Guess what, most of the population says the same trite garbage that you just wrote. That's why the US government is in shambles, and that's why your vote doesn't matter. Just from the start, you talk like there are only Democrats and Republicans. Well guess what? They're the same party, they have the same basic agendas, they break the same laws, and they are both corrupt. So don't vote for them; encourage everyone else to not vote for either; actually DO something.
So you're saying that since everyone doesn't already agree with you, that you should do nothing? Nobody else is willing, so you're not? What the hell is that kind of attitude? That's why the US is sucking right now, because of people with your attitude. Stop bitching, get off your ass and do something.
We haven't had war on US soil for just about 150 years. It has nothing to do with the people being happy; it has to do with being basically an island, and one in an inconvenient location to attack, and having the largest navy in the world. At one point it also involved most of the population being armed and, therefore, a potential member of the militia.
You know, there are ways to change things rather than sitting on the couch waiting for someone to do it for you. You could get involved in the government, you could vote for a cantidate that actually will represent your views, you could volunteer, you could donate, and on and on.
You're right, there is no perfect government. You would have to change fundamental things about how humans think to have a definite stable society, and if you did that you probably wouldn't need government anyway. There have been many books written about this, and they all end badly, for good reason. People, as a group, aren't trustworthy, and they are greedy, and the type that want to lead tend to want people to do things their way.
The US had tried to come up with the most favorable set of compromises towards having a stable and honest government. I still think they did a better job of it than any other government in history. While the US government is now out of control, it is still possible to fix it within the confines of the Constitutional system. The catch is that most of the population seems too lazy or contented or scared to actually do something about it. They keep electing horrible leaders time after time (I think we're up to about 12 of those), and accepting ridiculous laws and changes.
A lot of people like to blow a lot of wind about pure democracy. Honestly, that would be a total and complete nightmare. If you think pure democracy would work, then take a look at what the population of the US would agree to as a majority. Basic human nature would tell you why you don't want to do it in a pure form. Like I said, people are greedy, untrustworthy, and want everyone to be like themselves. Pure democracy will never work for the same reasons that communism will never work.
Basically, you have to admit that no system you choose will ever be perfect. Then you try very hard to make it flexible enough to deal with whatever you can come up with, and then whatever you can't. At some point you will always have a failure; you just make sure your system can recover, and deal with it appropriately. The original US system, for example, is about preventing the government from doing something, not the people or some company. To have freedom, you make the crime punished, not prevented, and you hope that, over time, people will stop committing crimes. Of course, that doesn't happen, being people and all, but the amount goes down a whole lot. You'll always get something like an Enron, but that is true under any system. As you pointed out, the problem is keeping the government honest enough to do something about it.
One of the problems in the US is that the Federal leaders don't change. We get a new President, but, by and large, the Senators and Representatives stay the same for decades. That is the major cause of corruption. For an interesting lesson in why pure democracy would be a failure, the corrupting and massive aggregation of Federal power, the empowerment of things like the FBI/CIA/NSA, the loss of a backed currency, and creation of a "nanny state", all took off with the 17th amendment, which was to have Senators directly elected by the populace. Whoops.
What a great example of ill-founded opinion wrapped up in dishonesty and incorrect information. Nothing you said has any bearing on reality.
It's a shame that you don't understand that you aren't exactly getting a subsidy once you take into account anything else. You can claim head of household, but you also have to pay the *marriage penalty*. As for your stance on encouraging "breeders" being a bad idea, well, go to hell. Great job using a demeaning term that a bunch of anti-birth whackos love to taut around. It has been the primary function of any organism to breed for all of existance. Oh, and just because *YOU* don't like the idea of a stay at home parent doesn't mean you're right. That can be trivially shown to be a major factor in why children have many of the social problems that they do. Many countries have negative growth, since you obviously don't know actual facts on the topic. Your mindset is detrimental to society.
BTW, TV is important, you're just wrong. It is THE major form of information dispersal and just about everyone has one. *You* are the odd one out for not having a TV. *You* didn't understand in the slightest where this funding is coming from. *You* didn't research a damned thing.
What you say is all about *you*, and what *you* want. Sounds like *you* have an issue with getting past "me me me".
I forgot about that one, and it is a good option for hydro. It requires either another huge project to dig out a lower elevation reservoir, or you need the dam in a mountainous area. Where you can do this it works very well.
Great, so theoretically wind can produce twice what we are using right now. Of course by placing a turbine behind a turbine you reduce the energy yield of the second. Do this enough and you have no more wind to move turbines. That energy is finite, too. Solar has problems with production waste and associated costs, as well as being fragile. Both have the issue of being unreliable. Geothermal isn't widely useable and hydro has an easily determined cap.
The next issue is that we have no way to store the energy. You mention research that might someday be good for storing power, and that is good for then. That is still finite for storage, but the risk is probably acceptable. We still have to make a good storage technique.
Just because something works on a small scale doesn't mean it works on a global scale. Getting that wrong is a large part of how we got into the energy mess we're in right now.
You also miss completely that our energy usage is only going to increase. We need higher energy density production, not lower energy density like what green power can do. Green is a step forward for waste material, and a big step backwards in output.
Green energy is inefficient compared to all the other forms of energy generation we use. Solar gets 15% at best, for example. It also requires the creation and use of large amount of toxic materials, and quite a bit of energy waste. (This is for photovoltaics.) Or you could use the oil convection style of solar, which is much less efficient, but doesn't require toxic materials or large amount of energy to put into service. Solar and wind are unreliable, so you can't use them as primary generation methods. Geothermal isn't available in most places. Hydro is the most useful one, and you can only put up so many of those.
Add to that the problem with photovoltaic panels being fragile, in addition to highly costly to manufacture, and there is another issue. They are very expensive to keep in service in large enough numbers for grid power generation. That's why solar production has so often been of the mirror and heating tower design: it's inexpensive to replace mirrors.
Even if this all was overcome, then you have to be able to store power to make solar/wind really useful, instead of a secondary generation system. There are currently no good ways to store that power, so it's a wash. You can't trust it enough to be primary, and you can't store it. Research into storage is useful, and it might change this somewhat.
As far as solar investment, if you look at the cost of high density panels, you'll find that they are very expensive and you have to hope the panel doesn't get damaged for over a decade to achieve positive return.
Given the apparent energy demands for the future, I'd say we can pretty much guarantee that green power isn't going to be sufficient. We need something with a tremendously higher energy density than those can ever reasonably offer us. You can't expect to cover the planet's surface in solar cells or wind turbines, and you do have a finite energy density, either way.
Don't you realize that lack of abundant and cheap energy hinders a lot of scientific endeavor? It cuts into a lot of physics research, materials research, etc...
Actually, I didn't know that Carter was a nuclear engineer. A little research shows he was prepping for doing training on the Seawolf. He was also the engineering officer for the nuclear plant on the Seawolf. He resigned the Navy before it was put into service, though. Certainly qualifies him to know more than most about the things. Carter was a fool about a lot of things, but yeah, he wasn't stupid nor was he a hippy.
I always have held that advertising was the biggest money sink out there, followed by big government. I don't see much nuclear advertising, but I do know there is a lot spent on lobbying.
Nuclear still does suffer heavily from the same issue as solar and wind. Many people don't want it anywhere near them.
There have been some developments that may allow the use of lower quality fuels, but I agree, right now it's all using high purity material, and a few reactors that can use weapons grade material. (Not that it isn't high purity, just not generally useful for energy production.)
It doesn't help our production methods that we so rarely are building new reactors. There also isn't a much industry push for fusion research, which would certainly speed things for superior types of energy production.
I read the ORNL study a few times and then knocked a lot of what it said down just becuase it's nearly 25 years old. I still figured that it wasn't so far off as to be useless. I didn't have any other studies that gave me any idea of the waste breakdown from a coal plant either, unfortunately.
I also admit that I wasn't using raw tonnage for mined uranium ore, but was talking about the refined fuel that goes into the reactor. I imagine that there is a similar case for the reduced pollution coal forms.
Yes, insurance costs would be very high, however that hasn't stopped every first world country from operating nuclear reactors for power generation. Substaintial amounts of all energy production in the US, China, France, Germany, Japan, etc, are all from fission reactors. The US government is preventing reactor operators within the US from being hit with some types of lawsuits. The US also has one of the lowest percentages of power generation from fission.
You're also forgetting how much it costs for the US government to fight all these wars, big and small, basically over oil. How much does the military protection really cost in actual dollars? How much does all the diplomacy cost, etc? When you compare those costs to the insurance costs, the latter doesn't look so bad. Also, insurance costs would go down as fission reactors were shown to be safe for longer periods of time.
If you're going to push for higher energy efficiency and more conservation, you'll run into problems, too. In general, people don't want to conserve, and they don't want to buy a new thing that does exactly the same as the old, but just uses less power. It's inconvenient to them and costs them more money up front. You'll get many people to conserve in small ways, but it'll be difficult to really push it home.
Bub, if you want to counterpoint then please post references to primary sources, or at least quote them, instead of insulting intelligence. I haven't read anything that refutes the ORNL study, but I do take it with a grain of salt for many of the reasons you mention.
If you look at the numbers for how much nuclear material is required to generate the same amount of energy as coal, you see that you need two orders of magnitude more coal. Common sense and basic science would tell you that the coal is the worse choice of the two. Even if I just ignore the radioactive material part of the argument, the amount of harmful by-product for coal is many times the amount that fission produces.
So really, throw some links in or name a few reliable studies to refute ORNL! I don't mind being *proven* wrong, and it's a lot better than "you're wrong", "no, you're wrong".:)
I think you just misunderstood my post. I wasn't saying that we don't need to conserve or that we shouldn't create more efficient tech, at all. I was saying, and am saying now, that our future advances *are* going to need a lot of power. Messing around on an atomic level to build molecules and nanotech, space flight, etc, require a huge amount of energy. We need to get that developed, and nuclear is just the best tech available for doing that. It takes a long time to bring a reactor online! Plus, we need to stop using fossil fuels in short order.
Actually, I already do a number of the things from that page, personally, and I push for them at my workplace. It looks like it's a good organisation. I think we *should* go for conservation and efficiency, but ultimately those are only going to give us a temporary reprieve.
I really doubt that renewable sources will give us the amount of energy we need, though. They aren't efficient and many aren't reliable for production. Solar and wind are especially bad for that, and they really are supplementary generation methods. Solar has issues of its own, with the very toxic process needed to create photovoltaic cells. The solar convection method is better for that, but it generates less power.
I think if we're getting our heads together over something, researching power productions methods is just as important as efficiency and conservation. Neither should supplant the other.
The point is that you end up with a *LOT* more radioactive waste from burning coal than you do with fission.
Coal produces large amounts of greenhouse gasses, sulfur- and nitrogen-oxides, uranium, and thorium. The last two are radioactive, the middle two are the largest contributors to acid rain. The amount of uranium and thorium actually adds more radiation than storing the spent fissionable fuels. Add to that the issue of 100s:1 for coal to nuclear for fuel amounts.
In the US, for example, more radioactive material is released into the air by burning coal *than used in nuclear reactors*!
I never said that nuclear didn't have waste, hence the term "nuclear waste". However, "clean" coal is not very clean, either, and coal waste really should be treated the same as nuclear waste. It contains the same materials, and in higher quantities. Also, for the amount of produced power, you have *less* waste from fission than you do from coal... and that includes "clean" coal.
My primary sources were DOE, ORNL, which is part of the DOE, and PG&E.
What? Nuclear is the best deal we have available. It generates substanially more power than any other type of generation and doesn't cost much more to operate. The start-up costs are large, mainly because of all the regulation to ensure safety. The costs of getting the ore, refining it, and transporting it, still are nowhere near making it unprofitable. It's about the same cost as oil when you consider all the issues and costs associated with getting oil and refining it and transporting it. You seem to be forgetting all the hidden costs involved with oil.
We need to have something to keep us going while other forms of production are researched. It's nice to say how we need to do this or need to do that, but that's down the road. If we don't have something now, then down the road doesn't matter, because we won't have the power to get there. Nuclear is what that something for today is.
Fuel efficiency is always good, but that and conservation is a temporary thing; it will stretch out what we have a little longer. This isn't to say that we shouldn't conserve, but our energy requirements *will* continue to rise, because all of our technology requires energy. We will get more and better advances, but they require more, more, more!
The US certainly does burn oil in quite a few generation plants. There are statistics for it all over the 'net.
To quote PG&E "Most electricity in the U.S. is generated using coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear energy, or hydropower. Some production is done with alternative fuels like geothermal energy, wind power, biomass, solar energy, or fuel cells."
To quote the DOE: "Coal was the fuel used to generate the largest share (50.8 percent) of electricity in 2003 1,974 billion kilowatthours(kWh). This is over one and a half times the annual electricity consumption of all U.S. households (1,273 billion kWh). Natural gas was used to generate 650 billion kWh (16.7 percent), and petroleum accounted for 119 billion kWh (3.1 percent)." They also list nuclear as accounting for 19.75% (764 billion killowatthours). The remaining 9.65% was mostly hydro (7.14%).
Yeah, that's such a bullshit statement. We generate orders of magnitude more radioactive waste with coal than we do with nuclear. And that radioactive coal waste is put out into the air.
BTW, if you have air scrubbers, where do you think the harmful removed by-products go? Do you think they're annihilated or something? You still have toxic waste to dispose of after you pull the pollutants out of the air from a hydrocarbon burning plant.
Power in the future isn't going to be wind, geothermal, etc, because it doesn't produce enough power. Obviously, the more we can get that way the better, but they are highly inefficient, and require specific placement. That means you have a limited amount that you can put online.
We have a very large amount of uranium ore around, but it isn't easy to get. The process of creating fuel from it is also complicated. Our best bet is to use fission while we refine the passive generation (solar, hydro, etc) and research fusion. If we figure fusion out, then we don't have to worry about the other forms, though solar is a good idea to continue researching.
Heh, I stopped using full numeric dates just because of that. I tended to do DD-MM-YYYY, but I'm in the US, and this format caused great confusion for too many people. Now I do DD-MMM-YYYY, as in 21-Oct-2005. That one is definitely not ambiguous.
Only 6.2% (5.3%)(4.5%) of my hits come from non-Windows platforms.
Non-MS traffic is going up steadily, FF/Mozilla/Netscape has lost some ground after gaining quite a bit, other browsers are becoming more popular steadily.
Actually, no, the US couldn't do any of that. About half of the root zone servers are not in the US. The government doesn't control most of the ones that remain, and the telecom that the Internet runs on is all private sector. Also, you can't reliably block "all of their IPs" since you can't reliably know which ones those are. Even if the US did that, the only way they could reliably block off access would be to block *all* outside access.
You're absolutly right, countries don't liek being told what to do by other countries. Sort of like what other countries are trying to do to the US over DNS.
As for ICANN, you don't know any of that. All you know is that they dropped the community voters. You don't know how they're structured internally, or whether they are playing favorites, or much of anything else.
All things considered, if people want it fixed, then we should be working to fix ICANN, rather than pissing between national governments.
The US is doing nothing wrong here. It is simple *not* doing what the UN and co. want it to do. That's fine, considering the UN has no authority over the operation of the US. This is by virtue of it being illegal under the US Constitution for anyone here to agree to cede power to them. For a diplomatic venue (UN), and a bastardized economic alliance (EU), there certainly seems to be an awful lot of laws and such going on.
If there is a fracturing of DNS, it will be directly the fault of the UN/EU/China/etc for doing it. *They* would have to set up another system, and that would be what results in a fracture.
DNS is working fine right now, and if they were so concerned with safeguarding the system, they could be making copies of the data "just in case". The approach of trying to forcibly take control guarantees a massive amount of disruption of the system, and a long period of distrust of the new system. The existing DNS is known to work, it has proven itself reliable and stable, and has done so over the course of decades. A new system would start with absolutely no history.
The UN and co. are the ones trying to split it up. If it is so bad to split it up, then perhaps *the UN shouldn't do it*. The truth is that the people pushing for this already have shown that they aren't trustworthy having power over this. They have already censored internet and banned things in regards to it. The US is actually the one that *hasn't* tampered with it!
-In response to LDAP as somewhat decentralized:- LDAP requires full centralization in a very similar way to DNS. You have a server that is master and everything slaves from it. Things bounce around with referrals to write masters if you want to commit an update. -End-
The issue that so many people here fail to comprehend is that you cannot implement a system such as DNS without there being some form of central authority. You have to be able to trust the data, so you can't let random people update it. The current setup is just about as decentralized as you can go for what the data and needs are.
"Tier 1" where a group of people run the root zone "Tier 2" where a larger and different group of people run each of the TLDs "Tier 3" where a truly massive group of peoplpe run each domain etc
You need to know where to go for each of the TLDs, and the TLDs need to know where to go for each of the domains. That means you need to have something to point you to what servers are running each TLD. That means you need something like what the root zone servers do right now.
How do you implement this in a more decentralized way?
In the US, when you write a work it comes into existance with a copyright. Registering your copyright is not necessary, but makes litigation easier.
If you're publicly using an actual trademark commercially, and someone else starts doing the same, you may be able to defend your use. If you register your mark, it is substantially easier to defend your trademark.
The huge difference is that if you don't defend your trademark in all cases that you are aware of, you can lose your legal ability to do so in the future.
Registration is not required to file suit. Failure to defend a trademark in every case results in losing the trademark. Under US law, if Google was using GMail as a mark, and the other company was aware but didn't pursue, then it is likely that the other company will lose their rights to the mark.
The vast majority of Windows software doesn't come with *any* printed manual, let along a thick one; the OS doesn't come with a manual at all now. If you really like having the CD, and you don't want to burn one yourself, then buy a copy of your favorite OSS on CD.
There is an immense library of UNIX software, too. The difference is that Windows software is available in brick and mortar stores, and UNIX software largely isn't. It is a chicken-and-egg problem. Stores won't stock and developers won't develop until there is market, and there can't be market if nobody is selling.
I'm working for government right now. I definitely don't have FICA taken out of my check, and I don't pay into a State program. I pay into a regional (non-State) retirement pension system. That amount is significantly less than what I would be paying with FICA, and the benefits are much improved.
Now I agree that right now I can't avoid paying into *some* retirement system. That doesn't make it right, and I can easily to better than what return I'll get from that money. A conservative private investment would get me 15% returns, where as this program returns only 8% on their investments. That is much better than what SSI pays, at least.
Slashdot Mirror
Guess what, most of the population says the same trite garbage that you just wrote. That's why the US government is in shambles, and that's why your vote doesn't matter. Just from the start, you talk like there are only Democrats and Republicans. Well guess what? They're the same party, they have the same basic agendas, they break the same laws, and they are both corrupt. So don't vote for them; encourage everyone else to not vote for either; actually DO something.
So you're saying that since everyone doesn't already agree with you, that you should do nothing? Nobody else is willing, so you're not? What the hell is that kind of attitude? That's why the US is sucking right now, because of people with your attitude. Stop bitching, get off your ass and do something.
We haven't had war on US soil for just about 150 years. It has nothing to do with the people being happy; it has to do with being basically an island, and one in an inconvenient location to attack, and having the largest navy in the world. At one point it also involved most of the population being armed and, therefore, a potential member of the militia.
You know, there are ways to change things rather than sitting on the couch waiting for someone to do it for you. You could get involved in the government, you could vote for a cantidate that actually will represent your views, you could volunteer, you could donate, and on and on.
You're right, there is no perfect government. You would have to change fundamental things about how humans think to have a definite stable society, and if you did that you probably wouldn't need government anyway. There have been many books written about this, and they all end badly, for good reason. People, as a group, aren't trustworthy, and they are greedy, and the type that want to lead tend to want people to do things their way.
The US had tried to come up with the most favorable set of compromises towards having a stable and honest government. I still think they did a better job of it than any other government in history. While the US government is now out of control, it is still possible to fix it within the confines of the Constitutional system. The catch is that most of the population seems too lazy or contented or scared to actually do something about it. They keep electing horrible leaders time after time (I think we're up to about 12 of those), and accepting ridiculous laws and changes.
A lot of people like to blow a lot of wind about pure democracy. Honestly, that would be a total and complete nightmare. If you think pure democracy would work, then take a look at what the population of the US would agree to as a majority. Basic human nature would tell you why you don't want to do it in a pure form. Like I said, people are greedy, untrustworthy, and want everyone to be like themselves. Pure democracy will never work for the same reasons that communism will never work.
Basically, you have to admit that no system you choose will ever be perfect. Then you try very hard to make it flexible enough to deal with whatever you can come up with, and then whatever you can't. At some point you will always have a failure; you just make sure your system can recover, and deal with it appropriately. The original US system, for example, is about preventing the government from doing something, not the people or some company. To have freedom, you make the crime punished, not prevented, and you hope that, over time, people will stop committing crimes. Of course, that doesn't happen, being people and all, but the amount goes down a whole lot. You'll always get something like an Enron, but that is true under any system. As you pointed out, the problem is keeping the government honest enough to do something about it.
One of the problems in the US is that the Federal leaders don't change. We get a new President, but, by and large, the Senators and Representatives stay the same for decades. That is the major cause of corruption. For an interesting lesson in why pure democracy would be a failure, the corrupting and massive aggregation of Federal power, the empowerment of things like the FBI/CIA/NSA, the loss of a backed currency, and creation of a "nanny state", all took off with the 17th amendment, which was to have Senators directly elected by the populace. Whoops.
What a great example of ill-founded opinion wrapped up in dishonesty and incorrect information. Nothing you said has any bearing on reality.
It's a shame that you don't understand that you aren't exactly getting a subsidy once you take into account anything else. You can claim head of household, but you also have to pay the *marriage penalty*. As for your stance on encouraging "breeders" being a bad idea, well, go to hell. Great job using a demeaning term that a bunch of anti-birth whackos love to taut around. It has been the primary function of any organism to breed for all of existance. Oh, and just because *YOU* don't like the idea of a stay at home parent doesn't mean you're right. That can be trivially shown to be a major factor in why children have many of the social problems that they do. Many countries have negative growth, since you obviously don't know actual facts on the topic. Your mindset is detrimental to society.
BTW, TV is important, you're just wrong. It is THE major form of information dispersal and just about everyone has one. *You* are the odd one out for not having a TV. *You* didn't understand in the slightest where this funding is coming from. *You* didn't research a damned thing.
What you say is all about *you*, and what *you* want. Sounds like *you* have an issue with getting past "me me me".
I forgot about that one, and it is a good option for hydro. It requires either another huge project to dig out a lower elevation reservoir, or you need the dam in a mountainous area. Where you can do this it works very well.
Great, so theoretically wind can produce twice what we are using right now. Of course by placing a turbine behind a turbine you reduce the energy yield of the second. Do this enough and you have no more wind to move turbines. That energy is finite, too. Solar has problems with production waste and associated costs, as well as being fragile. Both have the issue of being unreliable. Geothermal isn't widely useable and hydro has an easily determined cap.
The next issue is that we have no way to store the energy. You mention research that might someday be good for storing power, and that is good for then. That is still finite for storage, but the risk is probably acceptable. We still have to make a good storage technique.
Just because something works on a small scale doesn't mean it works on a global scale. Getting that wrong is a large part of how we got into the energy mess we're in right now.
You also miss completely that our energy usage is only going to increase. We need higher energy density production, not lower energy density like what green power can do. Green is a step forward for waste material, and a big step backwards in output.
Green energy is inefficient compared to all the other forms of energy generation we use. Solar gets 15% at best, for example. It also requires the creation and use of large amount of toxic materials, and quite a bit of energy waste. (This is for photovoltaics.) Or you could use the oil convection style of solar, which is much less efficient, but doesn't require toxic materials or large amount of energy to put into service. Solar and wind are unreliable, so you can't use them as primary generation methods. Geothermal isn't available in most places. Hydro is the most useful one, and you can only put up so many of those.
Add to that the problem with photovoltaic panels being fragile, in addition to highly costly to manufacture, and there is another issue. They are very expensive to keep in service in large enough numbers for grid power generation. That's why solar production has so often been of the mirror and heating tower design: it's inexpensive to replace mirrors.
Even if this all was overcome, then you have to be able to store power to make solar/wind really useful, instead of a secondary generation system. There are currently no good ways to store that power, so it's a wash. You can't trust it enough to be primary, and you can't store it. Research into storage is useful, and it might change this somewhat.
As far as solar investment, if you look at the cost of high density panels, you'll find that they are very expensive and you have to hope the panel doesn't get damaged for over a decade to achieve positive return.
Given the apparent energy demands for the future, I'd say we can pretty much guarantee that green power isn't going to be sufficient. We need something with a tremendously higher energy density than those can ever reasonably offer us. You can't expect to cover the planet's surface in solar cells or wind turbines, and you do have a finite energy density, either way.
Don't you realize that lack of abundant and cheap energy hinders a lot of scientific endeavor? It cuts into a lot of physics research, materials research, etc...
Actually, I didn't know that Carter was a nuclear engineer. A little research shows he was prepping for doing training on the Seawolf. He was also the engineering officer for the nuclear plant on the Seawolf. He resigned the Navy before it was put into service, though. Certainly qualifies him to know more than most about the things. Carter was a fool about a lot of things, but yeah, he wasn't stupid nor was he a hippy.
I always have held that advertising was the biggest money sink out there, followed by big government. I don't see much nuclear advertising, but I do know there is a lot spent on lobbying.
Nuclear still does suffer heavily from the same issue as solar and wind. Many people don't want it anywhere near them.
There have been some developments that may allow the use of lower quality fuels, but I agree, right now it's all using high purity material, and a few reactors that can use weapons grade material. (Not that it isn't high purity, just not generally useful for energy production.)
It doesn't help our production methods that we so rarely are building new reactors. There also isn't a much industry push for fusion research, which would certainly speed things for superior types of energy production.
I read the ORNL study a few times and then knocked a lot of what it said down just becuase it's nearly 25 years old. I still figured that it wasn't so far off as to be useless. I didn't have any other studies that gave me any idea of the waste breakdown from a coal plant either, unfortunately.
I also admit that I wasn't using raw tonnage for mined uranium ore, but was talking about the refined fuel that goes into the reactor. I imagine that there is a similar case for the reduced pollution coal forms.
Yes, insurance costs would be very high, however that hasn't stopped every first world country from operating nuclear reactors for power generation. Substaintial amounts of all energy production in the US, China, France, Germany, Japan, etc, are all from fission reactors. The US government is preventing reactor operators within the US from being hit with some types of lawsuits. The US also has one of the lowest percentages of power generation from fission.
You're also forgetting how much it costs for the US government to fight all these wars, big and small, basically over oil. How much does the military protection really cost in actual dollars? How much does all the diplomacy cost, etc? When you compare those costs to the insurance costs, the latter doesn't look so bad. Also, insurance costs would go down as fission reactors were shown to be safe for longer periods of time.
If you're going to push for higher energy efficiency and more conservation, you'll run into problems, too. In general, people don't want to conserve, and they don't want to buy a new thing that does exactly the same as the old, but just uses less power. It's inconvenient to them and costs them more money up front. You'll get many people to conserve in small ways, but it'll be difficult to really push it home.
Bub, if you want to counterpoint then please post references to primary sources, or at least quote them, instead of insulting intelligence. I haven't read anything that refutes the ORNL study, but I do take it with a grain of salt for many of the reasons you mention.
:)
If you look at the numbers for how much nuclear material is required to generate the same amount of energy as coal, you see that you need two orders of magnitude more coal. Common sense and basic science would tell you that the coal is the worse choice of the two. Even if I just ignore the radioactive material part of the argument, the amount of harmful by-product for coal is many times the amount that fission produces.
So really, throw some links in or name a few reliable studies to refute ORNL! I don't mind being *proven* wrong, and it's a lot better than "you're wrong", "no, you're wrong".
I think you just misunderstood my post. I wasn't saying that we don't need to conserve or that we shouldn't create more efficient tech, at all. I was saying, and am saying now, that our future advances *are* going to need a lot of power. Messing around on an atomic level to build molecules and nanotech, space flight, etc, require a huge amount of energy. We need to get that developed, and nuclear is just the best tech available for doing that. It takes a long time to bring a reactor online! Plus, we need to stop using fossil fuels in short order.
Actually, I already do a number of the things from that page, personally, and I push for them at my workplace. It looks like it's a good organisation. I think we *should* go for conservation and efficiency, but ultimately those are only going to give us a temporary reprieve.
I really doubt that renewable sources will give us the amount of energy we need, though. They aren't efficient and many aren't reliable for production. Solar and wind are especially bad for that, and they really are supplementary generation methods. Solar has issues of its own, with the very toxic process needed to create photovoltaic cells. The solar convection method is better for that, but it generates less power.
I think if we're getting our heads together over something, researching power productions methods is just as important as efficiency and conservation. Neither should supplant the other.
The point is that you end up with a *LOT* more radioactive waste from burning coal than you do with fission.
Coal produces large amounts of greenhouse gasses, sulfur- and nitrogen-oxides, uranium, and thorium. The last two are radioactive, the middle two are the largest contributors to acid rain. The amount of uranium and thorium actually adds more radiation than storing the spent fissionable fuels. Add to that the issue of 100s:1 for coal to nuclear for fuel amounts.
In the US, for example, more radioactive material is released into the air by burning coal *than used in nuclear reactors*!
I never said that nuclear didn't have waste, hence the term "nuclear waste". However, "clean" coal is not very clean, either, and coal waste really should be treated the same as nuclear waste. It contains the same materials, and in higher quantities. Also, for the amount of produced power, you have *less* waste from fission than you do from coal... and that includes "clean" coal.
My primary sources were DOE, ORNL, which is part of the DOE, and PG&E.
What? Nuclear is the best deal we have available. It generates substanially more power than any other type of generation and doesn't cost much more to operate. The start-up costs are large, mainly because of all the regulation to ensure safety. The costs of getting the ore, refining it, and transporting it, still are nowhere near making it unprofitable. It's about the same cost as oil when you consider all the issues and costs associated with getting oil and refining it and transporting it. You seem to be forgetting all the hidden costs involved with oil.
We need to have something to keep us going while other forms of production are researched. It's nice to say how we need to do this or need to do that, but that's down the road. If we don't have something now, then down the road doesn't matter, because we won't have the power to get there. Nuclear is what that something for today is.
Fuel efficiency is always good, but that and conservation is a temporary thing; it will stretch out what we have a little longer. This isn't to say that we shouldn't conserve, but our energy requirements *will* continue to rise, because all of our technology requires energy. We will get more and better advances, but they require more, more, more!
The US certainly does burn oil in quite a few generation plants. There are statistics for it all over the 'net.
To quote PG&E "Most electricity in the U.S. is generated using coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear energy, or hydropower. Some production is done with alternative fuels like geothermal energy, wind power, biomass, solar energy, or fuel cells."
To quote the DOE: "Coal was the fuel used to generate the largest share (50.8 percent) of electricity in 2003 1,974 billion kilowatthours(kWh). This is over one and a half times the annual electricity consumption of all U.S. households (1,273 billion kWh). Natural gas was used to generate 650 billion kWh (16.7 percent), and petroleum accounted for 119 billion kWh (3.1 percent)." They also list nuclear as accounting for 19.75% (764 billion killowatthours). The remaining 9.65% was mostly hydro (7.14%).
Yeah, that's such a bullshit statement. We generate orders of magnitude more radioactive waste with coal than we do with nuclear. And that radioactive coal waste is put out into the air.
BTW, if you have air scrubbers, where do you think the harmful removed by-products go? Do you think they're annihilated or something? You still have toxic waste to dispose of after you pull the pollutants out of the air from a hydrocarbon burning plant.
Power in the future isn't going to be wind, geothermal, etc, because it doesn't produce enough power. Obviously, the more we can get that way the better, but they are highly inefficient, and require specific placement. That means you have a limited amount that you can put online.
We have a very large amount of uranium ore around, but it isn't easy to get. The process of creating fuel from it is also complicated. Our best bet is to use fission while we refine the passive generation (solar, hydro, etc) and research fusion. If we figure fusion out, then we don't have to worry about the other forms, though solar is a good idea to continue researching.
Heh, I stopped using full numeric dates just because of that. I tended to do DD-MM-YYYY, but I'm in the US, and this format caused great confusion for too many people. Now I do DD-MMM-YYYY, as in 21-Oct-2005. That one is definitely not ambiguous.
I'm not seeing nearly so high for non-IE traffic. This is for Oct 1 to date, with Sept in parenthesis, followed by Aug.
MSIE - 88.6% (88.6%)(89.5%)
Mozilla/Firefox/Netscape - 8.4% [FF:4.9%] (8.6% [FF:6.8%])(8.0% [FF:5.5%])
Other: 3.0% (2.8%)(2.5%)
Only 6.2% (5.3%)(4.5%) of my hits come from non-Windows platforms.
Non-MS traffic is going up steadily, FF/Mozilla/Netscape has lost some ground after gaining quite a bit, other browsers are becoming more popular steadily.
Actually, no, the US couldn't do any of that. About half of the root zone servers are not in the US. The government doesn't control most of the ones that remain, and the telecom that the Internet runs on is all private sector. Also, you can't reliably block "all of their IPs" since you can't reliably know which ones those are. Even if the US did that, the only way they could reliably block off access would be to block *all* outside access.
You're absolutly right, countries don't liek being told what to do by other countries. Sort of like what other countries are trying to do to the US over DNS.
As for ICANN, you don't know any of that. All you know is that they dropped the community voters. You don't know how they're structured internally, or whether they are playing favorites, or much of anything else.
All things considered, if people want it fixed, then we should be working to fix ICANN, rather than pissing between national governments.
The US is doing nothing wrong here. It is simple *not* doing what the UN and co. want it to do. That's fine, considering the UN has no authority over the operation of the US. This is by virtue of it being illegal under the US Constitution for anyone here to agree to cede power to them. For a diplomatic venue (UN), and a bastardized economic alliance (EU), there certainly seems to be an awful lot of laws and such going on.
If there is a fracturing of DNS, it will be directly the fault of the UN/EU/China/etc for doing it. *They* would have to set up another system, and that would be what results in a fracture.
DNS is working fine right now, and if they were so concerned with safeguarding the system, they could be making copies of the data "just in case". The approach of trying to forcibly take control guarantees a massive amount of disruption of the system, and a long period of distrust of the new system. The existing DNS is known to work, it has proven itself reliable and stable, and has done so over the course of decades. A new system would start with absolutely no history.
The UN and co. are the ones trying to split it up. If it is so bad to split it up, then perhaps *the UN shouldn't do it*. The truth is that the people pushing for this already have shown that they aren't trustworthy having power over this. They have already censored internet and banned things in regards to it. The US is actually the one that *hasn't* tampered with it!
-In response to LDAP as somewhat decentralized:-
LDAP requires full centralization in a very similar way to DNS. You have a server that is master and everything slaves from it. Things bounce around with referrals to write masters if you want to commit an update.
-End-
The issue that so many people here fail to comprehend is that you cannot implement a system such as DNS without there being some form of central authority. You have to be able to trust the data, so you can't let random people update it. The current setup is just about as decentralized as you can go for what the data and needs are.
"Tier 1" where a group of people run the root zone
"Tier 2" where a larger and different group of people run each of the TLDs
"Tier 3" where a truly massive group of peoplpe run each domain
etc
You need to know where to go for each of the TLDs, and the TLDs need to know where to go for each of the domains. That means you need to have something to point you to what servers are running each TLD. That means you need something like what the root zone servers do right now.
How do you implement this in a more decentralized way?
In the US, when you write a work it comes into existance with a copyright. Registering your copyright is not necessary, but makes litigation easier.
If you're publicly using an actual trademark commercially, and someone else starts doing the same, you may be able to defend your use. If you register your mark, it is substantially easier to defend your trademark.
The huge difference is that if you don't defend your trademark in all cases that you are aware of, you can lose your legal ability to do so in the future.
Registration is not required to file suit. Failure to defend a trademark in every case results in losing the trademark. Under US law, if Google was using GMail as a mark, and the other company was aware but didn't pursue, then it is likely that the other company will lose their rights to the mark.
The vast majority of Windows software doesn't come with *any* printed manual, let along a thick one; the OS doesn't come with a manual at all now. If you really like having the CD, and you don't want to burn one yourself, then buy a copy of your favorite OSS on CD.
There is an immense library of UNIX software, too. The difference is that Windows software is available in brick and mortar stores, and UNIX software largely isn't. It is a chicken-and-egg problem. Stores won't stock and developers won't develop until there is market, and there can't be market if nobody is selling.
I'm working for government right now. I definitely don't have FICA taken out of my check, and I don't pay into a State program. I pay into a regional (non-State) retirement pension system. That amount is significantly less than what I would be paying with FICA, and the benefits are much improved.
Now I agree that right now I can't avoid paying into *some* retirement system. That doesn't make it right, and I can easily to better than what return I'll get from that money. A conservative private investment would get me 15% returns, where as this program returns only 8% on their investments. That is much better than what SSI pays, at least.
Quick correction, that was supposed to be "if people *WEREN'T* suckling".