You're right about the burial conditions necessary, but I thought being short, sweet, and direct would get my point across better. Yeah, of course, you can't bury it in a water table, etc, but the fact is, if you put it in a stable place deep underground, its absolutely safe.
"1) Most environmentalists supporting the Nuclear option do so only because it is the lesser of two evils, the latter of which (Global Warming) was not known of or understood back when the Nuclear Power protests were going on."
And its not understood very well now, Al Gore's movie notwithstanding.
"The technology has vastly improved, the safety measures are in place, it's time to go Nuclear."
The technology has been there for decades. We had one civilian mishap, Three Mile Island, where there was no environmental damage. The US Navy, which has been using nuclear propulsion intensively for 50 years, has had exactly two accidents, both of them in the early years of the program, and nothing since.
The safety problem has almost entirely been on the Soviet/Russian side, and it had nothing to do with computational technology and resources, and everything to do with shitty reactor designs and substandard safety procedures. After the Soviet Union collapsed, a US Navy admiral visited a Russian sub, and was exposed to more radiation in two hours than he'd been in his entire American naval career.
"Trying to run the thing at a profit, even a hugely government subsidized profit, leads to cutting corners"
That's utter horseshit. You're basically saying that not only does capitalism not work, but its dangerous as well.
Capitalism and market economies are all about efficiency. Efficiency isn't the same as "cutting corners". The longer you cut corners, the more likely that your business will suffer, or disappear completely. And as another poster has pointed out, simply making the whole thing a bureaucratic exercise is certainly no guarantee of safety. A government drone with a protected job and a quota to meet isn't exactly inducible to quality control.
"We don't use nuclear because it would put the oil barons out of business, not because it's dirty or unsafe. Most of France's power comes from nuclear, and they don't have any problems with it."
France isn't the US. In America, commercial nuclear power has most been opposed for enviromental/political reasons, mainly from the old "no nukes" crowd in the Democratic Party, with Three Mile Island as their Great-Warning-To-Mankind.
Never mind, as you mentioned, that in Western Europe they've managed to use nukes for decades without a Chernobyl.
"1) We don't have any technology that will last more than a couple of hundred years. Nuclear waste lasts for millions of years. We simply can't contain it."
We have the ultimate nuclear waste containment technology, and it's literally been around forever.
"Coal is not going to get more expensive until cap-and-trade economics (or just a flat-out CO2 tax) are introduced into the market."
Ahhh, the old "Markets aren't efficient and need to be managed by experts" argument. That kind of thinking prolonged the Depression. "Cap and Trade" regulations will just muck up the works.
Only two real factors will bring about nukes...either the natural supply and price of coal will make us turn to other alternatives, or the natural progression of advancing technology will make nuke power cheaper. The second is far more likely. We're in no danger of running out of coal.
One thing that is being overlooked here is not an economic, but rather a political consideration; the notion that perhaps we should produce our own power and fuel domestically rather than rely on fickle foreign sources. In the past, this hasn't been a strong enough inducement, but with Opec restricting production to drive up price, we might be reconsidering that position.
"Performance tuning at Microsoft seems blasphemy."
Actually maximizing performance means that you're not buying new hardware, which pisses off Microsoft's OEM partners. And in turn, that means you're not buying new copies of Windows as well.
Earlier this decade, even the cheapest PC you could buy off the shelf had far more horsepower than was necessary for apps of the time. With the sole exception of video cards, any El Cheapo Celeron you could buy would easily exceed the hardware standards for the latest games and apps. PC sales slowed down. The solution? Design apps and OS's that have so many bells and whistles that they use up all that excess computing power, and Voila, you have to buy new hardware.
"But heck, they are trying, even if there is some nuts like Bush who trying to undo all achieved."
I was with you until that part. Bush isn't real popular with anyone these days....liberals have always hated him, and now conservatives are mad at him over his betrayal with the amnesty for illegal aliens issue...but this notion that Bush is an all-powerful dictator is utter horseshit. The guy was elected twice, whether or not people here at Slashdot want to admit it. He just had one of his vetoes overridden. His party was beaten out of power in 2006 in Congress. Meanwhile, some of his "anti-American" programs have since been approved by the new Democratic overlords in the Congress. And I keep trying to recall a newspaper that he's shut down, or a tv station, or a radio station....none comes to mind. Care to name a protest that he's broken up?
Even if Bush TRIED to destroy Democracy, he couldn't. Anyone that says differently is a conspiracy nutcase. Democracy in America is doing just fine, thanks. And the dirty little secret of American society to your Europeans is that more Americans are like Bush than are like you. This is a more conservative country than not, and that isn't going to change, regardless of the party in power. Just because our democracy isn't of the flavor that you like doesn't mean that it's not a democracy anymore.
"WalMart is widely recognized as an unscrupulous retailer who does the socio-economic equivalent of "strip mining" wherever they take root."
Where I live, that's utter bullshit. Wherever a Wal Mart has popped up here, an entire ecosystem of smaller stores springs up around it. It's the ultimate anchor store. There are two super centers within 10 minutes of me, and both were huge boosts to the retail economy. They both have bakeries, haircut shops, auto service centers, jewelry shops, and food markets. And surprise surprise, right next to Wal Mart are shops that sell baked goods, cut hair, fix cars, sell jewelry, etc. I think you get the picture. Rather than coming in and driving out existing shops, the super centers have been huge economic shots in the arm...and if they're so predatory, then why do these other shops thrive right next to them?
General stores made the same argument against older retailers like Sears and JC Penney, and the argument was just as wrong back then.
"The United States is in a race to the bottom. Every great empire falls - I just wish I wasn't stuck in the middle of this one."
No one is making you stay. Delta's ready when you are.
"Unless things drastically change over the next few years, as a freedom loving individual, I'm sad to say I'll have no choice but to leave and watch the country implode from the sidelines."
As a "freedom loving individual", unless you're withdrawing from the modern world and choose to live in a cave in Tibet somewhere, you're going to be no more "free" any where else in the world.
"I could not care less about Vetereans day - and I'm an American USMC veteran (six years active duty, combat, got all the fruit salad to wear, thanks...)"
You're very much in the minority then, because the rest of us that served appreciate it.
What about left wing web sites? Should submissions be banned if they come from a specific POV? Can I expect another complaint if the submission comes from The Nation or Mother Jones?
On P2P file sharing: "Fans who share music are not thieves or pirates. Sharing music has been happening for decades."
While that's true, an important difference is that it used to be you shared music with a few friends, all local. Now people are sharing with, oh, tens of thousands of their closest friends. Does it cease to be sharing at that point and become something else?
Home desktops aren't going away so much as they're evolving to fill new roles and needs, as they've done for twenty years now. First they adapted to BBS, then to the Internet with modems, then to the Internet with broadband. Now with mulitmedia becoming essentially computerized, PCs are simply becoming hub controllers for our home electronics systems. We will indeed see many "Internet Appliances" become successful, but none of them will replace the PC entirely. Your PC will likely be your home manager, running not only your communications (including phones and faxes), but your entertainment and utilities. Wanna fire up the heater on the way home from a trip? Use your Blackberry to tell your PC to fire it up on the Interstate so you'll be toasty warm by the time you get there. You'll kick back and watch DVDs while dowloading torrents and running scripts to control your home electricity usage. Hell, maybe you'll even feed the dog with it at the same time.
As for Barney's assertion that Linux isn't really trying to be a competitor in this reason, he's right, but he's also very wrong. There is no commercial Linux competition here. But your home hacker will use Linux to do these things before Microsoft offers them on a commercial platforms. In other words, the hacker hobbyists will once again blaze the important trails in this area, and use Linux to do it. So in its own way, Linux will be well represented here.
A longer answer is that there's this lovely little checkbox you can mark on your user preference page to make sure you never, ever, ever, see articles like this again.
Which one would that be? The politics button? Oh, I see...except that this story wasn't just in the politics section, but biotech to boot. In other words, politics is bleeding into nearly every aspect of Slashdot. This is not how it was even a few short years ago.
...and don't want to take the time to defend your political views?
I'm tired of having to defend my political views in a tech website.
Either way, you're obviously lazy and perhaps stupid to boot...
. I might be both. Who knows. It doesn't invalidate my complaint, and doesn't make you any less of a fuckwit.
Your comments are proof that Slashdot has crept into the black-helicopter grassy-knoll mindset, and now wallows there.
It was passed by an overwhelming majority because an overwhelming majority in both parties agree wholeheartedly with pushing the US further towards a fascist state... and they don't have far to go.
You have no idea what fascism is. You're so swamped in hysteria and paranoia, you wouldn't recognize a real fascist if one was standing beside you.
Slashdot Mirror
So why are we surprised that OS X ruled the market there? Japanese consumers aren't terribly fond of shitty products. You know, like Vista...
You're right about the burial conditions necessary, but I thought being short, sweet, and direct would get my point across better. Yeah, of course, you can't bury it in a water table, etc, but the fact is, if you put it in a stable place deep underground, its absolutely safe.
"1) Most environmentalists supporting the Nuclear option do so only because it is the lesser of two evils, the latter of which (Global Warming) was not known of or understood back when the Nuclear Power protests were going on."
And its not understood very well now, Al Gore's movie notwithstanding.
"The technology has vastly improved, the safety measures are in place, it's time to go Nuclear."
The technology has been there for decades. We had one civilian mishap, Three Mile Island, where there was no environmental damage. The US Navy, which has been using nuclear propulsion intensively for 50 years, has had exactly two accidents, both of them in the early years of the program, and nothing since.
The safety problem has almost entirely been on the Soviet/Russian side, and it had nothing to do with computational technology and resources, and everything to do with shitty reactor designs and substandard safety procedures. After the Soviet Union collapsed, a US Navy admiral visited a Russian sub, and was exposed to more radiation in two hours than he'd been in his entire American naval career.
"Trying to run the thing at a profit, even a hugely government subsidized profit, leads to cutting corners"
That's utter horseshit. You're basically saying that not only does capitalism not work, but its dangerous as well.
Capitalism and market economies are all about efficiency. Efficiency isn't the same as "cutting corners". The longer you cut corners, the more likely that your business will suffer, or disappear completely. And as another poster has pointed out, simply making the whole thing a bureaucratic exercise is certainly no guarantee of safety. A government drone with a protected job and a quota to meet isn't exactly inducible to quality control.
"We don't use nuclear because it would put the oil barons out of business, not because it's dirty or unsafe. Most of France's power comes from nuclear, and they don't have any problems with it."
France isn't the US. In America, commercial nuclear power has most been opposed for enviromental/political reasons, mainly from the old "no nukes" crowd in the Democratic Party, with Three Mile Island as their Great-Warning-To-Mankind.
Never mind, as you mentioned, that in Western Europe they've managed to use nukes for decades without a Chernobyl.
"1) We don't have any technology that will last more than a couple of hundred years. Nuclear waste lasts for millions of years. We simply can't contain it."
We have the ultimate nuclear waste containment technology, and it's literally been around forever.
Its called Dirt.
"Coal is not going to get more expensive until cap-and-trade economics (or just a flat-out CO2 tax) are introduced into the market."
Ahhh, the old "Markets aren't efficient and need to be managed by experts" argument. That kind of thinking prolonged the Depression. "Cap and Trade" regulations will just muck up the works.
Only two real factors will bring about nukes...either the natural supply and price of coal will make us turn to other alternatives, or the natural progression of advancing technology will make nuke power cheaper. The second is far more likely. We're in no danger of running out of coal.
One thing that is being overlooked here is not an economic, but rather a political consideration; the notion that perhaps we should produce our own power and fuel domestically rather than rely on fickle foreign sources. In the past, this hasn't been a strong enough inducement, but with Opec restricting production to drive up price, we might be reconsidering that position.
"Performance tuning at Microsoft seems blasphemy."
Actually maximizing performance means that you're not buying new hardware, which pisses off Microsoft's OEM partners. And in turn, that means you're not buying new copies of Windows as well.
Earlier this decade, even the cheapest PC you could buy off the shelf had far more horsepower than was necessary for apps of the time. With the sole exception of video cards, any El Cheapo Celeron you could buy would easily exceed the hardware standards for the latest games and apps. PC sales slowed down. The solution? Design apps and OS's that have so many bells and whistles that they use up all that excess computing power, and Voila, you have to buy new hardware.
Performance tuning? Are you kidding?
" I shudder to think how being the only holder of that kind of power might have corrupted america. It's bad enough as it is."
If you're an American, Delta's ready when you are, asshole.
If you're not, well, fuck you too.
"But heck, they are trying, even if there is some nuts like Bush who trying to undo all achieved."
I was with you until that part. Bush isn't real popular with anyone these days....liberals have always hated him, and now conservatives are mad at him over his betrayal with the amnesty for illegal aliens issue...but this notion that Bush is an all-powerful dictator is utter horseshit. The guy was elected twice, whether or not people here at Slashdot want to admit it. He just had one of his vetoes overridden. His party was beaten out of power in 2006 in Congress. Meanwhile, some of his "anti-American" programs have since been approved by the new Democratic overlords in the Congress. And I keep trying to recall a newspaper that he's shut down, or a tv station, or a radio station....none comes to mind. Care to name a protest that he's broken up?
Even if Bush TRIED to destroy Democracy, he couldn't. Anyone that says differently is a conspiracy nutcase. Democracy in America is doing just fine, thanks. And the dirty little secret of American society to your Europeans is that more Americans are like Bush than are like you. This is a more conservative country than not, and that isn't going to change, regardless of the party in power. Just because our democracy isn't of the flavor that you like doesn't mean that it's not a democracy anymore.
"WalMart is widely recognized as an unscrupulous retailer who does the socio-economic equivalent of "strip mining" wherever they take root."
Where I live, that's utter bullshit. Wherever a Wal Mart has popped up here, an entire ecosystem of smaller stores springs up around it. It's the ultimate anchor store. There are two super centers within 10 minutes of me, and both were huge boosts to the retail economy. They both have bakeries, haircut shops, auto service centers, jewelry shops, and food markets. And surprise surprise, right next to Wal Mart are shops that sell baked goods, cut hair, fix cars, sell jewelry, etc. I think you get the picture. Rather than coming in and driving out existing shops, the super centers have been huge economic shots in the arm...and if they're so predatory, then why do these other shops thrive right next to them?
General stores made the same argument against older retailers like Sears and JC Penney, and the argument was just as wrong back then.
"The United States is in a race to the bottom. Every great empire falls - I just wish I wasn't stuck in the middle of this one."
No one is making you stay. Delta's ready when you are.
"Unless things drastically change over the next few years, as a freedom loving individual, I'm sad to say I'll have no choice but to leave and watch the country implode from the sidelines."
As a "freedom loving individual", unless you're withdrawing from the modern world and choose to live in a cave in Tibet somewhere, you're going to be no more "free" any where else in the world.
"I could not care less about Vetereans day - and I'm an American USMC veteran (six years active duty, combat, got all the fruit salad to wear, thanks...)"
You're very much in the minority then, because the rest of us that served appreciate it.
"Time to spend a few billion $ on R&D for new submarines!"
Our subs are fine. They still outclass anything the Chinese make (yet).
Our sonar technology in and of itself...now that is another matter altogether.
"World Net Daily is a right wing site"
And? So?
What about left wing web sites? Should submissions be banned if they come from a specific POV? Can I expect another complaint if the submission comes from The Nation or Mother Jones?
While that's true, an important difference is that it used to be you shared music with a few friends, all local. Now people are sharing with, oh, tens of thousands of their closest friends. Does it cease to be sharing at that point and become something else?
It was a line calculated to get a laugh, and it did (from the crowd at Tuskeegee). Only Slashdot and DailyKos would try to interpret it literally.
When you signed up for Slashdot.
Home desktops aren't going away so much as they're evolving to fill new roles and needs, as they've done for twenty years now. First they adapted to BBS, then to the Internet with modems, then to the Internet with broadband. Now with mulitmedia becoming essentially computerized, PCs are simply becoming hub controllers for our home electronics systems. We will indeed see many "Internet Appliances" become successful, but none of them will replace the PC entirely. Your PC will likely be your home manager, running not only your communications (including phones and faxes), but your entertainment and utilities. Wanna fire up the heater on the way home from a trip? Use your Blackberry to tell your PC to fire it up on the Interstate so you'll be toasty warm by the time you get there. You'll kick back and watch DVDs while dowloading torrents and running scripts to control your home electricity usage. Hell, maybe you'll even feed the dog with it at the same time.
As for Barney's assertion that Linux isn't really trying to be a competitor in this reason, he's right, but he's also very wrong. There is no commercial Linux competition here. But your home hacker will use Linux to do these things before Microsoft offers them on a commercial platforms. In other words, the hacker hobbyists will once again blaze the important trails in this area, and use Linux to do it. So in its own way, Linux will be well represented here.
You're honest, at least. Arrogant, but honest.
Which one would that be? The politics button? Oh, I see...except that this story wasn't just in the politics section, but biotech to boot. In other words, politics is bleeding into nearly every aspect of Slashdot. This is not how it was even a few short years ago.
I'm tired of having to defend my political views in a tech website.
. I might be both. Who knows. It doesn't invalidate my complaint, and doesn't make you any less of a fuckwit.
I'm not sure when Markos Moulitsas Zuniga snuck in here and stole Slashdot, but can we have it back, please?
How many political articles does this make this week?
The Omni Center? For Peace, Justice, and More Drugs? That's your fascism reference? Have anything a little less moonbat-ish?
You have no idea what fascism is. You're so swamped in hysteria and paranoia, you wouldn't recognize a real fascist if one was standing beside you.
And why should the Patriot Act have preveted these attacks in foreign countries?