Uranium mining has everything to do with politics, economics, and military needs, not geological realities a la hubbert. It's present in a wide spectrum of concentrations in most of the earth's crust, all that's needed for reserves to jump by orders of magnitude is a little bit higher price. Uranium power has more to do with the price of cement than the price of uranium - it is hugely price-insensitive (and don't even ask me about the insane energy return). Reserve estimates based on an artificially low price ceiling to rule out more difficult extractions ($130/kg looked pretty high in the 90's when prices were flirting with $20/kg) aren't exactly valid at this point - spot prices passed $300/kg this year.
We get around 40,000 kilowatt hours out of every kilogram of natural uranium. That means that at the ludicrously high $1000/kg, incremental cost due to uranium price is 2.5 cents per kwh. At that price, however, most experts agree that we could refine even trace amounts of uranium from seawater (for millions of years of supply), or simply build breeder reactors which get around 100x the amount of energy out of a given uranium input..
That's the traditional thing to do when faced with a field where skilled, expert labor cannot compete with unskilled labor doing the same jobs.
I was never a fan of organized labor as a negotiation tool - it's full of lose-lose situations, like whether to allow an airline's retirement benefits to lapse or allow the company to go bankrupt (resulting in those benefits being cut).
But it has two other roles As a political action group, it can achieve things that no amount of corporate negotiation ever can. Laws can be passed which mandate particular benefits - benefits which two competitors individually would otherwise have incentives to cut in order to better compete. As a standards organization, it can ensure that its members are respected in a way that no amount of advertising ever can. A level of skill can be assured and a level of job mobility acquired by good performance, when in a corporate setting your expertise only potentially grants you a promotion to a level that your skills are irrelevant.
Three things: 1) The infringement of free speech on the internet goes against a moral consensus among internet denizens that absolute free speech is the way to go - this holds even in most cases where that speech is illegal in the US, and PARTICULARLY when it is illegal elsewhere but not in the US.
2) Youtube was looked upon, was promoted, as a community, a place where people can communicate face to face or camera to camera in public free of restrictions traditionally imposed on publishing, whether legal, logistical, or social. It's premised upon the free ability to communicate what you want.
3) Google set the standard, not us - "do no evil." The TOS are not shit, enforcement is shit. The TOS was implemented so that things which are rarely seen as legitimate communication - things like snuff films and pornography, things which fulfill desires more perverse than conveying information. Even so, Youtube became infamous for its ability to graphically depict senseless fraternity-stunt violence, among other things. The fact that socially virtuous depictions of violence (which are objectively anti-evil) were just censored (not that they can be) is a violation of the self-imposed moral standard by the corporate entity which wrote the rules, as well as hypocrisy. I'm not saying that they could do much better - personal moral standards are difficult to apply to any non-personal corporatiaon, much less a publicly traded one whose administrators have no duty but "maximize shareholder value". But that doesn't make the anger any less real.
Of course they can censor - of course any corporation can censor anything which runs on their hardware. They're always able to, TOS or not. The wrongness or rightness of the action has nothing to do with what a TOS that they wrote explictly allows them to do or not. Noone's suggesting that what they did is against the law or "into the streets" vigilantism - they're suggesting that what they did deserves public condemnation. Just because the legal system exists to materially arbitrate when someone does something wrong enough to have a law written against it, doesn't invalidate extralegal social mores of right and wrong. And vigorous enforcement of a terms of service contract is not a responsibility, it's an option - one which should be chosen carefully.
Given that there are temporary measures an officeholder can take to push back major forseeable crises.
Given that these measures improve the immediate situation and deepen the intensity and inevitability of said crisis
Given that we have elected an officeholder who's not motivated by pure benevolence towards his constituents, and is self-interested in immediate popularity/power.
And given that this officeholder is term limited.
What motivation does this officeholder have not to set everything up so that it comes crashing down six months after he's out of office? This is in regards to budget problems, and wider than that, fiscal, monetary, and trade problems. Is it possible to avoid an officeholder using the quick (eventually disasterous) fixes available to him?
Bush/Greenspan's ticking timebomb appears to have sparked early, and we've crested the top of the hill - the dollar is accelerating downwards of its own accord now. Where will it stop, nobody knows.
I qualify the intentional infliction of serious pain on a captive but non-cooperative individual in order to engineer compliance, as torture. Every other week we see citizen journalists exposing the practice, showing multiple officers standing above someone while they cry out in pain. Officers chime in on the comment sections that this is Drive Stun mode, which isn't anywhere near as serious as a normal taser - no skin penetration, much less current, and little chance of injury. But it is serious pain, and falls under my IMO reasonable definition of torture. I believe that the capability should be removed. Tasers shot at a distance in place of a gun can save large numbers of lives, on both ends of the trigger. But they're not a substitute for physically forcing the person into cuffs - they're too deadly for that, and too painful. Whether it makes the officer's job easier is irrelevant. The preservation of human rights, primarily the right to be safe from violence, is the goal of police forces in the Western world.
On torture - The fact that an officer can clip electrodes to his testicles and shock himself wouldn't prevent the involuntary application of that practice from being called torture either.
As for being scared at policemen, rooting for idiots, or listening to N.W.A. - what the hell do these things matter to my points? Address the points I have proffered and we'll have a discussion, and in all likelihood you might convince someone to change their opinion. Address my person and you'll have the satisfaction of having insulted someone on the internet you'll never meet or communicate with again.
Some of them got along just fine before tasers were popularized, without any lethal force capability, to satisfy unfounded British fears that cops would be too aggressive if they were given lethal firearms.
Tasers are a less lethal weapon, and there is no doubt in my mind that they have saved more lives than they have ended. They have had a net positive effect.
But if they're used to torture people into compliance, or if they're used in gun mode so often that even mere vocal resistance to arrest or refusal to move, is answered with tasering, the fact that they've saved lives doesn't matter - they have caused the police in jurisdictions where tasers are used liberally to become an overtly oppressive force. And when this is allowed, it feeds on itself (power corrupts) until it produces scandal and we enact countermeasures. We've had several scandals, but countermeasures havn't even kept up with the spread of this weapon. Thus, we need more measures to keep taser use in check, without simply removing such a useful tool from the force. Tasers HAVE been proven deadly according to multiple coroner reports, been suspected COD in many others, and in others illnesses have been invented to pretend that they weren't the COD.
Drive Stun mode involves causing extreme, but not instantaneously disabling pain, in order to make a person submit to the officer's authority. In order to use it (as a melee weapon), the officer has to have passed within fist/knife/(possibly teeth) striking distance and be able to get an angle on uncovered or thinly covered skin. This typically happens after officers have the risk that the subject poses (barring hepatitic vampires) completely mitigated, but before the subject is acting as an obedient prisoner. I am saying that we NEED to restrict taser use to incidences where the subject still poses a risk, because anything else can be construed as torture - which our ethics system has traditionally claimed to be vehemently opposed to.
You do not stun a man with a knife or a gun, you either shoot him or you tase him until he drops his weapon or he dies. This is a fully defensible practice. But the chance that a man in a wifebeater who's being arrested for public drunkenness has hepatitis or AIDS is not reason enough to tase him or stun him half a dozen times if he isn't being the perfect prisoner, but doesn't threaten injury. Neither is it reason enough to hold him down and beat him with clubs until he submits to being cuffed. We train our (volunteer) police corps in physical combat because the application of force to limbs and body may be needed to get an unruly prisoner in shackles. A 'safe pain mace' (stungun) should not replace that, and a 'loss of muscle control gun'(taser) should only be used in extreme circumstances.
I've heard the "crazy meth'd up homeless guy" argument several times in every taser discussion.
Yet I've known several cops, and none of them have had to take down any crazy meth'd up homeless guys who were impossible to restrain using normal force, in their entire careers. I've never seen one outside of sensationalist websites or TV shows.
It's gotten to the point that Canadian police are trained that certain subjects suffer from a health condition called "excited delirium," where they do not feel pain, cannot communicate, and are in imminent danger of hyperthermia and death. It is in their interest, therefore, to be tased as many times as necessary to get them to a doctor and save their life. This is the belief that killed the Polish immigrant who couldn't speak English and was frustrated enough at Customs' ineptitude to try to break through the glass wall separating him from his mother. "Excited delirium" is then blamed for deaths that result from multiple taserings.
The coroner and medical community have another word for it - custody death.
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I'm in favor of simply completely removing "drive stun" mode, making tasers projectile only, and having cops fill out all the same paperwork and undergo the same investigation as firearm discharge entails. In order to safely use one as a stun gun, you have to have the prisoner basically within the scope of your physical control. THIS is torture - using pain compliance to subdue a subject who has been rendered harmless by the situation, or who was always harmless, but resisting arrest as best they are able (if that). It's the same as having cops hold down someone to pepper-spray their eyes.
I think it might also be wise to reform the doctrine to make further tasering after the first successful application, a substitute ONLY for lethal force.
This is what's required, in my eyes, to bring the taser back to the level of humanitarian weapon.
You could say the same thing about driving through any agricultural zone. The original landscape has utterly disappeared, replaced with rows of monocropped center-pivot-irrigated shrub for miles on end, interspersed with quarter mile long livestock hangars and lagoons of waste.
A ton of coal is equivalent to something like 8 YEARS of hard labor from a man-powered machine using up 3 men for 8 hours a day each. Power companies assign that a value of around $30.
We've been wasteful with our energy, and even if global warming was a non-issue (oxidizing almost pure carbon is much worse than busting hydrocarbon bonds), the pollution from coal is a serious offense. We shouldn't tolerate our landscape being destroyed for the sake of a fraction of a penny per kilowatt hour.
I'm not in favor of getting rid of coal altogether overnight, I'm in favor of an immediate moratorium on new coal plants or surface mines, and a 4 year total phaseout of surface coal/tarsands mining and importation of surface coal/tarsands. Coal mines are horrible, but they're much less destructive locally - you can count on popular support of coal mining in local districts, which would be impossible for surface solid hydrocarbon mining once a decent ad campaign gets done with it.
With surface coal mining dunked (60% of US coal), coal prices would adjust to a level more in line with alternatives, old inefficient plants would shut themselves down, dying mining towns would start themselves back up again, and wind would become the mainstay cheapest choice in many situations. The slow decline of coal after that would be due to geological and economic factors - we've mined much of the easy stuff.
Incidentally, I'm of the opine that cheap energy is a thing of the past, period. Peak oil will see to that... right about now, actually. Electricity is already set to take off because of PHEVs, and alternatives will be explored by everybody. We already have billions of rioting urban third worlders who have been priced out of burning oil in the last four years. NG, coal, nuclear - anything looks good to them right about now, with their workday restrained to daylight hours and winter a deadly menace they thought they'd conquered. Imagine what happens when the US's longrunning economic problems finally burst (beginning right about now, actually, if you look at the dollar vs Euro/basket), and a nation of people who have never known true want are plunged into what could be another Great Depression, but with 10x greater fuel costs. Why not prepare for that day by pricing the patio-heaters of the world out of mainstream use, while at the same time saving the environment and slowing Global Warming?
Decommissioning? They started with solid plans to build a network of nuclear plants in 1957, started construction on 5, and after a series of cost overruns and delays, managed to get 1 plant online in 1983. Their failure of management doesn't exactly speak to problems with the nuclear industry, not when entire nuclear weapons programs have been brought to fruition in that timespan.
That 1 plant currently produces 9% of Washington's power, btw. Around 9 billion kilowatt-hours a year. At 6 cents per kwh, that's 540 million dollars a year for your state.
And like I said, this is a design that's half a century old or more. The newer ones have improved significantly.
The Soviet defense wasn't just about weather. Germany spent the time between their first battles in 1941 and the end of the war discovering and trying to copy superior Russian tanks. If Stalin hadn't purged all the experience out of his army and all the independent thought out of his population, hadn't let his army rape + execute their way through conquered territory, and had been a little less sure that all his capitalist neighbors were destined to come under his rule due to Marxist Dialectic, he would have reached Normandy before we did.
The UK was an island nation, so naturally they built up a navy rather than an army. If the English channel didn't exist, lots of things would have been different - the navy being the first, German development of submarine warfare to counter their superior navy being the second, US participation in WW1 being a result of submarine warfare the third, and Germany's pre-WW2 situation being a result of US participation in WW1 the fourth.
The bird issue stems from a huge, primitive windfarm in Altamont Pass, California. Essentially, hundreds of small turbines built on steel truss towers form the only perches available (and lots of them) on the thin grassland; and thin grassland attracts plenty of mice. It was estimated that any given tower killed a raptor once every 5 years. Non-issue. Newer towers are much bigger(less blade edge per area), and are constructed as monolithic tubes which remove any perch space.
There was a concern with two series' of Appalachian ridgeline towers which were recording significant numbers of bat kills (around 1 a night per large turbine). The bats appeared on infrared to be specifically attracted to the moving propeller, particularly when it was extended to continue moving at full speed in low wind. What causes this is still under investigation, as well as potential ways to ward them off. This may have simply been because of a thriving local bat community, or merely the placement of the towers on heavily forested ridgeline, and a study done on the phenomena recommends that these be taken into account when siting towers.
Suffice it to say, though, that these are useless objections when faced with the alternative - wiping that forested Appalachian ridge clean off the face of the earth to get at the coal underneath, and dumping it into the valley on either side. This is happening now, and when you object to wind you support wind's alternatives.
Small wind turbines are generally not competitive.
It's the huge, 0.5-5MW carbon-fiber-and-steel constructions placed in ideal wind zones which are competing with other forms of generation. Subsidy can allow you less efficient development, if your country has the money to burn.
The "wind turbines on car parks" are practically decorations - 90% of them are placed in areas with very little wind. Greenwashing.
Positive Energy Return On Energy Invested on wind on a good site is on the order of months from start of operation. For silicon PV, it's still years off even in the best zones, and decades in some places. For solar thermal, I'm not sure - but I suspect (based on the relative costs) it's somewhere in between.
The old points against nuclear power have really, REALLY faded with age. Despite the lack of new plants in the last 20 years, the increase in reliability of existing plants have meant a continuously increasing amount of nuclear power produced in the US in that period. Meanwhile, we've made 4th gen plant designs that are difficult to melt down if you try, which dispose of their own transuranic waste via neutron bombardment, which breed fuel for 98% less mining required, which rely on non-uranium fuel cycles and are scalable to the small-town level.
Chernobyl, and disasters like it, were primarily conscious risks taken at a time when nuclear war was a consequence of failure to breed enough plutonium, and people were expendable (Stalin certainly liked his purges).
IN THE US: In 2006, wind was 0.65%% of electrical generation In 2005, it was 0.44%. In 2004, it was 0.36%.
Wind is 44% of new planned electrical generation for 2007.
If current growth rates hold: Next year, we'll generate more electricity from wind than we do from geothermal + solar + waste incinerators put together. The year after that, we'll generate more electricity from wind than we do from all petroleum products put together. Three more years, and wind will match hydro.
While I am extrapolating on the very high 50% growth figures... I think there is the potential for much more than that if a newly minted Democratically-controlled federal government does the environmentally sound thing and attacks coal, which is more polluting than any other energy source in pretty much every way. More CO2, more landscape destruction, more particulate matter, more sulfur, more methane, more radioactive material release, more unsafe groundwater, more mercury. A rational environmentalist with the ability to compare things (of which there are few) should table any objections that they have to other sources of energy, and protest surface coal + tarsands mining until they're banned. Yucca Mountain's worst-case-in-10,000-years-scenario is a joke compared to the devastation being doled out weekly from these two things.
Wind is already cost-competitive with coal + NG, and either wind getting increased federal subsidies of some type, wind getting significantly cheaper, or coal's externalities being priced seriously would make it much more than 44% of new capacity.
Yes, the article covers obvious points. More wind means a much more measured use of hydro, more turbine-local storage, more centralized pumped hydro storage, and more nationwide interconnects. We don't currently have a nationwide grid - we have a few small load balancing bridges between regional networks that themselves are pretty overloaded, and have trouble getting local utilities to cooperate to build more infrastructure. That would need to be built up dramatically to bring wind over 25% or so of our generation. But at the level we're at now, wind can be absorbed into slightly different duty cycles at the local hydropower quite easily.
You do not have a business relationship with your neighbor, and have no responsibilities towards them in this regard.
You have a business relationship with the ISP, who has a responsibility to provide you (and your neighbor) with the service you pay both for. How they achieve that is none of your business, and certainly not on your conscience. If they can't provide a service that's up to standard (such as putting you on separate backbone switches if necessary), then they shouldn't offer said services, and people shouldn't pay them to.
More seriously, a multistage approach appears to be seriously viable when using balloon-rocket hybrids. It's not so much that it helps you get to orbit distancewise or speedwise, but that it removes the necessity of putting so much energy into fighting drag and pushing aside air.
I don't know about mainstream lithium ion safety, but the nanolithium set - comprised of A123, Altairnano, and a few others, are claiming (and backing it up with videos of, say, nails being driven into their products) to be quite safe, in addition to having remarkably high power, being safe for full discharge, and fast-charging.
That's why one of the big vehicles that got overlooked in TFA, the Venture One, decided to go with them. It's an evolution of the dutch Carver, but as a slightly larger serial hybrid (small engine, small high-power battery, big electric inwheel motors).
The pitch is:
3 wheels with power tilting "Carving" feature
2 passenger
100mpg
100mph sustained speeds
0-60 in 7 seconds or less
350 mile range
Safety features equal to or exceeding a small car with rollcage, but still classified as a motorcycle in the US
less than $20k
I was hazy on its stability until I saw a video of its predecessor the Carver doing a 180 powerslide-stop in a parking lot in scarcely its own bodylength. It's being developed more on a venture-capital model than on a conventional automaker schedule, but it will be launching sometime in 2009. They're taking a LOT of feedback on their forums, and I get the feeling most of the features that weren't inherent to the Carver are going to have been implemented because of forum support.
The reason that they worked was that the underground green movement (against the wishes of the red movement, which wanted the planet to be studied sterile) had clandestinely seeded each one with a cocktail of extremophile lichens, algaes, and photosynthesizers. They darkened the surface of the planet and began the chemical transformation that its atmosphere would need (particularly once they started burning the regolith), as well as fixing soil at the surface. They were preserved in little colonies situated on the heaters, the better to keep them alive and acclimate them slowly to their new environment. More importantly than any of these primary effects, they poisoned the environment with life and justified further human ecoscaping (no more virgin Mars as a cassus belli).
The idea was pitched publicly as a very minor + experimental, but doable means of heating up the climate and reducing the existing winds, which could be severe, and which kicked up enough dust to reduce insolation at times.
This presents you with the situation where your contract is being unilaterally voided because someone else failed to use more banwidth than you, putting you in the top 10% of bandwidth users.
Consumer protection laws are gonna need some additions after the '08 and '10 elections, if there are any left by then.
Capitalism CAN work - if competition is possible in the given market, both physically(line access/linesharing are examples) and realistically (roughly equal service). Socialism CAN work - if the administrators are somehow accountable to their customers, and respect them (and if they are privately owned, are heavily regulated by people who care).
They currently aren't working very well in areas where someone has a natural, purchased, or politically imposed monopoly, and legislators find it difficult to care about things they are too old to understand. Anything invented after you turn 35 is wholly unnatural.
A democracy could hypothetically function quite well on a Nielson statistical basis - one in every hundred citizens is randomly selected to vote in every election. Averages play out, we still care about who leads us, political advertising and debates stay the same, et cetera. Voting personally is a ritualistic duty as much as a right. And apparently the only means surviving that elevates politics in the American psyche beyond "Who cares who wins" to a level of personal responsibility for the outcome. It's a motivational tool for anyone to care about politics.
Right now, I would trade my vote in a second for publicly funded elections and a vigilant media - the benefit to myself is much greater than my vote could ever be. Of course, if that fails, a million dollars can buy a lot of television advertising in a race you think matters - and most likely sway more than the number of votes that you'd be able to make in your lifetime.
The assumption therein is that others will continue to vote for or against things that benefit them.
Giving up your personal right to vote, or to speak, or to practice a religion, or to have a jury trial, for a certain amount of money is a financial decision that many people would be easily willing to make with no qualms. The assumption is that you can't give up EVERYBODY's right to do so, in which case it creates a very strong moral and ethical argument against. You can do without, very often, if it presents enough benefits to you.
If a hypothetical God found this system of democracy amusing and offered a scholarship to students in exchange for removing the practice of voting from American democracy as a whole...
Then you could make an analogous argument with those statistics. But the benefit to a student of the populace having the right to vote does not equate with the benefit to a student of the student having the right to vote. The Founders did not commit their lives so that they personally could put their ballots in, nor did the soldiers who fought for freedom plan on never missing an election in their lives - it was enough that they were governed by votes that came from interests very similar to theirs, rather than from an overseas king.
Felons do not, as a whole, spend the rest of their lives protesting voter disenfranchisement.
Comcast is not simply filtering. They are setting up a man-in-the-middle attack and fraudulently representing(spoofing) the customer in sending out termination packets. People are forced to use encryption (only with peers capable of decryption) if they want to use their bandwidth. According to torrent app FAQs, some regions even cancel encrypted connections if they are being run alongside unencrypted ones.
What they're doing is analogous to deciding that teenage girls in their customer's households use the majority of their phone bandwidth, so they should filter out teenage girl traffic. They accomplish this by using voice recognition/synthesizing software to acquire the vocal footprint of any conversation involving the teenage girl, and 10 seconds after the call starts, synthesize "I've got to go, goodbye" in a teenage girl voice, followed by a hangup signal. The teenage girl is forced to use a voicechanger (and another on end of the person she's calling) if she wants to be able to talk with people. Some regions even do the same thing to all calls incoming for an hour after the teenage girl's been cut off, including her using a voicechanger or her father trying to use the phone.
What would be the legal claim (and is it a tort or a crime) under which relief could be granted if such a system were put in place on a phone system? What are the legal differences between Comcast and a phone carrier? What will the FCC's decision that ownership of cable lines no longer ensure a monopoly position change?
Slashdot Mirror
Observe the price-supply effect of historical uranium consumption:
http://stockgroup.stockgroup.com/baimg/img/fs_uranium/vialoux_1-1.gif
http://www.stockinterview.com/News/03162007/world-prod-cons-U3O8.gif
Uranium mining has everything to do with politics, economics, and military needs, not geological realities a la hubbert. It's present in a wide spectrum of concentrations in most of the earth's crust, all that's needed for reserves to jump by orders of magnitude is a little bit higher price. Uranium power has more to do with the price of cement than the price of uranium - it is hugely price-insensitive (and don't even ask me about the insane energy return). Reserve estimates based on an artificially low price ceiling to rule out more difficult extractions ($130/kg looked pretty high in the 90's when prices were flirting with $20/kg) aren't exactly valid at this point - spot prices passed $300/kg this year.
We get around 40,000 kilowatt hours out of every kilogram of natural uranium. That means that at the ludicrously high $1000/kg, incremental cost due to uranium price is 2.5 cents per kwh. At that price, however, most experts agree that we could refine even trace amounts of uranium from seawater (for millions of years of supply), or simply build breeder reactors which get around 100x the amount of energy out of a given uranium input..
So go out there, and start a union/guild.
That's the traditional thing to do when faced with a field where skilled, expert labor cannot compete with unskilled labor doing the same jobs.
I was never a fan of organized labor as a negotiation tool - it's full of lose-lose situations, like whether to allow an airline's retirement benefits to lapse or allow the company to go bankrupt (resulting in those benefits being cut).
But it has two other roles
As a political action group, it can achieve things that no amount of corporate negotiation ever can. Laws can be passed which mandate particular benefits - benefits which two competitors individually would otherwise have incentives to cut in order to better compete.
As a standards organization, it can ensure that its members are respected in a way that no amount of advertising ever can. A level of skill can be assured and a level of job mobility acquired by good performance, when in a corporate setting your expertise only potentially grants you a promotion to a level that your skills are irrelevant.
Three things:
1) The infringement of free speech on the internet goes against a moral consensus among internet denizens that absolute free speech is the way to go - this holds even in most cases where that speech is illegal in the US, and PARTICULARLY when it is illegal elsewhere but not in the US.
2) Youtube was looked upon, was promoted, as a community, a place where people can communicate face to face or camera to camera in public free of restrictions traditionally imposed on publishing, whether legal, logistical, or social. It's premised upon the free ability to communicate what you want.
3) Google set the standard, not us - "do no evil." The TOS are not shit, enforcement is shit. The TOS was implemented so that things which are rarely seen as legitimate communication - things like snuff films and pornography, things which fulfill desires more perverse than conveying information. Even so, Youtube became infamous for its ability to graphically depict senseless fraternity-stunt violence, among other things. The fact that socially virtuous depictions of violence (which are objectively anti-evil) were just censored (not that they can be) is a violation of the self-imposed moral standard by the corporate entity which wrote the rules, as well as hypocrisy. I'm not saying that they could do much better - personal moral standards are difficult to apply to any non-personal corporatiaon, much less a publicly traded one whose administrators have no duty but "maximize shareholder value". But that doesn't make the anger any less real.
Of course they can censor - of course any corporation can censor anything which runs on their hardware. They're always able to, TOS or not. The wrongness or rightness of the action has nothing to do with what a TOS that they wrote explictly allows them to do or not. Noone's suggesting that what they did is against the law or "into the streets" vigilantism - they're suggesting that what they did deserves public condemnation. Just because the legal system exists to materially arbitrate when someone does something wrong enough to have a law written against it, doesn't invalidate extralegal social mores of right and wrong. And vigorous enforcement of a terms of service contract is not a responsibility, it's an option - one which should be chosen carefully.
What motivation does this officeholder have not to set everything up so that it comes crashing down six months after he's out of office? This is in regards to budget problems, and wider than that, fiscal, monetary, and trade problems. Is it possible to avoid an officeholder using the quick (eventually disasterous) fixes available to him?
Bush/Greenspan's ticking timebomb appears to have sparked early, and we've crested the top of the hill - the dollar is accelerating downwards of its own accord now. Where will it stop, nobody knows.
I qualify the intentional infliction of serious pain on a captive but non-cooperative individual in order to engineer compliance, as torture. Every other week we see citizen journalists exposing the practice, showing multiple officers standing above someone while they cry out in pain. Officers chime in on the comment sections that this is Drive Stun mode, which isn't anywhere near as serious as a normal taser - no skin penetration, much less current, and little chance of injury. But it is serious pain, and falls under my IMO reasonable definition of torture. I believe that the capability should be removed. Tasers shot at a distance in place of a gun can save large numbers of lives, on both ends of the trigger. But they're not a substitute for physically forcing the person into cuffs - they're too deadly for that, and too painful. Whether it makes the officer's job easier is irrelevant. The preservation of human rights, primarily the right to be safe from violence, is the goal of police forces in the Western world.
On torture - The fact that an officer can clip electrodes to his testicles and shock himself wouldn't prevent the involuntary application of that practice from being called torture either.
As for being scared at policemen, rooting for idiots, or listening to N.W.A. - what the hell do these things matter to my points? Address the points I have proffered and we'll have a discussion, and in all likelihood you might convince someone to change their opinion. Address my person and you'll have the satisfaction of having insulted someone on the internet you'll never meet or communicate with again.
Some of them got along just fine before tasers were popularized, without any lethal force capability, to satisfy unfounded British fears that cops would be too aggressive if they were given lethal firearms.
Tasers are a less lethal weapon, and there is no doubt in my mind that they have saved more lives than they have ended. They have had a net positive effect.
But if they're used to torture people into compliance, or if they're used in gun mode so often that even mere vocal resistance to arrest or refusal to move, is answered with tasering, the fact that they've saved lives doesn't matter - they have caused the police in jurisdictions where tasers are used liberally to become an overtly oppressive force. And when this is allowed, it feeds on itself (power corrupts) until it produces scandal and we enact countermeasures. We've had several scandals, but countermeasures havn't even kept up with the spread of this weapon. Thus, we need more measures to keep taser use in check, without simply removing such a useful tool from the force. Tasers HAVE been proven deadly according to multiple coroner reports, been suspected COD in many others, and in others illnesses have been invented to pretend that they weren't the COD.
Drive Stun mode involves causing extreme, but not instantaneously disabling pain, in order to make a person submit to the officer's authority. In order to use it (as a melee weapon), the officer has to have passed within fist/knife/(possibly teeth) striking distance and be able to get an angle on uncovered or thinly covered skin. This typically happens after officers have the risk that the subject poses (barring hepatitic vampires) completely mitigated, but before the subject is acting as an obedient prisoner. I am saying that we NEED to restrict taser use to incidences where the subject still poses a risk, because anything else can be construed as torture - which our ethics system has traditionally claimed to be vehemently opposed to.
You do not stun a man with a knife or a gun, you either shoot him or you tase him until he drops his weapon or he dies. This is a fully defensible practice. But the chance that a man in a wifebeater who's being arrested for public drunkenness has hepatitis or AIDS is not reason enough to tase him or stun him half a dozen times if he isn't being the perfect prisoner, but doesn't threaten injury. Neither is it reason enough to hold him down and beat him with clubs until he submits to being cuffed. We train our (volunteer) police corps in physical combat because the application of force to limbs and body may be needed to get an unruly prisoner in shackles. A 'safe pain mace' (stungun) should not replace that, and a 'loss of muscle control gun'(taser) should only be used in extreme circumstances.
I've heard the "crazy meth'd up homeless guy" argument several times in every taser discussion.
Yet I've known several cops, and none of them have had to take down any crazy meth'd up homeless guys who were impossible to restrain using normal force, in their entire careers. I've never seen one outside of sensationalist websites or TV shows.
It's gotten to the point that Canadian police are trained that certain subjects suffer from a health condition called "excited delirium," where they do not feel pain, cannot communicate, and are in imminent danger of hyperthermia and death. It is in their interest, therefore, to be tased as many times as necessary to get them to a doctor and save their life. This is the belief that killed the Polish immigrant who couldn't speak English and was frustrated enough at Customs' ineptitude to try to break through the glass wall separating him from his mother. "Excited delirium" is then blamed for deaths that result from multiple taserings.
The coroner and medical community have another word for it - custody death.
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I'm in favor of simply completely removing "drive stun" mode, making tasers projectile only, and having cops fill out all the same paperwork and undergo the same investigation as firearm discharge entails. In order to safely use one as a stun gun, you have to have the prisoner basically within the scope of your physical control. THIS is torture - using pain compliance to subdue a subject who has been rendered harmless by the situation, or who was always harmless, but resisting arrest as best they are able (if that). It's the same as having cops hold down someone to pepper-spray their eyes.
I think it might also be wise to reform the doctrine to make further tasering after the first successful application, a substitute ONLY for lethal force.
This is what's required, in my eyes, to bring the taser back to the level of humanitarian weapon.
You could say the same thing about driving through any agricultural zone. The original landscape has utterly disappeared, replaced with rows of monocropped center-pivot-irrigated shrub for miles on end, interspersed with quarter mile long livestock hangars and lagoons of waste.
A ton of coal is equivalent to something like 8 YEARS of hard labor from a man-powered machine using up 3 men for 8 hours a day each. Power companies assign that a value of around $30.
We've been wasteful with our energy, and even if global warming was a non-issue (oxidizing almost pure carbon is much worse than busting hydrocarbon bonds), the pollution from coal is a serious offense. We shouldn't tolerate our landscape being destroyed for the sake of a fraction of a penny per kilowatt hour.
I'm not in favor of getting rid of coal altogether overnight, I'm in favor of an immediate moratorium on new coal plants or surface mines, and a 4 year total phaseout of surface coal/tarsands mining and importation of surface coal/tarsands. Coal mines are horrible, but they're much less destructive locally - you can count on popular support of coal mining in local districts, which would be impossible for surface solid hydrocarbon mining once a decent ad campaign gets done with it.
With surface coal mining dunked (60% of US coal), coal prices would adjust to a level more in line with alternatives, old inefficient plants would shut themselves down, dying mining towns would start themselves back up again, and wind would become the mainstay cheapest choice in many situations. The slow decline of coal after that would be due to geological and economic factors - we've mined much of the easy stuff.
Incidentally, I'm of the opine that cheap energy is a thing of the past, period. Peak oil will see to that... right about now, actually. Electricity is already set to take off because of PHEVs, and alternatives will be explored by everybody. We already have billions of rioting urban third worlders who have been priced out of burning oil in the last four years. NG, coal, nuclear - anything looks good to them right about now, with their workday restrained to daylight hours and winter a deadly menace they thought they'd conquered. Imagine what happens when the US's longrunning economic problems finally burst (beginning right about now, actually, if you look at the dollar vs Euro/basket), and a nation of people who have never known true want are plunged into what could be another Great Depression, but with 10x greater fuel costs. Why not prepare for that day by pricing the patio-heaters of the world out of mainstream use, while at the same time saving the environment and slowing Global Warming?
Decommissioning? They started with solid plans to build a network of nuclear plants in 1957, started construction on 5, and after a series of cost overruns and delays, managed to get 1 plant online in 1983. Their failure of management doesn't exactly speak to problems with the nuclear industry, not when entire nuclear weapons programs have been brought to fruition in that timespan.
That 1 plant currently produces 9% of Washington's power, btw. Around 9 billion kilowatt-hours a year. At 6 cents per kwh, that's 540 million dollars a year for your state.
And like I said, this is a design that's half a century old or more. The newer ones have improved significantly.
The Soviet defense wasn't just about weather. Germany spent the time between their first battles in 1941 and the end of the war discovering and trying to copy superior Russian tanks. If Stalin hadn't purged all the experience out of his army and all the independent thought out of his population, hadn't let his army rape + execute their way through conquered territory, and had been a little less sure that all his capitalist neighbors were destined to come under his rule due to Marxist Dialectic, he would have reached Normandy before we did.
The UK was an island nation, so naturally they built up a navy rather than an army. If the English channel didn't exist, lots of things would have been different - the navy being the first, German development of submarine warfare to counter their superior navy being the second, US participation in WW1 being a result of submarine warfare the third, and Germany's pre-WW2 situation being a result of US participation in WW1 the fourth.
The bird issue stems from a huge, primitive windfarm in Altamont Pass, California. Essentially, hundreds of small turbines built on steel truss towers form the only perches available (and lots of them) on the thin grassland; and thin grassland attracts plenty of mice. It was estimated that any given tower killed a raptor once every 5 years. Non-issue. Newer towers are much bigger(less blade edge per area), and are constructed as monolithic tubes which remove any perch space.
There was a concern with two series' of Appalachian ridgeline towers which were recording significant numbers of bat kills (around 1 a night per large turbine). The bats appeared on infrared to be specifically attracted to the moving propeller, particularly when it was extended to continue moving at full speed in low wind. What causes this is still under investigation, as well as potential ways to ward them off. This may have simply been because of a thriving local bat community, or merely the placement of the towers on heavily forested ridgeline, and a study done on the phenomena recommends that these be taken into account when siting towers.
Suffice it to say, though, that these are useless objections when faced with the alternative - wiping that forested Appalachian ridge clean off the face of the earth to get at the coal underneath, and dumping it into the valley on either side. This is happening now, and when you object to wind you support wind's alternatives.
You've got it wrong on most points here.
Small wind turbines are generally not competitive.
It's the huge, 0.5-5MW carbon-fiber-and-steel constructions placed in ideal wind zones which are competing with other forms of generation. Subsidy can allow you less efficient development, if your country has the money to burn.
The "wind turbines on car parks" are practically decorations - 90% of them are placed in areas with very little wind. Greenwashing.
Positive Energy Return On Energy Invested on wind on a good site is on the order of months from start of operation. For silicon PV, it's still years off even in the best zones, and decades in some places. For solar thermal, I'm not sure - but I suspect (based on the relative costs) it's somewhere in between.
The old points against nuclear power have really, REALLY faded with age. Despite the lack of new plants in the last 20 years, the increase in reliability of existing plants have meant a continuously increasing amount of nuclear power produced in the US in that period. Meanwhile, we've made 4th gen plant designs that are difficult to melt down if you try, which dispose of their own transuranic waste via neutron bombardment, which breed fuel for 98% less mining required, which rely on non-uranium fuel cycles and are scalable to the small-town level.
Chernobyl, and disasters like it, were primarily conscious risks taken at a time when nuclear war was a consequence of failure to breed enough plutonium, and people were expendable (Stalin certainly liked his purges).
IN THE US:
In 2006, wind was 0.65%% of electrical generation
In 2005, it was 0.44%.
In 2004, it was 0.36%.
Wind is 44% of new planned electrical generation for 2007.
If current growth rates hold:
Next year, we'll generate more electricity from wind than we do from geothermal + solar + waste incinerators put together.
The year after that, we'll generate more electricity from wind than we do from all petroleum products put together.
Three more years, and wind will match hydro.
While I am extrapolating on the very high 50% growth figures... I think there is the potential for much more than that if a newly minted Democratically-controlled federal government does the environmentally sound thing and attacks coal, which is more polluting than any other energy source in pretty much every way. More CO2, more landscape destruction, more particulate matter, more sulfur, more methane, more radioactive material release, more unsafe groundwater, more mercury. A rational environmentalist with the ability to compare things (of which there are few) should table any objections that they have to other sources of energy, and protest surface coal + tarsands mining until they're banned. Yucca Mountain's worst-case-in-10,000-years-scenario is a joke compared to the devastation being doled out weekly from these two things.
Wind is already cost-competitive with coal + NG, and either wind getting increased federal subsidies of some type, wind getting significantly cheaper, or coal's externalities being priced seriously would make it much more than 44% of new capacity.
Yes, the article covers obvious points. More wind means a much more measured use of hydro, more turbine-local storage, more centralized pumped hydro storage, and more nationwide interconnects. We don't currently have a nationwide grid - we have a few small load balancing bridges between regional networks that themselves are pretty overloaded, and have trouble getting local utilities to cooperate to build more infrastructure. That would need to be built up dramatically to bring wind over 25% or so of our generation. But at the level we're at now, wind can be absorbed into slightly different duty cycles at the local hydropower quite easily.
You do not have a business relationship with your neighbor, and have no responsibilities towards them in this regard.
You have a business relationship with the ISP, who has a responsibility to provide you (and your neighbor) with the service you pay both for. How they achieve that is none of your business, and certainly not on your conscience. If they can't provide a service that's up to standard (such as putting you on separate backbone switches if necessary), then they shouldn't offer said services, and people shouldn't pay them to.
More seriously, a multistage approach appears to be seriously viable when using balloon-rocket hybrids. It's not so much that it helps you get to orbit distancewise or speedwise, but that it removes the necessity of putting so much energy into fighting drag and pushing aside air.
That's why one of the big vehicles that got overlooked in TFA, the Venture One, decided to go with them. It's an evolution of the dutch Carver, but as a slightly larger serial hybrid (small engine, small high-power battery, big electric inwheel motors). The pitch is:
- 3 wheels with power tilting "Carving" feature
- 2 passenger
- 100mpg
- 100mph sustained speeds
- 0-60 in 7 seconds or less
- 350 mile range
- Safety features equal to or exceeding a small car with rollcage, but still classified as a motorcycle in the US
- less than $20k
I was hazy on its stability until I saw a video of its predecessor the Carver doing a 180 powerslide-stop in a parking lot in scarcely its own bodylength. It's being developed more on a venture-capital model than on a conventional automaker schedule, but it will be launching sometime in 2009. They're taking a LOT of feedback on their forums, and I get the feeling most of the features that weren't inherent to the Carver are going to have been implemented because of forum support.The module would require a crane to remove, or ten minutes of gruntwork if broken into smaller chunks.
The reason that they worked was that the underground green movement (against the wishes of the red movement, which wanted the planet to be studied sterile) had clandestinely seeded each one with a cocktail of extremophile lichens, algaes, and photosynthesizers. They darkened the surface of the planet and began the chemical transformation that its atmosphere would need (particularly once they started burning the regolith), as well as fixing soil at the surface. They were preserved in little colonies situated on the heaters, the better to keep them alive and acclimate them slowly to their new environment. More importantly than any of these primary effects, they poisoned the environment with life and justified further human ecoscaping (no more virgin Mars as a cassus belli).
The idea was pitched publicly as a very minor + experimental, but doable means of heating up the climate and reducing the existing winds, which could be severe, and which kicked up enough dust to reduce insolation at times.
This presents you with the situation where your contract is being unilaterally voided because someone else failed to use more banwidth than you, putting you in the top 10% of bandwidth users.
Consumer protection laws are gonna need some additions after the '08 and '10 elections, if there are any left by then.
Capitalism CAN work - if competition is possible in the given market, both physically(line access/linesharing are examples) and realistically (roughly equal service).
Socialism CAN work - if the administrators are somehow accountable to their customers, and respect them (and if they are privately owned, are heavily regulated by people who care).
They currently aren't working very well in areas where someone has a natural, purchased, or politically imposed monopoly, and legislators find it difficult to care about things they are too old to understand. Anything invented after you turn 35 is wholly unnatural.
A democracy could hypothetically function quite well on a Nielson statistical basis - one in every hundred citizens is randomly selected to vote in every election. Averages play out, we still care about who leads us, political advertising and debates stay the same, et cetera. Voting personally is a ritualistic duty as much as a right. And apparently the only means surviving that elevates politics in the American psyche beyond "Who cares who wins" to a level of personal responsibility for the outcome. It's a motivational tool for anyone to care about politics.
Right now, I would trade my vote in a second for publicly funded elections and a vigilant media - the benefit to myself is much greater than my vote could ever be. Of course, if that fails, a million dollars can buy a lot of television advertising in a race you think matters - and most likely sway more than the number of votes that you'd be able to make in your lifetime.
The assumption therein is that others will continue to vote for or against things that benefit them.
Giving up your personal right to vote, or to speak, or to practice a religion, or to have a jury trial, for a certain amount of money is a financial decision that many people would be easily willing to make with no qualms. The assumption is that you can't give up EVERYBODY's right to do so, in which case it creates a very strong moral and ethical argument against. You can do without, very often, if it presents enough benefits to you.
If a hypothetical God found this system of democracy amusing and offered a scholarship to students in exchange for removing the practice of voting from American democracy as a whole...
Then you could make an analogous argument with those statistics. But the benefit to a student of the populace having the right to vote does not equate with the benefit to a student of the student having the right to vote. The Founders did not commit their lives so that they personally could put their ballots in, nor did the soldiers who fought for freedom plan on never missing an election in their lives - it was enough that they were governed by votes that came from interests very similar to theirs, rather than from an overseas king.
Felons do not, as a whole, spend the rest of their lives protesting voter disenfranchisement.
Comcast is not simply filtering. They are setting up a man-in-the-middle attack and fraudulently representing(spoofing) the customer in sending out termination packets. People are forced to use encryption (only with peers capable of decryption) if they want to use their bandwidth. According to torrent app FAQs, some regions even cancel encrypted connections if they are being run alongside unencrypted ones.
What they're doing is analogous to deciding that teenage girls in their customer's households use the majority of their phone bandwidth, so they should filter out teenage girl traffic. They accomplish this by using voice recognition/synthesizing software to acquire the vocal footprint of any conversation involving the teenage girl, and 10 seconds after the call starts, synthesize "I've got to go, goodbye" in a teenage girl voice, followed by a hangup signal. The teenage girl is forced to use a voicechanger (and another on end of the person she's calling) if she wants to be able to talk with people. Some regions even do the same thing to all calls incoming for an hour after the teenage girl's been cut off, including her using a voicechanger or her father trying to use the phone.
What would be the legal claim (and is it a tort or a crime) under which relief could be granted if such a system were put in place on a phone system? What are the legal differences between Comcast and a phone carrier? What will the FCC's decision that ownership of cable lines no longer ensure a monopoly position change?
Because phreaking is legal on common carrier phone companies?