Does the report give any basis for this claim? There are politics on all sides of this issue, because there is nothing better than a crisis to give power-hungry bastards like Al Gore and George W. Bush the excuse to enhance their position. The only differentiator is their crisis of choice. The debate about what to do about anthropogenic climate change is at real risk of being lost in the noise made by anti-scientific hysterics on both sides.
I raise the question of tropical storm intensity particuarly because there are some fairly strong claims by some very respectable scientists who are tropical storm experts that there is no evidence for nor expectation of increased tropical storm intensity:
All previous and current research in the area of hurricane variability has shown no reliable, long-term trend up in the frequency or intensity of tropical cyclones, either in the Atlantic or any other basin. The IPCC assessments in 1995 and 2001 also concluded that there was no global warming signal found in the hurricane record.
Moreover, the evidence is quite strong and supported by the most recent credible studies that any impact in the future from global warming upon hurricane will likely be quite small. The latest results from the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (Knutson and Tuleya, Journal of Climate, 2004) suggest that by around 2080, hurricanes may have winds and rainfall about 5% more intense than today.
I'm getting this from the better part of a decade working professionally as an interface between academics and developers in a variety of startup companies. I'm an ex-academic myself, and know the size of the gap between the academic and commercial mindsets because I've had to cross it.
My comment is an overstatement (this is/. after all, and you don't get modded up without a bit of theatrical embellishment) but I stand by the gist of it. What I have consistently found is that academics underestimate the difficulty and complexity of the techniques they employ and the diversity of circumstances commercial systems are exposed to. They also overestimate the capability of operators in the real world.
So I frequenty encounter systems that in the technical sense "solve the problem" but only if you are clever enough to use all the right parameters or have a good sense of what the applicable workflow is, or have inhumanly steady hands to perform a particularly tricky calibration step. Academics tend to take for granted a large body of background information and skill that the average person operating a system does not have.
For example, I was once involved with an application that used a very clever machine learning algorithm for classification. But it had half a dozen parameters whose meanings were required a fairly deep understanding of the underlying algorithm to grasp, and there was no simple way of figuring out what appropriate ranges of settings were. As a feature in an application aimed at users who were not mathematically aware, it was pretty much useless even though the classification performance was excellent if you set it up right. We had a small handful of customers who had the mathematical background to exploit the feature--to the rest it may as well not have existed.
This kind of practical problem is what academics often miss because they simply are not aware of how much more they know than the average person likely to be operating the system that embodies their work. I see this in requirements meetings all the time, where a requirement can't be fulfilled without an operator who has the same level of expertise as the academic who developed the original work. When I raise the issue the academic usually says, "Well the operator can just..." followed by ten minutes of deeply technical detail.
The really fun part of my job is translating that technical detail into a set of heuristics that will allow people without the same level of knowledge and understanding to exploit the underlying technique, but it makes me very aware of how big the gap is between "works in the lab" and "useful in a commerical product."
This is a specific result of Noether's theorem, and has been known since the 1920's but rarely gets mentioned in the popular press. For the specfic case of energy conservation, Noether's theorem implies that unless the form of the Lagrangian (the fundamental mathematical object underlying the equations of motion that govern a system) is explicitly time-dependent, then the Hamiltonian (which represents the total energy of the system) is conserved.
The form of the Lagrangian is determined by the laws of physics, which we are pretty sure do not change with time. Ergo, we are pretty sure that energy is strictly conserved (even more sure than we are from masses of empirical observations that confirm this to be the case.)
If anyone claims to have a machine that violates the first law, the question to ask them is, "What law of physics is changing with time?"
There's a reason that academic papers are complicated, and believe me, it's not to confuse the public. And the papers on which you can translate reliably into layspeak are probably shit in the first place.
Furthermore the problem of discovery is trivial compared to the problem of interfacing with academics. It's hard to underestimate the impedance mismatch between academic scientists and commericial developers and engineers.
Most academics think that if an expert operator has been able to do something once on a single dataset they have "solved the problem", while most commercial developers and engineers think that anything requiring more than simple arithmetic is "too complicated". Both groups have great strengths, but they speak completely different languages, have radically different priorities and frequently conflicting world-views.
Simply being able to find the work someone in academia is doing is never that difficult. Figuring out if it is possible to translate the work into a piece of a working apparatus or algorithm or whatever is very, very hard.
This unfortunately is the kind of logic that makes rational argument about environmental policy nearly impossible:
A believes fact X justifies policy P. B believes policy P is wrong. B therefore denies fact X.
What is wrong with this picture?
I don't deny for a moment that there are still a lot of watermellons in the green movement, but the above argument is simply a logical fallacy of the kind commited by people who care more about their politics than the facts.
True greens recognize that imposing coercive limits on human behaviour is unsustainable. And we also recognize that markets are one of the most effective tools for changing human behaviour and gaining large efficiencies (which so long as they don't depend on contaminating or otherwise abusing the commons are also environmental efficiencies.)
It is only when greens shed their lefty image and non-greens start making arguments based on fact rather than politics that the debate will get anywhere.
The Earth is a huge steady state system and it has corrected itself EVERY time in the past.
The first part of your claim is not only false, it is contradicted by the second part of your claim. "Steady state" systems do not need to undergo "corrections". Dynamically stable systems do.
The Earth is a huge dynamically stable system, and it has corrected itself EVERY time in the past. That is a true statement, but an uncomfortable one, because the Earth's dynamically stable climate undergoes excursions that are quite significant relative to the stability required for human civilization to thrive.
Even local events like the Younger Dryas can ruin your whole millenia. Global events like ice ages, or the mode switching to a hot, dry climate for a few hundred or a thousand years that we see in some ice core data, can make things very uncomfortable indeed.
Scientists are concerned about global climate change not because we are worried about the "end of all life on Earth" or some equally algorean kookery, but because we know with certainty that the Earth's climate maintains a dynamic equilibrium that will happily accomodate excursions that would make a mess of our lives and our descendent's lives, and we know with certainty that we are giving that dynamically stable system a nice wack with a hammer by increasing effective insolation by a percent or so over the past two hundred years.
I don't read books online because it's uncomfortable and inconvenient.
And you don't copy them because it's expensive, inconvenient and produces a very low quality product.
The article claims that we buy books because we want to "support our favourite authors" or something like that. But the truth is that we buy books because they are good value for money, copying is a real pain, and the quality of the copy is substantially inferior to that of the original.
Movies, on the other hand, are dead cheap to copy and the copy is just as good as the original. So the economics of book-copying are exactly the opposite of the economics of movie copying.
Maybe we need something like that "why your anti-spam thingy won't work" form for DRM. Ultimately, of course, creating "uncopyable bits" is like creating "massless matter", so the form would be a lot simpler:
approach to DRM. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
(X) All crypto can can be broken, and once broken it stays broken (X) Legitimate users will be harmed (X) The RIAA/MPAA won't like it (X) It will stop copying for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(X) Crypto-based DRM requires the user to have the keys, the plain-text and the cipher-text. Alan Turing won the War with just the cipher-text. (X) People won't pay more than they feel is fair just because they like you (X) Extreme stupidity of Hollywood exec's
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Bits are inherently copyable at nearly zero cost. (X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
What does Ayn Rand have to do with philosophy? Indeed. Whenever someone professes admiration for Ayn Rand, I can only assume that it is out of ignorance, a mere reading of her two fat novels without any training in real philosophy
There are a small number of people (a few dozen worldwide, maybe) who don't fall into that category, and Jimmy is one of them. Although his background is primarily in economics and I wouldn't accuse him of being a deep philosophical thinker, in the mid-90's he organized and ran the only worth-while electronic forum on objectivism, the e-mail list MDOP (Moderated Discussion of Objectivist Philosophy). A significant number of participants had reasonable scholarly credentials, at least some of them in philosophy. Admitedly, I believe that participation in MDOP was sufficient to get one banned from the more conventional objectivist organizations, which are all about orthodoxy and not at all about philosophy.
Jimmy is at his best as an organizer and bringer-together of others, and the fact that he was able to create and maintain for some years a rational, productive forum for the discussion of a topic as famously flamegenic as objectivism is a measure of his ability in this regard.
As for Rand, some aspects of her anti-realist metaphysics and epistemology actually can be fruitfully studied, although the usual crtiques regarding her lack of scholarship certainly apply.
That may have been true with respect to Mutually Assured Destruction, but I think that this is aimed more at modern asymmetrical warfare. These days the US doesn't really fear massive barrages from the Soviet Union or China as much as it fears a single missile from North Korea or Iran with a nuclear warhead. Something which can inflict tens of thousands of casualties.
The U.S. is pretty much afraid of everything and everyone right now: illegally incarcerated suicides, completely innocent Canadian software engineers and of course, Mexicans. All societies go through periodic bouts of xenophobia, and this happens to be America's turn. It'll all pass in a few years, but in the meantime it is doing great damage to America's security.
The problem is that unless America becomes a police state, there is no practical way to secure the borders against anything, be it illegal immigrants or one-off nuclear attacks. Getting a single nuclear weapon into the U.S. is incredibly easy--so easy that I wake up each morning deeply thankful that no one has done it yet. When (not if) it is done, it will be done either by domestic transportation (imagine what one nuclear bomb set up to trigger at 3000 m might look like flying into O'Hare or LAX...) or by smuggling it in (canonically, hidden inside a bale of marjuana.)
ABM systems actually made a little sense (if they had worked and the "successful" tests hadn't all been faked) against the threat of massive attacks back in the Cold War. Today, against people who only need to get one bomb in after years of planning, they make no sense at all. They are the most wasteful kind of security theatre around.
And if they don't, there's tons of signed musicians they can ask
Because after all, who wouldn't turn to a musician for legal advice?
It is naive to think that there is any comparable degree of power between record labels and individual performers. At least, before the Web gave performers new ways to access their audiences.
We are already starting to see a bifurcation of music distribution channels, and for the first time we are seeing top-40 hits that come from Web-only music. This kind of thing is going to make DRM completely irrelevant, because the folks making this kind of music aren't selling defective music files.
We can expect that in America the RIAA will be pushing to ensure that for-sale-by-download-only music will be excluded from the charts. Using nothing but their influence on an entirely level playing field, of course.
According to the wikipedia article on the price-anderson act, the actual subsidy comes out to around $2 million per reactor per year. That seems fairly modest to me, considering the financial risk power companies invest in the plants and their benefit to the country via clean, reliable power.
That's extremely modest, given a 1 GW reactor running at 80% duty cycle nets over $200 million per year (assuming they are making $0.03 per kW-hr). Note that this is an extremely conservative estimate--it is easy to find estimates of average electricity price at $0.12 per kW-hr, and data suggest that bus-bar generation costs are in the range of $0.05 per kW-hr. Even given the (very substantial) transmission losses (up to 40% in Canada due to our heavy use of hydro) an estimate of $0.03/kw-hr net does not seem unreasonable. Note that the generation cost I've cited above is at the very high end of the range, and that it already accounts for the discount rate.
In fact, if the subsidy is really only $2 million per year per reactor, it is so modest that I propose a 1% increase in power rates and an absolute elimination of the Price-Anderson subsidy. Such a small and irrelevant subsidy is clearly not in the least important to our brave new nuclear future, so no one who is an honest supporter of nuclear power could possibly object to eliminating it.
This subsidy issue has hung over the head of nuclear supporters for decades. "If it's so safe why does it need this artificial protection?" the anti-nukes ask again and again, and you have to admit it's a pretty hard argument to answer. Now that we know the subsidy is in fact trivial compared to the money being made in the industry, it is clearly time for it to be eliminated.
Obviously, all companies who are pushing for new nuclear capacity will be pushing for the elimination of this trivial subsidy as well, since it would make it so much easier to sell new plants to the public at such a negligable cost. Think of the marketing bonus pro-nukes would get out of such a move, "Yeah, old tech required subsidies, but pebble-bed reactors are so safe we don't need it."
Oddly, I can't find any information on companies that are pushing to eliminate the subsidy, but they must exist if it is really as trivial as Wikipedia says.
The basic problem DRM tries to solve is really simple - we want professionals to produce high quality 'creative works' despite us having technology that can replicate such an item for zero cost. The free market really can't cope with that at all, because it makes "supply" in the economic sense infinite therefore price becomes zero, implying that something has no value. That's clearly rubbish, and quality creative works definitely have value to millions of people.
This contains a couple of errors.
1) The problem DRM tries to solve is the preservation of a particular business model that allows content packagerss and distributors to use their position in between artists and their audience to keep the largest slice of the creative-works pie for themselves. This model once served everyone well, because the marketing power of the packagers and distributors made it possible for creators to reach a much wider audience than they would have otherwise, and people got the opporuntity to buy creative works from artists they might not ever have heard of. On the other hand, there is no evidence at all that cheap copying has stemmed the flow of professional creative works. Show me one musician, one author, one director anywhere who has said, "I thought about making this album/book/movie but decided not to because it could be copied too easily." One suspects that the claim there would be no professional creative works without DRM is just made up.
2) What is this "the" free market of which you speak, and how does it relate to the huge diversity of actual free markets in the real world, which vary in their legal and economic structure enormously? If we replace your incorrect usage with the correct usage, and say, "we want professionals to produce high quality 'creative works' despite us having technology that can replicate such an item for zero cost. A free market really can't cope with that at all..." it becomes clear that here too you are making stuff up. You are claiming that no possible free market whatsoever, out of the infinite possible market machines that we might invent, is capable of dealing with goods that are expensive to create and easy to copy (note that "cheap" isn't really the issue--stamping albums is cheap, downloading tunes is easy.) This is an incredibly strong claim, backed by...nothing.
When somebody can give me a sound, scalable, generic and implementable economic design for goods that cost money to build the first time but are free to copy from then on, I might start to protest against DRM, because I'd actually have an answer to the question of "If not DRM then what?". Until then I'll continue to argue the case for it, use it despite the inconvenience and who knows, maybe even implement it in future.
I guess I could just link to Baen Books here, or to any number of bands like the Barenaked Ladies who oppose DRM and have somehow managed to make an oodle of cash. If examples don't convince you, then you should think about the theoretical persepective that file sharing is nothing more than advertising for the work in question.
While I'm on advertising, there is always the possibility of ad-supported art. Product placement ads have never been been huge, but that may be just because there were easier ways of doing it.
The one thing we can be certain of is that DRM is nothing more than an attempt to save a obsolete business model, and history tells us it will be a failure. The only open question is: will it be an expensive failure, or a cheap one? It looks like it is going to be very expensive for studios and some publishers, and relatively cheap for everyone else.
I don't imagine there's some mystery heat engine there... just some extra chemical activity that hasn't been accounted for.
Planetary chemical reactions generally run to completion on relatively short timescales compared to the age of the solar system. For example, if Earth were deprived of life there would be no free oxygen left in its atmosphere after a million years or so due to weathering.
Giant planets are mostly hydrogen and helium, so there isn't a lot to work with chemically. There have been suggestions that ongoing fractionation of gases, with the helium sinking to the bottom and thereby releasing its gravitational potential energy, might be a source of the giant planet's excess heat. But even that explanation is a bit marginal, as the lifetime for such fractionation is comparable to the age of the solar system.
It kills me that people fail to understand that roughly 10,000 years ago we had a rapid, major climate shift. About 10,000 years before that, we had another one. And in the 100,000 years before that, we had around 23 major climate shifts. And all of these occurred on the order of a decade or two, at most. From 110,000 BP to modern times we've had 25 major climate shifts, many of them confined to one hemisphere. And we average one every 4400 years. But quite luckily for human civilization, we've had a relatively hospitable and stable climate for the last 10,000 years.
This is precisely the issue that has raised rational concern about global climate change. We are giving a system that is known to be unstable a tap with a hammer. There is no doubt whatsoever that we are giving it a tap with a hammer: anthropogenic greenhouse gases have changed the planetary heat balance around one percent in the past century or two (that is, the added gases produce something like a 1% change in effective insolation).
It is admittedly unlikely but it would be as embarrassing as hell if by this behaviour we happen to excite a mode in the Earth's naturally unstable climate that causes massive economic disruption.
So prudence dicates that we moderate our behaviour and focus on reducing greenhouse gas emissions over the next century of so. Prudence also dictates that we don't listen to enviro-wingnuts who want to change human behaviour based on some crackpot moral or political agenda. This has nothing to do with saving the Earth. It has everything to do with being rational stewards of our home, so that we and our descendents can live long and well upon it.
It is also consistent with the fossil record, which shows huge amounts of charcoal cinders near the K-T boundary wherever you look, and a drastic change in the types of pollen present.
The article claims based on microbiological analysis from drill cores in Texas that the impact event, the tsunami event often associated with the impact, and the KT boundary, are all quite distinct in time, and all are distinct from the changes in microfosils that they think are indicitave of the dinosaurs dying. The article ends with a ridiculous statement that implies birds evolved after the KT event rather than before. Birds are not dinosaurs. Birds survived the KT event. Dinosours did not.
Curiously, they do not discuss how an impact of the type they claim to identify was not associated with a tsunami. Nor is there mention of how the irridium got into the KT boundary layer without an impact.
Whenever you see anyone filling in an area of uncertainty with a trendy, crisis-du-jour explanation, you should be very sceptical. The odds that a major socio-economic/political concern today just happens to be related to a mass extinction in the distant past are extremely low. The odds of scientists (and reporters) letting current concerns bleed into their hypotheses is on the other hand extremely high.
Now if the people [wikipedia.org] decide to give that power of theirs to the national government by electing politicians to the legislature who create Medicare (or whatever over program you want to call into question), then the federal government now has the power to do so.
Nope. There is no mechanism defined in the constitution for the people to delegate their powers in this manner, other than holding a constitutional convention and amending the document itself. So as it stands, elected politicians have only the powers granted to the federal government by the constitution, period. The United States is not a democracy. It is a republic. And this illustrates the difference precisely.
I've gotten the bait & switch on jobs before (my second day on the job, job responsibilities changed dramatically)
There's a doctrine called "constructive dismissal" that may apply to cases like this. The idea is that substantially altering job responsibilities without your agreement is like asking you to leave the company. I don't know how it applies in the U.S., but in some jurisdictions it might allow people in the situation to describe to the same benefits as if the company had induced you to join them and then fired you on your second day there.
In general, a non-adversarial approach to HR is the best route to go in any of these situations. Make it a matter of policy, not politics or personalities.
While these solar fluctuations may exist (and I'm not an astronomer, just a meteorology/atmospheric science/climatology PhD student) I'd prefer to firm them up before they replace the classical orbital mechanisms that we know exist. Whether they cause the Ice Ages or not, they are present in the orbital path.
We do know the orbital fluxuations to exist, but we don't know that they cause terrestrial climate fluxuations. The problem is real: the dominant frequencies in the orbital fluxuations do not match well with the dominant frequencies in the climate fluxuations. Something more is going on, probably in our understanding of the global climate, which may impose frequencies of its own, like a resonant system excited by a non-resonant driving force.
Unfortunately, the kind of step-function we are giving the planet, and which it has had in the past from other natural occurences, is a pretty powerful excitation at all frequencies.
And one hardly needs any more formalism than the plain English of the 9th Ammendment:
"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
Besides that, the language of Article 1 is clear: "The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it."
There is no ambiguity here. The United States is neither being invaded nor is it in a state of rebellion. Ergo, the constitution does not give any basis whatsoever for the suspension of habeas corpus at the current time, and because the government of the United States has only the powers granted to it by the constitution and no other, it has no legal power at this time to suspend habeas corpus for anyone.
This is transparently and unambigously clear to anyone who isn't grasping for as much power as they can get as fast as they can get it.
The tests proposed would not "prove" string theory. They are only testing some of the fundemental assumptions on which string theory is based.
The assumptions are:
1) Lorentz invariance 2) Analyticity 3) Unitarity
The problem is that these are not exactly assumptions but rather desirable characteristics of any good theory in this domain, period. If anyone comes up with an alternative to string theory that is even remotely within the bounds of conventional physics, it will also have these chracteristics.
Lorentz invariance means that the theory is consistent with special relativity. Since our universe is manifestly correctly described by SR to a very high degree of accuracy, this is a desirable property of any theory of everything.
Analyticity (am I spelling that right?) means that the theory is mathematically continuous, which is again something that seems to be highly desirable as our universe contains very few (probably no) formal sigularities. One major goal for theories of everything is to show that the singularities in general relativity are smoothed away at small enough scales.
Unitarity means that the propogator conserves what is being propogated, so spontaneous creation or destruction of stuff doesn't just happen. Again, this is considered a generally desirable property, to the extent that any theory that lacked any of these three properties would be considered a very bad theory. The creator of such a theory would have to give some account as to why it was ok for their theory to not be Lorentz invariant, analytic or unitary.
So this is not so much "testing string theory" as "testing some very basic assumptions about the constraints any good theory should fulfill." This is a good and worthy goal, but it is a very weird bit of marketing to advertise it as "testing string theory" rather than putting it in its more fundamental context.
Ontario Hydro is mired in debt due to unexpected costs of its nuclear generating stations that were due to poor design of calandria tubes. Improper placement of garter springs and unexpectedly large changes in materials properties due to neutron bombardment produced corrosion that was far more severe than expected, requiring the shut-down and retubing of most reactors, at a cost of billions.
A coal plant with a similar problem would have been fixed sooner and cheaper. I am not an advocate of coal, and in fact lean somewhat toward nuclear if we really have to go with big centralized power plants, but have no illusions as to how incredibly expensive nuclear really is, based on its actual track record with a well-run utility using what is arguably the best (and safest) of first-generation reactor designs.
There is every reason to believe that nuclear power will continue to be a safe, clean and staggeringly expensive solution to our energy problems.
Of course the average greenie socialist here would mod me down, but I speak the truth -- there is no such thing as a free lunch, and this guy will get one after only 8 years or so. On your back.
This is why life expectancy and quality of life goes down so rapidly with increased government spending on infrastructure, eh?
You need to learn a little economics. Starting with Hazlett's "Economics in One Lesson" might be a good idea, and then apply it to your own thinking: you need to consider the full consequences of an economic change, not just the ones you like.
Markets, like any other completely artificial human construct, serve some purposes very well if they are well-designed. But simply because a well-designed market is a good tool for solving many problems does not mean it is possible to solve every problem of social interaction with a well-designed market. No matter how well-designed the hammer is, no hammer is going to make a good CPU.
Both poorly-designed markets and poorly-designed non-market systems are very, very bad for people, and trying to solve a problem that is well-suited to a market solution with a non-market approach is a certain disaster. But the issue is with the appropriatness of the solution, not any mystical superiority of one approach over the other.
People who take the "when all you've got is a market everything looks like a trade" approach to solving human problems go very easy on their favoured tool for its more egregious failures (1929, sweatshops, union-busting, etc.) And they forget that markets are artificial machines created solely by the coercive power of governments. Likewise, socialists tend to dismiss and excuse all of their obvious failures rather than asking if they have used the appropriate tool for the job.
In the case of the power industry, both the politics of providing universal power services as well as the nature of early power generation technology created incentives to centralize and regulate utilities. Now that standards are rock solid and distributed power generation technology is more widely available, it makes sense for governments to invest in more distributed alternatives. But it is an investment: there will probably be reduced need for new power plants (otherwise paid for by the public purse, one way or another) and potentially less polution released into the commons by such alternatives. Like any investment, it carries non-zero risk, but the payoff in terms of higher quality of life for everyone is quite real, and quite worth investing in, and the government is the most viable method we have for making such investments, although one could certainly think about creating a "green charity" for making them as well.
The problem is... most of those spammers use random mailaddresses, or even, my mailaddress.
One of my primary e-mails is on a domain that doesn't exist: I just do DNS forwarding to one of my real domains, and I am the only user on the fake domain. Ergo, I filter all e-mail with a FROM address in that domain, which is actually pretty effective at cutting spam. Admittedly, a domain per e-mail address is a bit excessive in terms of resource usage, though--this only works because I've used that address for years but no longer have any use for the domain name.
When used correctly, nuclear power has no emissions and no leaked radioactivity.
Sure, and when used "correctly" a coal plant doesn't emit anything much either. If we're comparing fantasies we can go on all day, each of us discounting anything we don't like about our preferred technology.
The problem with conventional fission power is a) it is relatively easy to use incorrectly and b) when it is used incorrectly you have an expensive pile of radioactive scrap metal where you power plant used to be. The high energy density of the core means that small mistakes can produce large consequences, and the radiogenic properties of neutrons means that the whole core will be moderately radioactive, making in situ repair of the sort you can do on a coal plant impractical.
Advanced pebble-bed designs fix some of this, particularly by taking most of the high-Z elements out of the core so you get much shorter lifetime low-level waste, but they are not yet a proven technology, thanks to the dearth of investment in the past thirty years.
But honest proponents of nuclear power should own up to the problems rather than making exceptions for them. The earthmuffins are having the same effect on rational energy policy that Creationists used to have on evolutionary theory.
Darwinian orthodoxy (particularly gradualism) went unchallenged for far longer than it should have because everyone was afraid that the kooks would seize on disagreements between evolutionists to justify their insane lies about the fundamental soundness of the theory. In the same way, admitting that there are real issues with fission power that have not yet been solved in any production environment (although there are some promising leads) may sound like you are "giving in" to the BANANAs (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything) but in fact it is the first step to making the morons irrelevant to the debate.
We are social primates, and therefore have evolved a variety of reciprocal-aid mechanisms in our behaviour. We are more likely to show helping behaviour toward our closer kin, but because we also (as a species) practice exogamy (breeding outside our kin group) rather vigorously we have a tendency to show helping behaviour toward anyone or anything that even looks remotely like us.
When raised in sufficiently violent, unloving circumstances that tendency may never be developed, but contra Freud it is not repression of our nature that makes us humane (anymore than feral, asocialized humans behave humanely) but rather a nurturing, loving and secure upbringing.
Slashdot Mirror
Increase in tropical storm intensity likely
Does the report give any basis for this claim? There are politics on all sides of this issue, because there is nothing better than a crisis to give power-hungry bastards like Al Gore and George W. Bush the excuse to enhance their position. The only differentiator is their crisis of choice. The debate about what to do about anthropogenic climate change is at real risk of being lost in the noise made by anti-scientific hysterics on both sides.
I raise the question of tropical storm intensity particuarly because there are some fairly strong claims by some very respectable scientists who are tropical storm experts that there is no evidence for nor expectation of increased tropical storm intensity:
All previous and current research in the area of hurricane variability has shown no reliable, long-term trend up in the frequency or intensity of tropical cyclones, either in the Atlantic or any other basin. The IPCC assessments in 1995 and 2001 also concluded that there was no global warming signal found in the hurricane record.
Moreover, the evidence is quite strong and supported by the most recent credible studies that any impact in the future from global warming upon hurricane will likely be quite small. The latest results from the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (Knutson and Tuleya, Journal of Climate, 2004) suggest that by around 2080, hurricanes may have winds and rainfall about 5% more intense than today.
Where are you getting this from?
/. after all, and you don't get modded up without a bit of theatrical embellishment) but I stand by the gist of it. What I have consistently found is that academics underestimate the difficulty and complexity of the techniques they employ and the diversity of circumstances commercial systems are exposed to. They also overestimate the capability of operators in the real world.
I'm getting this from the better part of a decade working professionally as an interface between academics and developers in a variety of startup companies. I'm an ex-academic myself, and know the size of the gap between the academic and commercial mindsets because I've had to cross it.
My comment is an overstatement (this is
So I frequenty encounter systems that in the technical sense "solve the problem" but only if you are clever enough to use all the right parameters or have a good sense of what the applicable workflow is, or have inhumanly steady hands to perform a particularly tricky calibration step. Academics tend to take for granted a large body of background information and skill that the average person operating a system does not have.
For example, I was once involved with an application that used a very clever machine learning algorithm for classification. But it had half a dozen parameters whose meanings were required a fairly deep understanding of the underlying algorithm to grasp, and there was no simple way of figuring out what appropriate ranges of settings were. As a feature in an application aimed at users who were not mathematically aware, it was pretty much useless even though the classification performance was excellent if you set it up right. We had a small handful of customers who had the mathematical background to exploit the feature--to the rest it may as well not have existed.
This kind of practical problem is what academics often miss because they simply are not aware of how much more they know than the average person likely to be operating the system that embodies their work. I see this in requirements meetings all the time, where a requirement can't be fulfilled without an operator who has the same level of expertise as the academic who developed the original work. When I raise the issue the academic usually says, "Well the operator can just..." followed by ten minutes of deeply technical detail.
The really fun part of my job is translating that technical detail into a set of heuristics that will allow people without the same level of knowledge and understanding to exploit the underlying technique, but it makes me very aware of how big the gap is between "works in the lab" and "useful in a commerical product."
But what keeps it from violating the 1st law: that energy is conserved?
"the conservation of energy is a consequence of invariance under time translations".
This is a specific result of Noether's theorem, and has been known since the 1920's but rarely gets mentioned in the popular press. For the specfic case of energy conservation, Noether's theorem implies that unless the form of the Lagrangian (the fundamental mathematical object underlying the equations of motion that govern a system) is explicitly time-dependent, then the Hamiltonian (which represents the total energy of the system) is conserved.
The form of the Lagrangian is determined by the laws of physics, which we are pretty sure do not change with time. Ergo, we are pretty sure that energy is strictly conserved (even more sure than we are from masses of empirical observations that confirm this to be the case.)
If anyone claims to have a machine that violates the first law, the question to ask them is, "What law of physics is changing with time?"
There's a reason that academic papers are complicated, and believe me, it's not to confuse the public. And the papers on which you can translate reliably into layspeak are probably shit in the first place.
Furthermore the problem of discovery is trivial compared to the problem of interfacing with academics. It's hard to underestimate the impedance mismatch between academic scientists and commericial developers and engineers.
Most academics think that if an expert operator has been able to do something once on a single dataset they have "solved the problem", while most commercial developers and engineers think that anything requiring more than simple arithmetic is "too complicated". Both groups have great strengths, but they speak completely different languages, have radically different priorities and frequently conflicting world-views.
Simply being able to find the work someone in academia is doing is never that difficult. Figuring out if it is possible to translate the work into a piece of a working apparatus or algorithm or whatever is very, very hard.
This unfortunately is the kind of logic that makes rational argument about environmental policy nearly impossible:
A believes fact X justifies policy P.
B believes policy P is wrong.
B therefore denies fact X.
What is wrong with this picture?
I don't deny for a moment that there are still a lot of watermellons in the green movement, but the above argument is simply a logical fallacy of the kind commited by people who care more about their politics than the facts.
True greens recognize that imposing coercive limits on human behaviour is unsustainable. And we also recognize that markets are one of the most effective tools for changing human behaviour and gaining large efficiencies (which so long as they don't depend on contaminating or otherwise abusing the commons are also environmental efficiencies.)
It is only when greens shed their lefty image and non-greens start making arguments based on fact rather than politics that the debate will get anywhere.
The Earth is a huge steady state system and it has corrected itself EVERY time in the past.
The first part of your claim is not only false, it is contradicted by the second part of your claim. "Steady state" systems do not need to undergo "corrections". Dynamically stable systems do.
The Earth is a huge dynamically stable system, and it has corrected itself EVERY time in the past. That is a true statement, but an uncomfortable one, because the Earth's dynamically stable climate undergoes excursions that are quite significant relative to the stability required for human civilization to thrive.
Even local events like the Younger Dryas can ruin your whole millenia. Global events like ice ages, or the mode switching to a hot, dry climate for a few hundred or a thousand years that we see in some ice core data, can make things very uncomfortable indeed.
Scientists are concerned about global climate change not because we are worried about the "end of all life on Earth" or some equally algorean kookery, but because we know with certainty that the Earth's climate maintains a dynamic equilibrium that will happily accomodate excursions that would make a mess of our lives and our descendent's lives, and we know with certainty that we are giving that dynamically stable system a nice wack with a hammer by increasing effective insolation by a percent or so over the past two hundred years.
I don't read books online because it's uncomfortable and inconvenient.
And you don't copy them because it's expensive, inconvenient and produces a very low quality product.
The article claims that we buy books because we want to "support our favourite authors" or something like that. But the truth is that we buy books because they are good value for money, copying is a real pain, and the quality of the copy is substantially inferior to that of the original.
Movies, on the other hand, are dead cheap to copy and the copy is just as good as the original. So the economics of book-copying are exactly the opposite of the economics of movie copying.
Maybe we need something like that "why your anti-spam thingy won't work" form for DRM. Ultimately, of course, creating "uncopyable bits" is like creating "massless matter", so the form would be a lot simpler:
Your post advocates a
(X) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante (X) psycho/socio-logical
approach to DRM. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
(X) All crypto can can be broken, and once broken it stays broken
(X) Legitimate users will be harmed
(X) The RIAA/MPAA won't like it
(X) It will stop copying for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(X) Crypto-based DRM requires the user to have the keys, the plain-text and the cipher-text. Alan Turing won the War with just the cipher-text.
(X) People won't pay more than they feel is fair just because they like you
(X) Extreme stupidity of Hollywood exec's
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Bits are inherently copyable at nearly zero cost.
(X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
What does Ayn Rand have to do with philosophy? Indeed. Whenever someone professes admiration for Ayn Rand, I can only assume that it is out of ignorance, a mere reading of her two fat novels without any training in real philosophy
There are a small number of people (a few dozen worldwide, maybe) who don't fall into that category, and Jimmy is one of them. Although his background is primarily in economics and I wouldn't accuse him of being a deep philosophical thinker, in the mid-90's he organized and ran the only worth-while electronic forum on objectivism, the e-mail list MDOP (Moderated Discussion of Objectivist Philosophy). A significant number of participants had reasonable scholarly credentials, at least some of them in philosophy. Admitedly, I believe that participation in MDOP was sufficient to get one banned from the more conventional objectivist organizations, which are all about orthodoxy and not at all about philosophy.
Jimmy is at his best as an organizer and bringer-together of others, and the fact that he was able to create and maintain for some years a rational, productive forum for the discussion of a topic as famously flamegenic as objectivism is a measure of his ability in this regard.
As for Rand, some aspects of her anti-realist metaphysics and epistemology actually can be fruitfully studied, although the usual crtiques regarding her lack of scholarship certainly apply.
That may have been true with respect to Mutually Assured Destruction, but I think that this is aimed more at modern asymmetrical warfare. These days the US doesn't really fear massive barrages from the Soviet Union or China as much as it fears a single missile from North Korea or Iran with a nuclear warhead. Something which can inflict tens of thousands of casualties.
The U.S. is pretty much afraid of everything and everyone right now: illegally incarcerated suicides, completely innocent Canadian software engineers and of course, Mexicans. All societies go through periodic bouts of xenophobia, and this happens to be America's turn. It'll all pass in a few years, but in the meantime it is doing great damage to America's security.
The problem is that unless America becomes a police state, there is no practical way to secure the borders against anything, be it illegal immigrants or one-off nuclear attacks. Getting a single nuclear weapon into the U.S. is incredibly easy--so easy that I wake up each morning deeply thankful that no one has done it yet. When (not if) it is done, it will be done either by domestic transportation (imagine what one nuclear bomb set up to trigger at 3000 m might look like flying into O'Hare or LAX...) or by smuggling it in (canonically, hidden inside a bale of marjuana.)
ABM systems actually made a little sense (if they had worked and the "successful" tests hadn't all been faked) against the threat of massive attacks back in the Cold War. Today, against people who only need to get one bomb in after years of planning, they make no sense at all. They are the most wasteful kind of security theatre around.
And if they don't, there's tons of signed musicians they can ask
Because after all, who wouldn't turn to a musician for legal advice?
It is naive to think that there is any comparable degree of power between record labels and individual performers. At least, before the Web gave performers new ways to access their audiences.
We are already starting to see a bifurcation of music distribution channels, and for the first time we are seeing top-40 hits that come from Web-only music. This kind of thing is going to make DRM completely irrelevant, because the folks making this kind of music aren't selling defective music files.
We can expect that in America the RIAA will be pushing to ensure that for-sale-by-download-only music will be excluded from the charts. Using nothing but their influence on an entirely level playing field, of course.
According to the wikipedia article on the price-anderson act, the actual subsidy comes out to around $2 million per reactor per year. That seems fairly modest to me, considering the financial risk power companies invest in the plants and their benefit to the country via clean, reliable power.
That's extremely modest, given a 1 GW reactor running at 80% duty cycle nets over $200 million per year (assuming they are making $0.03 per kW-hr). Note that this is an extremely conservative estimate--it is easy to find estimates of average electricity price at $0.12 per kW-hr, and data suggest that bus-bar generation costs are in the range of $0.05 per kW-hr. Even given the (very substantial) transmission losses (up to 40% in Canada due to our heavy use of hydro) an estimate of $0.03/kw-hr net does not seem unreasonable. Note that the generation cost I've cited above is at the very high end of the range, and that it already accounts for the discount rate.
In fact, if the subsidy is really only $2 million per year per reactor, it is so modest that I propose a 1% increase in power rates and an absolute elimination of the Price-Anderson subsidy. Such a small and irrelevant subsidy is clearly not in the least important to our brave new nuclear future, so no one who is an honest supporter of nuclear power could possibly object to eliminating it.
This subsidy issue has hung over the head of nuclear supporters for decades. "If it's so safe why does it need this artificial protection?" the anti-nukes ask again and again, and you have to admit it's a pretty hard argument to answer. Now that we know the subsidy is in fact trivial compared to the money being made in the industry, it is clearly time for it to be eliminated.
Obviously, all companies who are pushing for new nuclear capacity will be pushing for the elimination of this trivial subsidy as well, since it would make it so much easier to sell new plants to the public at such a negligable cost. Think of the marketing bonus pro-nukes would get out of such a move, "Yeah, old tech required subsidies, but pebble-bed reactors are so safe we don't need it."
Oddly, I can't find any information on companies that are pushing to eliminate the subsidy, but they must exist if it is really as trivial as Wikipedia says.
The basic problem DRM tries to solve is really simple - we want professionals to produce high quality 'creative works' despite us having technology that can replicate such an item for zero cost. The free market really can't cope with that at all, because it makes "supply" in the economic sense infinite therefore price becomes zero, implying that something has no value. That's clearly rubbish, and quality creative works definitely have value to millions of people.
This contains a couple of errors.
1) The problem DRM tries to solve is the preservation of a particular business model that allows content packagerss and distributors to use their position in between artists and their audience to keep the largest slice of the creative-works pie for themselves. This model once served everyone well, because the marketing power of the packagers and distributors made it possible for creators to reach a much wider audience than they would have otherwise, and people got the opporuntity to buy creative works from artists they might not ever have heard of. On the other hand, there is no evidence at all that cheap copying has stemmed the flow of professional creative works. Show me one musician, one author, one director anywhere who has said, "I thought about making this album/book/movie but decided not to because it could be copied too easily." One suspects that the claim there would be no professional creative works without DRM is just made up.
2) What is this "the" free market of which you speak, and how does it relate to the huge diversity of actual free markets in the real world, which vary in their legal and economic structure enormously? If we replace your incorrect usage with the correct usage, and say, "we want professionals to produce high quality 'creative works' despite us having technology that can replicate such an item for zero cost. A free market really can't cope with that at all..." it becomes clear that here too you are making stuff up. You are claiming that no possible free market whatsoever, out of the infinite possible market machines that we might invent, is capable of dealing with goods that are expensive to create and easy to copy (note that "cheap" isn't really the issue--stamping albums is cheap, downloading tunes is easy.) This is an incredibly strong claim, backed by...nothing.
When somebody can give me a sound, scalable, generic and implementable economic design for goods that cost money to build the first time but are free to copy from then on, I might start to protest against DRM, because I'd actually have an answer to the question of "If not DRM then what?". Until then I'll continue to argue the case for it, use it despite the inconvenience and who knows, maybe even implement it in future.
I guess I could just link to Baen Books here, or to any number of bands like the Barenaked Ladies who oppose DRM and have somehow managed to make an oodle of cash. If examples don't convince you, then you should think about the theoretical persepective that file sharing is nothing more than advertising for the work in question.
While I'm on advertising, there is always the possibility of ad-supported art. Product placement ads have never been been huge, but that may be just because there were easier ways of doing it.
The one thing we can be certain of is that DRM is nothing more than an attempt to save a obsolete business model, and history tells us it will be a failure. The only open question is: will it be an expensive failure, or a cheap one? It looks like it is going to be very expensive for studios and some publishers, and relatively cheap for everyone else.
I don't imagine there's some mystery heat engine there... just some extra chemical activity that hasn't been accounted for.
Planetary chemical reactions generally run to completion on relatively short timescales compared to the age of the solar system. For example, if Earth were deprived of life there would be no free oxygen left in its atmosphere after a million years or so due to weathering.
Giant planets are mostly hydrogen and helium, so there isn't a lot to work with chemically. There have been suggestions that ongoing fractionation of gases, with the helium sinking to the bottom and thereby releasing its gravitational potential energy, might be a source of the giant planet's excess heat. But even that explanation is a bit marginal, as the lifetime for such fractionation is comparable to the age of the solar system.
It kills me that people fail to understand that roughly 10,000 years ago we had a rapid, major climate shift. About 10,000 years before that, we had another one. And in the 100,000 years before that, we had around 23 major climate shifts. And all of these occurred on the order of a decade or two, at most. From 110,000 BP to modern times we've had 25 major climate shifts, many of them confined to one hemisphere. And we average one every 4400 years. But quite luckily for human civilization, we've had a relatively hospitable and stable climate for the last 10,000 years.
This is precisely the issue that has raised rational concern about global climate change. We are giving a system that is known to be unstable a tap with a hammer. There is no doubt whatsoever that we are giving it a tap with a hammer: anthropogenic greenhouse gases have changed the planetary heat balance around one percent in the past century or two (that is, the added gases produce something like a 1% change in effective insolation).
It is admittedly unlikely but it would be as embarrassing as hell if by this behaviour we happen to excite a mode in the Earth's naturally unstable climate that causes massive economic disruption.
So prudence dicates that we moderate our behaviour and focus on reducing greenhouse gas emissions over the next century of so. Prudence also dictates that we don't listen to enviro-wingnuts who want to change human behaviour based on some crackpot moral or political agenda. This has nothing to do with saving the Earth. It has everything to do with being rational stewards of our home, so that we and our descendents can live long and well upon it.
It is also consistent with the fossil record, which shows huge amounts of charcoal cinders near the K-T boundary wherever you look, and a drastic change in the types of pollen present.
The article claims based on microbiological analysis from drill cores in Texas that the impact event, the tsunami event often associated with the impact, and the KT boundary, are all quite distinct in time, and all are distinct from the changes in microfosils that they think are indicitave of the dinosaurs dying. The article ends with a ridiculous statement that implies birds evolved after the KT event rather than before. Birds are not dinosaurs. Birds survived the KT event. Dinosours did not.
Curiously, they do not discuss how an impact of the type they claim to identify was not associated with a tsunami. Nor is there mention of how the irridium got into the KT boundary layer without an impact.
Whenever you see anyone filling in an area of uncertainty with a trendy, crisis-du-jour explanation, you should be very sceptical. The odds that a major socio-economic/political concern today just happens to be related to a mass extinction in the distant past are extremely low. The odds of scientists (and reporters) letting current concerns bleed into their hypotheses is on the other hand extremely high.
Now if the people [wikipedia.org] decide to give that power of theirs to the national government by electing politicians to the legislature who create Medicare (or whatever over program you want to call into question), then the federal government now has the power to do so.
Nope. There is no mechanism defined in the constitution for the people to delegate their powers in this manner, other than holding a constitutional convention and amending the document itself. So as it stands, elected politicians have only the powers granted to the federal government by the constitution, period. The United States is not a democracy. It is a republic. And this illustrates the difference precisely.
I've gotten the bait & switch on jobs before (my second day on the job, job responsibilities changed dramatically)
There's a doctrine called "constructive dismissal" that may apply to cases like this. The idea is that substantially altering job responsibilities without your agreement is like asking you to leave the company. I don't know how it applies in the U.S., but in some jurisdictions it might allow people in the situation to describe to the same benefits as if the company had induced you to join them and then fired you on your second day there.
In general, a non-adversarial approach to HR is the best route to go in any of these situations. Make it a matter of policy, not politics or personalities.
While these solar fluctuations may exist (and I'm not an astronomer, just a meteorology/atmospheric science/climatology PhD student) I'd prefer to firm them up before they replace the classical orbital mechanisms that we know exist. Whether they cause the Ice Ages or not, they are present in the orbital path.
We do know the orbital fluxuations to exist, but we don't know that they cause terrestrial climate fluxuations. The problem is real: the dominant frequencies in the orbital fluxuations do not match well with the dominant frequencies in the climate fluxuations. Something more is going on, probably in our understanding of the global climate, which may impose frequencies of its own, like a resonant system excited by a non-resonant driving force.
Unfortunately, the kind of step-function we are giving the planet, and which it has had in the past from other natural occurences, is a pretty powerful excitation at all frequencies.
And one hardly needs any more formalism than the plain English of the 9th Ammendment:
"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
Besides that, the language of Article 1 is clear: "The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it."
There is no ambiguity here. The United States is neither being invaded nor is it in a state of rebellion. Ergo, the constitution does not give any basis whatsoever for the suspension of habeas corpus at the current time, and because the government of the United States has only the powers granted to it by the constitution and no other, it has no legal power at this time to suspend habeas corpus for anyone.
This is transparently and unambigously clear to anyone who isn't grasping for as much power as they can get as fast as they can get it.
The tests proposed would not "prove" string theory. They are only testing some of the fundemental assumptions on which string theory is based.
The assumptions are:
1) Lorentz invariance
2) Analyticity
3) Unitarity
The problem is that these are not exactly assumptions but rather desirable characteristics of any good theory in this domain, period. If anyone comes up with an alternative to string theory that is even remotely within the bounds of conventional physics, it will also have these chracteristics.
Lorentz invariance means that the theory is consistent with special relativity. Since our universe is manifestly correctly described by SR to a very high degree of accuracy, this is a desirable property of any theory of everything.
Analyticity (am I spelling that right?) means that the theory is mathematically continuous, which is again something that seems to be highly desirable as our universe contains very few (probably no) formal sigularities. One major goal for theories of everything is to show that the singularities in general relativity are smoothed away at small enough scales.
Unitarity means that the propogator conserves what is being propogated, so spontaneous creation or destruction of stuff doesn't just happen. Again, this is considered a generally desirable property, to the extent that any theory that lacked any of these three properties would be considered a very bad theory. The creator of such a theory would have to give some account as to why it was ok for their theory to not be Lorentz invariant, analytic or unitary.
So this is not so much "testing string theory" as "testing some very basic assumptions about the constraints any good theory should fulfill." This is a good and worthy goal, but it is a very weird bit of marketing to advertise it as "testing string theory" rather than putting it in its more fundamental context.
Ontario Hydro is mired in debt due to unexpected costs of its nuclear generating stations that were due to poor design of calandria tubes. Improper placement of garter springs and unexpectedly large changes in materials properties due to neutron bombardment produced corrosion that was far more severe than expected, requiring the shut-down and retubing of most reactors, at a cost of billions.
A coal plant with a similar problem would have been fixed sooner and cheaper. I am not an advocate of coal, and in fact lean somewhat toward nuclear if we really have to go with big centralized power plants, but have no illusions as to how incredibly expensive nuclear really is, based on its actual track record with a well-run utility using what is arguably the best (and safest) of first-generation reactor designs.
There is every reason to believe that nuclear power will continue to be a safe, clean and staggeringly expensive solution to our energy problems.
Of course the average greenie socialist here would mod me down, but I speak the truth -- there is no such thing as a free lunch, and this guy will get one after only 8 years or so. On your back.
This is why life expectancy and quality of life goes down so rapidly with increased government spending on infrastructure, eh?
You need to learn a little economics. Starting with Hazlett's "Economics in One Lesson" might be a good idea, and then apply it to your own thinking: you need to consider the full consequences of an economic change, not just the ones you like.
Markets, like any other completely artificial human construct, serve some purposes very well if they are well-designed. But simply because a well-designed market is a good tool for solving many problems does not mean it is possible to solve every problem of social interaction with a well-designed market. No matter how well-designed the hammer is, no hammer is going to make a good CPU.
Both poorly-designed markets and poorly-designed non-market systems are very, very bad for people, and trying to solve a problem that is well-suited to a market solution with a non-market approach is a certain disaster. But the issue is with the appropriatness of the solution, not any mystical superiority of one approach over the other.
People who take the "when all you've got is a market everything looks like a trade" approach to solving human problems go very easy on their favoured tool for its more egregious failures (1929, sweatshops, union-busting, etc.) And they forget that markets are artificial machines created solely by the coercive power of governments. Likewise, socialists tend to dismiss and excuse all of their obvious failures rather than asking if they have used the appropriate tool for the job.
In the case of the power industry, both the politics of providing universal power services as well as the nature of early power generation technology created incentives to centralize and regulate utilities. Now that standards are rock solid and distributed power generation technology is more widely available, it makes sense for governments to invest in more distributed alternatives. But it is an investment: there will probably be reduced need for new power plants (otherwise paid for by the public purse, one way or another) and potentially less polution released into the commons by such alternatives. Like any investment, it carries non-zero risk, but the payoff in terms of higher quality of life for everyone is quite real, and quite worth investing in, and the government is the most viable method we have for making such investments, although one could certainly think about creating a "green charity" for making them as well.
The problem is... most of those spammers use random mailaddresses, or even, my mailaddress.
One of my primary e-mails is on a domain that doesn't exist: I just do DNS forwarding to one of my real domains, and I am the only user on the fake domain. Ergo, I filter all e-mail with a FROM address in that domain, which is actually pretty effective at cutting spam. Admittedly, a domain per e-mail address is a bit excessive in terms of resource usage, though--this only works because I've used that address for years but no longer have any use for the domain name.
When used correctly, nuclear power has no emissions and no leaked radioactivity.
Sure, and when used "correctly" a coal plant doesn't emit anything much either. If we're comparing fantasies we can go on all day, each of us discounting anything we don't like about our preferred technology.
The problem with conventional fission power is a) it is relatively easy to use incorrectly and b) when it is used incorrectly you have an expensive pile of radioactive scrap metal where you power plant used to be. The high energy density of the core means that small mistakes can produce large consequences, and the radiogenic properties of neutrons means that the whole core will be moderately radioactive, making in situ repair of the sort you can do on a coal plant impractical.
Advanced pebble-bed designs fix some of this, particularly by taking most of the high-Z elements out of the core so you get much shorter lifetime low-level waste, but they are not yet a proven technology, thanks to the dearth of investment in the past thirty years.
But honest proponents of nuclear power should own up to the problems rather than making exceptions for them. The earthmuffins are having the same effect on rational energy policy that Creationists used to have on evolutionary theory.
Darwinian orthodoxy (particularly gradualism) went unchallenged for far longer than it should have because everyone was afraid that the kooks would seize on disagreements between evolutionists to justify their insane lies about the fundamental soundness of the theory. In the same way, admitting that there are real issues with fission power that have not yet been solved in any production environment (although there are some promising leads) may sound like you are "giving in" to the BANANAs (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything) but in fact it is the first step to making the morons irrelevant to the debate.
While it is true that we are born selfish...
What on Earth does this mean?
We are social primates, and therefore have evolved a variety of reciprocal-aid mechanisms in our behaviour. We are more likely to show helping behaviour toward our closer kin, but because we also (as a species) practice exogamy (breeding outside our kin group) rather vigorously we have a tendency to show helping behaviour toward anyone or anything that even looks remotely like us.
When raised in sufficiently violent, unloving circumstances that tendency may never be developed, but contra Freud it is not repression of our nature that makes us humane (anymore than feral, asocialized humans behave humanely) but rather a nurturing, loving and secure upbringing.