(Current spot price is about $25/barrel due to mideast tension, but it's been as low as $17.5 earlier this year.)
We aren't going to run out of oil anytime soon. What will happen is that the price will go up as we use up the easy stuff.
Eric
My guess is that the Military/CIA etc would be better advised to simply get people to learn the languages and to train others in using day to day expressions.
They do- it's called the Defense Language Institute out in Monterey. They teach dozens of languages in immersion programs. (My brother-in-law was slotted for Hebrew.) Probably one of the nicest military posts in the world as well.
The problem comes in that it's very expensive to do it this way. DLI ranks languages by difficulty on a 1-4 scale. A "1" isn't too bad, but for a "4" like Chinese (and I believe Arabic) expect to be there for well over a year and you probably still won't be fluent. That's a year+ of doing nothing else- no training for your actual job, just language.
Eric
-or-
The president of Kazaa complaining that people are pirating their software by using programs like KazaaLite?
All I have to say is BWAHAHAWHAHWHAW!
This is not intended as flamebait by any means, but does anyone know what sort of browser share Mozilla/Netscape have?
While not hard numbers, check out the Google Zeitgeist, which has graphs of both the types of browsers visiting Google and the OS used.
Netscape 4 has been on a steady decline for the last year: it's well below all of MSIE 5, 5.5 and 6- totalling those 3 would indicate that Netscape 4's share is pretty minimal. Mozilla isn't even broken out: it's lumped with "Other".
No idea of the exact algorithm used to determine this, so it's always possible folks have altered their browser ID string to mimic IE to fool sites that won't work otherwise.
(One other neat observation: note that the % of searches in English has been steadily dropping for the past year. The web is becoming more global by the day.)
I work on a 95% W2K campus, with the remainder being Mac. I've been gently pushing folks here to consider various Unix solutions. I even occasionally joke with my only-slightly-pointy-haired boss about replacing W2K and Office with Linux/OpenOffice whenever MS licensing costs come up.
I love Linux. I've got the only Linux box here since I don't feel like porting a bunch of CGI Perl I wrote to IIS. But I hear people talk all the time about how Linux is ready for the desktop and that KDE is just as easy as Windows.
And then I see the above post, and realize just how detached that view is from reality...
It was Sociology, wasn't it. Nobody wants to admit to a sociology degree. Stupid, stupid social science majors.
One of my college's courses in Sociology was entitled "Studies of a Contemporary American Subculture." It was a six credit 400 level course that met all summer.
The actual content: the students followed the Grateful Dead for six weeks, then wrote a paper about it.
I'm still convinced this is the single greatest course in all of college history: not only for the actual "Be a Deadhead" bit, but they got *six* credits for it.
I'm no longer convinced soc majors are dumb at all.
So she brings a new life into the world, and she brings joy to parents who may not have otherwise been able to have a child. She sees something genuinely good come out of what would have otherwise been a senseless tragedy.
Very true. I'm glad to see a few folks out there are willing to look the issues in the eye and do something about them. The problem comes when you eliminate abortions: there simply are not enough adoptive parents out there to handle the flood of children that will appear. Many of these children will be "difficult to place", to use a weasel term for "darker, handicapped and older."
Folks who hear the stats about the tremendous numbers of potential adoptive parents and the multi-year waits for a child don't realize one ugly reality about that stat: the wait is for healthy white infants. Shortly after we adopted our son, our agency had a beautiful baby boy available. Newborn and healthy, you'd think that one of the ~25 couples on the waiting list would have wanted him. None did- our social worker had to make dozens of calls to try and place him. Why? His birth father was black. (We couldn't adopt him since our agency requires 1-year seperation between kids.)
There are tons of kids sitting in foster homes across the country even as we speak. Nobody's willing to adopt them. How do you think dumping another ~1million kids per year into the system will affect things? (IIRC, there are roughly a million abortions/year: feel free to correct me.)
Adoption is not an easy process. It's expensive (although Clinton and Bush have done a good job with extending tax credits to make it easier.), very slow and *extremely* intrusive. (BTW: I agree with the intrusiveness. Somebody is going to give you a *child*- you better damn well be ready and capable.) Most people can't do it.
Until I see the pro-life folks standing up and admitting it's going to cost billions to handle the new flood of children, I have a problem with them just saying "Adoption works". It does, and it's a wonderful thing, but it's simply not going to solve this problem.
They're called Sprint engineers. Anyone who thinks that every single one of these folks is incorruptable is nuts- an extra $10k here and there and I bet you could get 20% to come to the dark side.