The problem with people like you is that you don't take the time to see how markets work in practice, rather than your randite dreams of how they ought to. Solar technology and the know-how to implement it may be cost-effective in the future, but someone has to get the ball rolling so we know what works and what doesn't in real life. As long as we don't have a large scale deployment, we will never get the costs down far enough to get the economies of scale to make it a regular thing. That's why it is often helpful if the government puts in a regulation requiring some people to buy something, as a market is created, even if it is an artificial one. It's all about the positive externalities. Early development companies tend to create lots of them, but the information gets disseminated, and is either not patentable, or the patents run out before they are profitable enough. If you force people to buy these things, there is an instant market and an instant incentive to develop the technology.
The problem for the electric companies right now is that there is no spread. There is a federal law requiring them to purchase power from alternate energy systems for the same price they are selling it at, under certain conditions. This means that some people with solar panels have an electric hookup yet pay no electric bill, even though the power company is providing them the service of taking power when they don't need it and providing it when they do, all through wires and distribution systems they paid for. This probably won't be true in the future, if distributed generation really takes off.
The thing is, of course, the minutes aren't free, they're just paid for by someone else. The problem is that you have no incentive to choose a cell provider that has a low incoming call charge because you're not paying for that call. Thus you get the stupid consequence of a competitive commodity good that still has to have regulated prices. In the U.S., the person who pays for the call is the same person that chooses the provider, thus providing an incentive to shop around.
This is far from a violent crime, so I'm sure it's in minimum or maybe medium security. From what I understand, federal prisons are usually a lot nicer than state prisons.
The 25 years claim is without reprocesing or breeders, and more importantly, *at current prices*. Uranium ore is not a very significant factor in the total cost of running a nuclear plant. If you triple the price, you can get Uranium from sea water, with virtually no impact on the end cost of the energy. This would make our reserves, even without any recycling, over 2000 years at current consumption. If we use breeders, the reserve is 100,000 years. If for some reason we don't have fusion technology developed in 100,000 years, we also know how to make Thorium breeder reactors, which would be good for another few hundred thousand years. We've been working on Fusion for about fifty years and made huge progress. If we can't figure it out in the next few hundred thousand years, humanity has bigger problems.
All reactors except the proposed accelerator based subcritical reactors are precisely critical during normal operation. Criticality is the point at which one fission causes exactly one more fission. This is necessary to keep the reaction going. A bomb is supercritical, and you don't want your reactor to be supercritical except when you are bringing it up to full power, and even then it is just barely supercritical. The reactors he was refering to use a subcritical nuclear assembly fed by a particle accelerator. Thus you have the safety measure that if you shut off the accelerator, the reactor naturally shuts itself off.
There was a big lawsuit that was settled out of court between the U of I and Netscape in the early days of Netscape. The case that there was code sharing was very strong. There were identical bugs and even identically misspelled error messages. The Netscape people certainly got a jump-start from the Mosaic code.
If we had decent regulators, this would be a piece of cake. The regulators simply require a certain level of service in an area, or the monopoly is bid out to a new company. Last mile wireline communication is a natural monopoly. The problem we're having now is that data service is becoming an unregulated monopoly. When there was only voice service, there were legal standards for voice quality, availability, etc, that the government required of phone companies in exchange for their mopoly position. Technology has changed, and it makes sense to either require the phone company to roll out high speed service or bid the rights of way out to a company that will.
The sarin attack in Tokyo was thankfully a failure because the terrorists incorrectly mixed the sarin. Had they mixed it correctly the death toll would have been far higher.
Cheney holds 433,000 options on Haliburton stock. That is, if Haliburton goes up one point, Cheney makes $433,000. Please explain how this does not constitute a conflict of interest.
Yes, CFC-12 was bad. It was way worse when you would just spray that stuff into the air any time you wanted some deodorant, spray paint, cooking spray, etc etc. Now the only time it's going to get into the environment is if you've got a broken air conditioner. The magnitude of the release went way down in '76 when that was finally banned.
Volcanoes don't produce CFCs. They produce sulfur, which depletes ozone, but the long-term ODP of the sulfur compounds from volcanoes aren't anything like CFCs, which stick around for a very long time. What we are seeing now is probably primarily the result of the 1976 ban on CFCs in aerosol cans.
Fly by wire just means that you're not directly moving the control surfaces with your control stick. Instead of passive stability on the airframe, the control stick is sampled, the result goes into a computer which looks at air data and gyros to figure out what the pilot was trying to do, and adds the stability augmentation input to the pilot's input. The result of being a blind pilot are the same in a fly-by-wire aircraft as any other aircraft. In other words, you're competely fucked unless you somehow manage to program the autopilot to fly you back to base and land. That's pretty tough without being able to read charts or even see cockpit displays. In the F-117, the pilot would probably eject as soon as it was clear that his vision wasn't coming back.
I'm also pro-nuke, but your point about solar isn't correct. Newer cells are 10+% efficient, and the super high-tech ones they put on satellites are over 25%. A lot of new installations are using fresnel lenses and small cells to get the costs way down. If you're in a desert type area, utility scale solar is pretty cost competitive with more expensive forms of conventional generation, like gas or oil. The big problem, of course, is the lack of power on demand. Hopefully if fuel cell and hydrogen generation technology advances, we will be able to generate hydrogen in Arizona and pipe it all over the country.
If you've ever seen this guy in person, he looks (or at least did in '96), and acts like Richard Simmons -- constantly dancing around, flaming, and a huge 'fro. It's seriously uncanny.
They screwed up the mixture of the chemicals to make the Sarin. It's extremely fortunate that they did, too, because many many more people would have died.
This was filed in April of 2000. Windows update definitely precedes this date. I'm not an expert on patent law by any means, but can you really do this? That is, invent something and then patent it ten years later after infringing products have already come on the market?
Alane would probably give an Isp of about 300-310 sec in an actual rocket. While that's very good for a solid, and is competitive with LOX/Kerosene, it's nowhere near Lox/LH2 which is typically about 450 sec for a good engine such as the SSME or newer RL-10s.
The Shuttle costs around $1 bil each launch. If you figure that the average NASA or NASA contractor employee makes about $50k a year and has a working lifetime of about 40 years, that's about $2 mil per working lifetime in salary. Thus the equivalent of 500 people put their life's work into each launch. A person's life's work is not the same as his life, but it's in the ballpark. The shuttle's construction is far more complicated than just launching it once, so to say that the shuttle is more valuable than its crew is true. It is the life's work of thousands upon thousands of people. Something like the shuttle is one of the only artifacts we have that is comparable to, for instance, the cathedrals of Europe in its scale.
Do you have any idea what the public perception of the area around such a blast would be? No cleanup effort is going to remove all of the radioactive dust particules. People would likely refuse to live or work in buildings near the blast because people are terrified of radiation. Even just a few blocks of Manhattan real estate would cost billions upon billions to tear down and rebuild.
Just because you saw this in a movie doesn't make it so. The relative isotope concentrations are dependent on a lot of factors, and in an enemy reactor, we wouldn't necessarily know all of the parameters. Furthermore, most of the stuff that's currently proliferating (centerfuges from Pakistan), would not have this sort of signature because it has never been in a reactor.
If you do the simple mechanics math, you see that a ballistic projectile fired at 45 degrees at that speed spends about 180 seconds getting to apogee, which is at over 450k ft, and only about 11 seconds getting to 60k ft. For the vast majority of the flight, there is essentially no air resistance.
You're not going to get 5Gflops on Linpack as it is commonly known as a benchmark on a G5. When people talk about Linpack benchmarks without a qualifier, they're talking double precision. Since Altivec doesn't do double precision, you have to use the scalar units, and the max is 2 ops/cycle. The theoretical peak is 4Gflops. I would expect the actual number to be somewhat over 3Gflops. By comparison, the P4 with its double precision vector unit can get 4Gflops in actual operation.
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Mathematica has become quite capable in the numerical department in the past couple of versions.
The problem with people like you is that you don't take the time to see how markets work in practice, rather than your randite dreams of how they ought to. Solar technology and the know-how to implement it may be cost-effective in the future, but someone has to get the ball rolling so we know what works and what doesn't in real life. As long as we don't have a large scale deployment, we will never get the costs down far enough to get the economies of scale to make it a regular thing. That's why it is often helpful if the government puts in a regulation requiring some people to buy something, as a market is created, even if it is an artificial one. It's all about the positive externalities. Early development companies tend to create lots of them, but the information gets disseminated, and is either not patentable, or the patents run out before they are profitable enough. If you force people to buy these things, there is an instant market and an instant incentive to develop the technology.
The problem for the electric companies right now is that there is no spread. There is a federal law requiring them to purchase power from alternate energy systems for the same price they are selling it at, under certain conditions. This means that some people with solar panels have an electric hookup yet pay no electric bill, even though the power company is providing them the service of taking power when they don't need it and providing it when they do, all through wires and distribution systems they paid for. This probably won't be true in the future, if distributed generation really takes off.
The thing is, of course, the minutes aren't free, they're just paid for by someone else. The problem is that you have no incentive to choose a cell provider that has a low incoming call charge because you're not paying for that call. Thus you get the stupid consequence of a competitive commodity good that still has to have regulated prices. In the U.S., the person who pays for the call is the same person that chooses the provider, thus providing an incentive to shop around.
No, that's min sink. Max L/D maximizes your distance/energy assuming no wind, an an engine that has the same efficiency across all speeds.
This is far from a violent crime, so I'm sure it's in minimum or maybe medium security. From what I understand, federal prisons are usually a lot nicer than state prisons.
The 25 years claim is without reprocesing or breeders, and more importantly, *at current prices*. Uranium ore is not a very significant factor in the total cost of running a nuclear plant. If you triple the price, you can get Uranium from sea water, with virtually no impact on the end cost of the energy. This would make our reserves, even without any recycling, over 2000 years at current consumption. If we use breeders, the reserve is 100,000 years. If for some reason we don't have fusion technology developed in 100,000 years, we also know how to make Thorium breeder reactors, which would be good for another few hundred thousand years. We've been working on Fusion for about fifty years and made huge progress. If we can't figure it out in the next few hundred thousand years, humanity has bigger problems.
All reactors except the proposed accelerator based subcritical reactors are precisely critical during normal operation. Criticality is the point at which one fission causes exactly one more fission. This is necessary to keep the reaction going. A bomb is supercritical, and you don't want your reactor to be supercritical except when you are bringing it up to full power, and even then it is just barely supercritical. The reactors he was refering to use a subcritical nuclear assembly fed by a particle accelerator. Thus you have the safety measure that if you shut off the accelerator, the reactor naturally shuts itself off.
There was a big lawsuit that was settled out of court between the U of I and Netscape in the early days of Netscape. The case that there was code sharing was very strong. There were identical bugs and even identically misspelled error messages. The Netscape people certainly got a jump-start from the Mosaic code.
If we had decent regulators, this would be a piece of cake. The regulators simply require a certain level of service in an area, or the monopoly is bid out to a new company. Last mile wireline communication is a natural monopoly. The problem we're having now is that data service is becoming an unregulated monopoly. When there was only voice service, there were legal standards for voice quality, availability, etc, that the government required of phone companies in exchange for their mopoly position. Technology has changed, and it makes sense to either require the phone company to roll out high speed service or bid the rights of way out to a company that will.
The sarin attack in Tokyo was thankfully a failure because the terrorists incorrectly mixed the sarin. Had they mixed it correctly the death toll would have been far higher.
Cheney holds 433,000 options on Haliburton stock. That is, if Haliburton goes up one point, Cheney makes $433,000. Please explain how this does not constitute a conflict of interest.
Yes, CFC-12 was bad. It was way worse when you would just spray that stuff into the air any time you wanted some deodorant, spray paint, cooking spray, etc etc. Now the only time it's going to get into the environment is if you've got a broken air conditioner. The magnitude of the release went way down in '76 when that was finally banned.
Volcanoes don't produce CFCs. They produce sulfur, which depletes ozone, but the long-term ODP of the sulfur compounds from volcanoes aren't anything like CFCs, which stick around for a very long time. What we are seeing now is probably primarily the result of the 1976 ban on CFCs in aerosol cans.
Fly by wire just means that you're not directly moving the control surfaces with your control stick. Instead of passive stability on the airframe, the control stick is sampled, the result goes into a computer which looks at air data and gyros to figure out what the pilot was trying to do, and adds the stability augmentation input to the pilot's input. The result of being a blind pilot are the same in a fly-by-wire aircraft as any other aircraft. In other words, you're competely fucked unless you somehow manage to program the autopilot to fly you back to base and land. That's pretty tough without being able to read charts or even see cockpit displays. In the F-117, the pilot would probably eject as soon as it was clear that his vision wasn't coming back.
I'm also pro-nuke, but your point about solar isn't correct. Newer cells are 10+% efficient, and the super high-tech ones they put on satellites are over 25%. A lot of new installations are using fresnel lenses and small cells to get the costs way down. If you're in a desert type area, utility scale solar is pretty cost competitive with more expensive forms of conventional generation, like gas or oil. The big problem, of course, is the lack of power on demand. Hopefully if fuel cell and hydrogen generation technology advances, we will be able to generate hydrogen in Arizona and pipe it all over the country.
If you've ever seen this guy in person, he looks (or at least did in '96), and acts like Richard Simmons -- constantly dancing around, flaming, and a huge 'fro. It's seriously uncanny.
They screwed up the mixture of the chemicals to make the Sarin. It's extremely fortunate that they did, too, because many many more people would have died.
This was filed in April of 2000. Windows update definitely precedes this date. I'm not an expert on patent law by any means, but can you really do this? That is, invent something and then patent it ten years later after infringing products have already come on the market?
Alane would probably give an Isp of about 300-310 sec in an actual rocket. While that's very good for a solid, and is competitive with LOX/Kerosene, it's nowhere near Lox/LH2 which is typically about 450 sec for a good engine such as the SSME or newer RL-10s.
The Shuttle costs around $1 bil each launch. If you figure that the average NASA or NASA contractor employee makes about $50k a year and has a working lifetime of about 40 years, that's about $2 mil per working lifetime in salary. Thus the equivalent of 500 people put their life's work into each launch. A person's life's work is not the same as his life, but it's in the ballpark. The shuttle's construction is far more complicated than just launching it once, so to say that the shuttle is more valuable than its crew is true. It is the life's work of thousands upon thousands of people. Something like the shuttle is one of the only artifacts we have that is comparable to, for instance, the cathedrals of Europe in its scale.
Do you have any idea what the public perception of the area around such a blast would be? No cleanup effort is going to remove all of the radioactive dust particules. People would likely refuse to live or work in buildings near the blast because people are terrified of radiation. Even just a few blocks of Manhattan real estate would cost billions upon billions to tear down and rebuild.
Just because you saw this in a movie doesn't make it so. The relative isotope concentrations are dependent on a lot of factors, and in an enemy reactor, we wouldn't necessarily know all of the parameters. Furthermore, most of the stuff that's currently proliferating (centerfuges from Pakistan), would not have this sort of signature because it has never been in a reactor.
If you do the simple mechanics math, you see that a ballistic projectile fired at 45 degrees at that speed spends about 180 seconds getting to apogee, which is at over 450k ft, and only about 11 seconds getting to 60k ft. For the vast majority of the flight, there is essentially no air resistance.
You're not going to get 5Gflops on Linpack as it is commonly known as a benchmark on a G5. When people talk about Linpack benchmarks without a qualifier, they're talking double precision. Since Altivec doesn't do double precision, you have to use the scalar units, and the max is 2 ops/cycle. The theoretical peak is 4Gflops. I would expect the actual number to be somewhat over 3Gflops. By comparison, the P4 with its double precision vector unit can get 4Gflops in actual operation.