It's treated differently in many US states too. Breaking into a house late at night in the US is (depending on the state) considered a direct threat on the life of anyone living there. Find a thief in your house at 2am? Feel free to take him out in any way you can. In a "your home is your castle" state, unless you tied him up before killing him, there's basically nothing the police are going to do to you. In high school, our government teacher told us that if we ever caught a thief climbing out the window with our television late at night and decided to shoot him, make sure the body falls back inside.;)
All very right, but what it comes down to in the end is that the design made it physically possible to have a Chernobyl event. The design of every single reactor ever used in western nations inherently makes a repeat of Chernobyl a physical impossibility. Workers in a CANDU or Westinghouse plant could sit down together and plan to intentionally cause as much damage as possible to the plant using the controls and overrides at their disposal, but the worst they could do is cause the reaction to stop and possibly cause minor damage to some reactor parts.
There's no combination of switches, buttons, levers, or commands you can use in a western nuclear power plant to cause anything like what happened in Chernobyl. No worker stupidity, negligence, or malicious intent could cause anything like a Chernobyl repeat.
It wasn't just a positive reactivity coefficient; it was a massively high positive reactivity coefficient. Between its design and its operation, it's truly a wonder the Chernobyl plant accident didn't do significantly higher damage to nearby populations and environment.
Coal fire plants blow up all the time. The only reason people don't panic is because virtually none of them have any comprehension of the amount of horribly toxic and radioactive crap floating around those plants. Maybe when a few more gigantic mountains of coal waste flood into populated areas, people will get the hint that it's a terribly dangerous and destructive energy solution. Unlike, for instance, nuclear power, which is safe, clean, efficient, reliable, and cost-effective.
I'm nearly certain that would violate other laws regarding nuclear non-proliferation. Even if it didn't, I know transport of any nuclear waste is extremely strictly controlled by the DoE, and NRC. This, like reprocessing, is a political issue; not a scientific one.
Nuclear power plants can't recycle their waste, they can't sell their waste, and they can't move their waste into any kind of secure long-term storage. And we wonder why it costs so much to bring down a nuclear plant...
0 people were killed or seriously injured by the Three Mile Island accident. The amount of radiation the average person in the area received was roughly equal to that received during a normal chest x-ray. The max anyone got was less than what you get from a year of celestial background radiation exposure.
Scientific studies and reports compiled in 1981, 1990, 2000 - 2003, 2005, 2008, and many others in between all found 0 causal link between the Three Mile Island nuclear accident and any deaths. The 2000 - 2003 study by U-Pitt looked at radiation exposure information gathered from 36,000 people living near the plant at the time of the accident, yet it found "no consistent evidence" linking the Three Mile Island incident to an increase in cancer or mortality rates.
The best reason I've ever heard, was Chernobyl. A perfectly good plant was destroyed by idiots stretching the envelope.
Chernobyl is universally understood by anyone involved in nuclear power to be a perfect example of how not to design a nuclear power plant. It was designed backwards, in that it could achieve a self-sustaining reaction. Yes, it was run into the ground by risky experiments and safeguards being offline, but any other design simply would have resulted in the reaction flaring out long before it became dangerous to people inside the plant, let alone people living nearby.
Chernobyl was anything but a "perfectly good plant". That much is evidenced by the fact that every plant using Chernobyl's design was quickly dismantled in every place where it was in use. No design ever built or used in a western country could have a Chernobyl incident even if every person working in the plant did everything they could to make it happen. The design of the reactors make such an event physically impossible.
oh yes sure it's safe, tell that to the british, or have you all forgot three mile island or chernobyl?
Two questions:
1) How many people died or sustained life-threatening injuries as a result of TMI? 2) Since you bring up Chernobyl in the context of western designed nuclear power plants, do you also bring up the Hindenburg in the context of Boeing commercial airliner safety? "oh yes sure commercial air travel is safe, tell that to the germans, or have you all forgot the Hindenburg?"
Groups like Greenpeace criticise if for "not doing enough" but this is the same group that run on a platform of "no more chernobyls" as a campaign (analogous to an anti-airline group running with "no more hindenburgs!" when protesting against modern aviation).
That's actually a great description. I'll have to use that in the future.
4. What do you mean "fuel dependency" - reactors don't just run on Uranium, even though there is plenty of that around, in the ground and in weapons. They can also run on Thorium with is about 4 times more abundant than Uranium and also on various other elements. We can also use "supply chain" style reactors that use the spent waste fuel from other reactors.
Just use CANDU reactors and you have your choice. Use Uranium you just mined, used "waste" from existing US nuclear plant sites, use plutonium from decommissioned nuclear weapons, or just use thorium. With the CANDU reactors, any of the above work just fine.
Generally I agree, but the image problem isn't just perception; it is reality. When there is a problem at a nuclear facility, it dwarfs those at any coal mine. Remember Chernobyl?
I honestly am not being mean when I say you really have no idea what you're talking about. Whenever there's a discussion about nuclear power plants, someone always brings up Chernobyl.
Anyone who brings up Chernobyl in the context of nuclear power plant safety quite honestly hasn't the slightest idea why Chernobyl happened or why it's physically impossible for it to happen in any nuclear power plant ever designed or built in any western nation, let alone a modern reactor design anywhere on Earth. Start with the fact that Chernobyl's design was backwards. If you don't understand what I mean by that, please read up on nuclear reactor design before commenting further on the topic of nuclear power plants.
Whether you realize it or not, your comment is the purest form of FUD.
First, the problems at Chernobyl were due to design; not workers. The workers did push the plant, but it was a terribly designed plant (it was essentially designed backwards) and it was designed to be a high-risk, high-reward plant for experimentation in weapons creation and other fun activities. That kind of design (the backwards kind) has never been used in any western nation and the existing plants using that design were dismantled after Chernobyl. Modern plants around the world are universally designed in such a way that the laws of physics prevent the kind of problems present at Chernobyl. It's physically impossible to see anything like what happened in Chernobyl in a modern nuclear power facility even if every tech there did everything they could to intentionally make it happen. It just can't due to the design of the reactor.
Second, TMI was a worker failure, but it's a perfect example of how western nuclear power plants have always been designed to use physics to their advantage. Everything that could have gone wrong at TMI did, yet the reactor shut down and there was no Chernobyl event. Why? Because in all western designs and even most Soviet designs (Chernobyl aside), the reactor is constructed in such a way that as it gets hotter and hotter, the difficulty in continuing a reaction massively increases. With more recent designs, things have gotten even safer due to automation in the safeguards.
If every single person working in a nuclear power plant in Canada, the US, and France simply got up and went home, every single plant would quietly shut down as automated systems kicked in in response to events within the reactor that wouldn't happen with regular maintenance proceeding normally. If those workers disabled every safety system in the plant before walking out, those plants would still quietly shut down, though some might have damage to the reactors. Nobody would be hurt, nothing would explode, and no nuclear waste or fuel would be released into the surrounding environment.
You try the same thing at a coal fire plant, you best get ready for one Hell of an explosion (or 10) followed by a fire that'll take days or weeks to extinguish. Pound for pound, nuclear power is safer for workers and nearby citizens than coal, oil, gas, and even hydro power.
What are we going to do with the waste? Until I hear a good answer to that question, nuclear power just doesn't cut it from my standpoint. Obama's nuclear plan, just like the rest of his policy, and US government policy in general, is shortsighted and leaves the burden on our kids. If we put 8bln into real solutions, we'd be able to build one.
What are we going to do with the waste? Don't know. What should we be doing with the waste? Reprocessing it like everyone else in the civilized world already does.
First, a word about modern reactor waste. If you just look at the crappy Westinghouse reactors the President announced loans for and don't even consider recycling all their waste (and we can do vastly better), the per-capita waste over the 60+ years life of the plant fits in a Coke bottle. Take a better design (CANDU, for instance), get less waste. Reprocess the waste you do get (which you can do multiple times in a CANDU reactor), get even less. So the actual level of waste we're talking about over a lifetime on a per-capita basis fits in a bottle of soda. Do what everyone else does with the waste and you end up with far less.
Second, the President has not specifically addressed what we're going to do with all our soda bottles of waste, but "senior" people dealing with the issue are supposedly telling journalists behind closed doors that they're looking at a number of possible solutions and that any final result will probably have to include reprocessing. If we were smart, we'd build a bunch of CANDU plants and feed our existing "waste" into them as fuel. CANDU plants are remarkably flexible. We can feed our existing waste into them now, take apart decommissioned nuclear weapons and feed their nuclear material into the plants later, and then switch either to natural uranium or to thorium. The CANDU plants would simply continue churning out clean, safe power throughout the whole process.
China's building CANDU plants right now (among others). Some CANDU projects have already been completed (either on or ahead of schedule and either on or under budget). To the best of my knowledge, the remaining CANDU projects in China are all ahead of schedule and under budget. That's what happens when you do something over and over again: you get better at it and it becomes cheaper and easier to do.
Per the ATS, exactly how laws are enforced is generally up to the country of citizenship for each individual. In the case of banking in the Antarctic, that could mean that individuals servicing the machine would be subject to the banking laws of their country of citizenship or the laws of the home country for the bank responsible for servicing the machine could apply. The ATS is intentionally unclear on the specifics of law enforcement. It's typically understood that each country has a responsibility to police its own citizens while they're there. The US actually has deputy marshals there to police the activities of US citizens and enforce US law among them.
I think the idea is that with populations being so low and conditions so harsh there, the law of common sense would apply.
That depends a lot on the individual. I don't have a lot of time to dedicate to playing, so a lot of the "busting your arse" for me is actually just Eve open in another window while I'm working at home at night. In that other window, I can hunt pirates, mine ore, or do missions with varying levels of attention and relatively low risk (depending on where I am). It isn't the fastest way to raise cash, but it works well enough for how involved I am. When I do have time to dedicate to play, I actually fly the ships I've been working to buy. I'll often branch out and try new types of ships (interdictors, stealth bombers, etc) or new ways of fitting ships just because I enjoy experimenting.
Since the skill training happens in real world real-time, it's going on behind the scenes whether you're logged in or not. On the other hand, it means there are few things you can do to get skills up faster to use a ship or a particular piece of equipment. As a result, when you forget to keep your clone up to date, the results can be devastating. Then you're not so much working toward it as you are waiting for it.
One of the hardest things for me to do when I have a new ship I can fly is to resist the urge to deck the thing out with the best stuff I can buy and fly. You can burn all the money in the world on the most amazing weapons, equipment, and rigs costing hundreds of times what the ship itself costs and all it takes is a couple guys flying the same ship with cheap stuff to blow you away.
I'm not a big fan of some of the Libertarian Party's platform. I think we need 6 - 8 major parties and a number of minor ones. Let them split Congress among them and let the people have some distinguishable choice between the party that sucks today and the party that'll suck tomorrow after they're elected.
He's doing just about everything he can to help the GOP win every seat in Congress that's up for election this year. Between him and the Democrats in Congress, it's a wonder anyone's left to support the lot of them. Perhaps if the GOP made an effort to make itself more palatable (or distinguishable), they'd be the ones in a supermajority.
Sometimes not if you were busting your arse to get something you really wanted (ability to fly a certain ship, for instance). And sometimes it gets even better when a ship's prices jump up for whatever reason (ie. Hulks going from 100 million to 300 million in just a couple months). Lose the ship you bought for 50 mill, have to buy another for 100 mill? Sign me up!
Most loss can be mitigated by playing smart. For one, never fly what you can't afford to lose. Never fight with what you can't laugh at losing. Insure Tech1 ships. Always, ALWAYS make sure your clone is up to date before exiting a station. And finally, get used to actually losing stuff. You don't just die and reappear somewhere with all your stuff on you. Die a few times (purposely even with cheap junk) to get used to the experience. I've played plenty of games before, but never one where real, immediate, unrecoverable loss was a consequence in a persistent game. Above all, paying attention is a must. I've lost tons of stuff by eithr not paying attention to what I was doing or by falling asleep at the keyboard because I was up way too late. I've even lost a week's worth of training by forgetting to keep a clone up to date. That about pissed me off as I couldn't mine for a week until I got the skill retrained.
But in the end, I still feel a genuine thrill when I go into a fight against other players that I haven't gotten in any other game. I know I can be called primary and killed immediately or perhaps land on top in the end. I've had fights where everyone just ran, fights where enemy ships just came pouring into the system (20 vs 2 turned into 20 vs ~150 in less than a minute), and fights where we came in with a plan and cleaned their clocks. But in each and everyone one of those, there was genuine risk for everyone involved. The smart move is to risk little while getting your opponents to risk a lot. Sometimes you just put yourself out as bait and see what comes of it. It's a game that really rewards playing smart. In a lot of ways, it's like Chess.
Tens, sometimes hundreds of hours of effort. Sometimes a month or more of skill training (if you're careless). Corp or alliance resources that have been worked for. You rarely lose much of anything in games like WoW. At worst, every supposed consequence of failure is just a speedbump. In Eve, when your ship blows up, it's just gone. It's gone forever. It doesn't appear with you somewhere nice and safe. In fact, you get to sit there and look at the wreck for a few seconds before you get podded (killed) or before you escape. If you get podded, your clone is gone (buy another), your implants are gone (can cost a fortune), and if your clone wasn't kept up to date, day, weeks, or months of real-world realtime skill training is gone too.
That makes for a genuine feeling of excitement going into a fight, nervousness when you're desperately trying to escape, and real relief amd joy when you narrowly survive a battle. Enough fights going badly and an unprepared individual could be left without money, assets, ships, and with an enormous loss in skillpoints on the character. Real loss? Eve is a game that lets you go backward to such an extent that that the money you've paid to CCP most recently has been for nothing at all and so that you'll spend weeks just getting back to where you were. With that kind of threat facing you, things look a lot more interesting and you pay a lot more attention to what's happening.
Actually, a more recent picture of the sedan is here. Looks like the shortened the body a tad from the earlier model. This is of a fully built and working Model S.
If you call having a Honda a standard of living, I'd agree with you.
You sound like quite the pretentious prick, you know that?
But I like to drive in a V8, no more than a V6 less. I like the roar of the engine, the smell of the gas, the stomping on the gas, the oodles of raw power, and you cannot and will not get that ever in a battery operated vehicle.
And the Roadster will leave your V8 sitting at the line with its dick in its hand. 0-60 in 3.6 seconds.
You keep saying that there will be some mythological increase in battery technology, but there will never, ever, be a day where battery energy density approaches that of gasoline.
It doesn't have to. Pound for pound, electricity is already a lot cheaper than refined petrol and electricity doesn't have to come from savages trying to kill us. The Tesla Roadster already blows away your V8 off the line and already cuts the price of going 200 miles in half off that of a Volt or Prius and more than two-thirds that of a decent gasoline vehicle.
Faster, cheaper, and doesn't financially support religious fanatics trying to kill us. Your V8 doesn't have anything other than the toxic fumes you enjoy enhaling left in its favor. It basically just sucks in every way.
Many PvP games come and go because the developers and managers treat the PvP part of the game like PvE; as if it's something to manipulated to suit their vision of what it should be. "Someone isn't using tool A to do task B? Break everything else they're doing with it until they use it to do task B! They stopped using tool A? Oh well. Oh, they're using vehicle B to do what? No, no, no, they're supposed to use vehicle at site B to solve that problem! Make it so they can't use vehicle B outside site B!"
This continues until people get tired of watching every strategy they develop and every new idea they have crushed by the will of devs living atop Mount Olympus.
What actually needs to happen is that when people are going a new route with tools, equipment, spells, etc, unless it completely unbalances gameplay to the point of absurdity, the devs and managers must change their idea of what those things should be doing and bring development forward based on the innovations of the playerbase. In other words, reward creative thinking and encourage players to outsmart you. That makes it their game that you develop instead of your world that they have the privilege of entering. The latter is a whole lot less inviting or fun.
This is a huge part of Eve Online's continued success. While they'll make big changes once in a while (titans, nano ships, etc), most of the changes are either tiny tweaks to existing stuff or new developments. The primary focus is moving forward rather than playing re-balance nerf bat whac-a-mole. Different ships and different equipment have different strengths and weaknesses. Rather than trying to simplify everything down to where nearly perfect balance is possible, they simply continue to expand things such that while your version of the ship might be better today, new equipment, skills, tactics, etc could easily make my version of the ship more powerful tomorrow.
And I think that's a much smarter way to move things ahead. Rather than dumbing it down so your developers can push numbers into an Excel spreadsheet, keep adding complexity and challenging players to find new variations and combinations that re-balance things. That keeps players interested, thinking, and invested. Keep simplifying things for the benefit of your devs and all you get is a game that isn't worth playing.
PvP that's worth playing is and should be hard as Hell to develop. Simply provide the players the tools to balance things on their own and stop trying to manufacture some utopian Atlantis of perfect PvP balance. It's not worth the effort because central planning works as well in a game as it did in the Soviet Union.
Na, I'll stay right here as long as I please. And yes, when a game that's part of a franchise with great potential is released and is crap, it's not unreasonable to hope it'll fail so something better will take its place.
I find it challenging to believe that some people actually see a Star Trek game where the Klingons have to ask permission from Federation captains in order to shoot at them as anything but a sick joke.
Slashdot Mirror
It's treated differently in many US states too. Breaking into a house late at night in the US is (depending on the state) considered a direct threat on the life of anyone living there. Find a thief in your house at 2am? Feel free to take him out in any way you can. In a "your home is your castle" state, unless you tied him up before killing him, there's basically nothing the police are going to do to you. In high school, our government teacher told us that if we ever caught a thief climbing out the window with our television late at night and decided to shoot him, make sure the body falls back inside. ;)
All very right, but what it comes down to in the end is that the design made it physically possible to have a Chernobyl event. The design of every single reactor ever used in western nations inherently makes a repeat of Chernobyl a physical impossibility. Workers in a CANDU or Westinghouse plant could sit down together and plan to intentionally cause as much damage as possible to the plant using the controls and overrides at their disposal, but the worst they could do is cause the reaction to stop and possibly cause minor damage to some reactor parts.
There's no combination of switches, buttons, levers, or commands you can use in a western nuclear power plant to cause anything like what happened in Chernobyl. No worker stupidity, negligence, or malicious intent could cause anything like a Chernobyl repeat.
It wasn't just a positive reactivity coefficient; it was a massively high positive reactivity coefficient. Between its design and its operation, it's truly a wonder the Chernobyl plant accident didn't do significantly higher damage to nearby populations and environment.
Coal fire plants blow up all the time. The only reason people don't panic is because virtually none of them have any comprehension of the amount of horribly toxic and radioactive crap floating around those plants. Maybe when a few more gigantic mountains of coal waste flood into populated areas, people will get the hint that it's a terribly dangerous and destructive energy solution. Unlike, for instance, nuclear power, which is safe, clean, efficient, reliable, and cost-effective.
I'm nearly certain that would violate other laws regarding nuclear non-proliferation. Even if it didn't, I know transport of any nuclear waste is extremely strictly controlled by the DoE, and NRC. This, like reprocessing, is a political issue; not a scientific one.
Nuclear power plants can't recycle their waste, they can't sell their waste, and they can't move their waste into any kind of secure long-term storage. And we wonder why it costs so much to bring down a nuclear plant...
The correct answer to #1 is 0.
0 people were killed or seriously injured by the Three Mile Island accident. The amount of radiation the average person in the area received was roughly equal to that received during a normal chest x-ray. The max anyone got was less than what you get from a year of celestial background radiation exposure.
Scientific studies and reports compiled in 1981, 1990, 2000 - 2003, 2005, 2008, and many others in between all found 0 causal link between the Three Mile Island nuclear accident and any deaths. The 2000 - 2003 study by U-Pitt looked at radiation exposure information gathered from 36,000 people living near the plant at the time of the accident, yet it found "no consistent evidence" linking the Three Mile Island incident to an increase in cancer or mortality rates.
The best reason I've ever heard, was Chernobyl. A perfectly good plant was destroyed by idiots stretching the envelope.
Chernobyl is universally understood by anyone involved in nuclear power to be a perfect example of how not to design a nuclear power plant. It was designed backwards, in that it could achieve a self-sustaining reaction. Yes, it was run into the ground by risky experiments and safeguards being offline, but any other design simply would have resulted in the reaction flaring out long before it became dangerous to people inside the plant, let alone people living nearby.
Chernobyl was anything but a "perfectly good plant". That much is evidenced by the fact that every plant using Chernobyl's design was quickly dismantled in every place where it was in use. No design ever built or used in a western country could have a Chernobyl incident even if every person working in the plant did everything they could to make it happen. The design of the reactors make such an event physically impossible.
oh yes sure it's safe, tell that to the british, or have you all forgot three mile island or chernobyl?
Two questions:
1) How many people died or sustained life-threatening injuries as a result of TMI?
2) Since you bring up Chernobyl in the context of western designed nuclear power plants, do you also bring up the Hindenburg in the context of Boeing commercial airliner safety? "oh yes sure commercial air travel is safe, tell that to the germans, or have you all forgot the Hindenburg?"
Groups like Greenpeace criticise if for "not doing enough" but this is the same group that run on a platform of "no more chernobyls" as a campaign (analogous to an anti-airline group running with "no more hindenburgs!" when protesting against modern aviation).
That's actually a great description. I'll have to use that in the future.
4. What do you mean "fuel dependency" - reactors don't just run on Uranium, even though there is plenty of that around, in the ground and in weapons. They can also run on Thorium with is about 4 times more abundant than Uranium and also on various other elements. We can also use "supply chain" style reactors that use the spent waste fuel from other reactors.
Just use CANDU reactors and you have your choice. Use Uranium you just mined, used "waste" from existing US nuclear plant sites, use plutonium from decommissioned nuclear weapons, or just use thorium. With the CANDU reactors, any of the above work just fine.
Generally I agree, but the image problem isn't just perception; it is reality. When there is a problem at a nuclear facility, it dwarfs those at any coal mine. Remember Chernobyl?
I honestly am not being mean when I say you really have no idea what you're talking about. Whenever there's a discussion about nuclear power plants, someone always brings up Chernobyl.
Anyone who brings up Chernobyl in the context of nuclear power plant safety quite honestly hasn't the slightest idea why Chernobyl happened or why it's physically impossible for it to happen in any nuclear power plant ever designed or built in any western nation, let alone a modern reactor design anywhere on Earth. Start with the fact that Chernobyl's design was backwards. If you don't understand what I mean by that, please read up on nuclear reactor design before commenting further on the topic of nuclear power plants.
Whether you realize it or not, your comment is the purest form of FUD.
First, the problems at Chernobyl were due to design; not workers. The workers did push the plant, but it was a terribly designed plant (it was essentially designed backwards) and it was designed to be a high-risk, high-reward plant for experimentation in weapons creation and other fun activities. That kind of design (the backwards kind) has never been used in any western nation and the existing plants using that design were dismantled after Chernobyl. Modern plants around the world are universally designed in such a way that the laws of physics prevent the kind of problems present at Chernobyl. It's physically impossible to see anything like what happened in Chernobyl in a modern nuclear power facility even if every tech there did everything they could to intentionally make it happen. It just can't due to the design of the reactor.
Second, TMI was a worker failure, but it's a perfect example of how western nuclear power plants have always been designed to use physics to their advantage. Everything that could have gone wrong at TMI did, yet the reactor shut down and there was no Chernobyl event. Why? Because in all western designs and even most Soviet designs (Chernobyl aside), the reactor is constructed in such a way that as it gets hotter and hotter, the difficulty in continuing a reaction massively increases. With more recent designs, things have gotten even safer due to automation in the safeguards.
If every single person working in a nuclear power plant in Canada, the US, and France simply got up and went home, every single plant would quietly shut down as automated systems kicked in in response to events within the reactor that wouldn't happen with regular maintenance proceeding normally. If those workers disabled every safety system in the plant before walking out, those plants would still quietly shut down, though some might have damage to the reactors. Nobody would be hurt, nothing would explode, and no nuclear waste or fuel would be released into the surrounding environment.
You try the same thing at a coal fire plant, you best get ready for one Hell of an explosion (or 10) followed by a fire that'll take days or weeks to extinguish. Pound for pound, nuclear power is safer for workers and nearby citizens than coal, oil, gas, and even hydro power.
What are we going to do with the waste? Until I hear a good answer to that question, nuclear power just doesn't cut it from my standpoint. Obama's nuclear plan, just like the rest of his policy, and US government policy in general, is shortsighted and leaves the burden on our kids. If we put 8bln into real solutions, we'd be able to build one.
What are we going to do with the waste? Don't know. What should we be doing with the waste? Reprocessing it like everyone else in the civilized world already does.
First, a word about modern reactor waste. If you just look at the crappy Westinghouse reactors the President announced loans for and don't even consider recycling all their waste (and we can do vastly better), the per-capita waste over the 60+ years life of the plant fits in a Coke bottle. Take a better design (CANDU, for instance), get less waste. Reprocess the waste you do get (which you can do multiple times in a CANDU reactor), get even less. So the actual level of waste we're talking about over a lifetime on a per-capita basis fits in a bottle of soda. Do what everyone else does with the waste and you end up with far less.
Second, the President has not specifically addressed what we're going to do with all our soda bottles of waste, but "senior" people dealing with the issue are supposedly telling journalists behind closed doors that they're looking at a number of possible solutions and that any final result will probably have to include reprocessing. If we were smart, we'd build a bunch of CANDU plants and feed our existing "waste" into them as fuel. CANDU plants are remarkably flexible. We can feed our existing waste into them now, take apart decommissioned nuclear weapons and feed their nuclear material into the plants later, and then switch either to natural uranium or to thorium. The CANDU plants would simply continue churning out clean, safe power throughout the whole process.
China's building CANDU plants right now (among others). Some CANDU projects have already been completed (either on or ahead of schedule and either on or under budget). To the best of my knowledge, the remaining CANDU projects in China are all ahead of schedule and under budget. That's what happens when you do something over and over again: you get better at it and it becomes cheaper and easier to do.
VMware. /debate
I'm not sure I understand, it took them 25 years to "invent" this and it doesn't even have a good spot to grip it like the original did?
Per the ATS, exactly how laws are enforced is generally up to the country of citizenship for each individual. In the case of banking in the Antarctic, that could mean that individuals servicing the machine would be subject to the banking laws of their country of citizenship or the laws of the home country for the bank responsible for servicing the machine could apply. The ATS is intentionally unclear on the specifics of law enforcement. It's typically understood that each country has a responsibility to police its own citizens while they're there. The US actually has deputy marshals there to police the activities of US citizens and enforce US law among them.
I think the idea is that with populations being so low and conditions so harsh there, the law of common sense would apply.
That depends a lot on the individual. I don't have a lot of time to dedicate to playing, so a lot of the "busting your arse" for me is actually just Eve open in another window while I'm working at home at night. In that other window, I can hunt pirates, mine ore, or do missions with varying levels of attention and relatively low risk (depending on where I am). It isn't the fastest way to raise cash, but it works well enough for how involved I am. When I do have time to dedicate to play, I actually fly the ships I've been working to buy. I'll often branch out and try new types of ships (interdictors, stealth bombers, etc) or new ways of fitting ships just because I enjoy experimenting.
Since the skill training happens in real world real-time, it's going on behind the scenes whether you're logged in or not. On the other hand, it means there are few things you can do to get skills up faster to use a ship or a particular piece of equipment. As a result, when you forget to keep your clone up to date, the results can be devastating. Then you're not so much working toward it as you are waiting for it.
One of the hardest things for me to do when I have a new ship I can fly is to resist the urge to deck the thing out with the best stuff I can buy and fly. You can burn all the money in the world on the most amazing weapons, equipment, and rigs costing hundreds of times what the ship itself costs and all it takes is a couple guys flying the same ship with cheap stuff to blow you away.
I'm not a big fan of some of the Libertarian Party's platform. I think we need 6 - 8 major parties and a number of minor ones. Let them split Congress among them and let the people have some distinguishable choice between the party that sucks today and the party that'll suck tomorrow after they're elected.
He's doing just about everything he can to help the GOP win every seat in Congress that's up for election this year. Between him and the Democrats in Congress, it's a wonder anyone's left to support the lot of them. Perhaps if the GOP made an effort to make itself more palatable (or distinguishable), they'd be the ones in a supermajority.
Sometimes not if you were busting your arse to get something you really wanted (ability to fly a certain ship, for instance). And sometimes it gets even better when a ship's prices jump up for whatever reason (ie. Hulks going from 100 million to 300 million in just a couple months). Lose the ship you bought for 50 mill, have to buy another for 100 mill? Sign me up!
Most loss can be mitigated by playing smart. For one, never fly what you can't afford to lose. Never fight with what you can't laugh at losing. Insure Tech1 ships. Always, ALWAYS make sure your clone is up to date before exiting a station. And finally, get used to actually losing stuff. You don't just die and reappear somewhere with all your stuff on you. Die a few times (purposely even with cheap junk) to get used to the experience. I've played plenty of games before, but never one where real, immediate, unrecoverable loss was a consequence in a persistent game. Above all, paying attention is a must. I've lost tons of stuff by eithr not paying attention to what I was doing or by falling asleep at the keyboard because I was up way too late. I've even lost a week's worth of training by forgetting to keep a clone up to date. That about pissed me off as I couldn't mine for a week until I got the skill retrained.
But in the end, I still feel a genuine thrill when I go into a fight against other players that I haven't gotten in any other game. I know I can be called primary and killed immediately or perhaps land on top in the end. I've had fights where everyone just ran, fights where enemy ships just came pouring into the system (20 vs 2 turned into 20 vs ~150 in less than a minute), and fights where we came in with a plan and cleaned their clocks. But in each and everyone one of those, there was genuine risk for everyone involved. The smart move is to risk little while getting your opponents to risk a lot. Sometimes you just put yourself out as bait and see what comes of it. It's a game that really rewards playing smart. In a lot of ways, it's like Chess.
This is why we can't have nice things. It'll always be "unfair" to somebody.
Tens, sometimes hundreds of hours of effort. Sometimes a month or more of skill training (if you're careless). Corp or alliance resources that have been worked for. You rarely lose much of anything in games like WoW. At worst, every supposed consequence of failure is just a speedbump. In Eve, when your ship blows up, it's just gone. It's gone forever. It doesn't appear with you somewhere nice and safe. In fact, you get to sit there and look at the wreck for a few seconds before you get podded (killed) or before you escape. If you get podded, your clone is gone (buy another), your implants are gone (can cost a fortune), and if your clone wasn't kept up to date, day, weeks, or months of real-world realtime skill training is gone too.
That makes for a genuine feeling of excitement going into a fight, nervousness when you're desperately trying to escape, and real relief amd joy when you narrowly survive a battle. Enough fights going badly and an unprepared individual could be left without money, assets, ships, and with an enormous loss in skillpoints on the character. Real loss? Eve is a game that lets you go backward to such an extent that that the money you've paid to CCP most recently has been for nothing at all and so that you'll spend weeks just getting back to where you were. With that kind of threat facing you, things look a lot more interesting and you pay a lot more attention to what's happening.
Actually, a more recent picture of the sedan is here. Looks like the shortened the body a tad from the earlier model. This is of a fully built and working Model S.
If you call having a Honda a standard of living, I'd agree with you.
You sound like quite the pretentious prick, you know that?
But I like to drive in a V8, no more than a V6 less. I like the roar of the engine, the smell of the gas, the stomping on the gas, the oodles of raw power, and you cannot and will not get that ever in a battery operated vehicle.
And the Roadster will leave your V8 sitting at the line with its dick in its hand. 0-60 in 3.6 seconds.
You keep saying that there will be some mythological increase in battery technology, but there will never, ever, be a day where battery energy density approaches that of gasoline.
It doesn't have to. Pound for pound, electricity is already a lot cheaper than refined petrol and electricity doesn't have to come from savages trying to kill us. The Tesla Roadster already blows away your V8 off the line and already cuts the price of going 200 miles in half off that of a Volt or Prius and more than two-thirds that of a decent gasoline vehicle.
Faster, cheaper, and doesn't financially support religious fanatics trying to kill us. Your V8 doesn't have anything other than the toxic fumes you enjoy enhaling left in its favor. It basically just sucks in every way.
And if you don't think all-electric vehicles can look cool, you need to open your eyes. The sports car looks like this and the sedan looks like http://motercar.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/tesla-model-s.jpg this.
Many PvP games come and go because the developers and managers treat the PvP part of the game like PvE; as if it's something to manipulated to suit their vision of what it should be. "Someone isn't using tool A to do task B? Break everything else they're doing with it until they use it to do task B! They stopped using tool A? Oh well. Oh, they're using vehicle B to do what? No, no, no, they're supposed to use vehicle at site B to solve that problem! Make it so they can't use vehicle B outside site B!"
This continues until people get tired of watching every strategy they develop and every new idea they have crushed by the will of devs living atop Mount Olympus.
What actually needs to happen is that when people are going a new route with tools, equipment, spells, etc, unless it completely unbalances gameplay to the point of absurdity, the devs and managers must change their idea of what those things should be doing and bring development forward based on the innovations of the playerbase. In other words, reward creative thinking and encourage players to outsmart you. That makes it their game that you develop instead of your world that they have the privilege of entering. The latter is a whole lot less inviting or fun.
This is a huge part of Eve Online's continued success. While they'll make big changes once in a while (titans, nano ships, etc), most of the changes are either tiny tweaks to existing stuff or new developments. The primary focus is moving forward rather than playing re-balance nerf bat whac-a-mole. Different ships and different equipment have different strengths and weaknesses. Rather than trying to simplify everything down to where nearly perfect balance is possible, they simply continue to expand things such that while your version of the ship might be better today, new equipment, skills, tactics, etc could easily make my version of the ship more powerful tomorrow.
And I think that's a much smarter way to move things ahead. Rather than dumbing it down so your developers can push numbers into an Excel spreadsheet, keep adding complexity and challenging players to find new variations and combinations that re-balance things. That keeps players interested, thinking, and invested. Keep simplifying things for the benefit of your devs and all you get is a game that isn't worth playing.
PvP that's worth playing is and should be hard as Hell to develop. Simply provide the players the tools to balance things on their own and stop trying to manufacture some utopian Atlantis of perfect PvP balance. It's not worth the effort because central planning works as well in a game as it did in the Soviet Union.
Na, I'll stay right here as long as I please. And yes, when a game that's part of a franchise with great potential is released and is crap, it's not unreasonable to hope it'll fail so something better will take its place.
I find it challenging to believe that some people actually see a Star Trek game where the Klingons have to ask permission from Federation captains in order to shoot at them as anything but a sick joke.