The energy density of nuclear power far outstrips any other energy source. No one can dispute that.
Now, if you express that energy density in terms of something like kilowatts per acre, then you see that something like solar and wind are ridiculous for the long term.
Now consider these points:
o Humans are never going to voluntarily limit their reproduction. We're specifically wired to not do that.
o Magifying the above, continual advances in medical science, quality of care, and availability of care, mean people live longer, people survive illnesses and diseases that they otherwise might not have.
o The above both translate to an ever-growing population of humans on the planet, regardless of availability of arable land and other resources to support them.
o With an ever-growing population and limited resources, at some point wars over control of arable land and resources are inevitable.
You can deny that last point all you want but historically that's what most wars are fought over: land and resources. When the Earths' population of humans rises above a certain point, it becomes inevitable, because people aren't just going to sit down and let themselves die.
Now, then, how the above relates to the subject of energy sources, if you didn't already follow me on this: When you have to take up millions and millions (or even billions) of acres of flat land that could be used for crops to feed people, eventually you're going to reach a breaking point where you can't grow enough food to feed everyone and still keep the lights on. What do you think is going to happen then?
Meanwhile you can build nuclear power plants here and there, taking up comparatively little acreage, give everyone as much power as they need, and preserve arable land to grow food to feed everyone.
Nuclear reactors can be designed in such ways to make them intrinsicly safer. I've seen the proposed designs.
Procedures and techniques can be devised to deal with waste products with better safety and efficiency, and perhaps even ways to neutralize it. Science will provide solutions for these sorts of problems.
Fusion power is just around the corner. We're almost there now. Fission will tide us over in the meantime.
Solar and wind can provide the stop-gap coverage while new generations of fission reactor designs are devised and built.
Meanwhile physics research continues to unlock the mysteries of Reality. They may come up with even more exotic energy sources that are even cleaner and safer than either fission or fusion.
Even if that's so it's still less than burning fossil fuels, and oh by the way the production of 'renewable' sources is far from 'carbon neutral' too and you can produce all the solar panels you want and it won't be enough in the long run. Nuclear power PLUS renewables are the way forward for the MIDDLE TERM. Fusion will replace fission sooner or later. That'll give us some breathing room until physicists come up with something even better; for all we know we might end up with anitmatter reactors or something even more exotic. But in the meantime we can't just sit here with our fingers up our collective noses and hope solar panels are enough. Oh and by the way even in yours and others' utopia of solar panels everywhere there still has to be massive energy storage to make that work 24/7/365, are any of you factoring that into your 'equations'? Probably not. The environmental cost of producing the raw materials for energy storage facilities? Probably not. Are you all factoring in the environmental impact of millions of acres of solar farms and wind generators everywhere, how they affect the ecosystem, how they affect wind and weather patterns? Probably not. How 'wave power' installations will affect ocean life, ocean current patterns? Probably not. I have NEVER come across anyone in any of these 'discussions' that even really tries to look at the total picture or the long term or even the medium term, you all look at the short term and a microcosm instead. I'm looking at as much of the total picture and the longer term as much as I can.
Yeah sure and your mind is already made up so what does that make you? I reversed course on nuclear a while back. Meanwhile you're not even willing to think about it. All your 'renewables' are not going to be enough but you don't want to hear that either, do you? You'd probably say 'no' to fusion power, too, just because it's still a form of nuclear power. With your 'plan' for the Earth, a die-back of our species is the only way we'll survive -- but consider this: how much CO2 is going to get dumped into the atmosphere during the inevitable wars over resources and arable land that will take place when things get too tight? Oh, wait, you'll deny that too, won't you? You more than likely think we can have 10 billion humans alive on the planet all at once and have no problems. If so I got bad news for you, old son..
Solar, wind, geothermal, tides, and so on. Long-term storage of nuclear waste is a problem that other technologies do not face.
Heard all this before. The former are not end-all be-all solutions, they're more supplemental, and producing the hardware for them is not carbon-neutral or carbon-negative, either; the latter does not have to be a deal-breaker, we can I'm sure come up with ways to deal with waste products that does not pose a risk. Hell, drop it into the Marianas Trench and allow the Earth to reabsorb the stuff via subduction. Or maybe we find a way to recycle nuclear waste back into useful fuel -- or even a way to neutralize it entirely. I flatly reject anyone who puts forth the notion that physics has 'discovered all there is to discover' (and yes someone has said that in the past, and they weren't kidding). Sticking our heads in the sand over nuclear just isn't going to cut it anymore though.
I'm having a problem with you conflating global warming and nuclear power the way you're doing, but I do agree -- even as a Democrat -- that we need to dispell the Boogeyman we've created surrounding nuclear power and avail ourselves of it before it's too late. It's possible to design and build inherently safer reactors, ones that won't suffer the pitfalls of even the most current design in use, but there first needs to be enough belief in the need for it to get the funding to first design them, then start building them. Meanwhile research into practical fusion power continues. It's all to the good so long as we get back on course and stay the course.
We've already got too many people to live comfortably. Perhaps what we need (and will have the Earth itself hand us, one way or another) is a die-back of our species. More doesn't seem to necessarily be better in this case. Or perhaps we need to develop the ability to get the hell off this planet so people can be somewhere else, where they have room to breathe again and be who they want to be without butting heads with everyone else. Any way you look at it I think a die-back of some sort is inevitable, either due to climate change, or war over resources, or pandemic. All species on this planet have their numbers ultimately regulated by environmental factors of one sort or another, be it food supply, or predation; humans have no natural predators other than ourselves and we adapt our environment to suit us instead of the other way around; one way or another we'll be the architects of our own demise, and self-regulation will assert itself, I think. No worries, it'll probably be somewhere in the neighborhood of 50-90%, so there'll still be humans -- just much less of them, with more room to breathe again.
Last night I watched the latest episode of Victoria on Masterpiece (PBS, if you didn't know). There was a cholera outbreak in London, and in their 19th century mindset, only 1 person out of several so-called 'experts' actually figured out what the real source of the outbreak was, while the other 'experts', including the ostensible Minister of Health, had wild, unsubstantiated 'theories' (using the word in the loosest sense possible here), which included things like "foreigners brought it with them, we should get rid of all the filthy foreigners". Of course the real cause was tracked down in a rational, logical manner by a stuttering doctor, who tracked it to a well that everyone in the outbreak area was using to get their water from.
Take from that story what you will; there is a relevant meaning to it, you just have to look.
**********
..in a more direct comment about the featured article:
Are we really going to unironicaly play the Minority Report card in actual law enforcement? Basically, take 'profiling' (comma, racial, I'm sure) to this extreme? Especially with the half-assed excuse for AI they keep applying to every damned thing? So much for the presumption of innocence, I guess. Reminds me of a bad joke a Latino comedian made once; he said "cops always follow around behind you when you're driving because they know sooner or later you'll do something wrong". You tell someone they're 'bad' often enough, they start believing it themselves. What's worse: shitty excuse for AI getting it wrong, and people minding their own business get watched constantly until someone 'decides' you did something wrong -- because cops never, ever plant evidence or otherwise 'manufacture' reasonable cause, and they never coerce people into false confessions.
Listen asshole, if you're going to spout white nationalist/supremacist/racist/bigoted/small-minded bullshit like that, at least be enough of a man to put your name to it, so we know who it is that's the white nationalist/supremacist/racist/bigoted/small-minded prick. Otherwise you just come off as a coward. If you really believe all that fucking bullshit you just vomited all over the screen then you should at least stick up for it and take whatever you get for saying it.
I'm not impressed by any piece of software that beats humans at games, and it certainly doesn't make me any more impressed with the so-called half-assed excuse for 'AI' they keep trotting out. Feels mostly like more of the cheap marketing bullshit they keep pushing on us.
I remember a story I heard many years ago. There was a couple who on the advent of their retirement had emigrated to the U.S. from some european country (I'm tempted to say 'Poland' but I could be wrong). They bought an RV with the intent to tour the United States in it. The RV had Cruise Control; now, mind you, this story is set (I believe) back in the 1970's, so 'cruise control' meant a mechanism that kept the vehicle at a set speed and that's all. They apparently had never heard of such a thing and for whatever reasons believed that meant it could control the entire vehicle, so they got up on the freeway, set the cruise control, and then just went into the back. Luck being the fickle thing it is sometimes they managed to not get killed when the RV crashed, but the point of the story is they believed the capabilities of the technology was far ahead of what it actually was. So it goes with so-called 'AI' and so-called 'self driving car' technology; really, neither one is very good at all, but is hyped up so much, using language that misleads people into believing it's as capable as a human driver, when it's really not and may never be. For the average person even warning them not to trust it is ineffective, them believing that they're being warned merely for liability control purposes. Thus you have incidents like in the featured article. More and more incidents like this will occur, but without such benign results, as auto manufacturers continue to push SDCs on the public in a mad dash to make back the money they invested in their development, even though they're not really good enough for public roads but will fool people into believing they can really be trusted with their lives. Better be ready for bad times to come as people die needlessly due to SDCs.
Honestly, if someone has an IQ well over average and a college education and they're an anti-vaxxer, I'm stunned, and the only possible explanation is that they're horribly gullible and fell prey to fake news. But even then that doens't get them off the hook for not vaccinating their kids. 'Choice' can't be in play in something like this.
So I'm supposed to 'respect the opinions' of people who side with anti-vaxxers? I don't think so.
Also do you actually think I'm some sort of Stealth Slashdot Administrator who can delete people's responses? LOL, no, of course I'm not, anti-vaxxers and the people who for whatever reasons support their nonsense can and have posted their hate of what I said; my stating 'I don't give a damn what you think so don't bother' is my way of saying "you're not going to bully, troll, or shame me into changing my viewpoint on this issue", and for the record: I will NOT change my viewpoint on this issue for anyone or any reason. The 'anti-vaxxer' crowd are, in my opinion, flat-out ignorant, and furthermore a danger to public safety, and the results of their ill-considered decisions to not vaccinate their kids has led to outbreaks of diseases that could have been avoided. There is no defense for what they have done. This is not negotiable.
The funny thing here is that Python is on a level with BASIC so far as complexity goes; it's designed and intended to be accessible, yet it can be powerful. You can't write an entire OS in it, but you can do a lot of useful things in it, and a journalist should be able to learn to code in it.
Somewhere above you in this thread someone is actually citing rare, outlier cases of vaccines "not being prepared properly" and other unlikely things as valid reasoning to NOT vaccinate kids, but as I and now you are pointing out, the overall positive outcome for our species as a whole is what matters here. Anti-vaxxers are the root cause behind some diseases that we otherwise thought were thoroughly erradicated coming back and causing current epidemics. In 2019 there is precisely ZERO reason for any kid to get measles or whooping cough or polio. It's embarassing that these things are happening here in a first-world country, embarassing that any actual adults are making such bad decisions that are behind this happening.
Fine. Right back at you, you're a 'foe' of our species if you support people being wilfully ignorant. No truly intelligent educated person can refute the overall positive effects of immunization.
Either this 'study' is deeply flawed, or it's actually the product of the Russian trolls it speaks of, since this makes precisely zero sense, someone not vaccinating their kids against common diseases is among the obvious definitions of 'unintelligent'. Don't really give a damn what anyone thinks of what I just said, either, so don't bother.
Is this a repeat from like 20 years ago or something? I'm sure I've seen a machine that does precisely what's described in TFA, but a long, long time ago.
Agreed. My first thought was, "Oh, great, so we can have the coding equivalent of mobility scooters?" If you're using it as a learning tool then great, but if you're relying on it to actually get your job done then I'm far from impressed. Also while Python is vast and strange it's not like it's difficult to learn, being easy to learn is one of it's main features, so if you really need some 'AI'-driven tool to get your work done, then I question why it is you're involved in any programming tasks at all.
How many of the positive comments in this discussion thread about being a warehouse worker for Amazon are paid astroturfers for Amazon Corporate trying to discredit the reports of alleged mistreatment of employess, poor working conditions, and so on? Or are you really going to believe that it's all some Amazon competitor trying to poison public opinion against them?
Far from the first time we've heard a litany of complaints about a big retailer over working conditions, either; Walmart comes to mind.
It'd also be far from the first time some big corporation tried to hush things like this up and whitewash it all by some means or other to protect themselves from liability.
Slashdot Mirror
The energy density of nuclear power far outstrips any other energy source. No one can dispute that.
Now, if you express that energy density in terms of something like kilowatts per acre, then you see that something like solar and wind are ridiculous for the long term.
Now consider these points:
o Humans are never going to voluntarily limit their reproduction. We're specifically wired to not do that.
o Magifying the above, continual advances in medical science, quality of care, and availability of care, mean people live longer, people survive illnesses and diseases that they otherwise might not have.
o The above both translate to an ever-growing population of humans on the planet, regardless of availability of arable land and other resources to support them.
o With an ever-growing population and limited resources, at some point wars over control of arable land and resources are inevitable.
You can deny that last point all you want but historically that's what most wars are fought over: land and resources. When the Earths' population of humans rises above a certain point, it becomes inevitable, because people aren't just going to sit down and let themselves die.
Now, then, how the above relates to the subject of energy sources, if you didn't already follow me on this: When you have to take up millions and millions (or even billions) of acres of flat land that could be used for crops to feed people, eventually you're going to reach a breaking point where you can't grow enough food to feed everyone and still keep the lights on. What do you think is going to happen then?
Meanwhile you can build nuclear power plants here and there, taking up comparatively little acreage, give everyone as much power as they need, and preserve arable land to grow food to feed everyone.
Nuclear reactors can be designed in such ways to make them intrinsicly safer. I've seen the proposed designs.
Procedures and techniques can be devised to deal with waste products with better safety and efficiency, and perhaps even ways to neutralize it. Science will provide solutions for these sorts of problems.
Fusion power is just around the corner. We're almost there now. Fission will tide us over in the meantime.
Solar and wind can provide the stop-gap coverage while new generations of fission reactor designs are devised and built.
Meanwhile physics research continues to unlock the mysteries of Reality. They may come up with even more exotic energy sources that are even cleaner and safer than either fission or fusion.
Look to the long term and the big picture.
Even if that's so it's still less than burning fossil fuels, and oh by the way the production of 'renewable' sources is far from 'carbon neutral' too and you can produce all the solar panels you want and it won't be enough in the long run. Nuclear power PLUS renewables are the way forward for the MIDDLE TERM. Fusion will replace fission sooner or later. That'll give us some breathing room until physicists come up with something even better; for all we know we might end up with anitmatter reactors or something even more exotic. But in the meantime we can't just sit here with our fingers up our collective noses and hope solar panels are enough. Oh and by the way even in yours and others' utopia of solar panels everywhere there still has to be massive energy storage to make that work 24/7/365, are any of you factoring that into your 'equations'? Probably not. The environmental cost of producing the raw materials for energy storage facilities? Probably not. Are you all factoring in the environmental impact of millions of acres of solar farms and wind generators everywhere, how they affect the ecosystem, how they affect wind and weather patterns? Probably not. How 'wave power' installations will affect ocean life, ocean current patterns? Probably not. I have NEVER come across anyone in any of these 'discussions' that even really tries to look at the total picture or the long term or even the medium term, you all look at the short term and a microcosm instead. I'm looking at as much of the total picture and the longer term as much as I can.
Yeah sure and your mind is already made up so what does that make you? I reversed course on nuclear a while back. Meanwhile you're not even willing to think about it. All your 'renewables' are not going to be enough but you don't want to hear that either, do you? You'd probably say 'no' to fusion power, too, just because it's still a form of nuclear power. With your 'plan' for the Earth, a die-back of our species is the only way we'll survive -- but consider this: how much CO2 is going to get dumped into the atmosphere during the inevitable wars over resources and arable land that will take place when things get too tight? Oh, wait, you'll deny that too, won't you? You more than likely think we can have 10 billion humans alive on the planet all at once and have no problems. If so I got bad news for you, old son..
The 'huge conspiracy' is the Dominionist types that poo-poo science, climate science in general, because it does not suit their agenda.
Solar, wind, geothermal, tides, and so on. Long-term storage of nuclear waste is a problem that other technologies do not face.
Heard all this before. The former are not end-all be-all solutions, they're more supplemental, and producing the hardware for them is not carbon-neutral or carbon-negative, either; the latter does not have to be a deal-breaker, we can I'm sure come up with ways to deal with waste products that does not pose a risk. Hell, drop it into the Marianas Trench and allow the Earth to reabsorb the stuff via subduction. Or maybe we find a way to recycle nuclear waste back into useful fuel -- or even a way to neutralize it entirely. I flatly reject anyone who puts forth the notion that physics has 'discovered all there is to discover' (and yes someone has said that in the past, and they weren't kidding). Sticking our heads in the sand over nuclear just isn't going to cut it anymore though.
I'm having a problem with you conflating global warming and nuclear power the way you're doing, but I do agree -- even as a Democrat -- that we need to dispell the Boogeyman we've created surrounding nuclear power and avail ourselves of it before it's too late. It's possible to design and build inherently safer reactors, ones that won't suffer the pitfalls of even the most current design in use, but there first needs to be enough belief in the need for it to get the funding to first design them, then start building them. Meanwhile research into practical fusion power continues. It's all to the good so long as we get back on course and stay the course.
That's more likely what they want to do: have 100% access to the conversations of deaf people.
We've already got too many people to live comfortably. Perhaps what we need (and will have the Earth itself hand us, one way or another) is a die-back of our species. More doesn't seem to necessarily be better in this case. Or perhaps we need to develop the ability to get the hell off this planet so people can be somewhere else, where they have room to breathe again and be who they want to be without butting heads with everyone else. Any way you look at it I think a die-back of some sort is inevitable, either due to climate change, or war over resources, or pandemic. All species on this planet have their numbers ultimately regulated by environmental factors of one sort or another, be it food supply, or predation; humans have no natural predators other than ourselves and we adapt our environment to suit us instead of the other way around; one way or another we'll be the architects of our own demise, and self-regulation will assert itself, I think. No worries, it'll probably be somewhere in the neighborhood of 50-90%, so there'll still be humans -- just much less of them, with more room to breathe again.
Last night I watched the latest episode of Victoria on Masterpiece (PBS, if you didn't know). There was a cholera outbreak in London, and in their 19th century mindset, only 1 person out of several so-called 'experts' actually figured out what the real source of the outbreak was, while the other 'experts', including the ostensible Minister of Health, had wild, unsubstantiated 'theories' (using the word in the loosest sense possible here), which included things like "foreigners brought it with them, we should get rid of all the filthy foreigners". Of course the real cause was tracked down in a rational, logical manner by a stuttering doctor, who tracked it to a well that everyone in the outbreak area was using to get their water from.
..in a more direct comment about the featured article:
Take from that story what you will; there is a relevant meaning to it, you just have to look.
**********
Are we really going to unironicaly play the Minority Report card in actual law enforcement? Basically, take 'profiling' (comma, racial, I'm sure) to this extreme? Especially with the half-assed excuse for AI they keep applying to every damned thing? So much for the presumption of innocence, I guess. Reminds me of a bad joke a Latino comedian made once; he said "cops always follow around behind you when you're driving because they know sooner or later you'll do something wrong". You tell someone they're 'bad' often enough, they start believing it themselves. What's worse: shitty excuse for AI getting it wrong, and people minding their own business get watched constantly until someone 'decides' you did something wrong -- because cops never, ever plant evidence or otherwise 'manufacture' reasonable cause, and they never coerce people into false confessions.
Listen asshole, if you're going to spout white nationalist/supremacist/racist/bigoted/small-minded bullshit like that, at least be enough of a man to put your name to it, so we know who it is that's the white nationalist/supremacist/racist/bigoted/small-minded prick. Otherwise you just come off as a coward. If you really believe all that fucking bullshit you just vomited all over the screen then you should at least stick up for it and take whatever you get for saying it.
Your supercomputer self-driving car will pull over and phone for remote human assistance faster than ever before.
I'm not impressed by any piece of software that beats humans at games, and it certainly doesn't make me any more impressed with the so-called half-assed excuse for 'AI' they keep trotting out. Feels mostly like more of the cheap marketing bullshit they keep pushing on us.
I remember a story I heard many years ago. There was a couple who on the advent of their retirement had emigrated to the U.S. from some european country (I'm tempted to say 'Poland' but I could be wrong). They bought an RV with the intent to tour the United States in it. The RV had Cruise Control; now, mind you, this story is set (I believe) back in the 1970's, so 'cruise control' meant a mechanism that kept the vehicle at a set speed and that's all. They apparently had never heard of such a thing and for whatever reasons believed that meant it could control the entire vehicle, so they got up on the freeway, set the cruise control, and then just went into the back. Luck being the fickle thing it is sometimes they managed to not get killed when the RV crashed, but the point of the story is they believed the capabilities of the technology was far ahead of what it actually was. So it goes with so-called 'AI' and so-called 'self driving car' technology; really, neither one is very good at all, but is hyped up so much, using language that misleads people into believing it's as capable as a human driver, when it's really not and may never be. For the average person even warning them not to trust it is ineffective, them believing that they're being warned merely for liability control purposes. Thus you have incidents like in the featured article. More and more incidents like this will occur, but without such benign results, as auto manufacturers continue to push SDCs on the public in a mad dash to make back the money they invested in their development, even though they're not really good enough for public roads but will fool people into believing they can really be trusted with their lives. Better be ready for bad times to come as people die needlessly due to SDCs.
Honestly, if someone has an IQ well over average and a college education and they're an anti-vaxxer, I'm stunned, and the only possible explanation is that they're horribly gullible and fell prey to fake news. But even then that doens't get them off the hook for not vaccinating their kids. 'Choice' can't be in play in something like this.
Thank you for being the Voice of Reason in an apparent wilderness of idiocy.
Go back to Moscow, Ivan.
So I'm supposed to 'respect the opinions' of people who side with anti-vaxxers? I don't think so.
Also do you actually think I'm some sort of Stealth Slashdot Administrator who can delete people's responses? LOL, no, of course I'm not, anti-vaxxers and the people who for whatever reasons support their nonsense can and have posted their hate of what I said; my stating 'I don't give a damn what you think so don't bother' is my way of saying "you're not going to bully, troll, or shame me into changing my viewpoint on this issue", and for the record: I will NOT change my viewpoint on this issue for anyone or any reason. The 'anti-vaxxer' crowd are, in my opinion, flat-out ignorant, and furthermore a danger to public safety, and the results of their ill-considered decisions to not vaccinate their kids has led to outbreaks of diseases that could have been avoided. There is no defense for what they have done. This is not negotiable.
The funny thing here is that Python is on a level with BASIC so far as complexity goes; it's designed and intended to be accessible, yet it can be powerful. You can't write an entire OS in it, but you can do a lot of useful things in it, and a journalist should be able to learn to code in it.
Somewhere above you in this thread someone is actually citing rare, outlier cases of vaccines "not being prepared properly" and other unlikely things as valid reasoning to NOT vaccinate kids, but as I and now you are pointing out, the overall positive outcome for our species as a whole is what matters here. Anti-vaxxers are the root cause behind some diseases that we otherwise thought were thoroughly erradicated coming back and causing current epidemics. In 2019 there is precisely ZERO reason for any kid to get measles or whooping cough or polio. It's embarassing that these things are happening here in a first-world country, embarassing that any actual adults are making such bad decisions that are behind this happening.
Fine. Right back at you, you're a 'foe' of our species if you support people being wilfully ignorant. No truly intelligent educated person can refute the overall positive effects of immunization.
Oh look everyone, an anti-vaxxer!
Either this 'study' is deeply flawed, or it's actually the product of the Russian trolls it speaks of, since this makes precisely zero sense, someone not vaccinating their kids against common diseases is among the obvious definitions of 'unintelligent'. Don't really give a damn what anyone thinks of what I just said, either, so don't bother.
Is this a repeat from like 20 years ago or something? I'm sure I've seen a machine that does precisely what's described in TFA, but a long, long time ago.
Agreed. My first thought was, "Oh, great, so we can have the coding equivalent of mobility scooters?" If you're using it as a learning tool then great, but if you're relying on it to actually get your job done then I'm far from impressed. Also while Python is vast and strange it's not like it's difficult to learn, being easy to learn is one of it's main features, so if you really need some 'AI'-driven tool to get your work done, then I question why it is you're involved in any programming tasks at all.
How many of the positive comments in this discussion thread about being a warehouse worker for Amazon are paid astroturfers for Amazon Corporate trying to discredit the reports of alleged mistreatment of employess, poor working conditions, and so on? Or are you really going to believe that it's all some Amazon competitor trying to poison public opinion against them?
Far from the first time we've heard a litany of complaints about a big retailer over working conditions, either; Walmart comes to mind.
It'd also be far from the first time some big corporation tried to hush things like this up and whitewash it all by some means or other to protect themselves from liability.
Always question.