If we had a practical fusion reactor - then we might want to use lithium as a blanket material. However we do not have one now and we will not have one for at least 25 years.
A fusion reactor that runs at a net energy loss can still be used as a breader for a fission cycle. This is why I suggested using U239 or Th232 as a blanket material.
Of course there are other alternatives in the fission cycle. IFR for instance uses the neutron flux from fission to transmute U238 to fissile material. But we don't have any IFR reactors running and this is because Clinton's administration cancelled the program in 1994.
Yes - you are correct. However Thorium is easy to mine and is commonly available. India is undertaking development of the Thorium cycle. China is also nuclear. Any nuclear reactor anywhere in the world can be stuffed with Thorium and you get U233 out of it which is easy to chemically separate from the Thorium.
You can also just pull a fuel element from the reactor when it has only been in there for a short period of time - this will contain a high percentage of Pu239 as opposed to Pu240. Pu is easy to chemically separate as well. It is an effective material for making bombs which "we" demonstrated on the Japanese.
The actinides can be burned. All you need is a neutron flux. This gets rid of the 1000++ year radioactive wastes - and we get power from this as well. This is what the IFR does in fact.
The nuclear genie is out of the bottle and has been for a long time. I personally do not think that our "misguided" decision to not use these fuel cycles will delay India, Pakistan or China from pursuing them.
OTHO, we are presently burning over 25% of the world's oil production and we have alternatives which we are not pursuing. Instead we are pursuing along with the UK - a misguided war in the middle east that is clearly based on our desire to control (you can read steal) their oil.
The middle east is living in part in the middle ages and they have an egaggerated view of the value of their oil. But of course - the price at the pumps has everything to do with our desire to buy it. Last time I filled up my car I bitched at all the other people in the service station that if they weren't so eager to full up their cars I wouldn't have to pay so much for the gas!
The point is that still people are looking over their shoulder at the next guy and playing a game of economic brinkmanship - wondering when the next guy will stand down and take the bus or ride a bike. As part of this game we send a lot of kids to the middle east to "stablise it". Some come back in body bags. We should add to this count the number of kids in the middle east who are killed - but somehow that number isn't worthy of the media's attention.
The issue is that we have all the energy we need right here at home and we are not using it. Instead we are the ones pursuing a war.
We have 1.8 trillion barrels of oil in the tar sands. We need hydrogen. We don't have it. We need about 75 nuclear reactors in the GWe range. We don't have them. The reason we don't have them in part is because as you point out - someone overseas might want to build a weapon.
The truth is that many people overseas already have built all the weapons they want. Furthermore in the middle east the main reason they want to build the weapons is because we're over there attacking them.
The biggest obstacle on nuclear fusion is neutrons. Fusion produces a lot of neutrons and the idea of neutron free fusion using He3 is so far over the horizon that it isn't worth thinking about.
Fission also produces neutrons.
Since both reactions produce neutrons they have the same issues - namely dealing with radioactive wastes.
Fisson is easy to create. A team of boy scouts can do it in their own back yard. Fusion is very difficult.
Fission can be totally safe. It can also be very dangerous. It depends on the reactor design but the issue is that the technology is already on the shelf. IE. We can do it now and we have been able to do it for 50 years.
Now the issue is that with the USA designed high pressure reactors, they only use about 2/10 of 1% of the uranium that is mined. What this means is that with a better design we can get about 475 times the milage from our uranium.
There is so much energy available to us that it is almost beyond our imagination. Consider that there are about 114 reactors in the USA which have been running say about 50 years. 50x475 = 23,750 years. There has literally already been enough uranium mined for almost 24,000 years for a well designed reactor like the IRF (Integral fast reactor - look it up in the wikipedia). If we wish to produce 100% of our energy from uranium we have enough uranium mined already for over 2,000 years. Of course the best solution is to use this energy to free up hydrogen which we can combine with carbon to produce synthetic oil (syncrude!). We need about 75 GWe reactors right now here in Alberta. We have a terrible hydrogen shortage. The price of gasoline at the pumps is a symptom of this problem.
Yet - we keep reading stories about the holly grail - Nuclear Fusion.
Yes, some day will will build a fusion reactor. The research is a good idea. But the idea that it will be problem free is a false idea. The biggest obstacle is not wear and tear due to plasma - the biggest obstacle is neutrons flying around and these are difficult to control. In fact - the best solution might be to pack a bunch of thorium around the plasma and use the neutrons to transmute it into U233 which we can cart off to a fission reactor. As an alternative we can pack U238 around the plasma and cart of the Pu239. These are viable fuel cycles - unfortunately at present they are not politically correct.
Have you ever tried to count the neutrons that come off a fusion reaction? If you do you will see that there are so many that the _best_ use of fusion once we get it will be to operate as a breader for U239->Pu239/Pu240 production or th232->U233. These are viable fuel cycles.
The short of it is that fusion is rather dirty - just as bad if not worse than fission and the reason is because of all of those neutrons that are released.
Forget about OIL & GAS dropping in price for any length of time.
Saudi Aramco has announced as of April 2006 that Saudi Arabian oil production is now in terminal decline and this is taken over all the production the country can muster which includes some heavy oils that were frowned upon before. Ghawar in particular is suffering about 8% declines.
Kuwait announced in November of 2005 that they are in terminal decline as well as the Bergan field has gone over the top.
Of the top four this leaves the Pemex (Mexico) Canateral field dropping from about 2 million BOPD currently to under 1.6 before the end of 2007 and China's DaQing feild also dropping by about 6% per year.
The combined reduced production (read depletion) of these 4 fields alone cannot be replaced.
You can say that in Ireland they will _NEVER_ look at fission - and you are completely correct about the problems with wind and solar. However their other option will be to see if they can buy coal and failing that - they will have to start driving their cars less which might mean getting a horse - and figuring out how to superinsluate their houses which is also something that most people seem to be adverse to doing. And even if they do this I suspect they will be importing nuclear power. Perhaps it will be from France mind you via the tunnel.
I recall reading that when autopsies are performed about 1/3 of the time brain tumours are found. These are generally benign and caused no problem. They are found because people went looking for them.
The same issue surrounds the thyroid cancers associated with the Chernobyl disaster. Again - the tumours appear to be natural and generally cause no problems.
This of course does not change the fact that anyone so diagnosed will be scared to death (bad pun) and wonder when the next shoe is going to drop. So while I feel for the patients I have to beleive this is blown out of porportion.
What a stupid idea! Wake up and smell the coffee - its not waste and if you think it is then send it to Alberta.
Up here we need about 75 nuclear plants and of course most Canadians have not come to grips with this idea either. But we need those plants and if we have them we'll make gasoline for our good friends just south of us.
So send all your nuclear waste up here. We do know what to do with it. Send up your nuclear engineers too. We need them also.
Just create a script called "README" and you are done once you put it into the path. There are only a handful of files like this. The issue with other files and typing the name is that you need (and can use) a MIME association but it often chooses the wrong way to do anything.
For instance if I type in the name of an HTML file what is the system to do? Fire up a browser? Maybe I want to edit it. Maybe I want to use a specific tool to edit it. What of file.jpg? Does the user want to bring it up in Gimp, a viewer, a web browser, something else?
This is why the original developers of the shells never put this sort of option in - because it was only useful in a very restricted fashion and only to the most novice of users.
One thing Microsoft did with windows and the idea of point and click is to organize files to a certain extent around the application that most often uses the file. This is a very short sighted way of doing things. Files should be organised around a project concept.
A lawyer for instance may have several different communications for a client and all should be kept in the same client folder. This is how the manual files are organised. It would be a nightmare for the secretary to organise all faxes in say one folder and no improvement to have incomming faxes verses outgoing faxes.
The point and click interface makes this very difficult to acheive and is more of a hinderance than a help. Hense the reason serious experianced users tend to like the command line. Hense the reason non-sophisticated users tend to lose files and have to re-type them or why you can find sometimes 5 different version of the same file lost in the wilderness they call a hard drive.
If you want a command to do this it should take you no more than about 5 mins to put together a bash script.
I have a notes command that fires up a list of things I need to know and typically forget.... and it works on several topics. If you want it I can send it to you. Again - the issue in part is sharing. Since I don't know you and you don't know me I can't send you the code and there is no common place for us to communicate.
The manuals in general are poorly organised and extremely verbose. There seems to be no good way for them to be updated. The man pages are notorious for not having good examples.
I consider myself to be somewhat of an expert because people actually pay me big bux to do things. It is extremely frustrating sometimes to get good information.
As an example - I posted a more or less correct road map on how to get sound working in a debian machine. Other than the fact that this is obsure - the woody configuration was borken. That was about 4 years ago as I recall.
While the post is not perfect - it is a start and it at least tells people what they should look for.
Over the last 4 years in the IRC linux help groups I have on several occations encountered people running into the same issues as I ran into in 2002. The manuals have NOT been updated. I have seen on a number of occasions A*holes telling people to RTFM. Like *WHAT* manual am I suppose to read? Why can't the software check for this? Why can't it put out a reasonable error message?
The situation is really bad in the Unix world and while it has gotten better over the years - there is a serious rift between what we need and what we have.
I have experiance on more than 13 operating sytems. Unix is the best by far. However the manuals are close to the worst with only the IBM mainframe manuals claiming the prize. Those are truely horrible - mostly because they are so thick that a person would have to spend a month to read even one of them.
Surely we can clean this mess up. A way to start is to open up the temple and let people actually correct and improve the manuals using a wiki style documentation system. I do know there are efforts in this area. The thing is these efforts need to be welded into the distros people commonly use.
People can disagree with me of course - but the flavour of the posts on this thread clearly indicate we have a major problem.
We have over 900 channels all largely showing the same crap and the same re-runs. I see little reason to even have a TV.
This will be yet another reason for people to (1) not buy the product and (2) find something that meets their needs - which may be a home grown product and (3) cancel their cable or satelite subscription as well.
Oh they say the road to hell is paved with good intentions - this isn't even a good intention.
I am aware of the website and the arguments. IMHO they are faulty. It is as simple as that. Also you might note that I did allude to the argument that since water vapour is short lived in the environment that it can be eliminated as a forcing variable. I alluded to it and said it is a faulty argument. This is clear if the premise ("short lived") is false.
The argument is logical mind you. If we are dealing with just a transient I might agree in fact. However - we are not (necessarily) dealing with transients when it comes to changes in water vapour.
1) We pump whole rivers into the atmosphere through irrigation. This is a lot of water. This is not a transient since it has been going on rather continously for most of the last century and the scale is massive.
2) Water vapour levels are limited to a large degree by the amount of land at high elevation. Ie - high elevation = colder temps = temps below the dew point = precipitation = dry air.
This means that when the planet has large amounts of land at high elevation we should expect the loss of incident solar energy to be greater. Since the Cretaceous and especially during the Miocene there was a great deal of mountain building and this is co-incident with the planetary cooling that has taken place. Over the last 30 million years there has been a great deal of erosion and if we look at our mountain belts (himalyan excluded to a large degree because they are still building) we find that a great percentage of what was there say 30 million years ago is no longer present... it has been eroded away and replaced with mountain valleys.
In the long run - the erosion will undoubtably move us past the tipping point and the planet will warm up. However - the frozen poles act to lock us in to the cold phase so we need to overcome this. I suspect we are well past the tipping point. Thus if the planet does start to warm it will probably swing back into and lock into the warm phase which will be about 20C warmer than now overall.
Very little of this temperature increase will be felt at the equator. The reasons for this are simply demonstrated. If you check the heat holding ability of the atmosphere in the tropics you will find that it is quite efficient (due to the large absolute humidity). Since a large percentage of the incident solar energy is already retained in the tropics and leaks out at higher latitudes - the tropics are already warm.
This means the effect of global warming when it occurs will be to push the temperate zone boundries towards the poles. Eventually the planet will lose the polar ice caps and this has been the situation for about ++80% of the last billion years of the geological history of the planet.
Yes - maybe the planet will warm up. Maybe we'll have another ice age or two before this happens since we've already had about 20 of them over the last 2 million years or so. Maybe we'll have another 20 ice ages. The point is that CO2 is not very significant in this picture. It is so insignificant in fact that CO2 levels 13x to 17x higher than now in the ordovician (tachonic orogeny) neither prevented the planet from plunging into an ice age nor did it cause the planet to warm up after that ice age.
Mountains clearly are "forcing" when it comes to water vapour mind you. CO2 will also "force" somewhat. So do volcanic eruptions. The Deccan Trapps volcanizm dumped huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. This may well have disrupted the carbon cycle and snuffed out the dinosaurs. The thing is man's contribution is still very very minor. A change of 100 ppm is nothing in comparision to the CO2 levels of the Ordovician (4000-6000 ppm) and the planet plunged into an ice age back then.
A suggestion might be to compare the "forcing" of water vapour by say a 1 C rise in temperature (who cares what it is attributed to) to the "negative forcing" of the Tibetian plateau which has lifted central Asia from about sea level to the elevation of say
There is NOTHING wrong with your thinking. When you "factor out" the variable this is the same as setting it to zero. In mathematics (and engineering and physics) we zero out variables we don't want. This is how we get rid of them. But first we try to do a sensitivity analysis to determine what this might so to our conculsions.
Your example of tire wear is ok - however ignoring tire pressure might be a greater sin. Both however would be expected to have an effect on overall milage.
People can be forgiven for not factoring variables. We could spend all day arguing and never get anywhere. But consider this.
Suppose the question is what can be done to get the best milage possible with your car... Would you factor out an engine swap?
I would expect most people will. Yet this is one of the most significant variables and the simple excersize of buying a VW diesel as used in the golf and machining the parts you need to fit it in might result is 3x the fuel economy. Fitting the VW diesel to the Toyota Prius hybred drive train may result in even better all around performance.
We are limited by our imaginations and we are also eliminated by our biases.
In the case of global warming however it is clear that the possibility of a trend line in the concentration of the most powerful green house gas is not part of the models. Hense - they would not be very useful if indeed a trend line exists. This is a valid critisicm of the models.
So - why would we presume there is no trend in the concentration of water vapour? There are many reasons to think there might be - and one is that we force whole rivers into the atmosphere through irrigation.
Some of the climate modelers I've spoken with have suggested that since water vapour is short lived in the atmosphere that it is safe to ignore its effect. Another argument is that increased H2O leads to increased cloud cover and while increased H2O perse is an increase in a green house gas, increased cloud cover will offset the positive warming effects of increased H2O.
Well - the latter comment is true. But there is nothing to suggest we necessarily get increased cloud cover just because we increase H2O - indeed - cloud cover is a function of the dew point curve and as temperature increases we get a greater H2O capacity without increasing cloud cover.
The point is these arguments point to the fact that the variables have NOT been factored in.
When we consider just how small the CO2 footprint is and especially how small the CO2 change ("toes?") are compared to H2O - well - it is still like comparing the thickness of a peice of paper to a tree stump and not having anything to measure the tree stump with...
Were I a moderator I would mod you up. If some dweeb mods you down then it is clearly an attempt to suppress the facts.
Your numbers indicate the total CHANGE in CO2 introduced into the atmosphere is 7/207 = 3.4% This is still less than the volatility of CO2 puffed out by volcanoes.
It is estimated that plant growth has INCREASED by about 10% due to increased CO2 levels. If you note the CO2 is in balence over the last few million years with the sources matched by the sinks (obvious) then you would have to conclude that a large amount of the manmade CO2 flux is simply soaked up by the flora on the planet.
It's like having some large corporation lower 100,000 sub-management employee wages by $5 an hour instead of laying off one CEO who is making $500k per year.
Well - I liked your post however its too bad you end it with such bad math.
100,000 employees * 2000 working hours per year * $5 bux = $1 billion per year.
$500,000 / 1,000,000,000 = 1/2,000 = 0.05%
Thus the hypothetical CEO's wages are more or less insignificant.
-------------------
On this note - it would be very instructive if you bought yourself a $0.69 plastic vernier caliper.
On such an instrument you can quickely locate a number that would represent the absolute amount of water vapour in the atmosphere - which is anywhere from 30,000 to 80,000 ppm. In the hot tropics on a saturated day there is about 8% H2O in the atmosphere. The global average is difficult to determine because there are large regions where the water vapour is practically non-existant - for instance Antarctica - and the reason is because that land mass is below the dew point.
A convinient scale would be to choose each inch to represent say 10,000 ppm. If you choose a metric caliper then choose a cm to represent say either 5,000 or 10,000 ppm. Either is convinient.
Once you have done this - then set the caliper at the CO2 concentration. Its about 370 ppm.
After you do this set the caliper to represent the CHANGE in CO2 which is about say 70-90 ppm. Make sure you use the vernier properly and this is why I suggest a cheap 69 cent caliper - because using a vernier scale will make anyone who does this little excersize think!!!
Just as your math was bad in your post - you will quickly see that since H2O is by far the most powerful greenhouse gas it swamps CO2 by so many orders of magnitude that really the CO2 is probably totally irrelevant.
We do not know if H2O levels over the planet have increased over the last few 100 years or decreased. We cannot measure H2O levels to the required precision. The climate models zero this out. IE - they eliminate the most significant variable.
Further more we do know that when we have a warming in say the Pacific there is a huge increase in precipitation and we can only conclude that water vapour levels have to greatly increase to allow this to happen.
So a very simple napkin style calculation illustrates that if global warming were so sentitive that a 90 ppm change in a green house gas would cause runaway planetary heating then we would have to conclude as well that an increase in the ocean surface temperature in say the pacfic would have a similar effect. Clearly this does not happen.
I am not saying global warming is not taking place. There have been warming trends in the past and we have recently matched a prior warming of a few 1000 years ago. Back then it surely wasn't due to CO2 unless it came from volcanoes. What I am saying is that any global warming is far more likely to be due to changes in water vapour and other variables and the trends of water vapour concentrations is a factor we have not been able to measure.
Until we can get a handle on H2O and whether there is any indication of a trend line in the concentrations - I would suggest we forget about CO2 because it is like comparing the thickness of a sheet of paper to a tree stump. The simple excersize of using a 69 cent caliper will confirm this, and you get a nice (but cheap) instrument out of the deal.
It is much easier to promote war if you can prevent people from talking to each other. Were it not for the ability of people to communicate I would expect the Veitnam war might still be going on.
I am sure there are many people who may not see this connection. However, we must consider the FUD that propaganda departments spew. In fact the very existance of propaganda departments illustrates the idea.
One of the biggest benefits the internet confers upon people is the ability for everyone to freely and inexpensivly communicate with anyone else in the world. Those who wish to prevent people from commuicating with each other are the same ones who wish to control people. A question to be asked is if Hitler could have prevailed in a world where people can freely communicate?
It is my opinion that people are generally able to weed out the ideas they don't like or which have destructive intent. By creating barriers between groups of people, information is not allowed to flow as freely.
The question that needs to be asked is "why"? Why is it necessary to partition the net? Address space is not a good reason because there is no shortage of addresses - especially with IPV6. Numbers are plentiful and free even though large vested interests like to charge for IP's. Effeciency is not a good reason. Ease of use is not a good reason - the present country codes work well enough.
The only anwers that make any sense is that certain folks like to have power - power to control people - and they don't like opposition to their power.
Slashdot Mirror
Typo - sorry.
If we had a practical fusion reactor - then we might want to use lithium as a blanket material. However we do not have one now and we will not have one for at least 25 years.
A fusion reactor that runs at a net energy loss can still be used as a breader for a fission cycle. This is why I suggested using U239 or Th232 as a blanket material.
Of course there are other alternatives in the fission cycle. IFR for instance uses the neutron flux from fission to transmute U238 to fissile material. But we don't have any IFR reactors running and this is because Clinton's administration cancelled the program in 1994.
Yes - you are correct. However Thorium is easy to mine and is commonly available. India is undertaking development of the Thorium cycle. China is also nuclear. Any nuclear reactor anywhere in the world can be stuffed with Thorium and you get U233 out of it which is easy to chemically separate from the Thorium.
You can also just pull a fuel element from the reactor when it has only been in there for a short period of time - this will contain a high percentage of Pu239 as opposed to Pu240. Pu is easy to chemically separate as well. It is an effective material for making bombs which "we" demonstrated on the Japanese.
The actinides can be burned. All you need is a neutron flux. This gets rid of the 1000++ year radioactive wastes - and we get power from this as well. This is what the IFR does in fact.
The nuclear genie is out of the bottle and has been for a long time. I personally do not think that our "misguided" decision to not use these fuel cycles will delay India, Pakistan or China from pursuing them.
OTHO, we are presently burning over 25% of the world's oil production and we have alternatives which we are not pursuing. Instead we are pursuing along with the UK - a misguided war in the middle east that is clearly based on our desire to control (you can read steal) their oil.
The middle east is living in part in the middle ages and they have an egaggerated view of the value of their oil. But of course - the price at the pumps has everything to do with our desire to buy it. Last time I filled up my car I bitched at all the other people in the service station that if they weren't so eager to full up their cars I wouldn't have to pay so much for the gas!
The point is that still people are looking over their shoulder at the next guy and playing a game of economic brinkmanship - wondering when the next guy will stand down and take the bus or ride a bike. As part of this game we send a lot of kids to the middle east to "stablise it". Some come back in body bags. We should add to this count the number of kids in the middle east who are killed - but somehow that number isn't worthy of the media's attention.
The issue is that we have all the energy we need right here at home and we are not using it. Instead we are the ones pursuing a war.
We have 1.8 trillion barrels of oil in the tar sands. We need hydrogen. We don't have it. We need about 75 nuclear reactors in the GWe range. We don't have them. The reason we don't have them in part is because as you point out - someone overseas might want to build a weapon.
The truth is that many people overseas already have built all the weapons they want. Furthermore in the middle east the main reason they want to build the weapons is because we're over there attacking them.
Insanity rules!
The biggest obstacle on nuclear fusion is neutrons. Fusion produces a lot of neutrons and the idea of neutron free fusion using He3 is so far over the horizon that it isn't worth thinking about.
Fission also produces neutrons.
Since both reactions produce neutrons they have the same issues - namely dealing with radioactive wastes.
Fisson is easy to create. A team of boy scouts can do it in their own back yard. Fusion is very difficult.
Fission can be totally safe. It can also be very dangerous. It depends on the reactor design but the issue is that the technology is already on the shelf. IE. We can do it now and we have been able to do it for 50 years.
Now the issue is that with the USA designed high pressure reactors, they only use about 2/10 of 1% of the uranium that is mined. What this means is that with a better design we can get about 475 times the milage from our uranium.
There is so much energy available to us that it is almost beyond our imagination. Consider that there are about 114 reactors in the USA which have been running say about 50 years. 50x475 = 23,750 years. There has literally already been enough uranium mined for almost 24,000 years for a well designed reactor like the IRF (Integral fast reactor - look it up in the wikipedia). If we wish to produce 100% of our energy from uranium we have enough uranium mined already for over 2,000 years. Of course the best solution is to use this energy to free up hydrogen which we can combine with carbon to produce synthetic oil (syncrude!). We need about 75 GWe reactors right now here in Alberta. We have a terrible hydrogen shortage. The price of gasoline at the pumps is a symptom of this problem.
Yet - we keep reading stories about the holly grail - Nuclear Fusion.
Yes, some day will will build a fusion reactor. The research is a good idea. But the idea that it will be problem free is a false idea. The biggest obstacle is not wear and tear due to plasma - the biggest obstacle is neutrons flying around and these are difficult to control. In fact - the best solution might be to pack a bunch of thorium around the plasma and use the neutrons to transmute it into U233 which we can cart off to a fission reactor. As an alternative we can pack U238 around the plasma and cart of the Pu239. These are viable fuel cycles - unfortunately at present they are not politically correct.
Have you ever tried to count the neutrons that come off a fusion reaction? If you do you will see that there are so many that the _best_ use of fusion once we get it will be to operate as a breader for U239->Pu239/Pu240 production or th232->U233. These are viable fuel cycles.
The short of it is that fusion is rather dirty - just as bad if not worse than fission and the reason is because of all of those neutrons that are released.
Forget about OIL & GAS dropping in price for any length of time.
Saudi Aramco has announced as of April 2006 that Saudi Arabian oil production is now in terminal decline and this is taken over all the production the country can muster which includes some heavy oils that were frowned upon before. Ghawar in particular is suffering about 8% declines.
Kuwait announced in November of 2005 that they are in terminal decline as well as the Bergan field has gone over the top.
Of the top four this leaves the Pemex (Mexico) Canateral field dropping from about 2 million BOPD currently to under 1.6 before the end of 2007 and China's DaQing feild also dropping by about 6% per year.
The combined reduced production (read depletion) of these 4 fields alone cannot be replaced.
You can say that in Ireland they will _NEVER_ look at fission - and you are completely correct about the problems with wind and solar. However their other option will be to see if they can buy coal and failing that - they will have to start driving their cars less which might mean getting a horse - and figuring out how to superinsluate their houses which is also something that most people seem to be adverse to doing. And even if they do this I suspect they will be importing nuclear power. Perhaps it will be from France mind you via the tunnel.
I recall reading that when autopsies are performed about 1/3 of the time brain tumours are found. These are generally benign and caused no problem. They are found because people went looking for them.
The same issue surrounds the thyroid cancers associated with the Chernobyl disaster. Again - the tumours appear to be natural and generally cause no problems.
This of course does not change the fact that anyone so diagnosed will be scared to death (bad pun) and wonder when the next shoe is going to drop. So while I feel for the patients I have to beleive this is blown out of porportion.
What a stupid idea! Wake up and smell the coffee - its not waste and if you think it is then send it to Alberta.
Up here we need about 75 nuclear plants and of course most Canadians have not come to grips with this idea either. But we need those plants and if we have them we'll make gasoline for our good friends just south of us.
So send all your nuclear waste up here. We do know what to do with it. Send up your nuclear engineers too. We need them also.
I could not find where M$ suggest surfing with JS disabled. Can you post a link?
That may be well and good but I can buy a used machine for $59 bux and typically they have a good assortment of PCI slots to plug cards into.
Of course as long as it runs Linux I'll be all for it.
Smart ppl generally know better than to allow Javascript.
ODSL announces Patent Commons Project
Wednesday August 10, @07:51PM
Rejected
The powers that be rejected this story. Funny thing is AFAIK ODSL operates slashdot. I guess they just didn't want you to know.
Just create a script called "README" and you are done once you put it into the path. There are only a handful of files like this. The issue with other files and typing the name is that you need (and can use) a MIME association but it often chooses the wrong way to do anything.
For instance if I type in the name of an HTML file what is the system to do? Fire up a browser? Maybe I want to edit it. Maybe I want to use a specific tool to edit it. What of file.jpg? Does the user want to bring it up in Gimp, a viewer, a web browser, something else?
This is why the original developers of the shells never put this sort of option in - because it was only useful in a very restricted fashion and only to the most novice of users.
One thing Microsoft did with windows and the idea of point and click is to organize files to a certain extent around the application that most often uses the file. This is a very short sighted way of doing things. Files should be organised around a project concept.
A lawyer for instance may have several different communications for a client and all should be kept in the same client folder. This is how the manual files are organised. It would be a nightmare for the secretary to organise all faxes in say one folder and no improvement to have incomming faxes verses outgoing faxes.
The point and click interface makes this very difficult to acheive and is more of a hinderance than a help. Hense the reason serious experianced users tend to like the command line. Hense the reason non-sophisticated users tend to lose files and have to re-type them or why you can find sometimes 5 different version of the same file lost in the wilderness they call a hard drive.
What about IBM? Seems VMWare is about 40 years late.
If you want a command to do this it should take you no more than about 5 mins to put together a bash script.
I have a notes command that fires up a list of things I need to know and typically forget.... and it works on several topics. If you want it I can send it to you. Again - the issue in part is sharing. Since I don't know you and you don't know me I can't send you the code and there is no common place for us to communicate.
I suspect the chick's attitude will not serve as an impediment to her ability to reproduce.
Well said!
I take exception to this.
d =203714 ID 653979
The manuals in general are poorly organised and extremely verbose. There seems to be no good way for them to be updated. The man pages are notorious for not having good examples.
I consider myself to be somewhat of an expert because people actually pay me big bux to do things. It is extremely frustrating sometimes to get good information.
As an example - I posted a more or less correct road map on how to get sound working in a debian machine. Other than the fact that this is obsure - the woody configuration was borken. That was about 4 years ago as I recall.
The procedure is posted in sourceforge under GRIP support and people can find it here: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=3714&ati
While the post is not perfect - it is a start and it at least tells people what they should look for.
Over the last 4 years in the IRC linux help groups I have on several occations encountered people running into the same issues as I ran into in 2002. The manuals have NOT been updated. I have seen on a number of occasions A*holes telling people to RTFM. Like *WHAT* manual am I suppose to read? Why can't the software check for this? Why can't it put out a reasonable error message?
The situation is really bad in the Unix world and while it has gotten better over the years - there is a serious rift between what we need and what we have.
I have experiance on more than 13 operating sytems. Unix is the best by far. However the manuals are close to the worst with only the IBM mainframe manuals claiming the prize. Those are truely horrible - mostly because they are so thick that a person would have to spend a month to read even one of them.
Surely we can clean this mess up. A way to start is to open up the temple and let people actually correct and improve the manuals using a wiki style documentation system. I do know there are efforts in this area. The thing is these efforts need to be welded into the distros people commonly use.
People can disagree with me of course - but the flavour of the posts on this thread clearly indicate we have a major problem.
We have over 900 channels all largely showing the same crap and the same re-runs. I see little reason to even have a TV.
This will be yet another reason for people to (1) not buy the product and (2) find something that meets their needs - which may be a home grown product and (3) cancel their cable or satelite subscription as well.
Oh they say the road to hell is paved with good intentions - this isn't even a good intention.
That might make debugging a little more difficult.
Sorry I could not reply sooner.
I am aware of the website and the arguments. IMHO they are faulty. It is as simple as that. Also you might note that I did allude to the argument that since water vapour is short lived in the environment that it can be eliminated as a forcing variable. I alluded to it and said it is a faulty argument. This is clear if the premise ("short lived") is false.
The argument is logical mind you. If we are dealing with just a transient I might agree in fact. However - we are not (necessarily) dealing with transients when it comes to changes in water vapour.
1) We pump whole rivers into the atmosphere through irrigation. This is a lot of water. This is not a transient since it has been going on rather continously for most of the last century and the scale is massive.
2) Water vapour levels are limited to a large degree by the amount of land at high elevation. Ie - high elevation = colder temps = temps below the dew point = precipitation = dry air.
This means that when the planet has large amounts of land at high elevation we should expect the loss of incident solar energy to be greater. Since the Cretaceous and especially during the Miocene there was a great deal of mountain building and this is co-incident with the planetary cooling that has taken place. Over the last 30 million years there has been a great deal of erosion and if we look at our mountain belts (himalyan excluded to a large degree because they are still building) we find that a great percentage of what was there say 30 million years ago is no longer present... it has been eroded away and replaced with mountain valleys.
In the long run - the erosion will undoubtably move us past the tipping point and the planet will warm up. However - the frozen poles act to lock us in to the cold phase so we need to overcome this. I suspect we are well past the tipping point. Thus if the planet does start to warm it will probably swing back into and lock into the warm phase which will be about 20C warmer than now overall.
Very little of this temperature increase will be felt at the equator. The reasons for this are simply demonstrated. If you check the heat holding ability of the atmosphere in the tropics you will find that it is quite efficient (due to the large absolute humidity). Since a large percentage of the incident solar energy is already retained in the tropics and leaks out at higher latitudes - the tropics are already warm.
This means the effect of global warming when it occurs will be to push the temperate zone boundries towards the poles. Eventually the planet will lose the polar ice caps and this has been the situation for about ++80% of the last billion years of the geological history of the planet.
Yes - maybe the planet will warm up. Maybe we'll have another ice age or two before this happens since we've already had about 20 of them over the last 2 million years or so. Maybe we'll have another 20 ice ages. The point is that CO2 is not very significant in this picture. It is so insignificant in fact that CO2 levels 13x to 17x higher than now in the ordovician (tachonic orogeny) neither prevented the planet from plunging into an ice age nor did it cause the planet to warm up after that ice age.
Mountains clearly are "forcing" when it comes to water vapour mind you. CO2 will also "force" somewhat. So do volcanic eruptions. The Deccan Trapps volcanizm dumped huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. This may well have disrupted the carbon cycle and snuffed out the dinosaurs. The thing is man's contribution is still very very minor. A change of 100 ppm is nothing in comparision to the CO2 levels of the Ordovician (4000-6000 ppm) and the planet plunged into an ice age back then.
A suggestion might be to compare the "forcing" of water vapour by say a 1 C rise in temperature (who cares what it is attributed to) to the "negative forcing" of the Tibetian plateau which has lifted central Asia from about sea level to the elevation of say
There is NOTHING wrong with your thinking. When you "factor out" the variable this is the same as setting it to zero. In mathematics (and engineering and physics) we zero out variables we don't want. This is how we get rid of them. But first we try to do a sensitivity analysis to determine what this might so to our conculsions.
Your example of tire wear is ok - however ignoring tire pressure might be a greater sin. Both however would be expected to have an effect on overall milage.
People can be forgiven for not factoring variables. We could spend all day arguing and never get anywhere. But consider this.
Suppose the question is what can be done to get the best milage possible with your car... Would you factor out an engine swap?
I would expect most people will. Yet this is one of the most significant variables and the simple excersize of buying a VW diesel as used in the golf and machining the parts you need to fit it in might result is 3x the fuel economy. Fitting the VW diesel to the Toyota Prius hybred drive train may result in even better all around performance.
We are limited by our imaginations and we are also eliminated by our biases.
In the case of global warming however it is clear that the possibility of a trend line in the concentration of the most powerful green house gas is not part of the models. Hense - they would not be very useful if indeed a trend line exists. This is a valid critisicm of the models.
So - why would we presume there is no trend in the concentration of water vapour? There are many reasons to think there might be - and one is that we force whole rivers into the atmosphere through irrigation.
Some of the climate modelers I've spoken with have suggested that since water vapour is short lived in the atmosphere that it is safe to ignore its effect. Another argument is that increased H2O leads to increased cloud cover and while increased H2O perse is an increase in a green house gas, increased cloud cover will offset the positive warming effects of increased H2O.
Well - the latter comment is true. But there is nothing to suggest we necessarily get increased cloud cover just because we increase H2O - indeed - cloud cover is a function of the dew point curve and as temperature increases we get a greater H2O capacity without increasing cloud cover.
The point is these arguments point to the fact that the variables have NOT been factored in.
When we consider just how small the CO2 footprint is and especially how small the CO2 change ("toes?") are compared to H2O - well - it is still like comparing the thickness of a peice of paper to a tree stump and not having anything to measure the tree stump with...
Were I a moderator I would mod you up. If some dweeb mods you down then it is clearly an attempt to suppress the facts.
Your numbers indicate the total CHANGE in CO2 introduced into the atmosphere is 7/207 = 3.4% This is still less than the volatility of CO2 puffed out by volcanoes.
It is estimated that plant growth has INCREASED by about 10% due to increased CO2 levels. If you note the CO2 is in balence over the last few million years with the sources matched by the sinks (obvious) then you would have to conclude that a large amount of the manmade CO2 flux is simply soaked up by the flora on the planet.
It's like having some large corporation lower 100,000 sub-management employee wages by $5 an hour instead of laying off one CEO who is making $500k per year.
Well - I liked your post however its too bad you end it with such bad math.
100,000 employees * 2000 working hours per year * $5 bux = $1 billion per year.
$500,000 / 1,000,000,000 = 1/2,000 = 0.05%
Thus the hypothetical CEO's wages are more or less insignificant.
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On this note - it would be very instructive if you bought yourself a $0.69 plastic vernier caliper.
On such an instrument you can quickely locate a number that would represent the absolute amount of water vapour in the atmosphere - which is anywhere from 30,000 to 80,000 ppm. In the hot tropics on a saturated day there is about 8% H2O in the atmosphere. The global average is difficult to determine because there are large regions where the water vapour is practically non-existant - for instance Antarctica - and the reason is because that land mass is below the dew point.
A convinient scale would be to choose each inch to represent say 10,000 ppm. If you choose a metric caliper then choose a cm to represent say either 5,000 or 10,000 ppm. Either is convinient.
Once you have done this - then set the caliper at the CO2 concentration. Its about 370 ppm.
After you do this set the caliper to represent the CHANGE in CO2 which is about say 70-90 ppm. Make sure you use the vernier properly and this is why I suggest a cheap 69 cent caliper - because using a vernier scale will make anyone who does this little excersize think!!!
Just as your math was bad in your post - you will quickly see that since H2O is by far the most powerful greenhouse gas it swamps CO2 by so many orders of magnitude that really the CO2 is probably totally irrelevant.
We do not know if H2O levels over the planet have increased over the last few 100 years or decreased. We cannot measure H2O levels to the required precision. The climate models zero this out. IE - they eliminate the most significant variable.
Further more we do know that when we have a warming in say the Pacific there is a huge increase in precipitation and we can only conclude that water vapour levels have to greatly increase to allow this to happen.
So a very simple napkin style calculation illustrates that if global warming were so sentitive that a 90 ppm change in a green house gas would cause runaway planetary heating then we would have to conclude as well that an increase in the ocean surface temperature in say the pacfic would have a similar effect. Clearly this does not happen.
I am not saying global warming is not taking place. There have been warming trends in the past and we have recently matched a prior warming of a few 1000 years ago. Back then it surely wasn't due to CO2 unless it came from volcanoes. What I am saying is that any global warming is far more likely to be due to changes in water vapour and other variables and the trends of water vapour concentrations is a factor we have not been able to measure.
Until we can get a handle on H2O and whether there is any indication of a trend line in the concentrations - I would suggest we forget about CO2 because it is like comparing the thickness of a sheet of paper to a tree stump. The simple excersize of using a 69 cent caliper will confirm this, and you get a nice (but cheap) instrument out of the deal.
It is much easier to promote war if you can prevent people from talking to each other. Were it not for the ability of people to communicate I would expect the Veitnam war might still be going on.
I am sure there are many people who may not see this connection. However, we must consider the FUD that propaganda departments spew. In fact the very existance of propaganda departments illustrates the idea.
One of the biggest benefits the internet confers upon people is the ability for everyone to freely and inexpensivly communicate with anyone else in the world. Those who wish to prevent people from commuicating with each other are the same ones who wish to control people. A question to be asked is if Hitler could have prevailed in a world where people can freely communicate?
It is my opinion that people are generally able to weed out the ideas they don't like or which have destructive intent. By creating barriers between groups of people, information is not allowed to flow as freely.
The question that needs to be asked is "why"? Why is it necessary to partition the net? Address space is not a good reason because there is no shortage of addresses - especially with IPV6. Numbers are plentiful and free even though large vested interests like to charge for IP's. Effeciency is not a good reason. Ease of use is not a good reason - the present country codes work well enough.
The only anwers that make any sense is that certain folks like to have power - power to control people - and they don't like opposition to their power.
He came a little prematurly! haha April fools day is a week away.
What a joke. This is better than anything on TBS. Hopefully he won't patent it.