Besides, as numerous other people have said, the number one man-made killer of birds is tall buildings, especially those with mirrored glass. And we all know how there are always mountains of bird carcasses at the foot of every skyscraper... *cough* It's just really not as big of a deal as it sounds like, in the great scheme of things. Nature is big. Anyone wanna estimate how many fish are caught by commercial fishing trawlers every day?
Wind farms will not be an extinction level event for birds. It's a tired, regressive, short-sighted argument that doesn't even make any sense, but some luddite invariably trots it out everytime someone so much as mentions the words 'wind' and 'power' in the same sentence. By reducing pollution output into the environment by nearly 100% we will save many more birds in the long run, and all kinds of animals, trees, and plants, as well as ourselves.
I've never argued wind power wasn't a good idea. I only argue it will be a small part of a different solution. The grand parent arguement was that cats kill more birds then wind mills. I'm just pointing out windmills kill more percapita, per year. If there were as many windmills as there are cats in the US, 90% of all birds woudl be exstinct and there would be massive climate change effects.
Not until either a solution is found for dealing with the radioactive waste that results from nuclear fission (i.e. never) or when we have perfected the use of controllable fusion (which is *always* 40 years away).
They do, mix it with molten silica and store it somewhere, or re-use it in another reactor. While it's dangerous to people the waste is still able to generate power, when it stops being usefull to generate power it is then as harmfull as any other heavy metal. The only reason why the US's nuclear waste isn't re-used is political, you don't want to make plutonium. If you did re-use the waste as canada does, you'd have very very little dangerously radiactive waste. Now coolant water is a different story but there are ways to decontaiminate that.
I'll get over my "petty" fears of nuclear energy once we find a way to safely store the wastes (High, Mid _AND_ Low level included) for the entirety of their dangerous lifes.
I'll get over my "petty" fears of nuclear energy once our engineers actually figure out how to build buildings and bridges that stay up, resisting earthquakes, tornadoes and hurricanes. ALL the time.
I'll get over my "petty" fears of nuclear energy once there are no terrorists who may want to siphon nuclear material out of the system, and making sure that nobody working in the system can be tempted by that extra couple of thousand, million or even more dollars.
I'll get over my "petty" fears of nuclear energy once we have operators of the equipment who are infallible, never erring. Never missing some crucial detail, never having a bad day.
Take care of those, then maybe I won't worry about nuclear energy.
Basically your saying your a petrified alarmist who needs the world to be perfectly and absolutly safe with no margin for error no matter how small the actual damage is.
Each outdoor cat probably kills an average of 50+ birds a year, though. Ask someone with birdfeeders. Cats are truly little sadistic monsters. But also cute and fluffy!
This site says that in WI alone cats kill 217 million birds a year: http://www.lcshelter.com/cat%20predation%20on%20bi rds.htm
I'm answerinf the AC:
The article says that a single windmill killes 364 birds per year. 364 > 50. Cats kill more then fans because there are a hell of a lot more cats.
Wouldn't a tall building, say the empire state building, absorb more energy than a windmill? Their are many thousands more tall buildings than there are windmills, but I never hear anyone saying, "Don't build a 20 story building because you will change the wind patern."
We have been building tall buildings for the last one hundred years and no one metioned problems from changing wind patterns, so isn't it a red herring to bring this argument up ONLY in the context of windmills?
Tall buildings do too, but you don't need 14000 km^2 of buildings, while you will need something like that to power a major city for wind mills. Buildings are just made, they have a adverse effect ont he wind. By design buildings ussually have a only moderate effect on the wind, their main purpose is to hold people. Wind mills are designed to suck energy out of them. So a wind mill of size X will pull more kinetic energy out of the wind then a building of some size greater then X. So a 1km^2 of windmills will do draw more kinetic energy then 1km^2 area of buildings.
Your forgetting the worst thing about wind isn't that it's ugly. It's that you get X power over Y square km. To supply a city with Z power you need (z/x)*y area which is ussually a huge huge area. Power density is an issue, how much land can you reasonable give to producing wind power, and how much of that will you have to deforest? destroy marhses?.
Cue an endless cycle of/. comments to the effect that wind energy is not as environmentally friendly as you think, and it costs more than you hope, and every other alternative to oil is problematic, and blah, blah, blah. I'm glad to see research continuing into alternatives. Just because something isn't 100% ready yet is no reason not to pursue it. Just think what weaning the U.S. off oil-dependence (yes, long term thinking here, try not to let your hat fly off your head) would do for its world politics. Whoops. Never mind. This is a message from the oil companies reminding you not to think that way. We now return you to your reality-based TV program.
There are n ideal solutions, everything has a cost. Wind doesn't have enough energy density to replace hydro carbons. It will be part of but (not a major part) of a solution to burning fossil fuels. Besides we have a lot of fossil fuels to go through before we "have" to make a change. (the middle east will last 40-50 years if we discover no more there, The Alberta tar sands and the Venezuala tarsands have another 200 years each).
Orbital solar collectors would be a great solution, microwave the energy back down, just watch your aim. But you will eventually have to deal with heating issues, your adding energy to the earth that would not normally accumulate there, which will warm the earth too. Most likly at a much slower rate the hydro-carbon induced green house effects.
There is always the problem with energy density. A single coal plant produces many more times as much electricity as a full scale wind farm. Wind farms can be part of the solution but their energy density precludes it form being the solution. Also they do more then just make electricity and kill birds, they change wind patters, absorb the kinetic energy from the wind. The number you would need to power a major city would be several times the area of that city. And anything can be green is small cales btu scale it up and it'll have ecological consequences too.
Nothgn is free, every energy source has pro's and cons'.
The ones that survive will evolve to be smarter. And just for your info, kitty cats kill more birds each day then any wind farm can in a year.
Due entirly to the fact that there are very few wind farms. Now birds killed per cat vs birds killed per wind mill per year is a better sat, i'm sure cats don't kill 364 birds each, each year.
Theres a few more problems with wind then just birds. Theres also the problem of energy density, you need a lot of open space to produce enough energy to meet demand and such large scale operations will affect local/global climate. The wind farms rob the wind of kinetic energy which will change the weather patterns in the area just as a large city with sky scrapper do, but the area you would need to produce that energy is huge.
There are no ideal solutions, we have to find good comprimises and tiday/wind power doesn't seem to be the answer due entirly to energy density/scalign issues.
It's NP complete, Pathing is a "difficult" problem. Doing true pathing is exstremly hard. So complex maps will always result in bad pathing. War 3 gets by this by making fairly straightforward maps where pathign isn't a huge issues and they use lots of "cheats". But when you have complex maps or a convuluted base structure your going to have lots of pathing problems. If you find a way to do it in a reasonably scaling time, then you will have broken np complete and essentially broken a few ecyption systems as well as solved every other np complete problem.
Anything You Don't Understand is Easy to Do. Example: If you have the right tools, how hard could it be to generate nuclear fission at home?
Sure you could, all you need is a nuclear pile. Nuclear fission right there. How hard is it to find a few hundred pounds of high grade uranium/plutonium?
See above in this thread. They've funded their studies and there is reasonable doubt as to global warming. More studies from the same industries probably isn't going to sway public opinion since everyone cynically believes that if an industry funded it it's automatically suspect whereas if someone else (including environmental organizations) funded it them it's somehow pure and untainted. Likewise scientists that publish papers on global warming are looked upon as progressive while those that question it would be ridiculed as industry stooges, etc. and have their credibility questioned.
Hmm, I wonder which path they're going to choose?
All the same, Where is yoru evidence? In pure numbers, the number of climate vents have increased, so there is no doubt the climate is changing.
As for scientific peer pressure, if you have enough proof to back up a claim, you write a paper. There as much push to be "revolutionary" and "counter intuitive" as there is to be "conformist" and "pro status qou". And the global warming front was the monority opinion till a decade ago. You using scarecrow arguements, where is yoru evidence? no change in climate? Take a look at the number of hurricanes this year? is that just random data noise? no. do the stats. Something is wrong, and the argument "well the scientists are being pressure to support veiw X" is idiotic.
Right and the rest of the world don't get to benefit from the side effects of America's production. We don't need no stinkin' yankee computers or stinkin' yankee internet!
America doens't make it's computers, Asia does. America invented the protocol but the content of the internet is mostly valueless to everyone.
80% chance your motherboard/videocrad/HD/ram was made in taiwan/japan/korea. And 99% chance anything on the internet you look at is junk... mostly porn junk.
Clinton was your electd leader, he signed a document with some implicit agreement to some conditions, Bush denied any obligatiosn to said agreement, thus pulling out of the aggreement.
You, my friend, have all the bullshit to yourself.
"In other news, 75% of the owners of McDonald's franchises believe that including McDonald's in your diet is not a bad idea. The other 25% had no opinion but that may be because they didn't stop munching on their Big Mac. This is not surprising at all. Very few human beings bite the hands that feed them and scientists are human--those in academia are especially human and especially political. They're not going to be out there proving that global warming isn't happening or that it is a natural phenomenon when doing so, in sufficient numbers, will guarantee that funding will dry up on the topic and they'll have to find another research gravy train.
This also doesn't consider how many studies may have been done, submitted for publishing, and rejected. This could be just as much a political condemnation on those that decide whether or not a study is worthy of being published as it is any comment on the validity of global warming and/or its possible human sources.
Any time you see every scientist agree (or at least no scientist disagree) on a very controversial topic, be very suspicious.
"
And your basically saying "I have no credible proof of my side of the agrument, so it must mean all the credible proof is magically hidden from us".
There as much money to be maid refuting global warming (Halberton and the auto-industry would dearly love to see a credible study refuting climate change) as there are supporting global warming.
Monster regen is enough to negate that. By the time you get there, it's at 100% health again. Also if you are a short distance away there is a level based timer you must wait for before ressing. So the Enemy is at 100% when you get there. Time penalties are just as valuabel to xp penalties. Xp penalties are just more annoying time penalties. In WoW you dont' think your losing anythign but the 3 min trek cost you time which is interchangable for xp.
Wow is pretty godo for that, 1 quests takes 30min -2h to finish. you can pick up anywhere. So you can just take short quest, complete it and still feel okay. pick friends wiht similiar scheduels and viola. You have a game with small incrmeental rewards even for players short on time.
Blizzard is one of the most succesful pc developers around. They sell console numbers on the PC. They do this by taking someone else idea (Dune 2) taking all the annoying bits out and making slight innovations (warcraft) then building upon that to crush the competition (warcraft 2 -> warcraft 3). They dont' make genres, they define them. (When I say RTS, most people think starcraft. When I say random dungeon hack, most people say diablo).
Their also pavign the way for the "expansion". which will include 60-99.
Which isn't a bad thing.
Re:There's a preventive vaccine already
on
HIV Vaccine
·
· Score: 1
I know exactly what I'm saying. The number of teen women getting it is less then the number of straight older men getting it. But it's no less true. and it's not that warped. Their 1/4 of black men who get it in the US. So it's pretty damn close and if it keeps growin ti'll surpass them pretty damn soon.
Slashdot Mirror
Besides, as numerous other people have said, the number one man-made killer of birds is tall buildings, especially those with mirrored glass. And we all know how there are always mountains of bird carcasses at the foot of every skyscraper... *cough* It's just really not as big of a deal as it sounds like, in the great scheme of things. Nature is big. Anyone wanna estimate how many fish are caught by commercial fishing trawlers every day?
Wind farms will not be an extinction level event for birds. It's a tired, regressive, short-sighted argument that doesn't even make any sense, but some luddite invariably trots it out everytime someone so much as mentions the words 'wind' and 'power' in the same sentence. By reducing pollution output into the environment by nearly 100% we will save many more birds in the long run, and all kinds of animals, trees, and plants, as well as ourselves.
I've never argued wind power wasn't a good idea. I only argue it will be a small part of a different solution. The grand parent arguement was that cats kill more birds then wind mills. I'm just pointing out windmills kill more percapita, per year. If there were as many windmills as there are cats in the US, 90% of all birds woudl be exstinct and there would be massive climate change effects.
Not until either a solution is found for dealing with the radioactive waste that results from nuclear fission (i.e. never) or when we have perfected the use of controllable fusion (which is *always* 40 years away).
They do, mix it with molten silica and store it somewhere, or re-use it in another reactor. While it's dangerous to people the waste is still able to generate power, when it stops being usefull to generate power it is then as harmfull as any other heavy metal. The only reason why the US's nuclear waste isn't re-used is political, you don't want to make plutonium. If you did re-use the waste as canada does, you'd have very very little dangerously radiactive waste. Now coolant water is a different story but there are ways to decontaiminate that.
I'll get over my "petty" fears of nuclear energy once we find a way to safely store the wastes (High, Mid _AND_ Low level included) for the entirety of their dangerous lifes.
I'll get over my "petty" fears of nuclear energy once our engineers actually figure out how to build buildings and bridges that stay up, resisting earthquakes, tornadoes and hurricanes. ALL the time.
I'll get over my "petty" fears of nuclear energy once there are no terrorists who may want to siphon nuclear material out of the system, and making sure that nobody working in the system can be tempted by that extra couple of thousand, million or even more dollars.
I'll get over my "petty" fears of nuclear energy once we have operators of the equipment who are infallible, never erring. Never missing some crucial detail, never having a bad day.
Take care of those, then maybe I won't worry about nuclear energy.
Basically your saying your a petrified alarmist who needs the world to be perfectly and absolutly safe with no margin for error no matter how small the actual damage is.
Do you happen to have 3 legs and 2 "heads"?
Each outdoor cat probably kills an average of 50+ birds a year, though. Ask someone with birdfeeders. Cats are truly little sadistic monsters. But also cute and fluffy!
i rds.htm
This site says that in WI alone cats kill 217 million birds a year: http://www.lcshelter.com/cat%20predation%20on%20b
I'm answerinf the AC:
The article says that a single windmill killes 364 birds per year. 364 > 50. Cats kill more then fans because there are a hell of a lot more cats.
Wouldn't a tall building, say the empire state building, absorb more energy than a windmill? Their are many thousands more tall buildings than there are windmills, but I never hear anyone saying, "Don't build a 20 story building because you will change the wind patern."
We have been building tall buildings for the last one hundred years and no one metioned problems from changing wind patterns, so isn't it a red herring to bring this argument up ONLY in the context of windmills?
Tall buildings do too, but you don't need 14000 km^2 of buildings, while you will need something like that to power a major city for wind mills. Buildings are just made, they have a adverse effect ont he wind. By design buildings ussually have a only moderate effect on the wind, their main purpose is to hold people. Wind mills are designed to suck energy out of them. So a wind mill of size X will pull more kinetic energy out of the wind then a building of some size greater then X. So a 1km^2 of windmills will do draw more kinetic energy then 1km^2 area of buildings.
Your forgetting the worst thing about wind isn't that it's ugly. It's that you get X power over Y square km. To supply a city with Z power you need (z/x)*y area which is ussually a huge huge area. Power density is an issue, how much land can you reasonable give to producing wind power, and how much of that will you have to deforest? destroy marhses?.
Cue an endless cycle of /. comments to the effect that wind energy is not as environmentally friendly as you think, and it costs more than you hope, and every other alternative to oil is problematic, and blah, blah, blah.
I'm glad to see research continuing into alternatives. Just because something isn't 100% ready yet is no reason not to pursue it. Just think what weaning the U.S. off oil-dependence (yes, long term thinking here, try not to let your hat fly off your head) would do for its world politics. Whoops. Never mind. This is a message from the oil companies reminding you not to think that way. We now return you to your reality-based TV program.
There are n ideal solutions, everything has a cost. Wind doesn't have enough energy density to replace hydro carbons. It will be part of but (not a major part) of a solution to burning fossil fuels. Besides we have a lot of fossil fuels to go through before we "have" to make a change. (the middle east will last 40-50 years if we discover no more there, The Alberta tar sands and the Venezuala tarsands have another 200 years each).
Orbital solar collectors would be a great solution, microwave the energy back down, just watch your aim. But you will eventually have to deal with heating issues, your adding energy to the earth that would not normally accumulate there, which will warm the earth too. Most likly at a much slower rate the hydro-carbon induced green house effects.
There is always the problem with energy density. A single coal plant produces many more times as much electricity as a full scale wind farm. Wind farms can be part of the solution but their energy density precludes it form being the solution. Also they do more then just make electricity and kill birds, they change wind patters, absorb the kinetic energy from the wind. The number you would need to power a major city would be several times the area of that city. And anything can be green is small cales btu scale it up and it'll have ecological consequences too.
Nothgn is free, every energy source has pro's and cons'.
The ones that survive will evolve to be smarter. And just for your info, kitty cats kill more birds each day then any wind farm can in a year.
Due entirly to the fact that there are very few wind farms. Now birds killed per cat vs birds killed per wind mill per year is a better sat, i'm sure cats don't kill 364 birds each, each year.
Theres a few more problems with wind then just birds. Theres also the problem of energy density, you need a lot of open space to produce enough energy to meet demand and such large scale operations will affect local/global climate. The wind farms rob the wind of kinetic energy which will change the weather patterns in the area just as a large city with sky scrapper do, but the area you would need to produce that energy is huge.
There are no ideal solutions, we have to find good comprimises and tiday/wind power doesn't seem to be the answer due entirly to energy density/scalign issues.
Wave and wind aren't "free" and they come with both consequences and scalign problems.
What's the difficult problem of pathfinding AI?
It's NP complete, Pathing is a "difficult" problem. Doing true pathing is exstremly hard. So complex maps will always result in bad pathing. War 3 gets by this by making fairly straightforward maps where pathign isn't a huge issues and they use lots of "cheats". But when you have complex maps or a convuluted base structure your going to have lots of pathing problems. If you find a way to do it in a reasonably scaling time, then you will have broken np complete and essentially broken a few ecyption systems as well as solved every other np complete problem.
Anything You Don't Understand is Easy to Do.
Example: If you have the right tools, how hard could it be to generate nuclear fission at home?
Sure you could, all you need is a nuclear pile. Nuclear fission right there. How hard is it to find a few hundred pounds of high grade uranium/plutonium?
See above in this thread. They've funded their studies and there is reasonable doubt as to global warming. More studies from the same industries probably isn't going to sway public opinion since everyone cynically believes that if an industry funded it it's automatically suspect whereas if someone else (including environmental organizations) funded it them it's somehow pure and untainted. Likewise scientists that publish papers on global warming are looked upon as progressive while those that question it would be ridiculed as industry stooges, etc. and have their credibility questioned.
Hmm, I wonder which path they're going to choose?
All the same, Where is yoru evidence? In pure numbers, the number of climate vents have increased, so there is no doubt the climate is changing.
As for scientific peer pressure, if you have enough proof to back up a claim, you write a paper. There as much push to be "revolutionary" and "counter intuitive" as there is to be "conformist" and "pro status qou". And the global warming front was the monority opinion till a decade ago. You using scarecrow arguements, where is yoru evidence? no change in climate? Take a look at the number of hurricanes this year? is that just random data noise? no. do the stats. Something is wrong, and the argument "well the scientists are being pressure to support veiw X" is idiotic.
Right and the rest of the world don't get to benefit from the side effects of America's production. We don't need no stinkin' yankee computers or stinkin' yankee internet!
America doens't make it's computers, Asia does. America invented the protocol but the content of the internet is mostly valueless to everyone.
80% chance your motherboard/videocrad/HD/ram was made in taiwan/japan/korea. And 99% chance anything on the internet you look at is junk... mostly porn junk.
Disregaurd my last post. The things that happen when you don't RTFQ.
All of this happened under Clinton.
So, sorry, but your bullshit post is just that.
Clinton was your electd leader, he signed a document with some implicit agreement to some conditions, Bush denied any obligatiosn to said agreement, thus pulling out of the aggreement.
You, my friend, have all the bullshit to yourself.
"In other news, 75% of the owners of McDonald's franchises believe that including McDonald's in your diet is not a bad idea. The other 25% had no opinion but that may be because they didn't stop munching on their Big Mac.
This is not surprising at all. Very few human beings bite the hands that feed them and scientists are human--those in academia are especially human and especially political. They're not going to be out there proving that global warming isn't happening or that it is a natural phenomenon when doing so, in sufficient numbers, will guarantee that funding will dry up on the topic and they'll have to find another research gravy train.
This also doesn't consider how many studies may have been done, submitted for publishing, and rejected. This could be just as much a political condemnation on those that decide whether or not a study is worthy of being published as it is any comment on the validity of global warming and/or its possible human sources.
Any time you see every scientist agree (or at least no scientist disagree) on a very controversial topic, be very suspicious.
"
And your basically saying "I have no credible proof of my side of the agrument, so it must mean all the credible proof is magically hidden from us".
There as much money to be maid refuting global warming (Halberton and the auto-industry would dearly love to see a credible study refuting climate change) as there are supporting global warming.
Canada? I think I've heard of it. Isn't it located in the Southern Arctic?
Cower in fear foul american. Our savage mooses of death riden by our Regal Canabal Molted Police will reign fir... err snow down on your puny country.
Monster regen is enough to negate that. By the time you get there, it's at 100% health again. Also if you are a short distance away there is a level based timer you must wait for before ressing. So the Enemy is at 100% when you get there. Time penalties are just as valuabel to xp penalties. Xp penalties are just more annoying time penalties. In WoW you dont' think your losing anythign but the 3 min trek cost you time which is interchangable for xp.
Wow is pretty godo for that, 1 quests takes 30min -2h to finish. you can pick up anywhere. So you can just take short quest, complete it and still feel okay. pick friends wiht similiar scheduels and viola. You have a game with small incrmeental rewards even for players short on time.
Blizzard is one of the most succesful pc developers around. They sell console numbers on the PC. They do this by taking someone else idea (Dune 2) taking all the annoying bits out and making slight innovations (warcraft) then building upon that to crush the competition (warcraft 2 -> warcraft 3). They dont' make genres, they define them. (When I say RTS, most people think starcraft. When I say random dungeon hack, most people say diablo).
Their also pavign the way for the "expansion". which will include 60-99.
Which isn't a bad thing.
I know exactly what I'm saying. The number of teen women getting it is less then the number of straight older men getting it. But it's no less true. and it's not that warped. Their 1/4 of black men who get it in the US. So it's pretty damn close and if it keeps growin ti'll surpass them pretty damn soon.