OUR only nuclear bunker buster apparently can't get more than 3m deep into alaskan tundra, and self destructs if shot at hard rock, much less a reinforced bunker a kilometer deep.
The fact is, not making a decision on nuclear waste IS making a decision - to leave the waste sitting distributed throughout cooling ponds all over the country, building up continuously as they wait for the federal government to build them the containment vessel that was promised to them years ago.
So you use the hydro, and someone somewhere in another state with less natural water resource burns an equivalent amount of coal to make up for the electricity that he didn't have because you used it.
You also never played Lineage 2 in the open beta, when the servers were full for 12 hours at a time... which some people spent pounding on the 'reconnect' button once a second. Two hours of clicking, if I was lucky, got me a few hours of playtime.
"Typically 30%," according to this link: http://sti.srs.gov/fulltext/ms2004186/ms2004186.pd f Also note that their GOAL for 2005 is to get leakage down below 0.1%/hour.
The biodiesel plan does indeed involve destroying a large stretch of the Mohave desert:) Or rather, flooding a 15,000 square mile section of it with the colorado river, like we did the Salton Sea, and growing algae in it. Hey, wouldn't you trade 10% of the Mohave for an indefinite renewable national supply of clean burning fuel that has no net contribution to global warming(it gets its carbon from the atmosphere)? At about what it costs us just to buy ONE YEAR's worth of foreign oil? The money remains in our economy, builds jobs for us, and destroys the knife that Opec has to our throats if we ever piss it off.
In my thinking, it's also quite cheap compared to what the war resulting from our running out of oil in thirty years or so will cost.
After examining at the article, I realize I wasn't fully aware of generation options available. I was under the impression that Salter's Duck was a dead idea, and they were going with projects that based themselves on the actual shoreline(All I'd heard press about was the air compression scheme or the overflow valve scheme), which is 100% unacceptable from an environmental standpoint, and has terrible efficiency compared to dam hydro (generation capacity is proportional to an exponent of depth, there's a reason that dams are built high).
Of the options they present, it appears that what they call the Terminator design is probably the most viable of the options, and I don't see it completely destroying coastlines. The design they call the Terminator (They mention the brand Pelamis, I believe) IMO has real potential for island areas. For huge landlocked nations like ours, however, I doubt it has a real future.
Wave power is a total ridiculosity - you want to sacrifice TWENTY FOUR PERCENT of US coastline in order to supply SEVEN PERCENT of the electricity.
This is our electricity usage BEFORE we tack on the electricity used to power our hydrogen cars, which will raise our consumption an order of magnitude.
Using algal biodiesel, breeder fission(with development on fusion), and wind where suitable, are the only remotely practical eco-friendly choices that are sustainable - Photovoltaic trumps them all, but to convert even just our current electrical needs to photovoltaic would cost more than we've spent on imported oil since we started importing oil. We could create an infrastructure to supply the entire nation's demand for fuel with algal biodiesel on an amount of money that's similar to what we spend anually on importing oil, which is coincidentally about the same amount of money it would cost to install a single hydrogen pump at every gas station in the US.
Wave power is and has always been a crock as an energy scheme.
A proof or disproof of something as complicated as an entire ecosystem, including detail down to individual amino acids and proteins, is quite impossible/impractical.
We observe patterns, we speculate oversimplified theories to explain these patterns. There is a biosphere of evidence on this particular topic. Some of it, we don't understand how to explain with our current theories of evolution.
Example: The gap between an animal without certain features (say, a rat), to an animal that has evolved certain features that add incredible compound utility, but have next to no marginal utility as they are being evolved (a bat).
Perhaps this is why we call it a theory - although 99% of the evidence is on one side, there is still evidence to the contrary.
Our theories of gravity, for example,[even when you take into account relativity] don't explain observed cosmic movements. Some have attempted to change the theory at its roots to explain this, some have ventured to create absurd Standard-Model-defying things like Dark Matter, and even stranger, Dark Energy. Meanwhile, the String Theorists attempt to revise gravity (along with all the other forces) at its core with a mathematical proof.
The scientific community takes this into account by saying that hey, our understanding may be imperfect. We might be wrong. Come up with something better. If your facts support it, perhaps we might try to verify it, and poove our our previous understanding wrong, humiliating as that may be. You will be hard-pressed to find a religious community that does the same, that DEMANDS evidence for each and every THEORY that is put out.
To respond to my parent post: Computers as a whole have been moving down in price, but the average customer still spends far more than he needs to. My original point was of the 640k variety: A system with a processor less than half the speed of the lowest tier sold now isn't going to make a major difference for J random technophobe's applications.
Cringely made a similar point a month ago when he wrote about the niche that ye-old-dead-techbubble-idea, internet appliances, could fill: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20041202. html
The vast majority of [let's call them non-technical customers] want:
to read email to browse the web to use a word processor / spreadsheet to burn/rip/download MP3's
None of these require a great processor, video card, memory, etc. None of these have major noticeable differences going from the bottom of the line, a 2.4ghz processor, to the top of the line, a 3.6ghz processor. (No, the ripping of a CD to a CPU-intensive encoder going from 40 minutes to 1 hour does NOT change the use of a computer significantly)
The "non-technical user" hasn't noticed a major improvement in hardware performance in years.
IF they understood this, and were educated enough to know exactly how the buzzwords would effect them (essentially, nil in terms of their use of the computer) the entire structure of the market would change, old components wouldn't ramp down in price so quickly, etc.
That said, "family buyers," are the cattle that have allowed Moore's Law powered components to decrease in prices though economies of scale to the point where people like me can afford them.
A major part of why these systems are specced is that gamers often help drive the purchases. Gamers who don't understand hardware enough to put together their own computer, but can compare numbers on labels, are a major factor these days. Geeks like me may cringe at the thought, but often they end up being the customers of the systems with $500 in the processor, $200 in the case, and $50 each in the memory + video card. "CS still isn't fast enough!" they say, and so they're planning on a 4ghz computer as soon as they find it on the shelves.
Religions are subject to a darwinism of their own, just as every social practice is, by its chance of terminating or hurting the society practicing it.
If I'm a tribal chief in the tenth century BC and I create "Drink all day, fuck all night" religion, my tribe of inebriated, tired men will likely perish when the crops fail to harvest themselves.
Religions have always been willing to adapt to the mores of the people, the things that rulers thought were prudent, as well as simple appeal to nonbelievers for conversion. Those that weren't didn't spread, and no longer exist.
Religions that promote evangelism + missionary activity tended to spread.
Religions that promoted altruism, probably far in excess of the merits of altruistic practices in the success of the society, succeeded because that behavior was endearing to the people, to the leaders, etc.
Likewise, religions that say that their way is the only way tend to make hardcore followers that are resistent to leaving the religion.
Okay, done w/ the tautology. All this becomes a bit less important once religions have reached an established phase, and politics plays more into the religion than independant thinking on the part of adopters. I doubt that the world would have the same distribution of religions right now if Constantine had lost the battle of Milvian bridge, or hadn't occurred to put a symbol on his shield from a certain Jewish cult as a good luck charm.
I don't know about you guys, but one of the things that threw me + a friend or two of mine off from Opticals when they first came out was that they had range. We would lift the thing off from the desk a quarter inch to go further without moving our whole arm (carpal tunnel addicts eat your heart out), and it would keep tracking. I still have balls merely through force of habit, my friends have switched to optical.
Wouldn't a mouse that is "always tracking," throw one off a bit? You can't reposition it if you want the sensitivity high enough that it takes more than a wrist movement of screen real estate, the only thing to distance itself from the physical world is bumping into the side of the screen.
Like a previous poster said, one can't use on airplanes or other forms of transpot, but also, could one have problems in tall buildings that flex slightly in the wind?
Slashdot Mirror
OUR only nuclear bunker buster apparently can't get more than 3m deep into alaskan tundra, and self destructs if shot at hard rock, much less a reinforced bunker a kilometer deep.
The fact is, not making a decision on nuclear waste IS making a decision - to leave the waste sitting distributed throughout cooling ponds all over the country, building up continuously as they wait for the federal government to build them the containment vessel that was promised to them years ago.
So you use the hydro, and someone somewhere in another state with less natural water resource burns an equivalent amount of coal to make up for the electricity that he didn't have because you used it.
You also never played Lineage 2 in the open beta, when the servers were full for 12 hours at a time... which some people spent pounding on the 'reconnect' button once a second. Two hours of clicking, if I was lucky, got me a few hours of playtime.
No, it doesn't.
The worrying thing is... We don't have much more than 25 years.
According to the DOE, the most probable scenario has us peaking and then rapidly ramping down oil production somewhere around 2037.
"Typically 30%," according to this link: http://sti.srs.gov/fulltext/ms2004186/ms2004186.pd f
Also note that their GOAL for 2005 is to get leakage down below 0.1%/hour.
There are 10 types of people in the world...
Doh, Mohave = Sonora.
:) Gotta get used to slashdot again.
Seriously, I've become addicted to editting my posts + submitting before finishing my thoughts
Forgot, linkage: http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.html
The biodiesel plan does indeed involve destroying a large stretch of the Mohave desert :) Or rather, flooding a 15,000 square mile section of it with the colorado river, like we did the Salton Sea, and growing algae in it. Hey, wouldn't you trade 10% of the Mohave for an indefinite renewable national supply of clean burning fuel that has no net contribution to global warming(it gets its carbon from the atmosphere)? At about what it costs us just to buy ONE YEAR's worth of foreign oil? The money remains in our economy, builds jobs for us, and destroys the knife that Opec has to our throats if we ever piss it off.
In my thinking, it's also quite cheap compared to what the war resulting from our running out of oil in thirty years or so will cost.
Bah, I'm too used to forums where I can edit posts :)
"Landlocked" in a relative sense, that we have a large land area to coastline ratio.
After examining at the article, I realize I wasn't fully aware of generation options available. I was under the impression that Salter's Duck was a dead idea, and they were going with projects that based themselves on the actual shoreline(All I'd heard press about was the air compression scheme or the overflow valve scheme), which is 100% unacceptable from an environmental standpoint, and has terrible efficiency compared to dam hydro (generation capacity is proportional to an exponent of depth, there's a reason that dams are built high).
Of the options they present, it appears that what they call the Terminator design is probably the most viable of the options, and I don't see it completely destroying coastlines. The design they call the Terminator (They mention the brand Pelamis, I believe) IMO has real potential for island areas. For huge landlocked nations like ours, however, I doubt it has a real future.
Wave power is a total ridiculosity - you want to sacrifice TWENTY FOUR PERCENT of US coastline in order to supply SEVEN PERCENT of the electricity.
:)
This is our electricity usage BEFORE we tack on the electricity used to power our hydrogen cars, which will raise our consumption an order of magnitude.
Using algal biodiesel, breeder fission(with development on fusion), and wind where suitable, are the only remotely practical eco-friendly choices that are sustainable - Photovoltaic trumps them all, but to convert even just our current electrical needs to photovoltaic would cost more than we've spent on imported oil since we started importing oil. We could create an infrastructure to supply the entire nation's demand for fuel with algal biodiesel on an amount of money that's similar to what we spend anually on importing oil, which is coincidentally about the same amount of money it would cost to install a single hydrogen pump at every gas station in the US.
Wave power is and has always been a crock as an energy scheme.
whoops, forgot to log in
As is irony.
The term is a Plurality, as in, the most votes in a 3+ person election.
Cruise missiles?
Careful though, that kind of talk will get you taken off the air in DC.
A proof or disproof of something as complicated as an entire ecosystem, including detail down to individual amino acids and proteins, is quite impossible/impractical.
We observe patterns, we speculate oversimplified theories to explain these patterns. There is a biosphere of evidence on this particular topic. Some of it, we don't understand how to explain with our current theories of evolution.
Example: The gap between an animal without certain features (say, a rat), to an animal that has evolved certain features that add incredible compound utility, but have next to no marginal utility as they are being evolved (a bat).
Perhaps this is why we call it a theory - although 99% of the evidence is on one side, there is still evidence to the contrary.
Our theories of gravity, for example,[even when you take into account relativity] don't explain observed cosmic movements. Some have attempted to change the theory at its roots to explain this, some have ventured to create absurd Standard-Model-defying things like Dark Matter, and even stranger, Dark Energy. Meanwhile, the String Theorists attempt to revise gravity (along with all the other forces) at its core with a mathematical proof.
The scientific community takes this into account by saying that hey, our understanding may be imperfect. We might be wrong. Come up with something better. If your facts support it, perhaps we might try to verify it, and poove our our previous understanding wrong, humiliating as that may be. You will be hard-pressed to find a religious community that does the same, that DEMANDS evidence for each and every THEORY that is put out.
This is hostile territory, and they know it.
The geek community is one of the most openly athiestic in the country, as the postcount demonstrates.
Viva la groupthink!
To respond to my parent post: Computers as a whole have been moving down in price, but the average customer still spends far more than he needs to. My original point was of the 640k variety: A system with a processor less than half the speed of the lowest tier sold now isn't going to make a major difference for J random technophobe's applications.
. html
Cringely made a similar point a month ago when he wrote about the niche that ye-old-dead-techbubble-idea, internet appliances, could fill: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20041202
The vast majority of [let's call them non-technical customers] want:
to read email
to browse the web
to use a word processor / spreadsheet
to burn/rip/download MP3's
None of these require a great processor, video card, memory, etc. None of these have major noticeable differences going from the bottom of the line, a 2.4ghz processor, to the top of the line, a 3.6ghz processor. (No, the ripping of a CD to a CPU-intensive encoder going from 40 minutes to 1 hour does NOT change the use of a computer significantly)
The "non-technical user" hasn't noticed a major improvement in hardware performance in years.
IF they understood this, and were educated enough to know exactly how the buzzwords would effect them (essentially, nil in terms of their use of the computer) the entire structure of the market would change, old components wouldn't ramp down in price so quickly, etc.
That said, "family buyers," are the cattle that have allowed Moore's Law powered components to decrease in prices though economies of scale to the point where people like me can afford them.
A major part of why these systems are specced is that gamers often help drive the purchases. Gamers who don't understand hardware enough to put together their own computer, but can compare numbers on labels, are a major factor these days. Geeks like me may cringe at the thought, but often they end up being the customers of the systems with $500 in the processor, $200 in the case, and $50 each in the memory + video card. "CS still isn't fast enough!" they say, and so they're planning on a 4ghz computer as soon as they find it on the shelves.
Religions are subject to a darwinism of their own, just as every social practice is, by its chance of terminating or hurting the society practicing it.
If I'm a tribal chief in the tenth century BC and I create "Drink all day, fuck all night" religion, my tribe of inebriated, tired men will likely perish when the crops fail to harvest themselves.
Religions have always been willing to adapt to the mores of the people, the things that rulers thought were prudent, as well as simple appeal to nonbelievers for conversion. Those that weren't didn't spread, and no longer exist.
Religions that promote evangelism + missionary activity tended to spread.
Religions that promoted altruism, probably far in excess of the merits of altruistic practices in the success of the society, succeeded because that behavior was endearing to the people, to the leaders, etc.
Likewise, religions that say that their way is the only way tend to make hardcore followers that are resistent to leaving the religion.
Okay, done w/ the tautology.
All this becomes a bit less important once religions have reached an established phase, and politics plays more into the religion than independant thinking on the part of adopters. I doubt that the world would have the same distribution of religions right now if Constantine had lost the battle of Milvian bridge, or hadn't occurred to put a symbol on his shield from a certain Jewish cult as a good luck charm.
Sometimes, I wish that moderation went beyond 5.
Thank you.
It brings the break-even in price in terms of capital down to (back-of-napkin-calculations) 5 years or so instead of 15-20.
I assume that it does something similar in terms of energy.
Does this concern anyone?
I don't know about you guys, but one of the things that threw me + a friend or two of mine off from Opticals when they first came out was that they had range. We would lift the thing off from the desk a quarter inch to go further without moving our whole arm (carpal tunnel addicts eat your heart out), and it would keep tracking. I still have balls merely through force of habit, my friends have switched to optical.
Wouldn't a mouse that is "always tracking," throw one off a bit? You can't reposition it if you want the sensitivity high enough that it takes more than a wrist movement of screen real estate, the only thing to distance itself from the physical world is bumping into the side of the screen.
Like a previous poster said, one can't use on airplanes or other forms of transpot, but also, could one have problems in tall buildings that flex slightly in the wind?
Ack, almost forgot to add attribution: Original thread