Even worse than backhoes are augers. A large website (traffic ~most of an OC-3) I work with just had an auger hit its last-mile feed. Not only does it break the fiber, but it pulled it out of the CPE termination all the way through the conduit back to the auger...
We have enough usable land, because every year advances in agricultural technology increase crop yields per unit area (selective breeding, genetic engineering, GPS-based micro-adjustments of field fertilization and drip irrigation).
There is plenty of fuel on the earth for 10 billion people living at Western levels. That fuel is Thorium, bred into fissionable U-233. Should last until we have enough solar satellites.
I suspect that genetic engineering will allow us to have crops that can survive almost any warming scenario.
No one will starve, except for the people who remain under governments that provide low levels of economic freedom and high levels of corruption.
Luckilly, almost two billion people in India and China are slowly getting more economic freedom, which have pulled hundreds of millions of people out of absolute poverty (under $1 per day) and millions of people into an almost western existence.
Indeed, economics is incorporating pscyhology as part of an effort known as Behavioral Economics. Often these new theories are based on empirical results from human subject studies.
Psychology can help to reveal the true nature of human "utility measures," which might be "rational" (in terms of being rule-based), even if they do not produce the best personal results.
For example, drug addicts have a higher utility measure for their drugs than non-addicts, regardless of the fact that the additional use of drugs may have long-term negative effects. It is a "rational" decision in that not taking a drug may cause an addict great short-term pain. Part of behavioral economics is understanding the relationship between short-term and long-term utility, as well as expectations of rare versus common events, etc.
At the same time, while there are plenty of interesting Behavioral Economic results, there still seems to be plenty of validity to most of the generalizations of classical economics (such as supply/demand curves, etc.)
It is easy to try to bash classical economics on special cases, but its predictive power for large marketplaces remains.
SMPTE is currently working on standardizing a version of Windows Media 9 video codec as the "VC-1 codec" under SMPTE 421M. This should provide an openly available standard to create VC-1 decoding software (if you pay your license fee to MPEGLA and potentially others).
As VC-1 is being touted as being as mass-market broadcast video codec, I imagine we will see it popping up in all kinds of ways (satellite and cable set-top boxes, and home theater sofwtare).
When you dam up a river, you end up converting all of the organic material drowned into methane over time through biological effects. Over the longer term, organic material from upstream washed into the new lake also decays because of stagnant water.
Plus the article that asserted this in the first place is crap and only has been cited in the media and not other scientific papers (prove me wrong someone).
Abstract Radiation doses from airborne effluents of model coal-fired and nuclear power plants (1000 megawatts electric) are compared. Assuming a 1 percent ash release to the atmosphere (Environmental Protection Agency regulation) and 1 part per million of uranium and 2 parts per million of thorium in the coal (approximately the U.S. average), population doses from the coal plant are typically higher than those from pressurized-water or boiling-water reactors that meet government regulations. Higher radionuclide contents and ash releases are common and would result in increased doses from the coal plant. The study does not assess the impact of nonradiological pollutants or the total radiological impacts of a coal versus a nuclear economy.
Humans currently use 321 TWH/day. Solar insolation at the equator is about 425 w/m^2. So 321,000,000,000,000 WH / 12H (sunlight per day at equator) and further / 425 W = 6.3 × 10E10 m^2 required for all human power needs, if located near the equator, and 100% efficiency.
Assuming 50% efficiency conversion gives 1.5 10E11 m^2 required, which would be a square 355 km (220 miles) on a side. This is about the distance between Washington, DC, and New York, NY.
So we need a photovoltaic array about the size of Pennsylvania (174 x 309 miles) at the Equator to produce 314 TWH/day.
Do you think that may have other environmental effects?
On the other hand, nuclear power reactors generally produce around 1 GW of electricity, so it would take 13,000 reactors to provide all human power. There currently are 441 producing 381 GW altogether (about 9 TWH if we assume they run 24 hours which most do while up).
Since the Earth's land area is 148 million km^2 / 13,000 = you can have 11,000 km^2 around each nuclear power plant, or one every 114 km or so. Or to make life easier, you can have more reactors per plant, there is no big reason why you couldn't have 10 per site and have only 1,300 installations (cooling is the only limitation, air cooling is possible but water cooling is cheaper and easier to build).
Current photovoltaic production is about 180 MW peak, keeping in mind that is probably around 1 GWH/day given average day length. That number is way up in the last few years, it was about half that in 2000. I imagine there is probably ~10 GWH/day being produced by solar now, compared to 9 TWH/day of nuclear, a factor of about around one thousand.
There has been only one significant reactor release of radiation (Chernobyl), and that was from a reactor type which has been recognized as being highly dangerous plus it was being operated in a highly stupid and illegal manner.
Thee Mile Island proved that meltdowns are not all they are cracked up to be. Sure, a reactor was lost, but there was no significant release of radiation. The US PWR design has had "hiccups," but so far every problem has been caught before major release. At the same time, we know there are systems (like gas-cooled pebble bed reactors) that are MORE SAFE than US PWRs, perhaps those are the ones that should be developed.
I'm all for solar and wind energy, but they do not have much energy density. Coal on the other hand, definately kills people through airborne radioactive release and fly-ash radiation concentration.
Wind has some odd environmental problems (noise, birdkill). Green-field solar installation leads to greater atmospheric heat production due to albedo changes. Probably less of a problem for solar installation on existing roofs though.
Nothing is perfect, but you are really hard-pressed to solve the global CO2 problem without using fission nuclear plants for base power, perhaps with solar/wind/wave for peaking power and some additional local generation.
The long-term nuclear waste disposal problem is a non-problem. If you can guard gold bars at Fort Knox, you can guard high-level nuclear waste. There just is very little produced! All HL waster generated to date would only fit a football field a yard or two high.
The Malthusian concept that there can only be a limited population is no longer relevant because a key requirement, that technology cannot make food farming more efficient, does not hold today. For a good analysis, see Julian Simon's info.
For example, most people in the US were farmers just 100 years ago, but today barely 2% of Americans are farmers, yet they are farming more food. The amount of food produced per area has tremendously increased as well. Technological advances to allow this include pesticides, better crop types, better irrigation, more efficient irrigation techniques, better soil planning, GPS-based maximization of resources, and much more.
Already the Green Revolution has saved a billion people from starvation based on seeds from first-generation genetic engineering (using radiation and mutagens).
Across the planet, hunger is mostly a function of bad economies, and occur in countries where economic freedom is low and corruption is high, as well as during times of war. While famine events are set off by environmental issues, when these same issues happen to countries with well-developed economies they are easilly shrugged off.
There is plenty of food in the world, and as more people become richer and can acquire new technology, these people will produce even more food.
Still, as you look at your screen, keep in mind that Ethernet was developed in the U.S., the commercial Internet as we know it was developed mainly in the US (with US routers from Cisco), and your CPU was developed (mainly) in the US. My OS was developed mainly in the US, but I'm sure many others have an OS developed by a guy who lived overseas, but for some crazy reason decided to move to the US...
What about decoding the human genome (mostly done in the US)? GPS (first done by US)? Space Shuttle (first done by US)?
I am trying hard to think of an interesting recent technology not mainly developed in the US...can you think of one? Perhaps animal cloning, but that has been rapidly commercialized in the US.
According to the CBO, effective total Federal tax rates on the lowest 20 million income earners (avg. income $14,800) is 4.8%, and the next lowest 20 million income earners (avg. income $34,100) have an effective Federal tax rate of 9.8%. This is a total of Federal taxes including payroll and excise taxes. Income taxes for both of these quintiles is actually negative because of the Earned Income Tax Credit.
The top 20 million income households (avg. income $180,500) pay 25% effective total Federal Tax rate. The top 1% of income earning households pay a 31.4% effective total Federal tax rate.
I have used an early DTV receiver with a computer monitor. It was a bit of a challenge to pick up more than three local stations.
My new Sony LCD projection set has an over-the-air DTV tuner. When my cable went out, I grabbed a "silver sensor" style antenna and tried to see which DTV stations I could receive. I'm in an exurb, but could still pick up about 5 stations, but had to reposition the antenna several times.
On the other hand, the digital signals (including when they are hi-def) from all the local stations are present on my cable system as well, so I generally don't use the over-the-air antenna.
ATSC is not inherently harder to demodulate than DVB-T, in fact it is a bit easier, but only if you don't have multipath interference. Until this year, ATSC demodulators have had a rough time with multipath intereference, but now there are new chips that can handle it OK.
DVB-T uses COFDM which uses hundreds or thousands of carriers at different frequencies that change amplitude slowly. On the other hand, ATSC uses a single carrier amplitude modulated very quickly (VSB modulated, technically). Thus small time differences due to multipath are not a problem for COFDM, but are a problem for 8-VSB modulation of ATSC. The new chips have extensive time-domain equalizers to handle multipath.
On the other hand, there was evidence that 8-VSB provides a greater coverage area with less power. Power costs are a major issue for television transmitters.
The other issue is that ATSC includes high-definition, while European DVB-T systems don't (as far as I know). Hi-def decoders are a bit more complex than standard-def decoders.
You'll be glad to know that during the Berlin analog TV turn-off, the government social security agencies purchased 6,000 DTV converter boxes for low-income residents. See, it isn't just the U.S. that is TV-crazy.
At Pete Ashdown's site page on economic issues, he claims "The United States of America has historically been an economic superpower and an innovator of technology. We harnessed electricity, invented the light-bulb and the television, but what have we produced lately?"
Let's see: The iPod, the SonicCare toothbrush, the Tivo, the E-Z pass, and there are these little things called CPUs produced by Intel and AMD.
U.S. resident inventors received 85,238 out of 165,485 U.S. patents in fiscal year 2005, which isn't too bad for a country that has only 6% of global population.
He then goes on to add: "Meanwhile the international community is closing in on energy production through fusion, and guess where the first operating plant is being built -- not in the U.S.A." Despite the fact that the plant in question, ITER, is a multinational project with partial American funding and scientific support! Moreover, ITER is not going to be an "operating plant," it will be a "fusion experiment" and is in no way a real prototype of a fusion plant.
Furthermore, he states "The Chinese are gearing up to clean our clock economically with no oil dependence at all." Based on empirical evidence, Chinese economic growth is compatible with US economic growth. Moreover, while the Chinese are beginning to investigate nuclear fission, and they have plans to build huge numbers of coal-burning electic power plants, they have no plans to eradicate their oil usage.
Also on the Commodore Pet, if you switch between lower case and uppercase in a loop it would eventually fry the monitor.
Really? I find that difficult to believe. I've got a PET at home, it is barely functional. Why not do it in?!? Anyone remember the POKE to change from upper case to lower case?
Greenpeace and PETA do have crossover with actual terrorist groups such as ELF, but they are really quite a different terrorist threat than Al Qaeda. One burns SUVs and could kill someone accidently, the other kills thousands of people indiscriminately. One thing for sure, ELF is anti-nuke that they'd never seek a nuclear weapon;)
he was said to have never spent more than $200 on a campaign
With today's incredibly complex campaign finance laws, you generally need to spend at least $10,000 on lawyer and accounting bills to be able to run even the smallest Federal campaign. State and local campaign finance laws can also require significant legal bills.
Here is the Federal campaign finance laws. Why don't you look through it, only 234 pags
Slashdot Mirror
Even worse than backhoes are augers. A large website (traffic ~most of an OC-3) I work with just had an auger hit its last-mile feed. Not only does it break the fiber, but it pulled it out of the CPE termination all the way through the conduit back to the auger...
We have enough usable land, because every year advances in agricultural technology increase crop yields per unit area (selective breeding, genetic engineering, GPS-based micro-adjustments of field fertilization and drip irrigation).
There is plenty of fuel on the earth for 10 billion people living at Western levels. That fuel is Thorium, bred into fissionable U-233. Should last until we have enough solar satellites.
I suspect that genetic engineering will allow us to have crops that can survive almost any warming scenario.
No one will starve, except for the people who remain under governments that provide low levels of economic freedom and high levels of corruption.
Luckilly, almost two billion people in India and China are slowly getting more economic freedom, which have pulled hundreds of millions of people out of absolute poverty (under $1 per day) and millions of people into an almost western existence.
Indeed, economics is incorporating pscyhology as part of an effort known as Behavioral Economics. Often these new theories are based on empirical results from human subject studies.
Psychology can help to reveal the true nature of human "utility measures," which might be "rational" (in terms of being rule-based), even if they do not produce the best personal results.
For example, drug addicts have a higher utility measure for their drugs than non-addicts, regardless of the fact that the additional use of drugs may have long-term negative effects. It is a "rational" decision in that not taking a drug may cause an addict great short-term pain. Part of behavioral economics is understanding the relationship between short-term and long-term utility, as well as expectations of rare versus common events, etc.
At the same time, while there are plenty of interesting Behavioral Economic results, there still seems to be plenty of validity to most of the generalizations of classical economics (such as supply/demand curves, etc.)
It is easy to try to bash classical economics on special cases, but its predictive power for large marketplaces remains.
SMPTE is currently working on standardizing a version of Windows Media 9 video codec as the "VC-1 codec" under SMPTE 421M. This should provide an openly available standard to create VC-1 decoding software (if you pay your license fee to MPEGLA and potentially others).
As VC-1 is being touted as being as mass-market broadcast video codec, I imagine we will see it popping up in all kinds of ways (satellite and cable set-top boxes, and home theater sofwtare).
Hydroelectric dams produce significant amounts of carbon dioxide and methane.
When you dam up a river, you end up converting all of the organic material drowned into methane over time through biological effects. Over the longer term, organic material from upstream washed into the new lake also decays because of stagnant water.
At the current rate of consumption, there is only enough Uranium on the planet for the next 50 years
Fortunately abundant Thorium can be bred into fissionable U-233, so there is no inherent problem with long-term fission power.
Plus the article that asserted this in the first place is crap and only has been cited in the media and not other scientific papers (prove me wrong someone).
Peer reviewed science:
Radiological Impact of Airborne Effluents of Coal and Nuclear Plants J. P. McBride, R. E. Moore, J. P. Witherspoon, R. E. Blanco
Science, New Series, Vol. 202, No. 4372 (Dec. 8, 1978) , pp. 1045-1050
Abstract
Radiation doses from airborne effluents of model coal-fired and nuclear power plants (1000 megawatts electric) are compared. Assuming a 1 percent ash release to the atmosphere (Environmental Protection Agency regulation) and 1 part per million of uranium and 2 parts per million of thorium in the coal (approximately the U.S. average), population doses from the coal plant are typically higher than those from pressurized-water or boiling-water reactors that meet government regulations. Higher radionuclide contents and ash releases are common and would result in increased doses from the coal plant. The study does not assess the impact of nonradiological pollutants or the total radiological impacts of a coal versus a nuclear economy.
Humans currently use 321 TWH/day. Solar insolation at the equator is about 425 w/m^2. So 321,000,000,000,000 WH / 12H (sunlight per day at equator) and further / 425 W = 6.3 × 10E10 m^2 required for all human power needs, if located near the equator, and 100% efficiency.
Assuming 50% efficiency conversion gives 1.5 10E11 m^2 required, which would be a square 355 km (220 miles) on a side. This is about the distance between Washington, DC, and New York, NY.
So we need a photovoltaic array about the size of Pennsylvania (174 x 309 miles) at the Equator to produce 314 TWH/day.
Do you think that may have other environmental effects?
On the other hand, nuclear power reactors generally produce around 1 GW of electricity, so it would take 13,000 reactors to provide all human power. There currently are 441 producing 381 GW altogether (about 9 TWH if we assume they run 24 hours which most do while up).
Since the Earth's land area is 148 million km^2 / 13,000 = you can have 11,000 km^2 around each nuclear power plant, or one every 114 km or so. Or to make life easier, you can have more reactors per plant, there is no big reason why you couldn't have 10 per site and have only 1,300 installations (cooling is the only limitation, air cooling is possible but water cooling is cheaper and easier to build).
Current photovoltaic production is about 180 MW peak, keeping in mind that is probably around 1 GWH/day given average day length. That number is way up in the last few years, it was about half that in 2000. I imagine there is probably ~10 GWH/day being produced by solar now, compared to 9 TWH/day of nuclear, a factor of about around one thousand.
There has been only one significant reactor release of radiation (Chernobyl), and that was from a reactor type which has been recognized as being highly dangerous plus it was being operated in a highly stupid and illegal manner.
Thee Mile Island proved that meltdowns are not all they are cracked up to be. Sure, a reactor was lost, but there was no significant release of radiation. The US PWR design has had "hiccups," but so far every problem has been caught before major release. At the same time, we know there are systems (like gas-cooled pebble bed reactors) that are MORE SAFE than US PWRs, perhaps those are the ones that should be developed.
I'm all for solar and wind energy, but they do not have much energy density. Coal on the other hand, definately kills people through airborne radioactive release and fly-ash radiation concentration.
Wind has some odd environmental problems (noise, birdkill). Green-field solar installation leads to greater atmospheric heat production due to albedo changes. Probably less of a problem for solar installation on existing roofs though.
Nothing is perfect, but you are really hard-pressed to solve the global CO2 problem without using fission nuclear plants for base power, perhaps with solar/wind/wave for peaking power and some additional local generation.
The long-term nuclear waste disposal problem is a non-problem. If you can guard gold bars at Fort Knox, you can guard high-level nuclear waste. There just is very little produced! All HL waster generated to date would only fit a football field a yard or two high.
The Malthusian concept that there can only be a limited population is no longer relevant because a key requirement, that technology cannot make food farming more efficient, does not hold today. For a good analysis, see Julian Simon's info.
For example, most people in the US were farmers just 100 years ago, but today barely 2% of Americans are farmers, yet they are farming more food. The amount of food produced per area has tremendously increased as well. Technological advances to allow this include pesticides, better crop types, better irrigation, more efficient irrigation techniques, better soil planning, GPS-based maximization of resources, and much more.
Already the Green Revolution has saved a billion people from starvation based on seeds from first-generation genetic engineering (using radiation and mutagens).
Across the planet, hunger is mostly a function of bad economies, and occur in countries where economic freedom is low and corruption is high, as well as during times of war. While famine events are set off by environmental issues, when these same issues happen to countries with well-developed economies they are easilly shrugged off.
There is plenty of food in the world, and as more people become richer and can acquire new technology, these people will produce even more food.
I found some data which compared Japan, Europe, and the US in patents.
The USPTO issues 53% of patents to Americans, 20% to japanese, and 17% to Europena.s
The European PTO issues 25% of patents to Americans, 19% to Japanese, and 53% to Europeans.
The Japanese PTO issues 5% of patents to Americans, 90% to Japanese, and 4% to Europeans.
So yeah, that's not much of an indicator.
Regarding patents granted per capita worldwide, Japan and South Korea are way ahead, followed by the US, Sweden, Germany, and France.
Still, as you look at your screen, keep in mind that Ethernet was developed in the U.S., the commercial Internet as we know it was developed mainly in the US (with US routers from Cisco), and your CPU was developed (mainly) in the US. My OS was developed mainly in the US, but I'm sure many others have an OS developed by a guy who lived overseas, but for some crazy reason decided to move to the US...
What about decoding the human genome (mostly done in the US)? GPS (first done by US)? Space Shuttle (first done by US)?
I am trying hard to think of an interesting recent technology not mainly developed in the US...can you think of one? Perhaps animal cloning, but that has been rapidly commercialized in the US.
According to the CBO, effective total Federal tax rates on the lowest 20 million income earners (avg. income $14,800) is 4.8%, and the next lowest 20 million income earners (avg. income $34,100) have an effective Federal tax rate of 9.8%. This is a total of Federal taxes including payroll and excise taxes. Income taxes for both of these quintiles is actually negative because of the Earned Income Tax Credit.
The top 20 million income households (avg. income $180,500) pay 25% effective total Federal Tax rate. The top 1% of income earning households pay a 31.4% effective total Federal tax rate.
I have used an early DTV receiver with a computer monitor. It was a bit of a challenge to pick up more than three local stations.
My new Sony LCD projection set has an over-the-air DTV tuner. When my cable went out, I grabbed a "silver sensor" style antenna and tried to see which DTV stations I could receive. I'm in an exurb, but could still pick up about 5 stations, but had to reposition the antenna several times.
On the other hand, the digital signals (including when they are hi-def) from all the local stations are present on my cable system as well, so I generally don't use the over-the-air antenna.
ATSC is not inherently harder to demodulate than DVB-T, in fact it is a bit easier, but only if you don't have multipath interference. Until this year, ATSC demodulators have had a rough time with multipath intereference, but now there are new chips that can handle it OK.
DVB-T uses COFDM which uses hundreds or thousands of carriers at different frequencies that change amplitude slowly. On the other hand, ATSC uses a single carrier amplitude modulated very quickly (VSB modulated, technically). Thus small time differences due to multipath are not a problem for COFDM, but are a problem for 8-VSB modulation of ATSC. The new chips have extensive time-domain equalizers to handle multipath.
On the other hand, there was evidence that 8-VSB provides a greater coverage area with less power. Power costs are a major issue for television transmitters.
The other issue is that ATSC includes high-definition, while European DVB-T systems don't (as far as I know). Hi-def decoders are a bit more complex than standard-def decoders.
You'll be glad to know that during the Berlin analog TV turn-off, the government social security agencies purchased 6,000 DTV converter boxes for low-income residents. See, it isn't just the U.S. that is TV-crazy.
At Pete Ashdown's site page on economic issues, he claims "The United States of America has historically been an economic superpower and an innovator of technology. We harnessed electricity, invented the light-bulb and the television, but what have we produced lately?"
Let's see: The iPod, the SonicCare toothbrush, the Tivo, the E-Z pass, and there are these little things called CPUs produced by Intel and AMD.
U.S. resident inventors received 85,238 out of 165,485 U.S. patents in fiscal year 2005, which isn't too bad for a country that has only 6% of global population.
He then goes on to add: "Meanwhile the international community is closing in on energy production through fusion, and guess where the first operating plant is being built -- not in the U.S.A." Despite the fact that the plant in question, ITER, is a multinational project with partial American funding and scientific support! Moreover, ITER is not going to be an "operating plant," it will be a "fusion experiment" and is in no way a real prototype of a fusion plant.
Furthermore, he states "The Chinese are gearing up to clean our clock economically with no oil dependence at all." Based on empirical evidence, Chinese economic growth is compatible with US economic growth. Moreover, while the Chinese are beginning to investigate nuclear fission, and they have plans to build huge numbers of coal-burning electic power plants, they have no plans to eradicate their oil usage.
Mr. Ashdown appears to be AN ECONOMIC IDIOT.
Where is that Wiki...
I ssh into my server from my Blackberry all the time.
Assembler? Real Men push toggle switches to load programs bit-by-bit!
I think a price rise in Uranium will lead to discovery of additional sources, but you are generally correct that Uranium is fairly scarce.
On the other hand, Thorium is very abundant, and there are ways of breeding Thorium into fissionable U-233.
If you listen to loud music, you should try the Online Hearing Test.
Check out Snackboy for a good Vlog example!
Also on the Commodore Pet, if you switch between lower case and uppercase in a loop it would eventually fry the monitor.
Really? I find that difficult to believe. I've got a PET at home, it is barely functional. Why not do it in?!? Anyone remember the POKE to change from upper case to lower case?
Greenpeace and PETA do have crossover with actual terrorist groups such as ELF, but they are really quite a different terrorist threat than Al Qaeda. One burns SUVs and could kill someone accidently, the other kills thousands of people indiscriminately. One thing for sure, ELF is anti-nuke that they'd never seek a nuclear weapon ;)
he was said to have never spent more than $200 on a campaign
With today's incredibly complex campaign finance laws, you generally need to spend at least $10,000 on lawyer and accounting bills to be able to run even the smallest Federal campaign. State and local campaign finance laws can also require significant legal bills.
Here is the Federal campaign finance laws. Why don't you look through it, only 234 pags