It shouldn't even be a matter of lots of people using it. After all, if you write something and get busted for it, you can use Plausible Deniability in court.
"Your honor, there is no way to prove that this message came from my client or was forged by the investigators who used to beat him up in gym class."
I guess then it would just turn into a matter of your word vs. theirs.
You mean consumers should push the car companies. This is already happening. I'm all for a very small CO2 tax but I have yet to hear about an instance where government intervention with the free market has yielded good results.
Oh, and if you think that a CO2 tax will be exclusively used for any one particular cause, you've got another thing coming. It all goes into one big pot (with some few exceptions) and congress allocates it where it sees fit. a billion taken in from CO2 taxes does not mean 1 billion spent on plug-in hybrid infrastructure.
Unless we ramp up a whole lot of nuclear plants, plugin hybrids will put a lot of strain on the electric grid, or make a lot of CO2, or both. That means making CO2 from coal rather than gas. There's some advantage there but it's not a clear win.
Let the government provide incentive to mitigate the external cost of pollution via a CO2 tax. The free market will take care of the rest. Perhaps fund some research but the utility companies will do it more efficiently than the government ever will.
Why should taxpayers pay for hybrid research? Let the car companies do that. If anything, the government should be funding research on techniques to grow more starch-rich plants and engineer more efficient bacteria. In fact, they're doing just that.
Grain isn't the only source either. Municipal waste and switchgrass are other places to get it. There is also research being done to produce ethanol from cellulose which will let you pretty much plant weeds and be able to harvest them for fuel.
It's an 85%/15% ethanol-gas mix. Outfitting a car to use it is cheap. There are a couple problems with it.
1. You're still using oil from the ground. 2. It still makes CO2. 3. You've got to produce the ethanol.
Still you can:
1. just keep using oil. I know that's not popular but e85 effectively multiplies the efficiency by a factor of more than 5. Also, oil isn't going to run out in 10 years if you understand the concept of "proven reserves". Even if you believe in peak oil theory, it staves it off by a good long while.
2. a lot of the CO2 produced is fixed the previous growing season by the plants.
3. producing ethanol is a net energy gain since the lion's share of the energy comes from the sun in the first place. Still we currently don't produce nearly enough of it to roll it out nation wide. That's just a matter of making a market for it. The good folks at Oak Ridge national labs are working on engineering plants that grow faster and produce more material to break down into ethanol. They're also working on bacteria that can do the fermenting on more materials. (sorry, no link. Too lazy.)
It's not perfect but it's a damn sight better than H2 and it's available on a limited basis now. I can go fill up on it today if I want. Best of all in my mind, this could boost the agribusiness industry to a point where farm subsidies are done away with for good.
This is largely driven by the US and it includes India and China. It'll have the same greenhouse effect as removing 7% of US fleet of cars from the road and it costs next to nothing.
Just because Bush doesn't sign up to a program with name recognition, doesn't mean the US government isn't doing anything.
Dude, what are you talking about? If we really wanted to, we could strike any location on the planet with nuclear weapons within a couple hours and there's really no defense against it. Weaponizing space by actually placing the weapons there doesn't really buy anyone anything.
This is just paranoia. ICBMs are decades old and for all intents and purposes, we (and the Russians) have already maxed out the concept of space-based weapons. Remember that a big leg of thier journey goes through space.
I'm not sure what past you're talking about but working conditions are much better today than they were in years past. How many offices were climate controled in 1900? How much demanding physical labor is done now as apposed to in decades past? Have living conditions and work weeks gotten better or worse? For the most part, you'll find it's better.
Work is demanding yes, but that's just the nature of work. If you're in a place where stress is not a component of the job, your job and possibly industry will probably be replaced by robots or programs soon.
I can understand the thing about a higher paycheck and I'm sure the chair and foosball thing were tongue-in-cheek but I think a sizable part of the IT industry actually expects these kinds of perks.
The tech boom gave a lot of us unreasonable expectations about what to expect from a job. I remember being flown out to San Fran from Chicago just for an interview. They treated us to all kind of posh digs after explaining their shake-oil product to us interviewees. I knew even then that this was way too good to last.
For everyone waiting for 1999 to return to the workplace in terms of dressing like slobs, having every perk comped and getting paid obscene amounts, it's time to wake up. That was just part of the business cycle that happened to benefit us. We're an industry like any other and times that good are too good to go on forever. Heaven help you if you're actually holding out for something like that again, at least in this industry.
Things do but the timescales are long. If you only dump post-reprocessed waste, anything that leaks out won't be any worse than regular dirt. Keep in mind too that vitrified waste will probably stay solid long enough to wait for a cheap, safe launch into space if we ever decide that we really don't want it on earth.
Cheap is a funny term. How much money will be spent to recover from the health and environmental damage of coal or even natural gas power. The economics of it are complex.
Why not just press for reprocessing of spent fuel? All the 250,000 year stuff is from material that can be recovered back into the fuel cycle. If you remove the junk lower down on the periodic table (the real nuclear waste) it only will be dangerous for a few hundred years.
On a side note, has anyone heard of the natural reactor in Oklo? A naturally occurring nuclear reaction there produced all the same waste of a modern reactor and it all stayed in place in de-facto geologic storage.
yucca is ready to accept waste, vitrification is mature. I really don't see why Yucca is still a controversy other than NIMBY and ignorance.
Is the cancer research they mention part of the United Devices effort or is this something different? The article confused me a bit on that count. It would be a shame to duplicate efforts.
Ok then. What part of NASA does the black-ops military stuff? How much money do they get for it and from whom? Perhaps you're getting confused with the fact that the airforce was helping out NASA with Atlas rockets in the early days but that's the other way around.
There was one case I heard of where a shuttle mission went on a secret military mission but that's about it.
Do you have any sources to back up these claims or just boogieman stuff? NASA and the US geologic survey are different agencies.
Well, according to the budget, I'd say none of the money goes into defense. The DoD isn't hurting for money and isn't going to covertly drain a couple billion from NASA to supliment it's already $400+ billion budget.
NASA is a civilian department. I think you need to adjust your tin-foil hat.
Seriously, why is this being done by NASA? This is a neat thing happening with this guy but don't we have dozens of people who've actually been in space for extended periods of time? Why aren't CAT scans of them enough?
I can't see how this has any practical relevance to the space program from the viewpoint of manned space (we have more than enough data on that front) or unmanned where this is completely unrelated.
What ever happened to NASA being the Aeronautics and Space administration. Wasn't the VSE supposed to put the kibosh on all this science fair side issue stuff? Shouldn't this be relegated to some university psych program with a government grant?
Slashdot Mirror
It shouldn't even be a matter of lots of people using it. After all, if you write something and get busted for it, you can use Plausible Deniability in court.
"Your honor, there is no way to prove that this message came from my client or was forged by the investigators who used to beat him up in gym class."
I guess then it would just turn into a matter of your word vs. theirs.
Any lawyers out there?
You mean consumers should push the car companies. This is already happening. I'm all for a very small CO2 tax but I have yet to hear about an instance where government intervention with the free market has yielded good results.
Oh, and if you think that a CO2 tax will be exclusively used for any one particular cause, you've got another thing coming. It all goes into one big pot (with some few exceptions) and congress allocates it where it sees fit. a billion taken in from CO2 taxes does not mean 1 billion spent on plug-in hybrid infrastructure.
Unless we ramp up a whole lot of nuclear plants, plugin hybrids will put a lot of strain on the electric grid, or make a lot of CO2, or both. That means making CO2 from coal rather than gas. There's some advantage there but it's not a clear win.
Let the government provide incentive to mitigate the external cost of pollution via a CO2 tax. The free market will take care of the rest. Perhaps fund some research but the utility companies will do it more efficiently than the government ever will.
Why should taxpayers pay for hybrid research? Let the car companies do that. If anything, the government should be funding research on techniques to grow more starch-rich plants and engineer more efficient bacteria. In fact, they're doing just that.
Grain isn't the only source either. Municipal waste and switchgrass are other places to get it. There is also research being done to produce ethanol from cellulose which will let you pretty much plant weeds and be able to harvest them for fuel.
The article states that 71% of the US grid electricity comes from fosil fuels. Unless I'm mistaken it's more like this.
coal 50%
petroleum 3%
gas 8.5%
nuclear 18.5%
hydro 8.4%
hippy stuff 0.2%
"nonutility" (?) 11.2%
That's like 61% fosil. How off are my numbers?
I know this isn't sexy but I'm convinced that this is the real way out of greenhouse and oil problems:
E85
It's an 85%/15% ethanol-gas mix. Outfitting a car to use it is cheap. There are a couple problems with it.
1. You're still using oil from the ground.
2. It still makes CO2.
3. You've got to produce the ethanol.
Still you can:
1. just keep using oil. I know that's not popular but e85 effectively multiplies the efficiency by a factor of more than 5. Also, oil isn't going to run out in 10 years if you understand the concept of "proven reserves". Even if you believe in peak oil theory, it staves it off by a good long while.
2. a lot of the CO2 produced is fixed the previous growing season by the plants.
3. producing ethanol is a net energy gain since the lion's share of the energy comes from the sun in the first place. Still we currently don't produce nearly enough of it to roll it out nation wide. That's just a matter of making a market for it. The good folks at Oak Ridge national labs are working on engineering plants that grow faster and produce more material to break down into ethanol. They're also working on bacteria that can do the fermenting on more materials. (sorry, no link. Too lazy.)
It's not perfect but it's a damn sight better than H2 and it's available on a limited basis now. I can go fill up on it today if I want. Best of all in my mind, this could boost the agribusiness industry to a point where farm subsidies are done away with for good.
Right, because not only was Iraq a war about oil, but increased electricity production will enable us to drive fewer cars somehow.
The Bush Administration rejects the Kyoto protocols, whether for good reasons or not, and then refuses to do anything else about global warming.
Bullshit.
14 Nations to Participate in Plan to Reduce Methane
This is largely driven by the US and it includes India and China. It'll have the same greenhouse effect as removing 7% of US fleet of cars from the road and it costs next to nothing.
Just because Bush doesn't sign up to a program with name recognition, doesn't mean the US government isn't doing anything.
Can someone explain to me how this is something more complicated than the birthday paradox?
(heh, Wang)
Dude, what are you talking about? If we really wanted to, we could strike any location on the planet with nuclear weapons within a couple hours and there's really no defense against it. Weaponizing space by actually placing the weapons there doesn't really buy anyone anything.
This is just paranoia. ICBMs are decades old and for all intents and purposes, we (and the Russians) have already maxed out the concept of space-based weapons. Remember that a big leg of thier journey goes through space.
Although a Zelda movie would be pretty neat.
They kind of already did make one.
Wait, I thought Robots stole old people's medicine.
I'm not sure what past you're talking about but working conditions are much better today than they were in years past. How many offices were climate controled in 1900? How much demanding physical labor is done now as apposed to in decades past? Have living conditions and work weeks gotten better or worse? For the most part, you'll find it's better.
Work is demanding yes, but that's just the nature of work. If you're in a place where stress is not a component of the job, your job and possibly industry will probably be replaced by robots or programs soon.
Is it a system requirement that all new manned spacecraft have to look like killer whales?
but I could be wrong.
Aeron chair? Fooseball table in the cubicle?
I can understand the thing about a higher paycheck and I'm sure the chair and foosball thing were tongue-in-cheek but I think a sizable part of the IT industry actually expects these kinds of perks.
The tech boom gave a lot of us unreasonable expectations about what to expect from a job. I remember being flown out to San Fran from Chicago just for an interview. They treated us to all kind of posh digs after explaining their shake-oil product to us interviewees. I knew even then that this was way too good to last.
For everyone waiting for 1999 to return to the workplace in terms of dressing like slobs, having every perk comped and getting paid obscene amounts, it's time to wake up. That was just part of the business cycle that happened to benefit us. We're an industry like any other and times that good are too good to go on forever. Heaven help you if you're actually holding out for something like that again, at least in this industry.
Things do but the timescales are long. If you only dump post-reprocessed waste, anything that leaks out won't be any worse than regular dirt. Keep in mind too that vitrified waste will probably stay solid long enough to wait for a cheap, safe launch into space if we ever decide that we really don't want it on earth.
Cheap is a funny term. How much money will be spent to recover from the health and environmental damage of coal or even natural gas power. The economics of it are complex.
Why not just press for reprocessing of spent fuel? All the 250,000 year stuff is from material that can be recovered back into the fuel cycle. If you remove the junk lower down on the periodic table (the real nuclear waste) it only will be dangerous for a few hundred years.
On a side note, has anyone heard of the natural reactor in Oklo? A naturally occurring nuclear reaction there produced all the same waste of a modern reactor and it all stayed in place in de-facto geologic storage.
yucca is ready to accept waste, vitrification is mature. I really don't see why Yucca is still a controversy other than NIMBY and ignorance.
Let me be the 427th person to suggest using tape to cover the flash.
Is the cancer research they mention part of the United Devices effort or is this something different? The article confused me a bit on that count. It would be a shame to duplicate efforts.
umm, ever heard of nuclear fision?
I want to see Bush-voters who cheered "4 more years" to suffer financial & economical devastation.
So you want some 59+ million Americans to suffer financial and economical devastation so you can say "I told you so"? Now that's patriotism!
How selfless of you.
Ok then. What part of NASA does the black-ops military stuff? How much money do they get for it and from whom? Perhaps you're getting confused with the fact that the airforce was helping out NASA with Atlas rockets in the early days but that's the other way around.
There was one case I heard of where a shuttle mission went on a secret military mission but that's about it.
Do you have any sources to back up these claims or just boogieman stuff? NASA and the US geologic survey are different agencies.
Well, according to the budget, I'd say none of the money goes into defense. The DoD isn't hurting for money and isn't going to covertly drain a couple billion from NASA to supliment it's already $400+ billion budget.
NASA is a civilian department. I think you need to adjust your tin-foil hat.
Seriously, why is this being done by NASA? This is a neat thing happening with this guy but don't we have dozens of people who've actually been in space for extended periods of time? Why aren't CAT scans of them enough?
I can't see how this has any practical relevance to the space program from the viewpoint of manned space (we have more than enough data on that front) or unmanned where this is completely unrelated.
What ever happened to NASA being the Aeronautics and Space administration. Wasn't the VSE supposed to put the kibosh on all this science fair side issue stuff? Shouldn't this be relegated to some university psych program with a government grant?
Can the potential difference in votes amount to a larger number than the margins by which either candidate won in a given state?
If not, the only concern should be to correct the problems and not to overturn the election right?