If North Korea is being rational, and is doing this to have deterrent to invasion, the country they're trying to deter from invading is China.
There is an informal logical falacy I call the "argumentum ad stultum", that is, "argument from stupidity". It applies to any argument that uses as an explicit or implicit premise "no one would ever do something that stupid." All such arguments are falacious, because it is a matter of empirical fact that people will and do behave with an astonishing degree of stupidity and irrationality every single day.
We all know that there are people out there who believe the Bible or the Koran are infallibly true, and that humans and dinosaurs shared the Earth. We know that the cleverly told just-so stories of Marx and Freud have been drivers of huge intellectual, political and cultural movements. We know that most people hate to have their assumptions or beliefs challenged in any way. And we know that these irrational, stupid behaviours know no boundaries of race or creed.
So any argument regarding the rationality of the North Koreans is simply irrelevant. The leadership of North Korea is living in a delusional bubble, to the extent that they have built a closed society that is subject to widespread starvation rather than open their own delusions of power and supremacy to external challenge.
The leadership of North Korea is just as much a bunch of monkeys as Bush, Cheney et al, and is doing much the same thing as the Americans were doing when undertaking some of their less-rational policiy initiatives in the past few years: thumping their chests and howling to show what a bunch of tough bastards they are. The desire to do this is universal amongst humans, and the only check against it is to have well-balanced antagonisitc powers that prevent anyone from ever getting a significant upper hand, because as soon as they do we find ourselves ona slippery slope to North Korea, the old Soviet Union, or what-have-you. That such situations are worse for almost everyone by any rational measure makes no difference to those who have the power, because they are fulfilling the basic desires of the kind of social primate we are, and rationality be damned.
The term can be applied to anything which decays with time, though radioactive decay would probably give the most attractive decay curve.
You get the same curve from anything that has a probability of decay that is independent of time.
If the probability of decay, destruction or loss for an individual atom is L per unit time, then for N atoms the rate of change of N is:
dN/dt = -L*N
and integrating gives N = No*exp(-L*t) where No is the number of atoms at some arbitrary t=0.
So for any situation where you have a constant decay probability you will get the same curve. For methane in the Martian atmosphere the rate of decay is pretty much constant due to solar ultra-violet radiation breaking up the molecules. Therefore, if there were no source the amount of methane in the atmosphere would drop exponentially.
And what is the probability of achieving those r-values by chance? If you do not know that, you have no basis other than faith for any belief about its significance.
The state of statisitical practice in the social sciences is shameful. To simply say that an r-value of "0.71-0.82" is "high" is completely and utterly meaningless. I have seen experiments where an r-value of 0.98 is "low" and 0.998 is "high". The meaning of "low" and "high" for r is entirely dependent on the distributions of the underlying data, which is why a) no one ever gives a p-value for it and b) it is a terrible measure of association that ought never to be used.
If a reseacher publishes an analysis that does not include a p-value (extra credit for Bonforoni correction) the paper is not worth reading and the author ought to be publically laughed at and/or sent off to a political re-education camp until they learn that probability is meaningful and everything else is just wanking.
Ergo, these guys have done an inadequate analysis, and they have further made an assumption of homogeneity that is according to their own conclusions incorrect. That is, they claim that "all students over-report equally" when it comes to academic scores, and they then claim that their study population is inhomogenous with respect to one of the variables measured. This purported difference trivially invalidates their use of a measure of association that assumes all students over-report equally.
What they are saying is, "If we assume all students over-report equally, we find a difference between them."
Ergo, perhaps the assumption of equal over-reporting is false, and they have found this because they have sliced the population in a manner that is different from previous studies on self-reported grades. Every large population contains many significantly different sub-populations. Maybe they have found one. This is as legitimate a conclusion as any other, and in particular, perhaps gamers have a better ability to evaluate their actual performance due to the feedback they get from playing games.
That is at least as legitimate a conclusion as any other.
However, what is happening is the quantum information (in this case, the spin state) of the matter has been instantly transported.
False.
All transmission effects in quantum entanglement based information transmission (QEBIT)--commonly and misleadingly called "quantum teleportation" for some strange reason--happen at the boring old speed of light.
There are aspects of quantum entanglement that are nonlocal, but all actual information (stuff we can use, stuff that has operational meaning) is transported via whatever hunks of matter or energy that are carried at perfectly finite speed along the transmission channel.
The important thing to remember about QEBIT is that if you stick you hand in between the source and the reciever, you will get a hole burned in it by the perfectly ordinary particle beam that is necessary to actually get the information from A to B. The information is entangled in the physical carrier particles in such a way that it cannot be eavesdropped upon disturbing it, but in other respects it is no different than encoding information by modulating a carrier wave.
The National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration still has this headline on their front page:
All weather organizations everywhere are incredibly biased toward reporting their predictions rather than reality, as if their predictions were either newsworthy or remotely accurate.
There was a case in Winnipeg a few years ago where a major storm hit the city and yet Environment Canada continued to report "possibility of snow flurries" twelve hours after the whole city had shut down due to heavy snowfall. The idiot from the local weather office was interviewed on local TV and appeared to simply not understand the question, "Why did you keep reporting the possibility of light snowfall for half a day after there was over 30 cm of snow on the ground?" They instead talked about how storms sometimes change course unexpectedly. I have never seen such a stupid person on television, and that's including the newscasters who report every interesting weather event as evidence of global climate change.
Weather prediction and climate prediction don't have much in common with each other, however. It is a fact that doubling the C02 concentration in the atmosphere changes the tropospheric heat flux by about 4 W/m**2 on a total mean insolation of 240 W/m**2 at the top of the troposphere. Changing the effective insolation by almost 2% is a very large perturbation, and while no one knows what the effects will be in detail, the claim that there will not be an effect is equivalent to claiming that insulating my roof will have no effect on the energy balance in my home. That change may appear in the form of differing temperatures, or in other effects, but to claim that it is possible to hit the system with such a large perturbation and have no effect whatsoever, which is what climate-change-deniers say, is simply not on.
It sounds like someone's cherry picking stats to make it sound bigger than it is.
This isn't cherry picking. The point is that the developed world has a resource usage pattern that is globally unsustainable. As the largest developed country in the world the U.S. is actually in a position to do something about this, and in fact actually are doing something about it at the state and local level, although the federal government leaves something to be desired in this regard.
There are more wasteful countries in the developed world, notably your smug neighbour to the north: Canadians are one of the few peoples on Earth who are even more wasteful than Americans, and our only saving grace is that there are so few of us in such a large amount of empty space that we don't in aggregate have such a large impact on the plant. Conversely, things don't improve so much globally when we clean up our act. But when America goes green, the weight of 5% of the world's population comes off the planet's shoulders.
There was some guy once who said something about treating others with the same love you give to yourself, and another guy around the same time who said something about not doing to other people what you do not want them to do to you. "Using up the world's non-renewable resources and treating the planet as our personal garbage can" is probably something that most of us would rather not see other people doing, and so it probably behooves us to not do so ourselves.
The advantages of being high up are......negligable. Realistically, you can only get a few kilometers up, unless you're proposing to build it in the Himalayas. It is well known from other mass-driver studies that the aerodynamic advantage of hitting 80 bar at Mach 23 are no big improvement over hitting 100 bar at Mach 23.
The reason why I mentioned pointing it up is that there is a big advantage to passing through the atmosphere as quickly as possible. Firing a capsule out normal to the local vertical will result in minutes being spent in getting to the top of the atmosphere, by which time you will have lost most of the initial velocity, to say nothing of broken all the windows for kilometers around. If you do the math, it takes about 13 seconds to travel 100 km at Mach 23 (just under 8 km/s). So a 30 degree incline nearly doubles that (you get some benefit from the curvature of the Earth) and things get rapidly worse from there on.
As the whole point of my calculation was to show how big the thing would have to be to keep the acceleration below 10 g there is no way a 30 degree incline is going to happen--you've have to have a curve so long that the top of it really would be above a significant fraction of the atmosphere.
Because we all know there's no way a bunch of bearded thugs could POSSIBLY take down a couple of 110 story buildings, especially in the heart of New York City.
Well, sure they could get lucky and do it once, half a decade ago. But could they do it again?
I mean, I guess there is some guy cowering in a cave half a world away who likes to think he's all that, but c'mon. No one with an ounce of sense is going to live in fear from a guy like that. He and his have to get incredibly lucky to do any damage, and again, no one with any sense would be willing to fundamentally alter their behaviour or give up their freedoms in the face of such a silly little man.
I have children, and like any parent who isn't a base coward, more than anything else I want my children to grow up free. If I have to allow my risk of death to increase an amount equal to driving a few hundred kilometers extra each year, I'm more than willing to do it, as I am sure all liberty-loving people are everywhere.
The speed of sound at sea level is 330 m/s, and a = v*2/r, so at 23*330 = 7590 m/s you would need r ~ 600 km to get a under 10 g.
Of course, there's going to be a bit of bump when the capsule hits the atmosphere, and there's also the bit of a trick about getting the thing oriented so the capsule if flung upward...
As a satelite launcher this sounds like a great technology, although I'm not sure who would be "targeting" it or for what purpose...advertisers, maybe? Painting thier logos on it or something? Or some guy hiding in a cave someplace that we're supposed to be all afear'd of?
I have have one or two ideas struggling to explain it, but nothing fully formed, nothing providing so much as a 50% explanation,
The left fails in talk radio because everyone who is remotely liberal is already listening to NPR, and has been from an early age. NPR is everything the left is looking for: broadminded, skeptical, eclectic. No startup can compete with that.
To be good manager is, among other things, to be a good diplomat.
Back in my management days I used to describe my primary job role as "to abase myself". When senior management had a problem I would take all the abuse, and protect my team from it (and then pass on the message more gently but also more effectively, and get the problem solved.) When someone on my team had a problem I was there for them to bitch as as well, running the whole process in reverse.
Which is pretty much the role of a diplomat, indeed.
I'm just astounded that there are people who think Diebold would 1) fix an election and risk bringing down the whole company, 2) find employees willing to make the code changes and risk jail, 3) find people willing install the changes and risk jail, 4) be able to do it on a large enough scale to make a difference, and 4) be able to keep the entire conspiracy totally silent.
You got modded funny for a reason.
"I'm astounded that people think the NAZIs would 1) fix an election and risk bringing down the whole party, 2) find police officers willing to arrest Communists on clearly trumped-up evidence, 3) find courts willing to convict said Communists 4) be able to do it all under the glare of national media 4)(again) be able to keep the entire conspiracy totally silent."
I'm NOT intending to say that Diebold are about to start rounding up all the Jews--although to be honest I think most people of all political stripes are closer to that kind of behaviour than we'd like to admit--but rather that the unwillingness of ordinary people to believe that the Powers That Be would "ever do such a thing" has always been a major weakness in democratic systems. Good democacies and democratic republics have always recognized that their continued existence depends on a balance of antagonisitic powers, and that the system needs to be designed to make fraud and malfeasence as difficult as possible.
Anyone familiar with human history will be aware that people do exactly the kind of things you talk about all the time. Companies lie about drug side-effects, for example (Vioxx), despite the obvious risks. People are stupid, managers doubly so, and never think they are going to get caught.
As others in this thread have pointed out, computers are very good at making massive, precise, pre-programmed changes while maintaining certain types of constraint. Anyone who has ever writtten a one-line Perl script to massively change a document will appreciate what I'm talking about, and anyone who says, "Elections can be stolen under paper ballots too" has clearly never written a line of code in their life. Electronic voting makes easy what was once hard--why set fire to the Riechstag when you can change a few lines of code?
As such, decentralized paper ballot counting is by far the best way to go. In Canada we have scrutineers from each party at polling stations, and paper ballots with electronic readers of one form or another. I leave the polling place knowing that my vote has already been counted by the reader, and that there will be spot-check counts on paper ballots to ensure the reading machine has not been tampered with. It's really not that hard to do.
Anybody that relies on VoIP service over a cable connection is insane.
And anyone who relies on Vonage, specifically, for that service are even more insane, or have yet to experience what passes for customer "service" at Vonage.
It's pretty funny seeing an article complaining that someone is lieing about Vonage, given the way Vonage gives false information about number portability, and then refuses to refund your money and charges you a cancellation fee when it turns out that despite what their website said when you checked your old number, they can only give you a local number for a city a hundred miles away.
I successfully disputed the cancellation fee through my credit card company, but the sign-up fee is a lost cause--it makes me wish I'd just kept their hardware, but that would be dishonest.
So far, from the opinions I have gathered, being required to show ID and other papers arbitrarily demanded by authorities ranks pretty highly.
This is why the flap about illegal immigration in the U.S. is so insidious. The only way to "secure the border" is to require all people on U.S. soil to carry ID all the time. Otherwise the border becomes a single point of failure, and once you're in you can get away with anything because in a free country everything that is not forbidden is permitted.
In the old Soviet Union everything that was not permited was forbidden, leaving people in a situation where they had to ask permission to do almost anything. I worked with a Soviet Georgian in the early '90's whom at first didn't understand that there was no form you had to fill out to make a long distance phone call. In the Soviet lab he'd worked in previously the procedure for making a long distance call was to file for permission, specifying who you were going to call and why, and then you were allowed access to the phone when (if) permission was granted.
String theory is a scientific theory that has neither been proved nor disproved to my knowledge.
What makes a theory scientific or not?
Falsifiability is only one criterion. Science is a communal activity, and to a far greater extent what is taken to be "scientific" is what is approved by the community. The community of science has a set of self-perpetuating rules such that we hope our communal sense of where the truth lies never gets too far out of sync with reality.
By the minimal standard of falsifiability string theory passes, just--there are experiments that can at least be imagined that would test the predictions of the large family of equations that string theory now encompasses. But it is a perfectly legitimate point that continuing to invest in a failed family of theories in perpetuity at some point becomes a faith-based initiative, and that divergent approaches should be more welcomed.
Insofar as aesthetics have played a role in physics, they have done so after the fact. The principles that guided most of the major developments in 20th century physics were consistency constraints with quite simple justifications. Most famously, Dirac's insistence on a second-order wave equation that treated space and time symmetrically gave us the foundations for relativistic quantum mechanics. This was not an arbitrary or aesthetic constraint, but a logical inference from empirical fact and known relativistic symmetries.
What string theorists are doing is quite different, and no amount of invoking Einstein or Dirac can hide that. If they want to be taken seriously they need to come up with "aesthetic" principles--if they want to call them that--that uniquely constrain their equations, perhaps up to a constant of integration (we gave Einstein that, after all.)
And until then, the measure of how "scientific" string theory is can be answered by a single question: How many string theorists are spending the majority of their time trying to prove that no string theory can ever describe the universe that we actually live in? If the answer to this question is: few or none, then the string theory community is not a scientific community, but merely a mutual admiration society.
For what it's worth (and I imagine it's worth a lot to slashdot readers), my experiences with online dating have always been best with okcupid.
I've found the free sites generally better than the pay sites, too. Never met anyone from okcupid, but I met my current g/f on PlentyOfFish, and met a previous g/f there as well.
In about three years of online dating I've observed that:
1) Almost everyone lies, generally about age, appearance and relationship history. Lieing about appearance is the one that I haven't been able to make sense of. I've observed it myself in women, and according to many women I've dated lots of men do it too. One women described a guy she met as being, relative to his online picture, like the "before and after" of some terrible and ravaging disease. Lieing is a showstopper for me, so I have tended to drop a lot of women gently after a first meeting.
2) Even on the really skanky sites, women are either looking for a relationship or are really messed up. I've never dated anyone from such sites, but poked around out of curiousity. Really.
3) Free sites are better than pay sites. Lavalife is the best pay site I've used.
4) Different sites have different geographic representations. I live in a small town, and some sites have far more women in my area than others. I have no idea why.
5) By far the best strategy is to "meet early, meet often." After a couple of e-mail exchanges I ask if she wants to meet for coffee somewhere. If not, that's the end of it--life is too short to waste time on electronic interaction when five minutes face-to-face will tell you more than five months online.
Overall, online dating is a very good thing if people go into with reasonable expectations and treat it as an introduction service rather than a magic filter that will find them "the One" without any hard relationship-building work on their part.
I would go even further than this in disagreeing with the GP's claim that "First off, more breakthroughs than ever are being made these days."
Almost all innovation in the 20th century happened in the first half, with the second half being primarily a working out of the technical details and integration into everyday life.
My grandmother was born in 1886 and died in 1980. She was born into a "a world lit only by fire", just four years after Edison's first commerical power plant. She lived to see ubiquitous telephony, the mass-produced automobile, powered flight, radio, television, nuclear power, supersonic flight, manned space travel and the early exploration of the solar system.
By the time she was my age (mid-40's) there were scheduled commerical flights on a mode of transportation that did not exist when she was born (aircraft) and scheduled commerical programmes using a mode of communication that did not exist when she was born (radio).
In contrast, every major technology that I currently use had been invented when I was born. Microchips were patented in the late 50's and lasers about the same time. The silicon transistor, which is the basis for so much we do, had been developed even earlier.
The pace of fundamental technological change has become so small as to be negligable compared to early 20th century levels. What we are doing now is working out how to use and combine the technologies of the past century. This naturally produces many more small developments and far fewer large ones, and perhaps that is part of the reason why "breakthrough" has become a devalued term. By comparsion to the first half the century just past, there simply aren't any breakthroughs to be had.
From the summary: The studies show that minor surgery is possible even during long-term inhabitation of space."
I love this kind of marketing-speak. People are told, "X is possible" and they assume it means "X is routine." What it actually means is, "Under the most carefully controlled conditions we tried X and didn't fail completely."
Just think of all the times marketing has pushed for early release of an insufficiently tested app and you'll get the picture.
This is an interesting and important step forward in proving that zero-g surgery is not impossible, but it is a long way from proving that zero-g surgery will ever be possible in most cases of interest.
For example, removal of a benign tumour could wait until return to Earth in most cases. It remains to be seen if there is any significant overlap in a) surgeries that can be done in zero-g and b) surgeries that need to be done in zero-g. Although I suspect most laproscopic procedures will be fairly easily adapted to zero-g, it just remains to be seen.
It all depends on which agenda they're pushing, or who's funding them.
Here's a lesson in elementary logic:
A->B does not mean B->A.
If we know who is funding a work, we can often predict its conclusions. It does not follow that if we know the conclusion of a work, we can predict who is funding it.
While it is true that climate change is highly politicized, it is also true that there are plenty of honest scientists out there trying to find the truth. It is possible to listen to them and gain some understanding of what is going on, but you have to first abandon a lot of reassuring certainties.
Everyone knows that there is getting on for twice as much CO2 in the atmosphere today as there was 200 years ago.
Everyone knows that CO2 is a powerful greenhouse gas, and it is a more-or-less back-of-the-envelope calculation to estimate the change in heat balance in the Earth's atmosphere due to the additional CO2.
People who would like to claim that changes in the Earth's climate are all down to solar variations are engaged in a campaign of distraction. It is probably true that solar variation has a role to play in the current changes in Earth's climate. But that changes nothing with regard to the absolutely certain fact that doubling the CO2 in the atmosphere will change the heat balance. To claim otherwise would be like saying that seasonal variations in outdoor temperature mean that the laws of physics have been suspended such that adding insulation to your house won't make any difference to the indoor temperature.
Anyone who claims that changes in CO2 content of the atmosphere can occur without any significant climate response is engaged in magical thinking.
The big open question is how the Earth's climate will respond to the changing the heat balance of the atmosphere. Because the atmosphere itself is complex, the mean air temperature could actually drop while the heat content of the atmosphere goes up due to changes in humidity. And that does not take into account potential changes in atmospheric and ocean circulation, and so on.
We do know, however, that if the changes are sufficiently large they will be extremely disruptive to our civilization. If I were paranoid about it, I would say that global warming deniers secretly hate Western civilization, and would like to see the world covered by failed states like Somalia and Afghanistan. But I will leave that kind of thinking to others.
Although there will certainly be some economic opportunities created by the Earth's response to the changes in atmospheric heat balance that are an absolutely certain consequence of doubling the CO2 content of the atmosphere, the modern economy as a whole is highly optimized for the current climate, and the changes and adaptations required for even moderate climate change have the potential to shave percentage points off economic growth. Therefore, even in relatively mild climate change scenarios, we have the potential for a decades-long world-wide recession.
Again, the more paranoid amongst us might think that climate-change deniers fundamentally hate economic prosperity and want to see humanity across the globe reduced to subsistence levels of economic activity for a generation or more. And again, I will leave that sort of thinking to others.
While your idea is good on paper, imagine how utterly crazy it would be if we all had to do that? The sheer logistics of a city with that spec is utterly insane.
Yeah, I was flying the other day and the plane had to land at every other town to refuel, and we had to change planes five times to get across the continent. No one will ever use air travel for anything practical--the logistics of linking cities by air is utterly insane, because we know that no technology ever improves due to new investment or rethinking of old ways of doing things.
"The existence of DRM abuse is no excuse for curtailing freedoms." (sec 5.1)
"As we stated in section 2 one of the serious issues in Open Source is too many licences." (sec 5.2)
With regard to the first quote, they seem to be saying that the DRM clause is restricting the freedom of companies who want to prevent buyers from owning their products. This suggests that have forgotten about whose freedom the GPL is aimed at protecting: the person who recieves the code from someone else, not the person who wrote it. By the definition of "freedom" they are using, the GPL as it stands restricts the "freedom" of companies who want to incorporate GPL'd code in their product without releasing their own source.
With regard to the second quote, this is a claim that I have only ever seen in the FUD-laced presentations of lawyers and patent agents. The number of open source licences is very, very small: there are fewer than a dozen common licenses, and the last time I counted only about fifty that are at all significant. Now compare that to the thousands or tens of thousands of closed-source licenses out there. There are amazingly few open source licenses. Indeed, if there really were hundreds of common licenses--instead of the GPLv2 plus a few other significant ones--then a new GPL version would be completely insignificant.
So their position is not even self-consistent: either there is a large number of licenses, and adding one more is a problem; or there is a small number of licenses, and adding one more is a big deal. Their second point takes the former position, their first point the latter. Neither makes for a plausible argument.
With regard to patents: if a new version of the GPL puts a spoke in the wheels of the software patent machine, more power to it.
the official languages of the conferences and workshops they run is always English.
This is generally true in the sciences, and may be a result of the ESA's scientific mandate.
It makes it easier that every word is an English word: "Pukka sushi compadre" is an English sentence. That's one reason why English has so many more words than most language: we borrow words from other languages with wild abandon (and aren't very good about giving them back.)
We can't prove that cracks that these haven't happened before, I agree, but we can prove with some pretty good evidence that the north pole hasn't gone through this amount of change recently (within a couple of hundred thousand years)
The very references you point to suggest otherwise. There is evidence from Greenland ice cores that the Earth went through periods considerably warmer than recent history in the past 10,000 years. There is also pollen data (google "paleolimnology" for references). These events occured within the past few hundred thousand years.
The claim that there is anything particularly "unprecedented" about current climate variability, including it's rapidity and it's affect on the Arctic, is simply marketing. The Earth's climate has always been highly variable, responding to a variety of external influences and internal changes, such as the current spike in atmospheric CO2 levels due to human industrial activity.
The consequences of climate variability, such as species extinction (but not apparently polar bears, thankfully, as they have survived through the warmer periods of the past) and the destruction of human societies--such as the Viking settlements in Greenland and North America--are also quite well known.
The problem with "news" is that it has to appear "new". Humans are attracted by novelty and most humans are cowards, so we are particulary attracted by novel threats. Ergo, even scientists (and certainly universities and research institutes that have an eye on public funding) put the most novel spin possible on every result.
Some people argue that we must lie this way to get attention paid to global climate change and our contribution to it. This is a mistake. A society that needs to believe falsehoods on the order of "nothing like this has ever happened before OMG it's new and scary" before it is willing to change does not deserve to survive.
In the same way that hostility from irrational, truth-hating creationists stifled healthy debate within the evolutionary community for many years, it is possible that irrational, truth-hating climate-change-deniers will cripple debate within the climatological community. That would be a shame, because it is only science that is going to get us out of this mess. And interestingly, creationists and climate-change-deniers have some remarkable similarities in their beliefs: they both believe that the Earth is far more stable than it actually is, and they both have blind faith in humanity's special place in it, as if we are immune to the forces of nature that we have helped unleash around us.
Even better, it could fund the construction of about four or five more clean, safe nuclear power plants so we can remove our dependence on power plants that produce more global warming
This may be a reasonable stopgap solution, but nuclear is not without its drawbacks, especially for the U.S., which is relatively uranium-poor.
Historically, nuclear has proven expensive, even without a full accounting of waste-disposal and mothballing costs (even assuming anyone is ever allowed to actually dispose of any nuclear waste, rather than simply keeping it in indefinite "temporary" storage on site.) Furthermore, while inherently stable designs do exist, the high energy density of the core means that small errors on the part of operators, which are certain to happen, are likely to write off the plant. What would be a messy repair in a coal-fired plant is an end-of-life-event in a nuclear plant. Expensive.
Breeder technology is relatively unproven, and even pebble-bed reactors have suffered fairly severe accidents. And the public is not yet ready to buy back in to the technological optimism that sold nuclear in the first place.
So while it's true that I'd rather have a nuclear plant next door than a coal-fired one, I'm not sure either are the best move to make in the next few decades, when a large investment in algal biodeisel seems more likely to create a sustainable energy future.
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If North Korea is being rational, and is doing this to have deterrent to invasion, the country they're trying to deter from invading is China.
There is an informal logical falacy I call the "argumentum ad stultum", that is, "argument from stupidity". It applies to any argument that uses as an explicit or implicit premise "no one would ever do something that stupid." All such arguments are falacious, because it is a matter of empirical fact that people will and do behave with an astonishing degree of stupidity and irrationality every single day.
We all know that there are people out there who believe the Bible or the Koran are infallibly true, and that humans and dinosaurs shared the Earth. We know that the cleverly told just-so stories of Marx and Freud have been drivers of huge intellectual, political and cultural movements. We know that most people hate to have their assumptions or beliefs challenged in any way. And we know that these irrational, stupid behaviours know no boundaries of race or creed.
So any argument regarding the rationality of the North Koreans is simply irrelevant. The leadership of North Korea is living in a delusional bubble, to the extent that they have built a closed society that is subject to widespread starvation rather than open their own delusions of power and supremacy to external challenge.
The leadership of North Korea is just as much a bunch of monkeys as Bush, Cheney et al, and is doing much the same thing as the Americans were doing when undertaking some of their less-rational policiy initiatives in the past few years: thumping their chests and howling to show what a bunch of tough bastards they are. The desire to do this is universal amongst humans, and the only check against it is to have well-balanced antagonisitc powers that prevent anyone from ever getting a significant upper hand, because as soon as they do we find ourselves ona slippery slope to North Korea, the old Soviet Union, or what-have-you. That such situations are worse for almost everyone by any rational measure makes no difference to those who have the power, because they are fulfilling the basic desires of the kind of social primate we are, and rationality be damned.
The term can be applied to anything which decays with time, though radioactive decay would probably give the most attractive decay curve.
You get the same curve from anything that has a probability of decay that is independent of time.
If the probability of decay, destruction or loss for an individual atom is L per unit time, then for N atoms the rate of change of N is:
dN/dt = -L*N
and integrating gives N = No*exp(-L*t) where No is the number of atoms at some arbitrary t=0.
So for any situation where you have a constant decay probability you will get the same curve. For methane in the Martian atmosphere the rate of decay is pretty much constant due to solar ultra-violet radiation breaking up the molecules. Therefore, if there were no source the amount of methane in the atmosphere would drop exponentially.
(r = 0.71-0.82)
And what is the probability of achieving those r-values by chance? If you do not know that, you have no basis other than faith for any belief about its significance.
The state of statisitical practice in the social sciences is shameful. To simply say that an r-value of "0.71-0.82" is "high" is completely and utterly meaningless. I have seen experiments where an r-value of 0.98 is "low" and 0.998 is "high". The meaning of "low" and "high" for r is entirely dependent on the distributions of the underlying data, which is why a) no one ever gives a p-value for it and b) it is a terrible measure of association that ought never to be used.
If a reseacher publishes an analysis that does not include a p-value (extra credit for Bonforoni correction) the paper is not worth reading and the author ought to be publically laughed at and/or sent off to a political re-education camp until they learn that probability is meaningful and everything else is just wanking.
Ergo, these guys have done an inadequate analysis, and they have further made an assumption of homogeneity that is according to their own conclusions incorrect. That is, they claim that "all students over-report equally" when it comes to academic scores, and they then claim that their study population is inhomogenous with respect to one of the variables measured. This purported difference trivially invalidates their use of a measure of association that assumes all students over-report equally.
What they are saying is, "If we assume all students over-report equally, we find a difference between them."
Ergo, perhaps the assumption of equal over-reporting is false, and they have found this because they have sliced the population in a manner that is different from previous studies on self-reported grades. Every large population contains many significantly different sub-populations. Maybe they have found one. This is as legitimate a conclusion as any other, and in particular, perhaps gamers have a better ability to evaluate their actual performance due to the feedback they get from playing games.
That is at least as legitimate a conclusion as any other.
However, what is happening is the quantum information (in this case, the spin state) of the matter has been instantly transported.
False.
All transmission effects in quantum entanglement based information transmission (QEBIT)--commonly and misleadingly called "quantum teleportation" for some strange reason--happen at the boring old speed of light.
There are aspects of quantum entanglement that are nonlocal, but all actual information (stuff we can use, stuff that has operational meaning) is transported via whatever hunks of matter or energy that are carried at perfectly finite speed along the transmission channel.
The important thing to remember about QEBIT is that if you stick you hand in between the source and the reciever, you will get a hole burned in it by the perfectly ordinary particle beam that is necessary to actually get the information from A to B. The information is entangled in the physical carrier particles in such a way that it cannot be eavesdropped upon disturbing it, but in other respects it is no different than encoding information by modulating a carrier wave.
Maybe one day it will be possible for American networks to do trival fact-checking using this kind of technology so they don't "accidentally" label a politician who has recently fallen out of favour as being a member of the wrong political party.
The National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration still has this headline on their front page:
All weather organizations everywhere are incredibly biased toward reporting their predictions rather than reality, as if their predictions were either newsworthy or remotely accurate.
There was a case in Winnipeg a few years ago where a major storm hit the city and yet Environment Canada continued to report "possibility of snow flurries" twelve hours after the whole city had shut down due to heavy snowfall. The idiot from the local weather office was interviewed on local TV and appeared to simply not understand the question, "Why did you keep reporting the possibility of light snowfall for half a day after there was over 30 cm of snow on the ground?" They instead talked about how storms sometimes change course unexpectedly. I have never seen such a stupid person on television, and that's including the newscasters who report every interesting weather event as evidence of global climate change.
Weather prediction and climate prediction don't have much in common with each other, however. It is a fact that doubling the C02 concentration in the atmosphere changes the tropospheric heat flux by about 4 W/m**2 on a total mean insolation of 240 W/m**2 at the top of the troposphere. Changing the effective insolation by almost 2% is a very large perturbation, and while no one knows what the effects will be in detail, the claim that there will not be an effect is equivalent to claiming that insulating my roof will have no effect on the energy balance in my home. That change may appear in the form of differing temperatures, or in other effects, but to claim that it is possible to hit the system with such a large perturbation and have no effect whatsoever, which is what climate-change-deniers say, is simply not on.
It sounds like someone's cherry picking stats to make it sound bigger than it is.
This isn't cherry picking. The point is that the developed world has a resource usage pattern that is globally unsustainable. As the largest developed country in the world the U.S. is actually in a position to do something about this, and in fact actually are doing something about it at the state and local level, although the federal government leaves something to be desired in this regard.
There are more wasteful countries in the developed world, notably your smug neighbour to the north: Canadians are one of the few peoples on Earth who are even more wasteful than Americans, and our only saving grace is that there are so few of us in such a large amount of empty space that we don't in aggregate have such a large impact on the plant. Conversely, things don't improve so much globally when we clean up our act. But when America goes green, the weight of 5% of the world's population comes off the planet's shoulders.
There was some guy once who said something about treating others with the same love you give to yourself, and another guy around the same time who said something about not doing to other people what you do not want them to do to you. "Using up the world's non-renewable resources and treating the planet as our personal garbage can" is probably something that most of us would rather not see other people doing, and so it probably behooves us to not do so ourselves.
The advantages of being high up are... ...negligable. Realistically, you can only get a few kilometers up, unless you're proposing to build it in the Himalayas. It is well known from other mass-driver studies that the aerodynamic advantage of hitting 80 bar at Mach 23 are no big improvement over hitting 100 bar at Mach 23.
The reason why I mentioned pointing it up is that there is a big advantage to passing through the atmosphere as quickly as possible. Firing a capsule out normal to the local vertical will result in minutes being spent in getting to the top of the atmosphere, by which time you will have lost most of the initial velocity, to say nothing of broken all the windows for kilometers around. If you do the math, it takes about 13 seconds to travel 100 km at Mach 23 (just under 8 km/s). So a 30 degree incline nearly doubles that (you get some benefit from the curvature of the Earth) and things get rapidly worse from there on.
As the whole point of my calculation was to show how big the thing would have to be to keep the acceleration below 10 g there is no way a 30 degree incline is going to happen--you've have to have a curve so long that the top of it really would be above a significant fraction of the atmosphere.
Because we all know there's no way a bunch of bearded thugs could POSSIBLY take down a couple of 110 story buildings, especially in the heart of New York City.
Well, sure they could get lucky and do it once, half a decade ago. But could they do it again?
I mean, I guess there is some guy cowering in a cave half a world away who likes to think he's all that, but c'mon. No one with an ounce of sense is going to live in fear from a guy like that. He and his have to get incredibly lucky to do any damage, and again, no one with any sense would be willing to fundamentally alter their behaviour or give up their freedoms in the face of such a silly little man.
I have children, and like any parent who isn't a base coward, more than anything else I want my children to grow up free. If I have to allow my risk of death to increase an amount equal to driving a few hundred kilometers extra each year, I'm more than willing to do it, as I am sure all liberty-loving people are everywhere.
I'm not going to do the math right now,
The speed of sound at sea level is 330 m/s, and a = v*2/r, so at 23*330 = 7590 m/s you would need r ~ 600 km to get a under 10 g.
Of course, there's going to be a bit of bump when the capsule hits the atmosphere, and there's also the bit of a trick about getting the thing oriented so the capsule if flung upward...
As a satelite launcher this sounds like a great technology, although I'm not sure who would be "targeting" it or for what purpose...advertisers, maybe? Painting thier logos on it or something? Or some guy hiding in a cave someplace that we're supposed to be all afear'd of?
I have have one or two ideas struggling to explain it, but nothing fully formed, nothing providing so much as a 50% explanation,
The left fails in talk radio because everyone who is remotely liberal is already listening to NPR, and has been from an early age. NPR is everything the left is looking for: broadminded, skeptical, eclectic. No startup can compete with that.
To be good manager is, among other things, to be a good diplomat.
Back in my management days I used to describe my primary job role as "to abase myself". When senior management had a problem I would take all the abuse, and protect my team from it (and then pass on the message more gently but also more effectively, and get the problem solved.) When someone on my team had a problem I was there for them to bitch as as well, running the whole process in reverse.
Which is pretty much the role of a diplomat, indeed.
I'm just astounded that there are people who think Diebold would 1) fix an election and risk bringing down the whole company, 2) find employees willing to make the code changes and risk jail, 3) find people willing install the changes and risk jail, 4) be able to do it on a large enough scale to make a difference, and 4) be able to keep the entire conspiracy totally silent.
You got modded funny for a reason.
"I'm astounded that people think the NAZIs would 1) fix an election and risk bringing down the whole party, 2) find police officers willing to arrest Communists on clearly trumped-up evidence, 3) find courts willing to convict said Communists 4) be able to do it all under the glare of national media 4)(again) be able to keep the entire conspiracy totally silent."
I'm NOT intending to say that Diebold are about to start rounding up all the Jews--although to be honest I think most people of all political stripes are closer to that kind of behaviour than we'd like to admit--but rather that the unwillingness of ordinary people to believe that the Powers That Be would "ever do such a thing" has always been a major weakness in democratic systems. Good democacies and democratic republics have always recognized that their continued existence depends on a balance of antagonisitic powers, and that the system needs to be designed to make fraud and malfeasence as difficult as possible.
Anyone familiar with human history will be aware that people do exactly the kind of things you talk about all the time. Companies lie about drug side-effects, for example (Vioxx), despite the obvious risks. People are stupid, managers doubly so, and never think they are going to get caught.
As others in this thread have pointed out, computers are very good at making massive, precise, pre-programmed changes while maintaining certain types of constraint. Anyone who has ever writtten a one-line Perl script to massively change a document will appreciate what I'm talking about, and anyone who says, "Elections can be stolen under paper ballots too" has clearly never written a line of code in their life. Electronic voting makes easy what was once hard--why set fire to the Riechstag when you can change a few lines of code?
As such, decentralized paper ballot counting is by far the best way to go. In Canada we have scrutineers from each party at polling stations, and paper ballots with electronic readers of one form or another. I leave the polling place knowing that my vote has already been counted by the reader, and that there will be spot-check counts on paper ballots to ensure the reading machine has not been tampered with. It's really not that hard to do.
Anybody that relies on VoIP service over a cable connection is insane.
And anyone who relies on Vonage, specifically, for that service are even more insane, or have yet to experience what passes for customer "service" at Vonage.
It's pretty funny seeing an article complaining that someone is lieing about Vonage, given the way Vonage gives false information about number portability, and then refuses to refund your money and charges you a cancellation fee when it turns out that despite what their website said when you checked your old number, they can only give you a local number for a city a hundred miles away.
I successfully disputed the cancellation fee through my credit card company, but the sign-up fee is a lost cause--it makes me wish I'd just kept their hardware, but that would be dishonest.
So far, from the opinions I have gathered, being required to show ID and other papers arbitrarily demanded by authorities ranks pretty highly.
This is why the flap about illegal immigration in the U.S. is so insidious. The only way to "secure the border" is to require all people on U.S. soil to carry ID all the time. Otherwise the border becomes a single point of failure, and once you're in you can get away with anything because in a free country everything that is not forbidden is permitted.
In the old Soviet Union everything that was not permited was forbidden, leaving people in a situation where they had to ask permission to do almost anything. I worked with a Soviet Georgian in the early '90's whom at first didn't understand that there was no form you had to fill out to make a long distance phone call. In the Soviet lab he'd worked in previously the procedure for making a long distance call was to file for permission, specifying who you were going to call and why, and then you were allowed access to the phone when (if) permission was granted.
This kind of routine intervention and restriction of citizen's lives is the eyes of some the only way to keep the country "safe". But others might ask: is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be bought at the price of chains and slavery?.
String theory is a scientific theory that has neither been proved nor disproved to my knowledge.
What makes a theory scientific or not?
Falsifiability is only one criterion. Science is a communal activity, and to a far greater extent what is taken to be "scientific" is what is approved by the community. The community of science has a set of self-perpetuating rules such that we hope our communal sense of where the truth lies never gets too far out of sync with reality.
By the minimal standard of falsifiability string theory passes, just--there are experiments that can at least be imagined that would test the predictions of the large family of equations that string theory now encompasses. But it is a perfectly legitimate point that continuing to invest in a failed family of theories in perpetuity at some point becomes a faith-based initiative, and that divergent approaches should be more welcomed.
Insofar as aesthetics have played a role in physics, they have done so after the fact. The principles that guided most of the major developments in 20th century physics were consistency constraints with quite simple justifications. Most famously, Dirac's insistence on a second-order wave equation that treated space and time symmetrically gave us the foundations for relativistic quantum mechanics. This was not an arbitrary or aesthetic constraint, but a logical inference from empirical fact and known relativistic symmetries.
What string theorists are doing is quite different, and no amount of invoking Einstein or Dirac can hide that. If they want to be taken seriously they need to come up with "aesthetic" principles--if they want to call them that--that uniquely constrain their equations, perhaps up to a constant of integration (we gave Einstein that, after all.)
And until then, the measure of how "scientific" string theory is can be answered by a single question: How many string theorists are spending the majority of their time trying to prove that no string theory can ever describe the universe that we actually live in? If the answer to this question is: few or none, then the string theory community is not a scientific community, but merely a mutual admiration society.
For what it's worth (and I imagine it's worth a lot to slashdot readers), my experiences with online dating have always been best with okcupid.
I've found the free sites generally better than the pay sites, too. Never met anyone from okcupid, but I met my current g/f on PlentyOfFish, and met a previous g/f there as well.
In about three years of online dating I've observed that:
1) Almost everyone lies, generally about age, appearance and relationship history. Lieing about appearance is the one that I haven't been able to make sense of. I've observed it myself in women, and according to many women I've dated lots of men do it too. One women described a guy she met as being, relative to his online picture, like the "before and after" of some terrible and ravaging disease. Lieing is a showstopper for me, so I have tended to drop a lot of women gently after a first meeting.
2) Even on the really skanky sites, women are either looking for a relationship or are really messed up. I've never dated anyone from such sites, but poked around out of curiousity. Really.
3) Free sites are better than pay sites. Lavalife is the best pay site I've used.
4) Different sites have different geographic representations. I live in a small town, and some sites have far more women in my area than others. I have no idea why.
5) By far the best strategy is to "meet early, meet often." After a couple of e-mail exchanges I ask if she wants to meet for coffee somewhere. If not, that's the end of it--life is too short to waste time on electronic interaction when five minutes face-to-face will tell you more than five months online.
Overall, online dating is a very good thing if people go into with reasonable expectations and treat it as an introduction service rather than a magic filter that will find them "the One" without any hard relationship-building work on their part.
I would go even further than this in disagreeing with the GP's claim that "First off, more breakthroughs than ever are being made these days."
Almost all innovation in the 20th century happened in the first half, with the second half being primarily a working out of the technical details and integration into everyday life.
My grandmother was born in 1886 and died in 1980. She was born into a "a world lit only by fire", just four years after Edison's first commerical power plant. She lived to see ubiquitous telephony, the mass-produced automobile, powered flight, radio, television, nuclear power, supersonic flight, manned space travel and the early exploration of the solar system.
By the time she was my age (mid-40's) there were scheduled commerical flights on a mode of transportation that did not exist when she was born (aircraft) and scheduled commerical programmes using a mode of communication that did not exist when she was born (radio).
In contrast, every major technology that I currently use had been invented when I was born. Microchips were patented in the late 50's and lasers about the same time. The silicon transistor, which is the basis for so much we do, had been developed even earlier.
The pace of fundamental technological change has become so small as to be negligable compared to early 20th century levels. What we are doing now is working out how to use and combine the technologies of the past century. This naturally produces many more small developments and far fewer large ones, and perhaps that is part of the reason why "breakthrough" has become a devalued term. By comparsion to the first half the century just past, there simply aren't any breakthroughs to be had.
From the summary: The studies show that minor surgery is possible even during long-term inhabitation of space."
I love this kind of marketing-speak. People are told, "X is possible" and they assume it means "X is routine." What it actually means is, "Under the most carefully controlled conditions we tried X and didn't fail completely."
Just think of all the times marketing has pushed for early release of an insufficiently tested app and you'll get the picture.
This is an interesting and important step forward in proving that zero-g surgery is not impossible, but it is a long way from proving that zero-g surgery will ever be possible in most cases of interest.
For example, removal of a benign tumour could wait until return to Earth in most cases. It remains to be seen if there is any significant overlap in a) surgeries that can be done in zero-g and b) surgeries that need to be done in zero-g. Although I suspect most laproscopic procedures will be fairly easily adapted to zero-g, it just remains to be seen.
It all depends on which agenda they're pushing, or who's funding them.
Here's a lesson in elementary logic:
A->B does not mean B->A.
If we know who is funding a work, we can often predict its conclusions. It does not follow that if we know the conclusion of a work, we can predict who is funding it.
While it is true that climate change is highly politicized, it is also true that there are plenty of honest scientists out there trying to find the truth. It is possible to listen to them and gain some understanding of what is going on, but you have to first abandon a lot of reassuring certainties.
Everyone knows that there is getting on for twice as much CO2 in the atmosphere today as there was 200 years ago.
Everyone knows that CO2 is a powerful greenhouse gas, and it is a more-or-less back-of-the-envelope calculation to estimate the change in heat balance in the Earth's atmosphere due to the additional CO2.
People who would like to claim that changes in the Earth's climate are all down to solar variations are engaged in a campaign of distraction. It is probably true that solar variation has a role to play in the current changes in Earth's climate. But that changes nothing with regard to the absolutely certain fact that doubling the CO2 in the atmosphere will change the heat balance. To claim otherwise would be like saying that seasonal variations in outdoor temperature mean that the laws of physics have been suspended such that adding insulation to your house won't make any difference to the indoor temperature.
Anyone who claims that changes in CO2 content of the atmosphere can occur without any significant climate response is engaged in magical thinking.
The big open question is how the Earth's climate will respond to the changing the heat balance of the atmosphere. Because the atmosphere itself is complex, the mean air temperature could actually drop while the heat content of the atmosphere goes up due to changes in humidity. And that does not take into account potential changes in atmospheric and ocean circulation, and so on.
We do know, however, that if the changes are sufficiently large they will be extremely disruptive to our civilization. If I were paranoid about it, I would say that global warming deniers secretly hate Western civilization, and would like to see the world covered by failed states like Somalia and Afghanistan. But I will leave that kind of thinking to others.
Although there will certainly be some economic opportunities created by the Earth's response to the changes in atmospheric heat balance that are an absolutely certain consequence of doubling the CO2 content of the atmosphere, the modern economy as a whole is highly optimized for the current climate, and the changes and adaptations required for even moderate climate change have the potential to shave percentage points off economic growth. Therefore, even in relatively mild climate change scenarios, we have the potential for a decades-long world-wide recession.
Again, the more paranoid amongst us might think that climate-change deniers fundamentally hate economic prosperity and want to see humanity across the globe reduced to subsistence levels of economic activity for a generation or more. And again, I will leave that sort of thinking to others.
While your idea is good on paper, imagine how utterly crazy it would be if we all had to do that? The sheer logistics of a city with that spec is utterly insane.
Yeah, I was flying the other day and the plane had to land at every other town to refuel, and we had to change planes five times to get across the continent. No one will ever use air travel for anything practical--the logistics of linking cities by air is utterly insane, because we know that no technology ever improves due to new investment or rethinking of old ways of doing things.
Yours truly, from 1932.
From the position statement:
"The existence of DRM abuse is no excuse for curtailing freedoms." (sec 5.1)
"As we stated in section 2 one of the serious issues in Open Source is too many licences." (sec 5.2)
With regard to the first quote, they seem to be saying that the DRM clause is restricting the freedom of companies who want to prevent buyers from owning their products. This suggests that have forgotten about whose freedom the GPL is aimed at protecting: the person who recieves the code from someone else, not the person who wrote it. By the definition of "freedom" they are using, the GPL as it stands restricts the "freedom" of companies who want to incorporate GPL'd code in their product without releasing their own source.
With regard to the second quote, this is a claim that I have only ever seen in the FUD-laced presentations of lawyers and patent agents. The number of open source licences is very, very small: there are fewer than a dozen common licenses, and the last time I counted only about fifty that are at all significant. Now compare that to the thousands or tens of thousands of closed-source licenses out there. There are amazingly few open source licenses. Indeed, if there really were hundreds of common licenses--instead of the GPLv2 plus a few other significant ones--then a new GPL version would be completely insignificant.
So their position is not even self-consistent: either there is a large number of licenses, and adding one more is a problem; or there is a small number of licenses, and adding one more is a big deal. Their second point takes the former position, their first point the latter. Neither makes for a plausible argument.
With regard to patents: if a new version of the GPL puts a spoke in the wheels of the software patent machine, more power to it.
the official languages of the conferences and workshops they run is always English.
This is generally true in the sciences, and may be a result of the ESA's scientific mandate.
It makes it easier that every word is an English word: "Pukka sushi compadre" is an English sentence. That's one reason why English has so many more words than most language: we borrow words from other languages with wild abandon (and aren't very good about giving them back.)
We can't prove that cracks that these haven't happened before, I agree, but we can prove with some pretty good evidence that the north pole hasn't gone through this amount of change recently (within a couple of hundred thousand years)
The very references you point to suggest otherwise. There is evidence from Greenland ice cores that the Earth went through periods considerably warmer than recent history in the past 10,000 years. There is also pollen data (google "paleolimnology" for references). These events occured within the past few hundred thousand years.
The claim that there is anything particularly "unprecedented" about current climate variability, including it's rapidity and it's affect on the Arctic, is simply marketing. The Earth's climate has always been highly variable, responding to a variety of external influences and internal changes, such as the current spike in atmospheric CO2 levels due to human industrial activity.
The consequences of climate variability, such as species extinction (but not apparently polar bears, thankfully, as they have survived through the warmer periods of the past) and the destruction of human societies--such as the Viking settlements in Greenland and North America--are also quite well known.
The problem with "news" is that it has to appear "new". Humans are attracted by novelty and most humans are cowards, so we are particulary attracted by novel threats. Ergo, even scientists (and certainly universities and research institutes that have an eye on public funding) put the most novel spin possible on every result.
Some people argue that we must lie this way to get attention paid to global climate change and our contribution to it. This is a mistake. A society that needs to believe falsehoods on the order of "nothing like this has ever happened before OMG it's new and scary" before it is willing to change does not deserve to survive.
In the same way that hostility from irrational, truth-hating creationists stifled healthy debate within the evolutionary community for many years, it is possible that irrational, truth-hating climate-change-deniers will cripple debate within the climatological community. That would be a shame, because it is only science that is going to get us out of this mess. And interestingly, creationists and climate-change-deniers have some remarkable similarities in their beliefs: they both believe that the Earth is far more stable than it actually is, and they both have blind faith in humanity's special place in it, as if we are immune to the forces of nature that we have helped unleash around us.
Even better, it could fund the construction of about four or five more clean, safe nuclear power plants so we can remove our dependence on power plants that produce more global warming
This may be a reasonable stopgap solution, but nuclear is not without its drawbacks, especially for the U.S., which is relatively uranium-poor.
Historically, nuclear has proven expensive, even without a full accounting of waste-disposal and mothballing costs (even assuming anyone is ever allowed to actually dispose of any nuclear waste, rather than simply keeping it in indefinite "temporary" storage on site.) Furthermore, while inherently stable designs do exist, the high energy density of the core means that small errors on the part of operators, which are certain to happen, are likely to write off the plant. What would be a messy repair in a coal-fired plant is an end-of-life-event in a nuclear plant. Expensive.
Breeder technology is relatively unproven, and even pebble-bed reactors have suffered fairly severe accidents. And the public is not yet ready to buy back in to the technological optimism that sold nuclear in the first place.
So while it's true that I'd rather have a nuclear plant next door than a coal-fired one, I'm not sure either are the best move to make in the next few decades, when a large investment in algal biodeisel seems more likely to create a sustainable energy future.