There is a lot of opposition to damns in Pacific Northwest where I live (salmon habitat). It's hard to say this without sounding republican (which I most definetely am not), but people must realize that having energy requires trade-offs. I'm not saying damns are absolutely better than coal/gas/oil fired energy plants, but it seems fairly intuitive that the overall negative effects of damns on the environment at the worldwide scale, is far far less than that created by combustion.
As a native of Central Wa, I kind of get irritated by anti-dam talk. Of course, as you said, they provide huge amounts of power. But also, dams such as the Snake River Dams and the Grand Coulee have made it possible to farm hundreds of square miles of fertile but parched land on the Columbia Basin. The Grand Coulee, with it's 100 mile long resiviour and additional Banks Lake Reservoir up on the plateau (which water is pumped up several hundred vertical feet to) has given us one of the richest agricultural areas in the nation, producing more potatoes than Idaho and far more orchard crops than anyone else in the country.
As soon as we have space colonies, there will be space wars. If we can't have peace on Earth where we live together, I don't see much hope for utopias in space.
kind of like saying all of the worlds air pollution could be contained in a space the size of football stadium if properly processed and compressed... lets be realistic...
Well, our high level waste would fit in such an area without being processed at all. Most of it is in solid metal form. If we processed it with breeder reactors to use more of it, it would fit inside of a largish dining room.
Nuclear power doesn't get much more taxpayer support than other forms of power. Most plants are just corporate interests. I've seen "studies" of nuclear power costs by Greenpeace. Completely ridiculous. For example, they seem to think that the cost of Yucca Mountain is footed by the taxpayers, which it isn't. If nuclear power weren't so amazingly cheap, we wouldn't use it for 20% of our power production.
Look at solar and wind: They vary from about 7 to 10 cents. But we don't use them to a large extent. We do use nuclear power a huge amount. I don't think that would happen if it didn't cost significantly less than solar and wind.
Um. Yeah, Chernobyl does. But that is an incredibly bad analogy.
Chernobyl==Horribly designed reactor without a containment building. Thus it experienced a meltdown and spread some radioactivity.
Yucca Mountain==Heavily redundantly shielded space under 1000 feet of rock and hundreds of feet above the water line.
Yucca Mountain can't melt down. It's physically impossible. At any rate, the safety for well built Western reactors has been adminable. There have only been a few people killed. TMI didn't kill anybody at all. Compare that to coal: It is estimated to kill 50,000 people a year due to pollution. In addition, coal plant workers are killed in accidents regularly. Workers in nuclear plants aren't.
I think the keyword is "could" and that might be stretching it.. how much of the nuclear waste produced by all of the reactors in the world is actually re-processed? What about the Nuclear reactors themselves?
Actually, the guy's right. It could fit into such an area. Reactors just use damn, damn little fuel. If you reprocessed it, it would take only a tiny fraction of that space.
Maybe the nuclear reactors are a temporary measure until we get enough hydrogen to keep the process running primarily with fuel cells. Seems to me that hydrogen should be easy enough to extract from seawater though without resorting to other drastic measures. Still, what's worse, depending on foreign oil from the volatile middle east, or dealing with radioactive waste here in the states ? I'll bet Nevada isn't too happy about all this.
That would work just awesome, if it wasn't for thermodynamics. You see, to extract hydrogen from water, which has no chemical energy, you need to use electrolysis. Guess what you need for electrolysis?
Electricity!!
So you need an actual power source for a hydrogen economy. Remember: Hydrogen is not an energy source. It is more of a really good battery. Thus, we need a clean source of energy to get us our hydrogen such as nuclear power. Nuclear power has a wonderful safety recor, better than coal or oil power for sure. It is very cheap as well. And if we use breeder reactors instead of our current wasteful reactor designs, our high level nuclear waste would by reduced by a factor of 100. (By the way, our current waste problem isn't so bad. All of our waste could fit into 2 small high school gyms.)
Um....what about the immense "hidden" costs of nuclear? The assertion from nuclear industry insiders in the article seems to indicate that all the rad waste generated by all the worlds power plants could fit in a basketball court sized, 2 story building. If so, then why did us taxpayers get stuck with a $58 billion basketball court called Yucca Mountain? I know government can be innefficient, but...
Haha. The volume of our total waste is indeed in that area. That's actually a fair volume of rock to hollow out a thousand feet under a mountain, and surround with redundant shielding. $58 billion does sound like a lot though.
But taxpayers aren't really paying for a whole lot of that. The nuclear power industry has paid huge amounts of money to DOE for years so they can get a place to store high level waste. So the cost of Yucca Mountain factors into the cost of electricity from nuclear power anyway. It's not a hidden cost. Nuclear power is pretty cost effective. It is price competitive, and sometimes cheaper, than coal. And it doesn't pollute a huge amount like coal does or leave mountains of toxic coal ash that seep into the water supply.
I remember years ago a scientist warned about the dangerous in performing atom accelerator experiments, which might lead to total disaster. I forgot the details but move along this line, someone might create a mishandled black hole and all of a sudden we suck into a tiny dot. Then we might hear something like that:
Actually, the scientist is completely wrong. There are much higher energy reactions going on naturally with cosmic rays and such. Quantum black holes, wormholes, etc are created all of the time. And destroyed just as quickly.
On the other hand I'm probably an atypical/. reader since I don't really like any form of communication that isn't face to face.
Haha, you're not the only one. I finally broke down two years ago and got an el-cheapo Nokia with a Tracfone plan from Wal-Mart. Never carry the thing around. I hate being on call all of the time.
Do not forget, water + electronics is not the problem, its water + electricity (off course, leaving your electronics for months under water, well, it might rust... Don't over do it.:) ) So go on, and clean your keyboards under the sink.
As another poster said, watch out for hard water. My favorite way is to wash it with ethanol. Excellent solvent. And it dries quickly with no residue.
Defrag does NOT "organize" the hard drive, and per Microsoft, you don't need to defragment NTFS - it doesn't suffer the same penalties as FAT with fragmented files - you AREN'T still using FAT, are you? Defragging also does not save you a single byte of space.
Actually, defrag does save some space. If you have a small file fragmented that takes up 4k in say, 5 pieces, it will take up at least 5 clusters. As you know, clusters are groups of sectors that are the smallest size a file can take up.
In FAT32, the cluster size for partitions under 8 gb is 4k. That means our tiny 4 k file in 5 pieces will take up 20k. (Of course, in real life, it's not that dramatic.)
So, defragging defragments your files, putting them in neat areas of the HD. This can save quite a bit of space with little small files, although it doesn't make much of a difference with large files.
Of course, NTFS doesn't need defragging very often. Because it is a journaling FS, it doesn't fragment files so much, and it has smaller cluster sizes.
It is a series about these mysterious things called Angels that seem to be bent on destruction. A very complicated and philosophical series, if you're into that sort of thing.
There is no reason to cater to the belief that there is a necessity to speak a language of imaginary creatures. It's not healthy.
If a significant number of mental health patients do only speak Klingon, they should be catered to so their illness can be treated. Yes, it's weird. But it it helps...
Also, THIS IS AN URBAN LEGEND!!Look here for a Kuro5hin story on this example of pack journalism.
Very odd. I've had experience with 4 different DVD players, and all have been able to play VCDs. Even my first Panasonic, which was a first-generation player... Maybe I was just lucky.
Also, I meant store-bought VCDs, not home-burned ones. I don't know the compatibility with those.
I get the feeling that newer players tend not to be as good about supporting (s)vcd. I got my Panasonic way back in '98. It supports VBR & CBR VCDs and SVCDs and even CVDs. My grandmother bought a cheap Apex player in '99 as well, which also supports every video format under the sun.I've noticed with most newer players I've seen, (S)VCDs aren't supported much. I don't understand why. It uses the same decoder chip. Wouldn't cost any more to put in. Considering that probably 95+% of the population doesn't know what a VCD is, it's probably just not worth the miniscule cost.
By the way, home burned SVCDs and VCDs are just as compatible as store bought ones. I burn quite a few SVCDs. Lovely laserdisc-quality video on a cheap CDR.
> we really do tax marijuana and if you pay the tax, it's legal to possess it.
Do you have any reliable references to this?
Originally this was the case with the Marijuana Tax Act. They made a token amount of stamps available. Possessing pot without the stamps was illegal. But to get a stamp, you had to obtain the pot before hand, which would make you guilty of posession. So, it was basically illegal.
If you stare at a CRT for that long, the radiation will most likely cause an inoperable brain tumor... If you stare at a CRT for that long, the radiation will most likely cause an inoperable brain tumor...
CRTs emit a minuscule amount of radiation compared to the sun, for example. It would never be enough to cause cancer. However, staring at a CRT for that long would get you a nice heart attack.
So its $300 (PC) + $300 (burner, using your numbers above) + $500 for DVD software which = $1100, yet you forget a PC needs a good sound card and video card as most new boxes come with crap (Or home build comes with nothing) so there is another $300 or more for both (Personally i paid $400 for my pcs video card alone, and over $200 on its soundcard, but i assume im an exception), which brings us to $1400. Also your PC needs more than just CPU/Mobo/RAM (which is all your $300 number could really include) You will probably want a case/power supply as well, so add another $100 for a nice one which is now $1500.
What!!? A PC that could burn DVDs would cost maybe $500 + $200 for the DVD drive. I don't understand why mac users always use the most expensive PC hardware available when comparing prices.
$500 of DVD burning software!! Come on. That's completely farking ridiculous. Usually, DVD burning software such as Nero comes with the drive. You can create fancier DVDs with a number of free programs out there.
You do not need a $300 vid card to burn DVDs. Not even close. The onboard video that would come with your computer would be perfectly sufficient.
You do not need a $200 sound card!! What does having the most expensive, super duper Sound Blaster have to do with burning DVDs? If you feel that your onboard is insufficient, you can buy a cheap SB for 20 bucks or even less.
You'll need a disk (atleast one) so lets add another $100 for 120 gig. Now were at an even $2000.
Um. The HD would be included with the computer. Typically Dell sells their computers with HDDs.
So assuming windows, that raises the price to $1900. Uh, Windows is also included.
Let's see. I'll go with a more expensive $500 PC here. 500 bucks + 300 for the drive is $800. And even that would outperform a $1200 desktop Mac. A $2000 PC like you showed would ridiculously outperform the fastest Dual G4 by a longshot. Of course, if I wanted things like Firewire and gigabit ethernet, I could get those cards for less than $100 all together.
Don't get me wrong, I like Macs and I like OSX. But trying to argue that they are price competitive and/or faster than PCs is ridiculous. M
Re:Nice idea, but...
on
High Density CDs
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· Score: 2, Informative
If you're like me (approximately 300 CDs or media laying around) you can't afford the DVDs for storage, even if you have the DVD burner. If you're an artist who often ends up with 300-400 meg photoshop files or massive 3D renders, you need this kind of stuff.
The prices for DVDs at stores like Best Buy are horrible, horrible, horrible. But if you look at Pricewatch, the price, for the data, is less than CDs. Currently, they sell a 50 pack of DVD-R for only $45. That's equal to that data of about 330 CDs. That's quite a bit cheaper than CDs for the data. DVD-RWs are currently at $47 for a 50 pack.
Shop around a bit. Places like Best Buy have shitty deals on media.
Re:Double density floppy anyone?
on
High Density CDs
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
and blank dvds are far less likely to be read if they get a small scratch
Surprisingly, blank dvds are much more resistant to scratches than CDs. Sure their data density is about 7 times as much. But DVD error correction is 10 times as good as CDs. Of course, it's madness that neither CDs or DVDs come in cartridges.
At $500, you have just limited yourself to a mid-ranged Athlon or P4.
More like very high range. A quick glance at Pricewatch will show you that currently, the fastest Intel, 3.06 ghz, costs $388. The fasted Athlon, the 3000+, costs $320. Even the 2.8 Xeon is $425.
We don't contribute anything to science and technology. Well, not much. It's piddling. Just stuff the transistor, the microchip, the tv, the computer, the space shuttle, the Apollo program, the affordable car, the tech behind the internet, stealth aircraft, lasers, probes to the outer solar system, UNIX, AC, the Hubble telescope, the lightbulb, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, nuclear power, nuclear bombs, and a few other worthless little dodads.
Yeah, we suck.
Of course, we are the only ones in the world who have low IQs like this. No other country was ever stupid enough to use leaded gasoline prior to the 1970's or lead plumbing. Only we are that dumb.
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There is a lot of opposition to damns in Pacific Northwest where I live (salmon habitat). It's hard to say this without sounding republican (which I most definetely am not), but people must realize that having energy requires trade-offs. I'm not saying damns are absolutely better than coal/gas/oil fired energy plants, but it seems fairly intuitive that the overall negative effects of damns on the environment at the worldwide scale, is far far less than that created by combustion.
As a native of Central Wa, I kind of get irritated by anti-dam talk. Of course, as you said, they provide huge amounts of power. But also, dams such as the Snake River Dams and the Grand Coulee have made it possible to farm hundreds of square miles of fertile but parched land on the Columbia Basin. The Grand Coulee, with it's 100 mile long resiviour and additional Banks Lake Reservoir up on the plateau (which water is pumped up several hundred vertical feet to) has given us one of the richest agricultural areas in the nation, producing more potatoes than Idaho and far more orchard crops than anyone else in the country.
As soon as we have space colonies, there will be space wars. If we can't have peace on Earth where we live together, I don't see much hope for utopias in space.
Space wars!!!??
AWESOME!!
kind of like saying all of the worlds air pollution could be contained in a space the size of football stadium if properly processed and compressed ... lets be realistic ...
Well, our high level waste would fit in such an area without being processed at all. Most of it is in solid metal form. If we processed it with breeder reactors to use more of it, it would fit inside of a largish dining room.
Nuclear power doesn't get much more taxpayer support than other forms of power. Most plants are just corporate interests. I've seen "studies" of nuclear power costs by Greenpeace. Completely ridiculous. For example, they seem to think that the cost of Yucca Mountain is footed by the taxpayers, which it isn't. If nuclear power weren't so amazingly cheap, we wouldn't use it for 20% of our power production.
Look at solar and wind: They vary from about 7 to 10 cents. But we don't use them to a large extent. We do use nuclear power a huge amount. I don't think that would happen if it didn't cost significantly less than solar and wind.
Um. Yeah, Chernobyl does. But that is an incredibly bad analogy.
Chernobyl==Horribly designed reactor without a containment building. Thus it experienced a meltdown and spread some radioactivity.
Yucca Mountain==Heavily redundantly shielded space under 1000 feet of rock and hundreds of feet above the water line.
Yucca Mountain can't melt down. It's physically impossible. At any rate, the safety for well built Western reactors has been adminable. There have only been a few people killed. TMI didn't kill anybody at all. Compare that to coal: It is estimated to kill 50,000 people a year due to pollution. In addition, coal plant workers are killed in accidents regularly. Workers in nuclear plants aren't.
I think the keyword is "could" and that might be stretching it .. how much of the nuclear waste produced by all of the reactors in the world is actually re-processed? What about the Nuclear reactors themselves?
Actually, the guy's right. It could fit into such an area. Reactors just use damn, damn little fuel. If you reprocessed it, it would take only a tiny fraction of that space.
Maybe the nuclear reactors are a temporary measure until we get enough hydrogen to keep the process running primarily with fuel cells. Seems to me that hydrogen should be easy enough to extract from seawater though without resorting to other drastic measures.
Still, what's worse, depending on foreign oil from the volatile middle east, or dealing with radioactive waste here in the states ? I'll bet Nevada isn't too happy about all this.
That would work just awesome, if it wasn't for thermodynamics. You see, to extract hydrogen from water, which has no chemical energy, you need to use electrolysis. Guess what you need for electrolysis?
Electricity!!
So you need an actual power source for a hydrogen economy. Remember: Hydrogen is not an energy source. It is more of a really good battery. Thus, we need a clean source of energy to get us our hydrogen such as nuclear power. Nuclear power has a wonderful safety recor, better than coal or oil power for sure. It is very cheap as well. And if we use breeder reactors instead of our current wasteful reactor designs, our high level nuclear waste would by reduced by a factor of 100. (By the way, our current waste problem isn't so bad. All of our waste could fit into 2 small high school gyms.)
Um....what about the immense "hidden" costs of nuclear? The assertion from nuclear industry insiders in the article seems to indicate that all the rad waste generated by all the worlds power plants could fit in a basketball court sized, 2 story building. If so, then why did us taxpayers get stuck with a $58 billion basketball court called Yucca Mountain? I know government can be innefficient, but...
Haha. The volume of our total waste is indeed in that area. That's actually a fair volume of rock to hollow out a thousand feet under a mountain, and surround with redundant shielding. $58 billion does sound like a lot though.
But taxpayers aren't really paying for a whole lot of that. The nuclear power industry has paid huge amounts of money to DOE for years so they can get a place to store high level waste. So the cost of Yucca Mountain factors into the cost of electricity from nuclear power anyway. It's not a hidden cost. Nuclear power is pretty cost effective. It is price competitive, and sometimes cheaper, than coal. And it doesn't pollute a huge amount like coal does or leave mountains of toxic coal ash that seep into the water supply.
I remember years ago a scientist warned about the dangerous in performing atom accelerator experiments, which might lead to total disaster. I forgot the details but move along this line, someone might create a mishandled black hole and all of a sudden we suck into a tiny dot. Then we might hear something like that:
Actually, the scientist is completely wrong. There are much higher energy reactions going on naturally with cosmic rays and such. Quantum black holes, wormholes, etc are created all of the time. And destroyed just as quickly.
On the other hand I'm probably an atypical /. reader since I don't really like any form of communication that isn't face to face.
Haha, you're not the only one. I finally broke down two years ago and got an el-cheapo Nokia with a Tracfone plan from Wal-Mart. Never carry the thing around. I hate being on call all of the time.
Do not forget, water + electronics is not the problem, its water + electricity (off course, leaving your electronics for months under water, well, it might rust... Don't over do it. :) ) So go on, and clean your keyboards under the sink.
As another poster said, watch out for hard water. My favorite way is to wash it with ethanol. Excellent solvent. And it dries quickly with no residue.
Defrag does NOT "organize" the hard drive, and per Microsoft, you don't need to defragment NTFS - it doesn't suffer the same penalties as FAT with fragmented files - you AREN'T still using FAT, are you? Defragging also does not save you a single byte of space.
Actually, defrag does save some space. If you have a small file fragmented that takes up 4k in say, 5 pieces, it will take up at least 5 clusters. As you know, clusters are groups of sectors that are the smallest size a file can take up.
In FAT32, the cluster size for partitions under 8 gb is 4k. That means our tiny 4 k file in 5 pieces will take up 20k. (Of course, in real life, it's not that dramatic.)
So, defragging defragments your files, putting them in neat areas of the HD. This can save quite a bit of space with little small files, although it doesn't make much of a difference with large files.
Of course, NTFS doesn't need defragging very often. Because it is a journaling FS, it doesn't fragment files so much, and it has smaller cluster sizes.
Actually, Evangelion is considered by many on par with Bebop and better than Trigun.
Here is a good page describing Evangelion.
It is a series about these mysterious things called Angels that seem to be bent on destruction. A very complicated and philosophical series, if you're into that sort of thing.
There is no reason to cater to the belief that there is a necessity to speak a language of imaginary creatures. It's not healthy.
If a significant number of mental health patients do only speak Klingon, they should be catered to so their illness can be treated. Yes, it's weird. But it it helps...
Also, THIS IS AN URBAN LEGEND!! Look here for a Kuro5hin story on this example of pack journalism.
Very odd. I've had experience with 4 different DVD players, and all have been able to play VCDs. Even my first Panasonic, which was a first-generation player... Maybe I was just lucky.
Also, I meant store-bought VCDs, not home-burned ones. I don't know the compatibility with those.
I get the feeling that newer players tend not to be as good about supporting (s)vcd. I got my Panasonic way back in '98. It supports VBR & CBR VCDs and SVCDs and even CVDs. My grandmother bought a cheap Apex player in '99 as well, which also supports every video format under the sun.I've noticed with most newer players I've seen, (S)VCDs aren't supported much. I don't understand why. It uses the same decoder chip. Wouldn't cost any more to put in. Considering that probably 95+% of the population doesn't know what a VCD is, it's probably just not worth the miniscule cost.
By the way, home burned SVCDs and VCDs are just as compatible as store bought ones. I burn quite a few SVCDs. Lovely laserdisc-quality video on a cheap CDR.
> we really do tax marijuana and if you pay the tax, it's legal to possess it.
Do you have any reliable references to this?
Originally this was the case with the Marijuana Tax Act. They made a token amount of stamps available. Possessing pot without the stamps was illegal. But to get a stamp, you had to obtain the pot before hand, which would make you guilty of posession. So, it was basically illegal.
It seems to be causing repetitive cntrl-v's.
If you stare at a CRT for that long, the radiation will most likely cause an inoperable brain tumor...
If you stare at a CRT for that long, the radiation will most likely cause an inoperable brain tumor...
CRTs emit a minuscule amount of radiation compared to the sun, for example. It would never be enough to cause cancer. However, staring at a CRT for that long would get you a nice heart attack.
Also your PC needs more than just CPU/Mobo/RAM (which is all your $300 number could really include)
You will probably want a case/power supply as well, so add another $100 for a nice one which is now $1500.
What!!? A PC that could burn DVDs would cost maybe $500 + $200 for the DVD drive. I don't understand why mac users always use the most expensive PC hardware available when comparing prices.
$500 of DVD burning software!! Come on. That's completely farking ridiculous. Usually, DVD burning software such as Nero comes with the drive. You can create fancier DVDs with a number of free programs out there.
You do not need a $300 vid card to burn DVDs. Not even close. The onboard video that would come with your computer would be perfectly sufficient.
You do not need a $200 sound card!! What does having the most expensive, super duper Sound Blaster have to do with burning DVDs? If you feel that your onboard is insufficient, you can buy a cheap SB for 20 bucks or even less.
You'll need a disk (atleast one) so lets add another $100 for 120 gig.
Now were at an even $2000.
Um. The HD would be included with the computer. Typically Dell sells their computers with HDDs.
So assuming windows, that raises the price to $1900.
Uh, Windows is also included.
Let's see. I'll go with a more expensive $500 PC here. 500 bucks + 300 for the drive is $800. And even that would outperform a $1200 desktop Mac. A $2000 PC like you showed would ridiculously outperform the fastest Dual G4 by a longshot. Of course, if I wanted things like Firewire and gigabit ethernet, I could get those cards for less than $100 all together.
Don't get me wrong, I like Macs and I like OSX. But trying to argue that they are price competitive and/or faster than PCs is ridiculous. M
If you're like me (approximately 300 CDs or media laying around) you can't afford the DVDs for storage, even if you have the DVD burner. If you're an artist who often ends up with 300-400 meg photoshop files or massive 3D renders, you need this kind of stuff.
The prices for DVDs at stores like Best Buy are horrible, horrible, horrible. But if you look at Pricewatch, the price, for the data, is less than CDs. Currently, they sell a 50 pack of DVD-R for only $45. That's equal to that data of about 330 CDs. That's quite a bit cheaper than CDs for the data. DVD-RWs are currently at $47 for a 50 pack.
Shop around a bit. Places like Best Buy have shitty deals on media.
and blank dvds are far less likely to be read if they get a small scratch
Surprisingly, blank dvds are much more resistant to scratches than CDs. Sure their data density is about 7 times as much. But DVD error correction is 10 times as good as CDs. Of course, it's madness that neither CDs or DVDs come in cartridges.
At Digikey [digikey.com] you can purchase 10 128MB compact FLASH for $524.42(US). That is a total of 1280 MB of FLASH...
Flash is ridiculously slow compared to HDDs.
I would love to see companies incorporate colour screens that could provide the ability for video to be displayed since the storage is already there.
Try this. It holds 20 gigs, and has a small color screen for displaying divx. Only $359. Not a bad deal, considering the price of the iPod.
At $500, you have just limited yourself to a mid-ranged Athlon or P4.
More like very high range. A quick glance at Pricewatch will show you that currently, the fastest Intel, 3.06 ghz, costs $388. The fasted Athlon, the 3000+, costs $320. Even the 2.8 Xeon is $425.
We don't contribute anything to science and technology. Well, not much. It's piddling. Just stuff the transistor, the microchip, the tv, the computer, the space shuttle, the Apollo program, the affordable car, the tech behind the internet, stealth aircraft, lasers, probes to the outer solar system, UNIX, AC, the Hubble telescope, the lightbulb, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, nuclear power, nuclear bombs, and a few other worthless little dodads.
Yeah, we suck.
Of course, we are the only ones in the world who have low IQs like this. No other country was ever stupid enough to use leaded gasoline prior to the 1970's or lead plumbing. Only we are that dumb.