While I don't doubt there is a complicated, elegant rationale for a baryonic upper limit in your cosmology of choice...
The basis for every response here is - the study suggests this is a basic, fundamental, empirical fact of astronomy that a century of viewing galaxies has managed to overlook. In order to establish your upper limit, astrophysicists had to postulate exotic, undetectable forms of matter. Even then, all their calculations couldn't agree with cosmological data, so they had to bring up dark energy - which they can barely begin to agree on, much less explain.
Occam's razor, combined with articles like this, offers a strong suggestion to those of us not versed in your particular specialty, that you're simply missing out on some fundamental observation. Perhaps in 2031 a physicist will smack themselves over the head and go "But of course WMAP came out even, the intergalactic dust that we'd always assumed was trivial ended up diffusing the CMB!!" or some other obvious-in-retrospect observation, and the entire need for 'dark energy' and 'dark matter' will cease to exist... Myths that helped astronomers of their day reason out what they observed much as the Zodiac did millenia earlier.
One question - could this observation (that there exists a larger-than-expected galactic halo of interstellar dust (rather than dark matter)) at least be used to explain the galactic rotation rate problem?
There are more conspiracy nuts on the opposite of whichever side has systematically abused their power for sinister gain, dissolving long-held protections, destroying systems and bucking customs for their own confusing purposes in direct opposition to the obvious right thing to do, or the interests of their employers (us). When they do it openly in many different areas without explaining themselves, and there is a well-funded, small group of idealogues behind them, who insist on an absolute right to their own secrecy(they claim the entire Executive Branch may choose whether to testify to court or Congress), and secrets keep leaking out (like suspending the 4th amendment in 2002) from disgruntled ex-employees...
It's very difficult to have ANY sort of imagination, not just the tin-foil hat kind, and avoid wondering about at least the possibility that the current administration is involved in several large, sinister conspiracies which the public doesn't know about yet. We have literally dozens available that are already in the public sphere.
This is why 9/11 conspiracy nuts will never die, even if they can't convince skeptics like myself who pick at the technical details. The thing their stories agree on - that those presently in power either caused or could have prevented the attack - fits like a glove into what we know about the administration's goals pre-attack and their actions post-attack. If the Democrats used an attack(cause unknown) to drastically change the country, get rid of all the constitutional rights you hold dear, fulfill a bullet point in preexisting plan to grow the military industrial complex, wage an aggressive war longer than WW2, set us up for at least the possibility of the destruction of our democracy, steal elections, and generally act like a bad Disney villain, there would be a hell of a lot of Republican conspiracy theorists after 8 years as well.
Your political beliefs should not inform your reasoning, it should be the other way around.
And?
South Australia has a million and a half people in it. And the expansion gets those people an export worth 4.3 billion dollars a year.
Olympic Dam is a copper mine. When the expanded production reaches full capacity in 2015 or so, 450,000 tons of copper metal will be produced annually.
There is a little bit of uranium, gold, and a couple of other things mixed into the orebody which are valuable too, so they extract them as well when the copper ore is processed.
It's a homogeneous orebody - the uranium and copper and things are all mixed together, so it is impossible to mine the copper without mining uranium, too.
For that 450,000 tons of copper metal that will be produced, only about 14,000 tons of uranium oxide will be produced. The uranium is only a byproduct.
Remember - without copper being mined out of the ground, no electricity of any kind, clean, green or not, can be generated, distributed or used. Without production of aluminium metal, a popular target of so-called environmentalists, electricity transmission over overhead cables cannot be done.
Even since the stone age or the bronze age, mining has been integral to the existence of our technological civilisation. Even as we move to clean sources of energy to power our technological civilisation, such as geothermal and nuclear energy, mining will always be essential.
Now, the expanded mine will consume 690 megawatts of electrical power, on average.
A typical nuclear power reactor generating 1 gigawatt of electricity requires an amount of uranium fuel corresponding to about 200 tons of natural uranium in the form of uranium oxide per year.
So, Olympic Dam will consume 690 megawatts of electricty - and it will produce enough uranium in one year to generate 70 gigawatts of electricity for one year -
over one hundred times the total power consumption of the mine.
I think there's another factor not being considered.
Their paygrade, hirability, et cetera are not related to their talent or the success of companies under their leadership. They are, however, related directly to the size of the companies they have led. This worship of size in the bulging financial sector scales all the way up to the Fed Chairman, who holds the power to destroy the US economy, and continue to be asked to all the good parties afterwards.
It's at least partially a recent cultural ramification of taxing capital gains very gently, and unregulating the financial sector. A dividend-based economy where people invest in companies and the companies pay them after they use it to procure profits, I would not expect to suffer from this particular delusion.
Not at all, he's saying that a bookie always makes his cut. He's saying that if you bet based on probability (if team A is 10%, you bet 10% of your money on him, and 90% on the other guy) on both sports teams in a head-to-head contest with no chance of a tie, it will cost you about 20% of your bet. With such a heavy cut (common in risky black markets), even a highly effective predictive algorithm can lose money.
You cried wolf. Again. They don't know anything about luminous intensity, and the fact that you were packing something that strong never occurred to them.
They've slapped dire warning labels on 0.1-5mw LEDs that are demonstrably safe to shine directly into your eye for so long, no layperson believes them anymore. Even at/above the upper end of that if you manage to cause serious damage, it's nearly indetectable because the eye compensates so well.
If you want to warn someone that your machine can cause ocular explosions, burn a hole through some construction paper, or shine it at their hand for a while.
If you can realistically send enough people and equipment to start an entire human civilization & self-sustaining biosphere to the planet, you can sure as hell send enough nukes to destroy it, so long as they can be identified as the culprit, or there are enough nukes to point at everybody. Mutually assured destruction has a long reach.
The Dune cycle's Golden Path involved doing whatever possible(up to and including genocide) to spread humanity far beyond the reach of any one human or organization. It's a nontrivial goal.
When you're a hundred miles from the nearest powergrid, and THAT runs off an oil-powered generator which the townspeople can't afford.
As for LEDs in general - they've improved a lot over the years, but for general lighting they're still not competitive with fluorescents or Metal Halides for color(just off), efficiency(comparable to worse, depending on product), or cost per lumen(order of magnitude higher). The phosphor has improved a lot over the last few years apparently (it used to greatly limit the life of white LEDs, along with an even harsher color). LEDs are perfect for colored(a filter gel passes a tiny percentage of light), directional (so do most reflectors, to a lesser degree), small-scale(They don't make some of the alternatives in less than "sun" intensity) lighting. The farther you get from that ideal, the worse off they are.
Greens are mindlessly promoting them for general lighting, when in reality that's their worst suit, and we've had better for years. The response to this is that you can conceivably plot their advancement in efficiency and longevity on an exponential curve, and we all know that exponential curves are safe to extrapolate with, right?
Say this device didn't exist, and guard dogs were the trendy new protection device. I have problems with graffiti on my storefront, which faces a sidewalk on a public street.
Regardless of whether I can train it to only bark at people who look young, I don't have the right to hook up a leash to the door handle and let it bark at people who approach a 30 meter radius of the door.
He's less of a loon than Huckabee, less of a one-note candidate than Giuliani, far more of a politician than Thompson, more honest than Mccain. He's one of the rare true-believer populists, and he's crafted a wonderful Narrative (which is inherently superior to a Face(Romney, Giuliani, Thompson, McCain), a Tribe(Huckabee), or Experience(McCain, Giuliani)). And he comes bearing a message of "I want to set you free and reduce the powers of the federal government and the president," in the middle stages of a gradual fascist takeover of the US. He's the anti-war candidate in the middle of a war led by the most discredited president in history.
On the internet, Where People Read(tm), a Narrative is a particular advantage. It spreads virally in a way that the other political attributes don't. When it's judged to be important, it produces an astonishing amount of support. The Money Bombs set records.
On cable news, a Narrative is useless, because they don't give a shit about analyzing political positions and issues. Cable news primarily covers the meta-politics, leadership-as-sport angle. And so among those who get their political fix from cable news, actual positions on actual issues, and the logic behind them, don't have a first order effect on next month's polls. Last month's polls do. Five second (not thirty) soundbites do. Cable news may as well be a single half-hour show on Intrade: Politics Markets for the content-neutral, content-light way they deal with things. Merely cutting down on the "two people yelling at each other" screen wasn't the way to fix journalism.
Libertarianism isn't a terribly strong platform to run on, but it does have its followers, and a large portion of the population could be mustered behind it in times like this. Being the only libertarian is a stronger, more attractive background than actorhood, Mormonism, Christian Dominianism, or repeating 9/11 over and over again. He could have competed with McCain, or possibly even the Democratic candidate (though unlikely). The media didn't do anything so complicated as to conspire to sink his candidacy; But its failure to be news is entirely their fault because they've delved so far into meta-politics that genuine analysis is a minor foreign good, to be outsourced to party insiders and pundits who are paid to hate people like RP and Kucinich.
The japanese standard is, to put it bluntly, complete BS.
We MIGHT have the technical capability to encode 4K video in 4:4:4 by 2015 in realtime with upper-pro-level gear - it's a stretch. We won't see cameras like the Red One standardize in movie studios until well after this decade, much less television studios. 33 megapixels for a broadcast standard is ludicrous - and will be impossible even for the highest end cinema to implement in 7 years.
I'd settle for a solid, end-to-end 1080p60 in VC-1 as a broadcast standard - it's at the upper end of the picture quality an average person can distinguish, it's barely doable with today's hardware and bandwidth, and it's a big step above the current incredibly messy process (which usually includes reencoding in lower resolutions or horrible bitrates, interlacing, and viewing in non-native resolutions).
They would also be required to sign up with the national center for missing and exploited children, as well as retain copies of the images in the house child pornography collection, for legal purposes.
It's my understanding that the recent anti-child porn bill would enforce civil penalties of $300k per instance in cases where a company actually honors such a contract on finding child porn - or images of naked children, or cartoons of naked children (watch out, Simpsons Movie rippers), or images of statues of naked children (David, get out your ID).
If it included her distinctive name and business, the squatter is liable. And regardless, even assuming he wasn't, the squatter would need to contest a subpeona that's likely in a different state, after consulting a lawyer, et cetera, et cetera.
The marginal cost for bulk domains is something like 20-50 cents per year. One lawsuit which costs a thousand dollars to have dismissed costs the squatter thousands of names he could otherwise potentially profit from.
You upgrade because of pricks like this who believe that not tithing Microsoft arbitrarily is just being cheap at their expense, and maintain their (otherwise high quality) software thusly.
I've been on win2kpro since release, and have adopted Ubuntu on the side in the last year. I havn't had many problems - most developers are more reasonable about maintaining compatibility, with a few notable exceptions (I still wanna try paint.net).
Any honest estimate of the cost of nuclear power is fully burdened, up to and including long term storage of wastes, decommissioning of the plant, fuel costs, design, construction, et cetera. My aim wasn't to make one. These estimates have been done, and if they hadn't been favorable nuclear wouldn't be so attractive. My point was merely that the actual price of uranium forms a very small part of nuclear power, and as you raise the price (and thus, lower the acceptable concentration) reserves increase exponentially. Basically, uranium is not a limiting factor using the primitive, wasteful cycles we use now, and if the price rises much further, technology develops which makes it even less of a limiting factor.
To answer your question: we currently have 105 reactors at 65 sites producing 787 terawatt hours per year, or 90 gigawatts. We would have to approximately quantuple this to replace all other electrical power production. The latest 3rd gen AP1000 reactor that's available now is supposed to settle out to about $1/watt to get it up and running. So - $360 billion dollars will be your bill. Double that if you want to build the electrical capacity necessary to replace a majority of fuel oil usage - not counting the vehicles, grid, or other limiting factors.
I'm not of the opinion that we should undergo a crash program of nuclear power generation quite yet. I don't think we're capable of one, that we have the motivation for one, or that we would choose wisely.
I give us 8 years for preparation. We havn't done much nuclear construction since Chernobyl, there are a whole bunch of reactors designed in the interval, and we're a bit rusty. The newer reactor designs are passively safe, hard to meltdown if you try, secure from nuclear proliferation, self-disposing of waste transuranics, able to create hydrogen, and able to breed depleted uranium. 8 years is long enough to try those elements, and see how well the developments on the horizon of alternative energy pan out - whether wind and solar can reach competitive price levels (wind is about there), and whether biofuels and new batteries pan out. It's long enough to train a generation of nuclear engineers where we have essentially missed the last two. It's long enough to start and close construction on a crash program of nuclear testbeds reactors.. It's enough to culture a competitive (rather than oligopolic) field of nuke construction companies, and to prospect for native uranium sources.
Here's the rough plan: Beginning shortly after taking office, the next president campaigns about the dangers of global warming, the enslavement of the US to foreign oil interests, and the horrors of surface coal mining and coal burning powerplants.
A few months later, they introduce an omnibus spending bill: They declare that the country is in a fuel, energy, transportation, and environmental emergency. The neocon plan to dominate energy militarily has failed, and they flatly reject the requirement that America pillage the world to fulfill its addictions, as well as the ability of the severely abused/neglected US military to even begin to do so. The US is being left behind by the rest of the world in green tech, and its trade balance is setting it up for permanent servitude to peoples on the other side of the planet.
*An immediate $500 "Fuel price emergency relief credit" is sent to every adult US citizen who chooses to participate in a minimal federal ID program. More payments are promised annually, increased at inflation + 5%. *After the first year, this credit is to be taken not from the general budget, but from tariffs on imported oil, implemented at the corporate level. *A shifting of transportation funds away from highway subsidies and towards an 80%/20% federal matching fund for local+state electric mass transportation projects. *To the highest degree possible, federal encouragement to relax housing standards, zoning standards, car + train crash-safety standards, mandatory efficiency standards (like the idiocy th
Your statement appears to spring from a monotheist linguistic assumption - that God will be capitalized, omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, and ineffable. That conception of a god is not the only one, and "deity" often implies that you're not using that concept. "Minor deity" certainly does.
The Forsaken are immortal, exist primarily in songs and legends, have powers greater than any normal or even unusual man, have a sect devoted to their worship, and were granted their power by a henotheist 'supreme god' whose mere name is regarded as a literal curse. The Forsaken are granted more fear and respect than any human tyrant or wizard, and their powers are acknowledged to be a few notches above any single human (at the start of the series, anyway). They're roughly equivalent to angels/demons, but they touch the mortal realm directly, commanding vast hordes of minor demons in the eschatological architecture of the world - and were defeated by an act of sacrifice which sealed them in the tome of history forever. They exist in a pantheon of 13, their names derived at least partially from judeo-christian demonology, and are primarily concerned with fighting for power among themselves - the affairs of mere mortals are below them (until it becomes clear that the Last Battle is coming, and they are called into action).
There are many less 'godlike' deities in various religions than the Forsaken.
-------------------
The issue with the books is escalation. In the first few books, the scale kept getting bigger, Rand kept gaining power and gaining his messianic kinghood, bit by bit. Then, the geopolitical action slowed down, the mythology expanded into hopelessly obscure subjects like the Finns, and the action scaled down to entire chapters about a festival in Ebou Dar where little happened. Nation-sized armies move slowly, and this point was pounded home over the second half of the series, as every step was detailed of enough different factions that you had difficulty telling them apart. Uniting the world under the banner of the Dragon, bit by detailed bit, is simply not as entertaining as going from farmboy to messiah. So then, we started to delve into the detailed bits of the pantheon of Forsaken, and their problems and history...
Jordan has a need to expand every detail and create plotlines in every area, and this is charming to readers initially - because we know that the world is full of individuals with their own complicated intentions. But he doesn't finish many of them, we don't see those plotlines climax and conclude - for every one that does, five more sprout out of the wreckage. I'm a geek who hasn't played Ultima Online in 9 years, but I can still trace my way through the dungeons in my head... and even I would be lost in Jordan's epic without having all the previous books onhand, and being able to refer to Theoryland and encyclopedia wot. I can't even tell you, off the top of my head, how many alternate dimensions there are.
I've been told that in real world usage conditions, 200 tonnes a year of natural uranium is used in a 1 gigawatt plant. At modern capacity factors, that's around 40000 kilowatt hours per kilogram. At a 2% low concentration ore, mine just a ton of the stuff and you have the equivalent of (at 20% load factor) a 1MW wind turbine running for 5.5 months. I assure you that the steel and carbon fiber used to produce one of those isn't free, either.
So yes, huge amounts of energy are input in order to run things. But absolutely absurd amounts of energy are taken out, as well. The observed phenomena with uranium reserves is that when you decrease the concentration you consider practical to 1/10 of your current metric, you increase the observed reserves by a factor of 300. Any concentrations above 20 ppm for solid deposits are considered viable from an energy return on invested energy standpoint, and the highest deposits available hit around 20% concentration. Liquid refining uranium from seawater traces is considered practically undepletable as well (millions of years).
Slashdot Mirror
"You know how many long haul truckers there are in the States?"
is a completely different statement from
"You know how much long haul trucking there is in the States?"
The addendum "Most of these could be moved to rail which is much more energy efficient" only applies to one.
A 100 car freight train is far less labor intensive than 100 semis.
While I don't doubt there is a complicated, elegant rationale for a baryonic upper limit in your cosmology of choice...
The basis for every response here is - the study suggests this is a basic, fundamental, empirical fact of astronomy that a century of viewing galaxies has managed to overlook. In order to establish your upper limit, astrophysicists had to postulate exotic, undetectable forms of matter. Even then, all their calculations couldn't agree with cosmological data, so they had to bring up dark energy - which they can barely begin to agree on, much less explain.
Occam's razor, combined with articles like this, offers a strong suggestion to those of us not versed in your particular specialty, that you're simply missing out on some fundamental observation. Perhaps in 2031 a physicist will smack themselves over the head and go "But of course WMAP came out even, the intergalactic dust that we'd always assumed was trivial ended up diffusing the CMB!!" or some other obvious-in-retrospect observation, and the entire need for 'dark energy' and 'dark matter' will cease to exist... Myths that helped astronomers of their day reason out what they observed much as the Zodiac did millenia earlier.
One question - could this observation (that there exists a larger-than-expected galactic halo of interstellar dust (rather than dark matter)) at least be used to explain the galactic rotation rate problem?
Those are river/lake water samples. Where fish live.
Fish that bioaccumulate fat-soluble toxins in their flesh.
Just a little?
There are more conspiracy nuts on the opposite of whichever side has systematically abused their power for sinister gain, dissolving long-held protections, destroying systems and bucking customs for their own confusing purposes in direct opposition to the obvious right thing to do, or the interests of their employers (us). When they do it openly in many different areas without explaining themselves, and there is a well-funded, small group of idealogues behind them, who insist on an absolute right to their own secrecy(they claim the entire Executive Branch may choose whether to testify to court or Congress), and secrets keep leaking out (like suspending the 4th amendment in 2002) from disgruntled ex-employees...
It's very difficult to have ANY sort of imagination, not just the tin-foil hat kind, and avoid wondering about at least the possibility that the current administration is involved in several large, sinister conspiracies which the public doesn't know about yet. We have literally dozens available that are already in the public sphere.
This is why 9/11 conspiracy nuts will never die, even if they can't convince skeptics like myself who pick at the technical details. The thing their stories agree on - that those presently in power either caused or could have prevented the attack - fits like a glove into what we know about the administration's goals pre-attack and their actions post-attack. If the Democrats used an attack(cause unknown) to drastically change the country, get rid of all the constitutional rights you hold dear, fulfill a bullet point in preexisting plan to grow the military industrial complex, wage an aggressive war longer than WW2, set us up for at least the possibility of the destruction of our democracy, steal elections, and generally act like a bad Disney villain, there would be a hell of a lot of Republican conspiracy theorists after 8 years as well.
Your political beliefs should not inform your reasoning, it should be the other way around.
South Australia has a million and a half people in it. And the expansion gets those people an export worth 4.3 billion dollars a year.
ref
I think there's another factor not being considered.
Their paygrade, hirability, et cetera are not related to their talent or the success of companies under their leadership. They are, however, related directly to the size of the companies they have led. This worship of size in the bulging financial sector scales all the way up to the Fed Chairman, who holds the power to destroy the US economy, and continue to be asked to all the good parties afterwards.
It's at least partially a recent cultural ramification of taxing capital gains very gently, and unregulating the financial sector. A dividend-based economy where people invest in companies and the companies pay them after they use it to procure profits, I would not expect to suffer from this particular delusion.
Not at all, he's saying that a bookie always makes his cut. He's saying that if you bet based on probability (if team A is 10%, you bet 10% of your money on him, and 90% on the other guy) on both sports teams in a head-to-head contest with no chance of a tie, it will cost you about 20% of your bet. With such a heavy cut (common in risky black markets), even a highly effective predictive algorithm can lose money.
You might try turning them down. Seriously. If your environment is too loud, buy ones with better isolation.
You cried wolf. Again. They don't know anything about luminous intensity, and the fact that you were packing something that strong never occurred to them.
They've slapped dire warning labels on 0.1-5mw LEDs that are demonstrably safe to shine directly into your eye for so long, no layperson believes them anymore. Even at/above the upper end of that if you manage to cause serious damage, it's nearly indetectable because the eye compensates so well.
If you want to warn someone that your machine can cause ocular explosions, burn a hole through some construction paper, or shine it at their hand for a while.
But are all those parametrics good for forests of individual leaves effortlessly swaying in time to the wind?
If you can realistically send enough people and equipment to start an entire human civilization & self-sustaining biosphere to the planet, you can sure as hell send enough nukes to destroy it, so long as they can be identified as the culprit, or there are enough nukes to point at everybody. Mutually assured destruction has a long reach.
The Dune cycle's Golden Path involved doing whatever possible(up to and including genocide) to spread humanity far beyond the reach of any one human or organization. It's a nontrivial goal.
When you're a hundred miles from the nearest powergrid, and THAT runs off an oil-powered generator which the townspeople can't afford.
As for LEDs in general - they've improved a lot over the years, but for general lighting they're still not competitive with fluorescents or Metal Halides for color(just off), efficiency(comparable to worse, depending on product), or cost per lumen(order of magnitude higher). The phosphor has improved a lot over the last few years apparently (it used to greatly limit the life of white LEDs, along with an even harsher color). LEDs are perfect for colored(a filter gel passes a tiny percentage of light), directional (so do most reflectors, to a lesser degree), small-scale(They don't make some of the alternatives in less than "sun" intensity) lighting. The farther you get from that ideal, the worse off they are.
Greens are mindlessly promoting them for general lighting, when in reality that's their worst suit, and we've had better for years. The response to this is that you can conceivably plot their advancement in efficiency and longevity on an exponential curve, and we all know that exponential curves are safe to extrapolate with, right?
I doesn't matter.
Say this device didn't exist, and guard dogs were the trendy new protection device. I have problems with graffiti on my storefront, which faces a sidewalk on a public street.
Regardless of whether I can train it to only bark at people who look young, I don't have the right to hook up a leash to the door handle and let it bark at people who approach a 30 meter radius of the door.
To be honest, yes.
He's less of a loon than Huckabee, less of a one-note candidate than Giuliani, far more of a politician than Thompson, more honest than Mccain. He's one of the rare true-believer populists, and he's crafted a wonderful Narrative (which is inherently superior to a Face(Romney, Giuliani, Thompson, McCain), a Tribe(Huckabee), or Experience(McCain, Giuliani)). And he comes bearing a message of "I want to set you free and reduce the powers of the federal government and the president," in the middle stages of a gradual fascist takeover of the US. He's the anti-war candidate in the middle of a war led by the most discredited president in history.
On the internet, Where People Read(tm), a Narrative is a particular advantage. It spreads virally in a way that the other political attributes don't. When it's judged to be important, it produces an astonishing amount of support. The Money Bombs set records.
On cable news, a Narrative is useless, because they don't give a shit about analyzing political positions and issues. Cable news primarily covers the meta-politics, leadership-as-sport angle. And so among those who get their political fix from cable news, actual positions on actual issues, and the logic behind them, don't have a first order effect on next month's polls. Last month's polls do. Five second (not thirty) soundbites do. Cable news may as well be a single half-hour show on Intrade: Politics Markets for the content-neutral, content-light way they deal with things. Merely cutting down on the "two people yelling at each other" screen wasn't the way to fix journalism.
Libertarianism isn't a terribly strong platform to run on, but it does have its followers, and a large portion of the population could be mustered behind it in times like this. Being the only libertarian is a stronger, more attractive background than actorhood, Mormonism, Christian Dominianism, or repeating 9/11 over and over again. He could have competed with McCain, or possibly even the Democratic candidate (though unlikely). The media didn't do anything so complicated as to conspire to sink his candidacy; But its failure to be news is entirely their fault because they've delved so far into meta-politics that genuine analysis is a minor foreign good, to be outsourced to party insiders and pundits who are paid to hate people like RP and Kucinich.
Mod up plz
The japanese standard is, to put it bluntly, complete BS.
We MIGHT have the technical capability to encode 4K video in 4:4:4 by 2015 in realtime with upper-pro-level gear - it's a stretch. We won't see cameras like the Red One standardize in movie studios until well after this decade, much less television studios. 33 megapixels for a broadcast standard is ludicrous - and will be impossible even for the highest end cinema to implement in 7 years.
I'd settle for a solid, end-to-end 1080p60 in VC-1 as a broadcast standard - it's at the upper end of the picture quality an average person can distinguish, it's barely doable with today's hardware and bandwidth, and it's a big step above the current incredibly messy process (which usually includes reencoding in lower resolutions or horrible bitrates, interlacing, and viewing in non-native resolutions).
And I'm worried that my 1 foot length of rope is too small to be useful. They better work on scaling rope up to be useful.
sorry *criminal penalties.
They would also be required to sign up with the national center for missing and exploited children, as well as retain copies of the images in the house child pornography collection, for legal purposes.
It's my understanding that the recent anti-child porn bill would enforce civil penalties of $300k per instance in cases where a company actually honors such a contract on finding child porn - or images of naked children, or cartoons of naked children (watch out, Simpsons Movie rippers), or images of statues of naked children (David, get out your ID).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anticybersquatting_Consumer_Protection_Act
If it included her distinctive name and business, the squatter is liable. And regardless, even assuming he wasn't, the squatter would need to contest a subpeona that's likely in a different state, after consulting a lawyer, et cetera, et cetera.
The marginal cost for bulk domains is something like 20-50 cents per year. One lawsuit which costs a thousand dollars to have dismissed costs the squatter thousands of names he could otherwise potentially profit from.
You upgrade because of pricks like this who believe that not tithing Microsoft arbitrarily is just being cheap at their expense, and maintain their (otherwise high quality) software thusly.
I've been on win2kpro since release, and have adopted Ubuntu on the side in the last year. I havn't had many problems - most developers are more reasonable about maintaining compatibility, with a few notable exceptions (I still wanna try paint.net).
Any honest estimate of the cost of nuclear power is fully burdened, up to and including long term storage of wastes, decommissioning of the plant, fuel costs, design, construction, et cetera. My aim wasn't to make one. These estimates have been done, and if they hadn't been favorable nuclear wouldn't be so attractive. My point was merely that the actual price of uranium forms a very small part of nuclear power, and as you raise the price (and thus, lower the acceptable concentration) reserves increase exponentially. Basically, uranium is not a limiting factor using the primitive, wasteful cycles we use now, and if the price rises much further, technology develops which makes it even less of a limiting factor.
To answer your question: we currently have 105 reactors at 65 sites producing 787 terawatt hours per year, or 90 gigawatts. We would have to approximately quantuple this to replace all other electrical power production. The latest 3rd gen AP1000 reactor that's available now is supposed to settle out to about $1/watt to get it up and running. So - $360 billion dollars will be your bill. Double that if you want to build the electrical capacity necessary to replace a majority of fuel oil usage - not counting the vehicles, grid, or other limiting factors.
I'm not of the opinion that we should undergo a crash program of nuclear power generation quite yet. I don't think we're capable of one, that we have the motivation for one, or that we would choose wisely.
I give us 8 years for preparation. We havn't done much nuclear construction since Chernobyl, there are a whole bunch of reactors designed in the interval, and we're a bit rusty. The newer reactor designs are passively safe, hard to meltdown if you try, secure from nuclear proliferation, self-disposing of waste transuranics, able to create hydrogen, and able to breed depleted uranium. 8 years is long enough to try those elements, and see how well the developments on the horizon of alternative energy pan out - whether wind and solar can reach competitive price levels (wind is about there), and whether biofuels and new batteries pan out. It's long enough to train a generation of nuclear engineers where we have essentially missed the last two. It's long enough to start and close construction on a crash program of nuclear testbeds reactors.. It's enough to culture a competitive (rather than oligopolic) field of nuke construction companies, and to prospect for native uranium sources.
Here's the rough plan:
Beginning shortly after taking office, the next president campaigns about the dangers of global warming, the enslavement of the US to foreign oil interests, and the horrors of surface coal mining and coal burning powerplants.
A few months later, they introduce an omnibus spending bill:
They declare that the country is in a fuel, energy, transportation, and environmental emergency. The neocon plan to dominate energy militarily has failed, and they flatly reject the requirement that America pillage the world to fulfill its addictions, as well as the ability of the severely abused/neglected US military to even begin to do so. The US is being left behind by the rest of the world in green tech, and its trade balance is setting it up for permanent servitude to peoples on the other side of the planet.
*An immediate $500 "Fuel price emergency relief credit" is sent to every adult US citizen who chooses to participate in a minimal federal ID program. More payments are promised annually, increased at inflation + 5%.
*After the first year, this credit is to be taken not from the general budget, but from tariffs on imported oil, implemented at the corporate level.
*A shifting of transportation funds away from highway subsidies and towards an 80%/20% federal matching fund for local+state electric mass transportation projects.
*To the highest degree possible, federal encouragement to relax housing standards, zoning standards, car + train crash-safety standards, mandatory efficiency standards (like the idiocy th
Your statement appears to spring from a monotheist linguistic assumption - that God will be capitalized, omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, and ineffable. That conception of a god is not the only one, and "deity" often implies that you're not using that concept. "Minor deity" certainly does.
The Forsaken are immortal, exist primarily in songs and legends, have powers greater than any normal or even unusual man, have a sect devoted to their worship, and were granted their power by a henotheist 'supreme god' whose mere name is regarded as a literal curse. The Forsaken are granted more fear and respect than any human tyrant or wizard, and their powers are acknowledged to be a few notches above any single human (at the start of the series, anyway). They're roughly equivalent to angels/demons, but they touch the mortal realm directly, commanding vast hordes of minor demons in the eschatological architecture of the world - and were defeated by an act of sacrifice which sealed them in the tome of history forever. They exist in a pantheon of 13, their names derived at least partially from judeo-christian demonology, and are primarily concerned with fighting for power among themselves - the affairs of mere mortals are below them (until it becomes clear that the Last Battle is coming, and they are called into action).
There are many less 'godlike' deities in various religions than the Forsaken.
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The issue with the books is escalation. In the first few books, the scale kept getting bigger, Rand kept gaining power and gaining his messianic kinghood, bit by bit. Then, the geopolitical action slowed down, the mythology expanded into hopelessly obscure subjects like the Finns, and the action scaled down to entire chapters about a festival in Ebou Dar where little happened. Nation-sized armies move slowly, and this point was pounded home over the second half of the series, as every step was detailed of enough different factions that you had difficulty telling them apart. Uniting the world under the banner of the Dragon, bit by detailed bit, is simply not as entertaining as going from farmboy to messiah. So then, we started to delve into the detailed bits of the pantheon of Forsaken, and their problems and history...
Jordan has a need to expand every detail and create plotlines in every area, and this is charming to readers initially - because we know that the world is full of individuals with their own complicated intentions. But he doesn't finish many of them, we don't see those plotlines climax and conclude - for every one that does, five more sprout out of the wreckage. I'm a geek who hasn't played Ultima Online in 9 years, but I can still trace my way through the dungeons in my head... and even I would be lost in Jordan's epic without having all the previous books onhand, and being able to refer to Theoryland and encyclopedia wot. I can't even tell you, off the top of my head, how many alternate dimensions there are.
I've been told that in real world usage conditions, 200 tonnes a year of natural uranium is used in a 1 gigawatt plant. At modern capacity factors, that's around 40000 kilowatt hours per kilogram. At a 2% low concentration ore, mine just a ton of the stuff and you have the equivalent of (at 20% load factor) a 1MW wind turbine running for 5.5 months. I assure you that the steel and carbon fiber used to produce one of those isn't free, either.
So yes, huge amounts of energy are input in order to run things. But absolutely absurd amounts of energy are taken out, as well. The observed phenomena with uranium reserves is that when you decrease the concentration you consider practical to 1/10 of your current metric, you increase the observed reserves by a factor of 300. Any concentrations above 20 ppm for solid deposits are considered viable from an energy return on invested energy standpoint, and the highest deposits available hit around 20% concentration. Liquid refining uranium from seawater traces is considered practically undepletable as well (millions of years).