The nuclear industry does have liability insurance. We have something that is the equivalent to the FDIC.
You have a fund of about $10 billion, last I read. Even compared to the FDIC, that's under-capitalized. A big nuclear disaster could lead to losses in the tens of billions of dollars.
In the event of a catastrophic accident all the other plants will pitch in to cover the costs.
Or, their parent utilities will simply declare bankruptcy, leaving taxpayers holding the bag. Or, they'll pass the costs onto their consumers - so much for nuclear power being cheaper than the alternatives.
I fully understand the fear of a "core meltdown" scenario. But I am completely comfortable living just 10 minutes from work.
That's nice. I'll be fully-comfortable when you guys have enough private insurance to cover the massive liability your plants represent. It'll be a cold day in hell before that happens, though.
Taxpayers are bailing out banks left and right this year, but when was the last time a nuclear power plant had to be bailed out?
Actually, quite a few of them have been "bailed out" already by rate payers, who are paying far more for their electricity than nuclear boosters had told them they would, because the construction costs of the plants went way, way over budget.
Beyond that, nobody is paying for the decommissioning and dismantling of most existing plants yet, or the longterm storage of their waste. Most of that waste is still sitting around in cooling ponds next to the plants, last time I checked. Wait 'till the bill for handling all of that crap comes due. Talk about a bailout.
You want nuclear power to be shut down and replaced because you see it as "too big to fail". Yet I'm 100% sure you are still using a bank, aren't you? I'm also sure I won't see you arguing that all banks should be put out of business.
No, but the ones "too big to fail" clearly need to be split into smaller entities. Likewise, nuclear power has associated costs and liabilities which aren't currently being accounted for in the heavily-subsidized rates charged for the electricity it generates. It's socialism for billionaires, where Joe Taxpayer is on the hook for all the liabilities, while the slick energy industry hucksters in Armani suits walk off with all the profits.
Look, the levels aren't exactly as low as you make it out to be.
The level of actual signal - as opposed to noise - at those levels is vanishingly tiny, and our ability to hear those signals rolls off starting at around 15kHz, further reducing their use when it comes to high (apparent) fidelity reproduction. Few instruments outside of cymbals and such make much - if any - noise above 20kHz - maybe some faint harmonics that are likely to be drowned out by much louder information further down the audio spectrum. Beyond that, the whole recording chain, from the mic to the console to the tape recorder (or hard drive) frequently isn't setup to handle those high frequencies. They either aren't getting picked up in the first place, or they're getting rolled off or totally blocked before they ever make it onto a CD or vinyl record. Or they're swamped by noise, which is the case with most recordings made prior to the 1970's.
There is a ton of ultrasonic noise on vinyl, and that will certainly color the material you're playing back, but that's got nothing to do with high fidelity.
Beyond that, the way human hearing works, while some young people can discern frequencies above 18-20kHz, we have little acuity at those levels. Typically high frequency information above around 15kHz is perceived to add a bit of ambiance or space to a recording, but doesn't carry much discernible information. For example, if you filter out the signal above 18kHz, and then replace it with a roughly equal amount of random high frequency information (hiss, in other words), the recording will sound about the same. Try that at 1,500Hz, and you'll have a very different experience.
Also, many medium to high end microphones can go to almost 40khz, some even more.
Yes, but those aren't the microphones that have been used to record music over the past century or so, let alone to record those instruments which are most likely to produce ultrasonics loud enough to be heard and perceived over the rest of the audio signal by human hearing.
99.9% of the microphones used over the past 60 years to record audio in the studio or concert hall are lucky to have a usable frequency response out to as far as 20kHz. Most begin a pretty severe rolloff at 15kHz, and by 20kHz only a handful manage to maintain a flat response, with performance dropping off rapidly thereafter. Anything they're picking up beyond 20kHz is going to be so faint as to be inaudible once it passes through the gauntlet of noise and distortion inherent in the vinyl format. The legendary Neumann U87 has been the studio standard for vocal recording since the '60s – the Beatles used this mic, and singers & engineers continue to choose this mic over all others even to this day. Its frequency response tops out at 20kHz. So much for recording ultrasonics. And the instrument probably most likely to produce loud ultrasonics – the cymbal – is typically recorded using a mic like the Shure SM57, which has been a standard for recording percussion since its introduction over thirty years ago. Its frequency response tops out at a measly 15kHz. What ultrasonics?
Also, your entire argument is based on a faulty premise that CD's cutoff frequency is 20khz. It is not. It is, in fact, 22.05khz. And that 2 khz is a huge difference, as adults who can hear above 20khz exist, but above 22khz are REALLY hard to come by.
Um, actually, you're the one proceeding from a faulty premise, namely that the CD's 22.05kHz theoretical frequency limit reflects the material actually encoded on the CD. Due to the Nyquist limit inherent in digital recording at 44.1kHz, filters have to be put into place to pretty much eliminate any signal at or beyond 22.05kHz, and the way those filters work they have to begin rolling off the signal pretty dramatically at around 20kHz. Some of these early "brickwall" filters had their own issues, which colored the sound being recorded on CD, but those issues have all pretty much been resolved over the past quarter century.
Exactly. With 1TB drives selling for under $100, why even bother with lossy formats for archival storage. Rip once and be done with it. If a better lossy format comes along in the future, you'll be able to make copies of your FLAC files in that format. If one doesn't come along, it's not like you've sacrificed anything.
Oh, there is one other advantage to ripping to FLAC - it can be a lot faster than ripping to MP3 or AAC, because the FLAC compression requires less processor overhead than MP3 or AAC. Ripping is still a pretty tedious process, so I see anything that speeds it up as a big plus. You can always use programs like MediaMonkey to made a MP3 or AAC copy of your library later, and run that as a batch job while you sleep.
It works in the Sun, so to say it could never work here ignores the fact that the sun works.
The sun works because it's, well, the sun. Just because something works deep inside the sun doesn't mean it'll ever work on the surface of the earth, at least in any form that'll return more energy in a controlled manner than we dump into it.
I mean, thinking works really well inside the human brain, but just because your brain can think doesn't mean your ass ever will.
You aren't factoring in the cost of liability insurance for nuclear power plants and nuclear waste dumps.
Oh, that's right - nuclear power plants don't really pay all that much for liability insurance. Why is that? Oh yeah, because the government doesn't require them to - I think the pool they do pay into is currently sitting on a pitiful $10 billion in cash, which could easily be wiped out by a single nuclear accident. So, why aren't they forced to carry at least a few billion in coverage per-plant, the way most drivers are forced to carry liability insurance? Because even the nutbags at AIG wouldn't write such a policy - the damage a nuclear power plant or waste dump could cause if it goes all China syndrome could easily run into the tens or perhaps even hundreds of billions of dollars. Per-plant. The biggest "too big to fail" financial services companies couldn't hope to absorb that kind of loss.
If nuclear power plants were required to buy private liability insurance on the private market, providing them will full coverage for the potential damage they could do, and the government required the insurers to have enough assets to cover any potential payout, the entire nuclear power industry would be shut down overnight. The only way they could afford the premiums would be to jack the cost of power way, way, way up, enough to cover billions, tens of billions or even hundreds of billions of liability per-plant . Rates would skyrocket so high just about every alternative would become cheaper.
There's no such thing as a free lunch. Unless you're a nuclear power plant, in which case the taxpayers are ultimately on the hook for any of your screwups. They are yet another "too big to fail" institution that will end up costing the taxpayers dearly someday.
Shut them all down and replace them with pretty much anything but nuclear power. Preferably starting with conservation, the #1 renewable energy "resource".
Yeah, I don't know why people don't understand this. Sure, AAC and MP3 are the hot lossy formats *today*, but will they be so hot 10 years from now? Rip to FLAC and you never need to rip again - just transcode to whatever format you like. And FLAC takes up about half the space of raw WAV files, supports metadata (so you can tag it to your heart's desire), and can even be streamed.
There is one benefit I haven't seen anyone point out yet when it comes to the lossy formats. By chucking away some of the supposedly inaudible signal, they do lessen the amount of work your amp and speakers have to perform. So in theory the remaining, more audible signal should be getting reproduced more accurately than it would have been otherwise. I wonder if someday, as these psychoacoustic models continue to grow in sophistication, it'll become commonplace to feed all audio thru some kind of model before it's amplified and delivered to your speakers. In theory you might be able to generate a signal that will be reproduced with greater apparent fidelity to the original performance than you would achieve from an unprocessed signal.
Vinyl is the only format of the three that contains very high and very low frequency data that you cannot hear.
I'm sorry, but this simply isn't the case. Vinyl absolutely cannot "contain" any loud low frequency stereo signal - at least, nothing that was put there intentionally. The groove would become so shallow the needle would pop out of it and go skidding across the platter. You might be able to record a very soft low-frequency signal onto vinyl, but given the way human hearing works, that would almost certainly be masked by louder low frequency signals further up the audio spectrum in the music. Unless you like to sit around and listen to the output of a pure tone generator, this isn't really much of an "advantage" for vinyl.
Vinyl's inability to handle even moderately loud low bass is the reason why the sound of dance music changed so much starting in the mid-'80s - eventually resulting in things like house music - as CDs became popular and suddenly you could record deep bass at maximum volume and deliver it to consumers unaltered. I recall hearing Pet Shop Boys "I Want A Dog" in 1988 or thereabouts on a high-end sub/sat system at an audio dealer and thinking, "Holy crap! How did they get the bass so loud?" It felt like I'd swallowed a subwoofer it was so loud. You couldn't physically deliver anything like that on vinyl - you would have to roll the deep bass off by many decibels or the groove would literally go flat. Even most consumer tape formats would have had trouble handling that much low-frequency signal, especially given the tape duplication methods used at that time (although at least they'd fail less spectacularly, with tape's fairly warm-sounding saturation).
Discos in the '70s could pump out that kind of deep bass, but they did it using a gadget from dbx called a subharmonic synthesizer, which would produce a note exactly an octave below whatever you fed into it. They'd feed your typical vinyl recording with its anemic bass into the device, and get this pulsating, throbbing audio out. But until CD came around there was no way to deliver that to the home, maybe short of half-speed mastered reel to reel or (possibly) metal cassette tape.
You do get all sorts of low frequency signal coming off of vinyl when you play it, but it's mostly noise - rumble from the motor and pickup in the turntable itself, the scraping of the needle in the groove, low-frequency resonances induced by the playback speakers, and harmonics and low-frequency noise etched into the master itself when that was being cut. All of that garbage robs power from your amplifier and causes scads of distortion in your speakers, screwing up the real signal you're trying to reproduce. It's just another way in which vinyl is not only an awful audio format, but a spectacularly awful audio format. It's not just awful because of what it can't accurately record, it's awful because of all of the noise and artifacts it introduces which cause further distortion of what it has managed to accurately record.
As for high frequency data, yes vinyl can record signals higher than the 20kHz limit of CD, but if you're over 13 and live in the West it's unlikely you can hear any of it. Worse, each time you play a record the needle actually damages it, and the high frequencies are damaged the first and the worst. That's one of the many reasons why the old discrete quad format failed back in the '70s - it used ultrasonic multiplexing to record the quad signal, and that signal rapidly degraded with every playback. Whoops! (The matrix quad formats - which didn't rely on ultrasonics - failed for other reasons.) Beyond that, the vast majority of what signal there is over 20kHz on most vinyl records is pure unadulterated noise which has absolutely nothing to do with the original signal that was recorded. It's hiss, it's harmonic distortion induced in both the cutting head and in your pickup's needle by lower-frequency signals, it's from clicks and pops caused by dust or by imperfections
When I checked out their website a year or so back, The Eagles were offering their latest album in FLAC format for about the same price as the CD. They were always a very fidelity-conscious act - their '70s records were sonically flawless - so I wouldn't be surprised to see their catalog crop up in FLAC format at their website.
That's one of the reasons why I've held off picking up the latest remasters. I hear they sound great, but why split the profits with the do-nothing crackheads at Warner?
It doesn't. CFL's have made good financial and environment sense for well over a decade now, at least in most lighting applications. Unless you need a bulb with a wide dimmable range or some other fairly exotic use, CFL's will always cost out as the cheapest option. The bulbs themselves aren't even that expensive anymore - at IKEA they don't cost much more than standard incandescents do at my local grocery store.
If you live in a warm climate CFL's have another big advantage - they don't heat your room the way incandescent bulbs do. That can really reduce the load on your air conditioner, saving you even more money. And if you have light fixtures in hard to reach areas, they really cut down on the need to change your bulbs. I've had some CFL bulbs in use in the same fixtures now for almost a decade.
LED technology looks promising, but it still isn't as cheap as CFL. Will probably get there though sometime in the next decade.
Thank you! I was going to post something similar. You think Apple are control freaks, and AT&T limits what features are available? They're amateurs compared to Verizon. I had a dumb Motorola phone with them for over 4 years, and paid a fortune during that time for all sorts of add-on features - data, contact synching, text messaging - that were standard with other carriers. I'm actually paying less a month with AT&T for my iPhone than I was for Verizon and their Crap Phone.
I think that's probably true, but I'm not certain that Verizon wants the iPhone. It's way too open for them - which is saying something! Verizon is all about making money off of charging fees for the things other providers give you for free. I also think that their network performance is superior to AT&T's largely because they lock down their phones so dramatically in terms of features and aren't a leading provider of smartphones with a decent web browser. I tried a friend's Blackberry Storm on Verizon, and the experience sucked compared even to 1st gen iPhone.
If Verizon does get the iPhone, I think a lot of users are gonna discover their network isn't all that much better than AT&T's. Even if they don't get the iPhone, a new generation of smartphones is about to land from other vendors, and with their improved browsers and more advanced applications those smartphones will place a far greater strain on Verizon's network than their existing offerings. It'll be interesting to see how that network handles it. My guess is, not as well as people appear to be assuming it will.
You're ignoring the fact that the dense urban centers are already covered.
Uh, wrong. You couldn't be more wrong. I've used the iPhone in Manhattan and in San Francisco, two of the most densely-populated urban centers in the US, and there are serious coverage issues in both cities. I got better performance in Napa and Sonoma, even on the fringes of town. Towers don't just cover a physical area, they also support a population of users.
If AT&T took some of the millions it wastes every year in executard compensation and invested that cash adding a couple dozen more cell towers in Manhattan and San Francisco, they'd improve the user experience of tens of thousands of lucrative customers and guarantee themselves a healthy revenue stream for years to come. But like most boardrooms in this country, AT&T's is packed full of brown-nosing, greedy psychopaths hell bent on grabbing as much cash as they can today without the slightest concern regarding what happens tomorrow.
You can bet that when the iPhone becomes available via another carrier, there will be a stampede of customers away from AT&T and their financials will go straight into the toilet. Then they'll probably beg the taxpayers for a bailout.
Welcome to unregulated "capitalism", where a bunch of slick lunatics in $2,000 suits eat all of their seed corn in the spring, then piss and moan in the fall that they're starving, before demanding that the peasants come feed them.
One of these days, the peasants are gonna wise up, and our fatted executive class is gonna find itself on the dinner plate.
The ISS has cost well north of $100 billion so far. It hasn't come close to producing $100 billion worth of research. Or even $1 billion worth.
Imagine if we'd taken the $100 billion wasted on the ISS and spent it developing carbon nanotubes, or spent it on high-speed rail networks, or spent it researching wind or solar power. Or, for that matter, spent it on interplanetary probes. $100 billion would pay for a lot of Europa orbiters, landers and even a probe that could melt thru the surface and explore Europa's vast ocean.
Can you imagine how many iPhone features are covered by Palm patents?
Given that Apple was the first into the whole PDA space with the Newton - remember, they coined the phrase Personal Digital Assistant - I should think that quite a few Palm features are covered by Apple patents. Palm isn't exactly in any financial position to wage a lengthy patent war with Apple. Whereas Apple is sitting on enough cash to buy Palm many times over.
You'd think Palm would go around the whole iTunes sync issue entirely. Just develop software (or customize existing software, like MediaMonkey) that pulls in the existing iTunes library and allows it to sync with the Pre.
Okay, yes, they both groups did crash their respective countries' economies, so in that perhaps some equivalence could be drawn, but there's the small matter of TENS OF MILLIONS OF PEOPLE SLAUGHTERED by the former group, but not the banksters.
I'm looking at things purely from an economic standpoint, not from a moral standpoint. Stalin and some of this fellow command economy psychopaths managed to keep the trains running, which is more than you get in failed states like Haiti or Somalia or those other libertarian wonderlands with little to no regulation (because there's little to no government).
Although I have to say, supposedly small-government America is doing a pretty good job in the death, oppression and destruction department. We have a far larger percentage of our population incarcerated than China, and I believe we even have a larger prison population in absolute numbers, which is a pretty impressive achievement (I'm sure Mao would be so proud of us), even if we aren't quite as execution happy as the Chinese (yet!). And of course, we're now world famous for waging extraordinarily expensive yet utterly pointless wars for completely illegitimate reasons, resulting in between 100,000 to a million (depending on which study is correct) deaths in Iraq alone.
I will say that our free market kleptocrats and the political lackeys they foist upon us have a ways to go to catch up with Stalin and their ilk in the bodycount department. But give them time. A few more decades of melamine-contaminated milk, deadly prescription drugs marketed on the basis of fraudulent test results, support for brutal dictators across the globe, health insurance rescissions and so forth and our domestic kleptocracy could certainly give the lesser foreign tyrants a run for their money in the slaughter department.
And still not get the trains to run on time.
some types of enterprises, like building airplanes, are inherently more efficient at large scale
Perhaps. But there's no reason why a single entity has to be ginormous in order to achieve the efficiencies of scale. There's no reason why multiple corporations couldn't pool their resources in the same way individuals pool their resources in order to form corporations in the first place.
I don't see why the non-parasitic sectors, like software, aircraft, industrial machinery, and so on, should be blasted by government because of the malfeasance of financiers
Except all of those sectors are just as parasitic, even if they're smaller. The software industry receives tens of billions of dollars a year from the government. What, you think government PC's get Windows installed for free? Who enforces copyright, and runs the court system sue-happy corporations use to enforce their patents? How much do you think the big aircraft makers haul in every year from their government contracts?
Corporations need to be kept small enough to drown in a bathtub when they step out of line.
The non-free market we had allowed banks substantial freedom to make loans, while pressuring them to make a bunch of loans to poor credit risks.
More BS, but at least you're consistent. Was the government "pressuring" these poor independent lenders like Countrywide and Ameriquest - who were responsible for over half of the subprime loans now going tits up - into making exotic loans on overpriced properties in the Oort Clouds of suburbia, and then forcing them to bundle those loans up into fraudulently-graded tranches and sell them off in the mortgage securitization market?
No.
In fact, the only loans the government kinda-sorta forced banks to issue were those in limited geographic areas covered by the Community Reinvestment Act. Those CRA loans are typically far lower in value than most of the subprime loans currently going bad, they were issued on more conservative terms, and lo and behold they're defaulting at lower rates than non-CRA loans.
In other words, we'd have been better off if the government had forced lenders to only issue loans covered by the CRA. But that would be all communist or socialist or something.
During the peak of the mortgage bubble I was receiving well over a dozen solicitations a week, in e-mail, telemarketing calls and direct mailings. A friend of mine received a mortgage offer for her dog, who was dead. The government didn't kill her dog, and it didn't force some flaky lender to market its scam loans to her dead pet. Their own rapacious greed did that.
A free market would let companies make any loans they want, to anyone they want, but would not bail out anyone for any reason.
I'm sorry, but what did the bailout have to do with the crash? The crash came before the bailout.
Why don't all of you libertarian geniuses, who seem to have trouble with basic concepts like cause and effect, move to some libertarian wonderland like Somalia or Haiti, where the government is virtually non-existent and chaos reigns supreme. They're OK places to be if you're already rich and can afford your own little army I suppose, but you don't see many factories, universities or other hallmarks of advanced civilization popping up there.
It's also important to keep in mind that a corporation is just a vehicle to generate money right now for these nuts. So the guys running Enron or AIG could give a flip if their actions cause the company to crash and burn a year or two down the road, so long as they can extract millions (or billions) out of the scam before the sh*t hits the fan.
Countrywide is a great example. Orange Ooompa Loompa Angelo Mozillo over at Countrywide cashed out to the tune of $500 million while running what amounted to an enormous Ponzi scheme straight into the dirt. Investors in Contrywide and its spin-off IndyMac have been left holding a flaming bag of poo, as have the taxpayers, who now have to bail out Mozillo's mess.
But what does he care? He made his hundreds of millions - money he would have never made from honest work. If Countrywide had been a legitimate company he might have made $100 million or so over the course of a lifetime, tops. In laissez-faire bizarro world, it's actually a lot more profitable to run an enormous scam and destroy corporations and capital left and right.
Libertarian *uckwads like you have the infuriating habit of comparing everything but Laissez-faire capitalism to authoritarian command economies.
That's as concise a summary as I've seen. They really are the mirror image of communist lunatics like Lenin. Although I must say, the way the free market halfwits crashed the world's largest economy only 20 years or so after being handed partial control, authoritarian command economies certainly seem to work better than laissez-faire free for alls.
Both wind up with psychopaths running things after a certain amount of time (Stalin, Mao, the lunatics at Enron, AIG, Citibank, etc.). But at least the command economies can keep the trains running on time.
The really odd thing about laissez-faire cluster*ucks is how much they behave like command economies. In a command economy you wind up with political psychopaths in charge who enforce groupthink thru ideological propaganda. The ideology influences policy and behavior, so you wind up with insanity like the Soviet government refusing to fund the study of genetics because it clashed with the Party line. Or the insanity of Mao's great leap forward, which was anything but. Irrefutable evidence which contradicts the ideology is simply ignored or shouted down by propaganda-baked fanatics. So the society as a whole follows utterly irrational beliefs right off a cliff.
In a laissez-faire economy you wind up with a few wealthy psychopaths - a kleptocracy - in charge of the economy and government. Command authority isn't vested in a single individual, but that doesn't seem to matter much. If anything, it's worse - you wind up with an uncoordinated gang of crazed thieves in charge, stealing everything that isn't nailed down, destroying the economy in the process. They use propaganda to incite bigots, psychotics and religious fanatics to vote against their own best social and economic interests, in order to seize and maintain control of the government and prevent it from stopping their psychopathic rampage (indeed, government is now feeding their rampage - witness the recent multi-trillion dollar "bailout" of Wall Street).
It's something like having a cabal comprised of folks like Jeffery Dahmer, David Berkowitz, and Charles Manson running the country. Their primary interest isn't in running anything - they're only invested in keeping anything from interrupting their rampage, as (in this case) they steal everything in sight. These psychopaths are so greed-crazed, they don't even seem to realize they're destroying the very system they've been stealing from. They're parasites that are killing their host. The whackjobs running Enron are a textbook example. And just as in command economies, the society as a whole follows these nuts right over a cliff (witness the housing boom and bust).
The solution seems to be having a government structured in such a way that it simply doesn't allow psychopaths to gain enough power - political or economic - to have any substantial influence over either the government or the economy. So companies the size of AIG or Citibank would automatically be broken up, or taxed so heavily they'd be better off broken up. Extreme concentrations of wealth would be taxed out of existence, and exotic "investment" vehicles would be taxed and treated like what they really are - gambling. Government itself would be structured in such a way that no single position, or even large group of positions, would have enough power to substantially alter either the structure of the government or its relationship to the economy - particularly when it comes to allowing any individual or corporation to become too powerful.
And the "coverage" that folks without traditional healthcare have access to is pretty awful - like free clinics with hours-long waits. Hard to go there for your "healthcare" if you have to work.
Wow, you actually think AIG's customers got screwed over?
If the government hadn't stepped in with a whopping $150 billion taxpayer dollars to bail AIG out, their customers would be up a creek without insurance, because their insurer would have gone bankrupt. So no, AIG's customers haven't been screwed over (yet!), but the taxpayers sure have.
Nobody knows just how enormous the claims might be in the wake of a major nuclear disaster, but they could easily overwhelm the reserves of a private insurer. Which is why no private insurer will cover a nuclear power plant in the US. Instead, there's a quasi-private pool of about $10 billion to cover all the plants in the country. Once that's exhausted - which might not take long in the wake of a serious incident - the taxpayers will be on the hook for the rest. Which is BS.
If these things can't get private insurance backed by adequate reserves - reserves capable of covering not only the plants themselves but also the waste they generate - they shouldn't be built.
Good luck with the insurance policy. As AIG shows, what makes anybody think the insurance company will have the money - or even be around - in 60 years to cover the cost of dismantling a reactor?
The only way you can get nuclear power to pan out financially is if you have the government own and run all the reactors on what amounts to a non-profit basis (as in France, with EDF, which is something like 80% government-owned). You can't even get private insurance for the things (and I wouldn't trust private insurers to pay out in the event of a major incident, anyhow).
Even in France, EDF isn't in great financial shape. They don't have enough money to support their pension obligations and all decommissioning expenses, although presumably the French government has made enough money off EDF over the years they could pick up some of that tab and still ultimately leave taxpayers in the black.
The reality is, fission power never has and never will make much financial sense. When France went nuclear in the post WWII era there weren't any viable alternatives for them, but clearly that's no longer the case today for many nations, the United States included.
I was worried about what might happen when the mice want to puree my brain in an attempt to get at the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything. It's reassuring to know that soon an artificial brain actually will be available to replace mine. I'll be able to ask for tea and everything!
The first IBM PC wasn't exactly budget equipment. With a monitor and a floppy drive, the 5150 cost a whopping $3,000. For the money they charged, they could have easily afforded to slap a 68000 in that thing.
I recall reading once, years ago, that IBM considered using the 68000 but ended up going with Intel's 8088 because Motorola couldn't guarantee delivery of the quantity of processors IBM thought they needed.
By the time the Mac / Atari ST / Amiga / Sinclair QL hit the market, volume was no longer an issue for Motorola.
According to the Wikipedia article on the 5150, IBM's designers had also considered using the IBM 801 processor, an early RISC design far more powerful than the 8086/8088. They ended up going with the 8088 in part because of IBM's experience using it in their $10,000 Datamaster business computer (which ironically only hit the market a month or so before the far less expensive PC - can you say "dead on arrival"?).
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The nuclear industry does have liability insurance. We have something that is the equivalent to the FDIC.
You have a fund of about $10 billion, last I read. Even compared to the FDIC, that's under-capitalized. A big nuclear disaster could lead to losses in the tens of billions of dollars.
In the event of a catastrophic accident all the other plants will pitch in to cover the costs.
Or, their parent utilities will simply declare bankruptcy, leaving taxpayers holding the bag. Or, they'll pass the costs onto their consumers - so much for nuclear power being cheaper than the alternatives.
I fully understand the fear of a "core meltdown" scenario. But I am completely comfortable living just 10 minutes from work.
That's nice. I'll be fully-comfortable when you guys have enough private insurance to cover the massive liability your plants represent. It'll be a cold day in hell before that happens, though.
Taxpayers are bailing out banks left and right this year, but when was the last time a nuclear power plant had to be bailed out?
Actually, quite a few of them have been "bailed out" already by rate payers, who are paying far more for their electricity than nuclear boosters had told them they would, because the construction costs of the plants went way, way over budget.
Beyond that, nobody is paying for the decommissioning and dismantling of most existing plants yet, or the longterm storage of their waste. Most of that waste is still sitting around in cooling ponds next to the plants, last time I checked. Wait 'till the bill for handling all of that crap comes due. Talk about a bailout.
You want nuclear power to be shut down and replaced because you see it as "too big to fail". Yet I'm 100% sure you are still using a bank, aren't you? I'm also sure I won't see you arguing that all banks should be put out of business.
No, but the ones "too big to fail" clearly need to be split into smaller entities. Likewise, nuclear power has associated costs and liabilities which aren't currently being accounted for in the heavily-subsidized rates charged for the electricity it generates. It's socialism for billionaires, where Joe Taxpayer is on the hook for all the liabilities, while the slick energy industry hucksters in Armani suits walk off with all the profits.
Look, the levels aren't exactly as low as you make it out to be.
The level of actual signal - as opposed to noise - at those levels is vanishingly tiny, and our ability to hear those signals rolls off starting at around 15kHz, further reducing their use when it comes to high (apparent) fidelity reproduction. Few instruments outside of cymbals and such make much - if any - noise above 20kHz - maybe some faint harmonics that are likely to be drowned out by much louder information further down the audio spectrum. Beyond that, the whole recording chain, from the mic to the console to the tape recorder (or hard drive) frequently isn't setup to handle those high frequencies. They either aren't getting picked up in the first place, or they're getting rolled off or totally blocked before they ever make it onto a CD or vinyl record. Or they're swamped by noise, which is the case with most recordings made prior to the 1970's.
There is a ton of ultrasonic noise on vinyl, and that will certainly color the material you're playing back, but that's got nothing to do with high fidelity.
Beyond that, the way human hearing works, while some young people can discern frequencies above 18-20kHz, we have little acuity at those levels. Typically high frequency information above around 15kHz is perceived to add a bit of ambiance or space to a recording, but doesn't carry much discernible information. For example, if you filter out the signal above 18kHz, and then replace it with a roughly equal amount of random high frequency information (hiss, in other words), the recording will sound about the same. Try that at 1,500Hz, and you'll have a very different experience.
Also, many medium to high end microphones can go to almost 40khz, some even more.
Yes, but those aren't the microphones that have been used to record music over the past century or so, let alone to record those instruments which are most likely to produce ultrasonics loud enough to be heard and perceived over the rest of the audio signal by human hearing.
99.9% of the microphones used over the past 60 years to record audio in the studio or concert hall are lucky to have a usable frequency response out to as far as 20kHz. Most begin a pretty severe rolloff at 15kHz, and by 20kHz only a handful manage to maintain a flat response, with performance dropping off rapidly thereafter. Anything they're picking up beyond 20kHz is going to be so faint as to be inaudible once it passes through the gauntlet of noise and distortion inherent in the vinyl format. The legendary Neumann U87 has been the studio standard for vocal recording since the '60s – the Beatles used this mic, and singers & engineers continue to choose this mic over all others even to this day. Its frequency response tops out at 20kHz. So much for recording ultrasonics. And the instrument probably most likely to produce loud ultrasonics – the cymbal – is typically recorded using a mic like the Shure SM57, which has been a standard for recording percussion since its introduction over thirty years ago. Its frequency response tops out at a measly 15kHz. What ultrasonics?
Also, your entire argument is based on a faulty premise that CD's cutoff frequency is 20khz. It is not. It is, in fact, 22.05khz. And that 2 khz is a huge difference, as adults who can hear above 20khz exist, but above 22khz are REALLY hard to come by.
Um, actually, you're the one proceeding from a faulty premise, namely that the CD's 22.05kHz theoretical frequency limit reflects the material actually encoded on the CD. Due to the Nyquist limit inherent in digital recording at 44.1kHz, filters have to be put into place to pretty much eliminate any signal at or beyond 22.05kHz, and the way those filters work they have to begin rolling off the signal pretty dramatically at around 20kHz. Some of these early "brickwall" filters had their own issues, which colored the sound being recorded on CD, but those issues have all pretty much been resolved over the past quarter century.
Exactly. With 1TB drives selling for under $100, why even bother with lossy formats for archival storage. Rip once and be done with it. If a better lossy format comes along in the future, you'll be able to make copies of your FLAC files in that format. If one doesn't come along, it's not like you've sacrificed anything.
Oh, there is one other advantage to ripping to FLAC - it can be a lot faster than ripping to MP3 or AAC, because the FLAC compression requires less processor overhead than MP3 or AAC. Ripping is still a pretty tedious process, so I see anything that speeds it up as a big plus. You can always use programs like MediaMonkey to made a MP3 or AAC copy of your library later, and run that as a batch job while you sleep.
It works in the Sun, so to say it could never work here ignores the fact that the sun works.
The sun works because it's, well, the sun. Just because something works deep inside the sun doesn't mean it'll ever work on the surface of the earth, at least in any form that'll return more energy in a controlled manner than we dump into it.
I mean, thinking works really well inside the human brain, but just because your brain can think doesn't mean your ass ever will.
You aren't factoring in the cost of liability insurance for nuclear power plants and nuclear waste dumps.
Oh, that's right - nuclear power plants don't really pay all that much for liability insurance. Why is that? Oh yeah, because the government doesn't require them to - I think the pool they do pay into is currently sitting on a pitiful $10 billion in cash, which could easily be wiped out by a single nuclear accident. So, why aren't they forced to carry at least a few billion in coverage per-plant, the way most drivers are forced to carry liability insurance? Because even the nutbags at AIG wouldn't write such a policy - the damage a nuclear power plant or waste dump could cause if it goes all China syndrome could easily run into the tens or perhaps even hundreds of billions of dollars. Per-plant. The biggest "too big to fail" financial services companies couldn't hope to absorb that kind of loss.
If nuclear power plants were required to buy private liability insurance on the private market, providing them will full coverage for the potential damage they could do, and the government required the insurers to have enough assets to cover any potential payout, the entire nuclear power industry would be shut down overnight. The only way they could afford the premiums would be to jack the cost of power way, way, way up, enough to cover billions, tens of billions or even hundreds of billions of liability per-plant . Rates would skyrocket so high just about every alternative would become cheaper.
There's no such thing as a free lunch. Unless you're a nuclear power plant, in which case the taxpayers are ultimately on the hook for any of your screwups. They are yet another "too big to fail" institution that will end up costing the taxpayers dearly someday.
Shut them all down and replace them with pretty much anything but nuclear power. Preferably starting with conservation, the #1 renewable energy "resource".
Yeah, I don't know why people don't understand this. Sure, AAC and MP3 are the hot lossy formats *today*, but will they be so hot 10 years from now? Rip to FLAC and you never need to rip again - just transcode to whatever format you like. And FLAC takes up about half the space of raw WAV files, supports metadata (so you can tag it to your heart's desire), and can even be streamed.
There is one benefit I haven't seen anyone point out yet when it comes to the lossy formats. By chucking away some of the supposedly inaudible signal, they do lessen the amount of work your amp and speakers have to perform. So in theory the remaining, more audible signal should be getting reproduced more accurately than it would have been otherwise. I wonder if someday, as these psychoacoustic models continue to grow in sophistication, it'll become commonplace to feed all audio thru some kind of model before it's amplified and delivered to your speakers. In theory you might be able to generate a signal that will be reproduced with greater apparent fidelity to the original performance than you would achieve from an unprocessed signal.
Vinyl is the only format of the three that contains very high and very low frequency data that you cannot hear.
I'm sorry, but this simply isn't the case. Vinyl absolutely cannot "contain" any loud low frequency stereo signal - at least, nothing that was put there intentionally. The groove would become so shallow the needle would pop out of it and go skidding across the platter. You might be able to record a very soft low-frequency signal onto vinyl, but given the way human hearing works, that would almost certainly be masked by louder low frequency signals further up the audio spectrum in the music. Unless you like to sit around and listen to the output of a pure tone generator, this isn't really much of an "advantage" for vinyl.
Vinyl's inability to handle even moderately loud low bass is the reason why the sound of dance music changed so much starting in the mid-'80s - eventually resulting in things like house music - as CDs became popular and suddenly you could record deep bass at maximum volume and deliver it to consumers unaltered. I recall hearing Pet Shop Boys "I Want A Dog" in 1988 or thereabouts on a high-end sub/sat system at an audio dealer and thinking, "Holy crap! How did they get the bass so loud?" It felt like I'd swallowed a subwoofer it was so loud. You couldn't physically deliver anything like that on vinyl - you would have to roll the deep bass off by many decibels or the groove would literally go flat. Even most consumer tape formats would have had trouble handling that much low-frequency signal, especially given the tape duplication methods used at that time (although at least they'd fail less spectacularly, with tape's fairly warm-sounding saturation).
Discos in the '70s could pump out that kind of deep bass, but they did it using a gadget from dbx called a subharmonic synthesizer, which would produce a note exactly an octave below whatever you fed into it. They'd feed your typical vinyl recording with its anemic bass into the device, and get this pulsating, throbbing audio out. But until CD came around there was no way to deliver that to the home, maybe short of half-speed mastered reel to reel or (possibly) metal cassette tape.
You do get all sorts of low frequency signal coming off of vinyl when you play it, but it's mostly noise - rumble from the motor and pickup in the turntable itself, the scraping of the needle in the groove, low-frequency resonances induced by the playback speakers, and harmonics and low-frequency noise etched into the master itself when that was being cut. All of that garbage robs power from your amplifier and causes scads of distortion in your speakers, screwing up the real signal you're trying to reproduce. It's just another way in which vinyl is not only an awful audio format, but a spectacularly awful audio format. It's not just awful because of what it can't accurately record, it's awful because of all of the noise and artifacts it introduces which cause further distortion of what it has managed to accurately record.
As for high frequency data, yes vinyl can record signals higher than the 20kHz limit of CD, but if you're over 13 and live in the West it's unlikely you can hear any of it. Worse, each time you play a record the needle actually damages it, and the high frequencies are damaged the first and the worst. That's one of the many reasons why the old discrete quad format failed back in the '70s - it used ultrasonic multiplexing to record the quad signal, and that signal rapidly degraded with every playback. Whoops! (The matrix quad formats - which didn't rely on ultrasonics - failed for other reasons.) Beyond that, the vast majority of what signal there is over 20kHz on most vinyl records is pure unadulterated noise which has absolutely nothing to do with the original signal that was recorded. It's hiss, it's harmonic distortion induced in both the cutting head and in your pickup's needle by lower-frequency signals, it's from clicks and pops caused by dust or by imperfections
When I checked out their website a year or so back, The Eagles were offering their latest album in FLAC format for about the same price as the CD. They were always a very fidelity-conscious act - their '70s records were sonically flawless - so I wouldn't be surprised to see their catalog crop up in FLAC format at their website.
That's one of the reasons why I've held off picking up the latest remasters. I hear they sound great, but why split the profits with the do-nothing crackheads at Warner?
It doesn't. CFL's have made good financial and environment sense for well over a decade now, at least in most lighting applications. Unless you need a bulb with a wide dimmable range or some other fairly exotic use, CFL's will always cost out as the cheapest option. The bulbs themselves aren't even that expensive anymore - at IKEA they don't cost much more than standard incandescents do at my local grocery store.
If you live in a warm climate CFL's have another big advantage - they don't heat your room the way incandescent bulbs do. That can really reduce the load on your air conditioner, saving you even more money. And if you have light fixtures in hard to reach areas, they really cut down on the need to change your bulbs. I've had some CFL bulbs in use in the same fixtures now for almost a decade.
LED technology looks promising, but it still isn't as cheap as CFL. Will probably get there though sometime in the next decade.
Thank you! I was going to post something similar. You think Apple are control freaks, and AT&T limits what features are available? They're amateurs compared to Verizon. I had a dumb Motorola phone with them for over 4 years, and paid a fortune during that time for all sorts of add-on features - data, contact synching, text messaging - that were standard with other carriers. I'm actually paying less a month with AT&T for my iPhone than I was for Verizon and their Crap Phone.
I think that's probably true, but I'm not certain that Verizon wants the iPhone. It's way too open for them - which is saying something! Verizon is all about making money off of charging fees for the things other providers give you for free. I also think that their network performance is superior to AT&T's largely because they lock down their phones so dramatically in terms of features and aren't a leading provider of smartphones with a decent web browser. I tried a friend's Blackberry Storm on Verizon, and the experience sucked compared even to 1st gen iPhone.
If Verizon does get the iPhone, I think a lot of users are gonna discover their network isn't all that much better than AT&T's. Even if they don't get the iPhone, a new generation of smartphones is about to land from other vendors, and with their improved browsers and more advanced applications those smartphones will place a far greater strain on Verizon's network than their existing offerings. It'll be interesting to see how that network handles it. My guess is, not as well as people appear to be assuming it will.
You're ignoring the fact that the dense urban centers are already covered.
Uh, wrong. You couldn't be more wrong. I've used the iPhone in Manhattan and in San Francisco, two of the most densely-populated urban centers in the US, and there are serious coverage issues in both cities. I got better performance in Napa and Sonoma, even on the fringes of town. Towers don't just cover a physical area, they also support a population of users.
If AT&T took some of the millions it wastes every year in executard compensation and invested that cash adding a couple dozen more cell towers in Manhattan and San Francisco, they'd improve the user experience of tens of thousands of lucrative customers and guarantee themselves a healthy revenue stream for years to come. But like most boardrooms in this country, AT&T's is packed full of brown-nosing, greedy psychopaths hell bent on grabbing as much cash as they can today without the slightest concern regarding what happens tomorrow.
You can bet that when the iPhone becomes available via another carrier, there will be a stampede of customers away from AT&T and their financials will go straight into the toilet. Then they'll probably beg the taxpayers for a bailout.
Welcome to unregulated "capitalism", where a bunch of slick lunatics in $2,000 suits eat all of their seed corn in the spring, then piss and moan in the fall that they're starving, before demanding that the peasants come feed them.
One of these days, the peasants are gonna wise up, and our fatted executive class is gonna find itself on the dinner plate.
The ISS has cost well north of $100 billion so far. It hasn't come close to producing $100 billion worth of research. Or even $1 billion worth.
Imagine if we'd taken the $100 billion wasted on the ISS and spent it developing carbon nanotubes, or spent it on high-speed rail networks, or spent it researching wind or solar power. Or, for that matter, spent it on interplanetary probes. $100 billion would pay for a lot of Europa orbiters, landers and even a probe that could melt thru the surface and explore Europa's vast ocean.
Can you imagine how many iPhone features are covered by Palm patents?
Given that Apple was the first into the whole PDA space with the Newton - remember, they coined the phrase Personal Digital Assistant - I should think that quite a few Palm features are covered by Apple patents. Palm isn't exactly in any financial position to wage a lengthy patent war with Apple. Whereas Apple is sitting on enough cash to buy Palm many times over.
You'd think Palm would go around the whole iTunes sync issue entirely. Just develop software (or customize existing software, like MediaMonkey) that pulls in the existing iTunes library and allows it to sync with the Pre.
Okay, yes, they both groups did crash their respective countries' economies, so in that perhaps some equivalence could be drawn, but there's the small matter of TENS OF MILLIONS OF PEOPLE SLAUGHTERED by the former group, but not the banksters.
I'm looking at things purely from an economic standpoint, not from a moral standpoint. Stalin and some of this fellow command economy psychopaths managed to keep the trains running, which is more than you get in failed states like Haiti or Somalia or those other libertarian wonderlands with little to no regulation (because there's little to no government).
Although I have to say, supposedly small-government America is doing a pretty good job in the death, oppression and destruction department. We have a far larger percentage of our population incarcerated than China, and I believe we even have a larger prison population in absolute numbers, which is a pretty impressive achievement (I'm sure Mao would be so proud of us), even if we aren't quite as execution happy as the Chinese (yet!). And of course, we're now world famous for waging extraordinarily expensive yet utterly pointless wars for completely illegitimate reasons, resulting in between 100,000 to a million (depending on which study is correct) deaths in Iraq alone.
I will say that our free market kleptocrats and the political lackeys they foist upon us have a ways to go to catch up with Stalin and their ilk in the bodycount department. But give them time. A few more decades of melamine-contaminated milk, deadly prescription drugs marketed on the basis of fraudulent test results, support for brutal dictators across the globe, health insurance rescissions and so forth and our domestic kleptocracy could certainly give the lesser foreign tyrants a run for their money in the slaughter department.
And still not get the trains to run on time.
some types of enterprises, like building airplanes, are inherently more efficient at large scale
Perhaps. But there's no reason why a single entity has to be ginormous in order to achieve the efficiencies of scale. There's no reason why multiple corporations couldn't pool their resources in the same way individuals pool their resources in order to form corporations in the first place.
I don't see why the non-parasitic sectors, like software, aircraft, industrial machinery, and so on, should be blasted by government because of the malfeasance of financiers
Except all of those sectors are just as parasitic, even if they're smaller. The software industry receives tens of billions of dollars a year from the government. What, you think government PC's get Windows installed for free? Who enforces copyright, and runs the court system sue-happy corporations use to enforce their patents? How much do you think the big aircraft makers haul in every year from their government contracts?
Corporations need to be kept small enough to drown in a bathtub when they step out of line.
Oh, for *uck's sake. Did you know that the USSR had a negative GDP?
And what year would that be in, Einstein?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Soviet_Union_GDP.gif
The non-free market we had allowed banks substantial freedom to make loans, while pressuring them to make a bunch of loans to poor credit risks.
More BS, but at least you're consistent. Was the government "pressuring" these poor independent lenders like Countrywide and Ameriquest - who were responsible for over half of the subprime loans now going tits up - into making exotic loans on overpriced properties in the Oort Clouds of suburbia, and then forcing them to bundle those loans up into fraudulently-graded tranches and sell them off in the mortgage securitization market?
No.
In fact, the only loans the government kinda-sorta forced banks to issue were those in limited geographic areas covered by the Community Reinvestment Act. Those CRA loans are typically far lower in value than most of the subprime loans currently going bad, they were issued on more conservative terms, and lo and behold they're defaulting at lower rates than non-CRA loans.
In other words, we'd have been better off if the government had forced lenders to only issue loans covered by the CRA. But that would be all communist or socialist or something.
During the peak of the mortgage bubble I was receiving well over a dozen solicitations a week, in e-mail, telemarketing calls and direct mailings. A friend of mine received a mortgage offer for her dog, who was dead. The government didn't kill her dog, and it didn't force some flaky lender to market its scam loans to her dead pet. Their own rapacious greed did that.
A free market would let companies make any loans they want, to anyone they want, but would not bail out anyone for any reason.
I'm sorry, but what did the bailout have to do with the crash? The crash came before the bailout.
Why don't all of you libertarian geniuses, who seem to have trouble with basic concepts like cause and effect, move to some libertarian wonderland like Somalia or Haiti, where the government is virtually non-existent and chaos reigns supreme. They're OK places to be if you're already rich and can afford your own little army I suppose, but you don't see many factories, universities or other hallmarks of advanced civilization popping up there.
Yeah, that's a great point.
It's also important to keep in mind that a corporation is just a vehicle to generate money right now for these nuts. So the guys running Enron or AIG could give a flip if their actions cause the company to crash and burn a year or two down the road, so long as they can extract millions (or billions) out of the scam before the sh*t hits the fan.
Countrywide is a great example. Orange Ooompa Loompa Angelo Mozillo over at Countrywide cashed out to the tune of $500 million while running what amounted to an enormous Ponzi scheme straight into the dirt. Investors in Contrywide and its spin-off IndyMac have been left holding a flaming bag of poo, as have the taxpayers, who now have to bail out Mozillo's mess.
But what does he care? He made his hundreds of millions - money he would have never made from honest work. If Countrywide had been a legitimate company he might have made $100 million or so over the course of a lifetime, tops. In laissez-faire bizarro world, it's actually a lot more profitable to run an enormous scam and destroy corporations and capital left and right.
Libertarian *uckwads like you have the infuriating habit of comparing everything but Laissez-faire capitalism to authoritarian command economies.
That's as concise a summary as I've seen. They really are the mirror image of communist lunatics like Lenin. Although I must say, the way the free market halfwits crashed the world's largest economy only 20 years or so after being handed partial control, authoritarian command economies certainly seem to work better than laissez-faire free for alls.
Both wind up with psychopaths running things after a certain amount of time (Stalin, Mao, the lunatics at Enron, AIG, Citibank, etc.). But at least the command economies can keep the trains running on time.
The really odd thing about laissez-faire cluster*ucks is how much they behave like command economies. In a command economy you wind up with political psychopaths in charge who enforce groupthink thru ideological propaganda. The ideology influences policy and behavior, so you wind up with insanity like the Soviet government refusing to fund the study of genetics because it clashed with the Party line. Or the insanity of Mao's great leap forward, which was anything but. Irrefutable evidence which contradicts the ideology is simply ignored or shouted down by propaganda-baked fanatics. So the society as a whole follows utterly irrational beliefs right off a cliff.
In a laissez-faire economy you wind up with a few wealthy psychopaths - a kleptocracy - in charge of the economy and government. Command authority isn't vested in a single individual, but that doesn't seem to matter much. If anything, it's worse - you wind up with an uncoordinated gang of crazed thieves in charge, stealing everything that isn't nailed down, destroying the economy in the process. They use propaganda to incite bigots, psychotics and religious fanatics to vote against their own best social and economic interests, in order to seize and maintain control of the government and prevent it from stopping their psychopathic rampage (indeed, government is now feeding their rampage - witness the recent multi-trillion dollar "bailout" of Wall Street).
It's something like having a cabal comprised of folks like Jeffery Dahmer, David Berkowitz, and Charles Manson running the country. Their primary interest isn't in running anything - they're only invested in keeping anything from interrupting their rampage, as (in this case) they steal everything in sight. These psychopaths are so greed-crazed, they don't even seem to realize they're destroying the very system they've been stealing from. They're parasites that are killing their host. The whackjobs running Enron are a textbook example. And just as in command economies, the society as a whole follows these nuts right over a cliff (witness the housing boom and bust).
The solution seems to be having a government structured in such a way that it simply doesn't allow psychopaths to gain enough power - political or economic - to have any substantial influence over either the government or the economy. So companies the size of AIG or Citibank would automatically be broken up, or taxed so heavily they'd be better off broken up. Extreme concentrations of wealth would be taxed out of existence, and exotic "investment" vehicles would be taxed and treated like what they really are - gambling. Government itself would be structured in such a way that no single position, or even large group of positions, would have enough power to substantially alter either the structure of the government or its relationship to the economy - particularly when it comes to allowing any individual or corporation to become too powerful.
Mod this up!
And the "coverage" that folks without traditional healthcare have access to is pretty awful - like free clinics with hours-long waits. Hard to go there for your "healthcare" if you have to work.
The 2004 Battlestar Galactica has already shown Cylons running into combat. It was a pretty chilling sight.
Wow, you actually think AIG's customers got screwed over?
If the government hadn't stepped in with a whopping $150 billion taxpayer dollars to bail AIG out, their customers would be up a creek without insurance, because their insurer would have gone bankrupt. So no, AIG's customers haven't been screwed over (yet!), but the taxpayers sure have.
Nobody knows just how enormous the claims might be in the wake of a major nuclear disaster, but they could easily overwhelm the reserves of a private insurer. Which is why no private insurer will cover a nuclear power plant in the US. Instead, there's a quasi-private pool of about $10 billion to cover all the plants in the country. Once that's exhausted - which might not take long in the wake of a serious incident - the taxpayers will be on the hook for the rest. Which is BS.
If these things can't get private insurance backed by adequate reserves - reserves capable of covering not only the plants themselves but also the waste they generate - they shouldn't be built.
Good luck with the insurance policy. As AIG shows, what makes anybody think the insurance company will have the money - or even be around - in 60 years to cover the cost of dismantling a reactor?
The only way you can get nuclear power to pan out financially is if you have the government own and run all the reactors on what amounts to a non-profit basis (as in France, with EDF, which is something like 80% government-owned). You can't even get private insurance for the things (and I wouldn't trust private insurers to pay out in the event of a major incident, anyhow).
Even in France, EDF isn't in great financial shape. They don't have enough money to support their pension obligations and all decommissioning expenses, although presumably the French government has made enough money off EDF over the years they could pick up some of that tab and still ultimately leave taxpayers in the black.
The reality is, fission power never has and never will make much financial sense. When France went nuclear in the post WWII era there weren't any viable alternatives for them, but clearly that's no longer the case today for many nations, the United States included.
I was worried about what might happen when the mice want to puree my brain in an attempt to get at the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything. It's reassuring to know that soon an artificial brain actually will be available to replace mine. I'll be able to ask for tea and everything!
Every last pin is now on fire.
The first IBM PC wasn't exactly budget equipment. With a monitor and a floppy drive, the 5150 cost a whopping $3,000. For the money they charged, they could have easily afforded to slap a 68000 in that thing.
I recall reading once, years ago, that IBM considered using the 68000 but ended up going with Intel's 8088 because Motorola couldn't guarantee delivery of the quantity of processors IBM thought they needed.
By the time the Mac / Atari ST / Amiga / Sinclair QL hit the market, volume was no longer an issue for Motorola.
According to the Wikipedia article on the 5150, IBM's designers had also considered using the IBM 801 processor, an early RISC design far more powerful than the 8086/8088. They ended up going with the 8088 in part because of IBM's experience using it in their $10,000 Datamaster business computer (which ironically only hit the market a month or so before the far less expensive PC - can you say "dead on arrival"?).