... nuclear power is definitely a part of the solution to our power issues. But you kind of blow your credibility on the subject out of the water when you say stuff like this:
-There really are no long-term storage problems once we get reliable and inexpensive orbital insertions. (Hurl it at the Sun, or other body)
The point here is that your "solution" is essentially magic - you've just made the problem of getting inexpensive orbital insertions disappear by waving your hands. Not to mention the fact that the space launch industry has a safety record that makes oil drilling look good in comparison. And having a rocket with a full load of nuclear waste blow up on the launch pad, or fail to achieve orbit and burn up on re-entry... that would be, you know, bad.
It's also kind of hilarious that a nuclear apologist is accusing other power industries of being in it for the subsidies. Did you not notice that the gov't just announced gigantic loan guarantees for nuclear plants?
... if it weren't for those pesky laws of physics. Wind turbine efficiency goes up with the square of the radius of the turbine. So small turbines are way, way less efficient than big ones - which really means that household sized wind turbines are unlikely to ever win out over industrial sized ones. Solar PE and solar thermal you can do on a single home basis, but wind... not so much.
Expected value of wildlife killed by windmills if the most expansive plans are realized: what, a few thousand per year?
Wildlife killed from oil spills (Exxon Valdez, the Santa Barbara spill, the Mexican spill of a few years back, Deepwater Horizon, etc): uncountably large, even on an annualized basis. So, anti-wind people: spare me the "won't someone think of the birds" line of reasoning.
On offshore wind farms: both the Great Plains and offshore areas have the advantage of strong, sustained winds. But offshore wind farms have the advantage of being closer to population centers, so you have less transmission loss to worry about - I think that's the real attraction. Then again, it's likely cheaper to site the turbines on land (less complicated than attaching them to the ocean floor, etc). There's also a fair sized installed base on land, so we likely have more expertise there. I think the most likely end result is that we end up using both types of site.
Your employer having access to things you do with IT equipment they furnish is pretty much standard operating procedure, and has been for some time now. I'm having some trouble understanding how this even got to the Supreme Court. The fact that the government allowed them to use the devices for personal messaging doesn't mean that it gave up the right to see what they were doing with them.
... not bee pollinated. But your point stands. And in the case of the bluefin, there's another factor in play - they're rather delicious. So it's to our advantage to keep them around.
This article is specifically about bluefin, but if you do more reading, you find out that virtually ALL the large fish in the ocean are being overfished. As an example, the fishing industry on the Grand Banks, once thriving, is now all but gone. The reason? We caught all the fish. And I mean literally, almost every single fish. An area of the ocean that used to be teeming with life, is now an underwater desert. And all the people who used to make a living on the water... the ones that couldn't make the move to another industry are now mostly unemployed. The same thing happened to the Pacific sardine population (think Cannery Row).
There are real economic consequences to our tendency to mine the ocean of fish. And more importantly, no one knows what's going to happen to the ocean ecosystem if we don't stop.
If bluefin tuna were naturally going extinct, that would be one thing. But we're actually driving them to extinction through overfishing (primarily) and habitat destruction. This is not a matter of trying to save species that nature is killing off. This is an effort to stop actively killing off entire species.
Then there's the fact that bluefin tuna are an extremely valuable commercial item - so making them go extinct is going to have costs beyond pure esthetics.
... and it's hardly unique to Apple. Damn near every company in existence comes up with some feature, gives it a name that's stupid to one degree or another, and uses it to help sell the product. Sometimes this helps, sometimes not. Remember Intel's "Viiv"? That was marketing stupid turned up to 11.
... at least the UC is providing a valuable service. Nature provides almost nothing - the labor is almost entirely done by other people/organizations for free (or close to it). Nature simply publishes the results. Why should they expect to make enormous amounts of money when they're doing almost nothing to add value?
It seems to me a clever trick to get people to use Bing just to see what the savings may be. The people who probably never heard of Bing in the first place now must actually use the search engine.
Wow, thanks for explaining that one. Although that was the expressed purpose of the cashback plan, I probably wouldn't have gotten it without this insightful post.
For one thing, I really don't understand why you'd want to have a device like this with a split screen (aside from slavish copying of the appearance of a book). It would be a lot more useful to have a single screen with the same width - then you're not stuck with a giant seam down the middle of the thing. I suppose being able to fold the thing in half is useful, but I'd still prefer it as a single screen.
Also, this seems like an awful lot of money to pay for a device that just displays books. I can't help but think that a netbook would be more versatile and cheaper.
Sure, in history or english 101 or whatever, I'm sure I could type faster and more legibly than I could write. But when the prof is covering the board in Hamiltonian dynamics equations... you can damn sure bet that I could write that down faster than I could peck it out in an equation editor. I would have been hopelessly behind. And I never got very much out of pre-printed notes - it was the act of writing stuff down that helped me understand and remember it.
... but AdBlockPlus doesn't depend on an ad being Flash-based to block it. It blocks by hostname - so if you hit www.cnn.com, and that web page tries to pull in ad content from www.punchthemonkey.com, AdBlockPlus recognizes that site as an ad server, and blocks it. No matter what the form of the ad is. The only real way around it is to have the ads come from the same domain as the actual content, which is apparently tricky to do.
This sounds disturbingly like the Broken Window Falacy - replacing a bunch of stuff that works just fine until you broke it (by declaring it evil!1!) and claiming that the jobs so created are "economic growth".
Except, of course, that it doesn't "work just fine". It (meaning our current energy system) pollutes the hell out of the atmosphere, results in massive oil spills, and involves sending vast quantities of money to a group of folks who don't necessarily have our best interests at heart. This isn't a matter of "declaring" something to be evil. The fact that it's evil is objectively true.
While I could quibble with some of the particulars in your argument (the government is actually getting back almost all of the money spent in "bailouts", and a "deficit" is not something you can "spend money on", for example), the overall point here is correct. The economics of getting your ass to Mars simply don't work out. And a lot of the responses here only help prove your point - that people are in denial over this.
This idea keeps coming up, but repetition doesn't make it any more sensible. There's absolutely no way to make space mining or manufacturing pay off. Consider that 1) The asteroids, the Moon, Mars, etc, are made of silicates, iron, nickel, and a small amount of carbonaceous stuff. So is the earth. 2) There's no reason to fabricate anything in space because we don't really have a use for stuff in space. No one lives there, remember? 3) Even if you could think of a reason to mine/make stuff in space, you'd have to lift all the materials necessary to build your factory, mining equipment, whatever... millions of miles, and fight against earth's gravity to get there. Then you'd need to bring along all the people necessary to run this gear, plus their life support, minimal personal possessions, housing, etc. Then consider that it costs $10k/kg just to get to low earth orbit.
So what you're talking about is an absolutely colossal expenditure, and what do you get? The same stuff we can get right here on earth for a lot cheaper. There's a reason why the Lockheeds, Boeings, and Raytheons of the world are not going hog wild into this business - no one can figure out how to make any money at it.
Some of the big problem areas involved - the psychological issues regarding isolation & small group dynamics, logistics of maintaining a sealed environment, etc... are exactly the kinds of things this experiment is supposed to address. Not that it couldn't be all for show, but it seems at least potentially worthwhile.
And regarding Biosphere 2: not really an apt comparison for the space flight portion of this. Biosphere 2 was meant to be an entire enclosed ecosystem, and yeah, it really did a pretty bad job of it - they had to ventilate it on more than one occasion (as I understand it) because the atmosphere was becoming unsuitable. Biosphere 2 had important lessons to teach us about forming an actual permanent colony on someplace like Mars (lesson: we still don't know what we're doing with respect to closed ecosystems, therefore we're not ready to colonize)... but about prolonged space flight: not so much. That mission is a lot like being in a submerged submarine, with artificial air purifiers, etc. We can already do that, but it isn't routinely done for such extended periods. So this mission will be helpful in testing that aspect out.
Sure, over the course of geologic time, oil is a renewable resource. Unfortunately, our lifespans (and, in fact, the lifetime of all of human civilization so far) are considerably shorter than the period required to form any significant quantity of oil. So practically speaking, there is a finite supply of oil. This entire line of argument has been rehashed about a billion times already both on Slashdot and elsewhere - so what's the purpose of your comment?
Private ownership of capital has been proven time and time again to work.
This is probably not the best time in history to be pointing out the wonders of capitalism. Between global financial meltdown, widening income inequality, and environmental devastation, capitalism has not exactly been covering itself in glory lately.
This attitude that no one can do anything until everyone is ready to do something is killing us. We need to stop wasting time worrying about what the Chinese are doing and get our own house in order. Then we'd at least have some moral authority behind us when we push for their change.
The idea that getting our economy switched over to renewable power sources is somehow going to devastate it is ridiculous. There is a ton of money in manufacturing, installing, operating, and maintaining things like windmills, solar thermal, solar PE, and nuclear plants. And at least the installing, operating, and maintaining part can't be off-shored. And we could also stop sending dollars by the supertanker load to Saudi Arabia. And we could avoid all kinds of costs like, oh, say, the entire Gulf coast fishing and tourism industry being canceled. And we could get rid of a lot of pollution costs. And we could stop getting miners killed in Appalachia, etc, etc.
Every day we delay fixing our energy problems, the consequences get worse. But hey, at least ExxonMobil, et al, are making a lot of money, so there's that.
It's just made more strongly than normal beer, but it isn't distilled. As such, about the highest alcohol concentration you can achieve is around 12-15%.
... there's practically no methanol produced in the process of fermentation. For it to be produced at all, there needs to be some pectin present, and that wouldn't normally be found in beer. A bigger problem is the presence of fusel alcohols. These higher order alcohols are removed to a greater or lesser degree during the process of heat distilling, but remain with the distillate in freeze distilling. They can add off flavors to the product, and some believe they are contributors to hangover symptoms, although some studies apparently dispute this.
Methanol in Prohibition-era hootch was present as an adulterant - in other words, it was deliberately added to bathtub gin because it was cheap, and the producers didn't particularly care about their customers' health. Much like melamine was added to various Chinese products to make them appear more protein-rich.
... not very much methanol is actually produced in the process of fermentation. Typically, methanol formation requires the presence of pectin, which wouldn't normally be found in wort, and even then, very little is formed. A bigger issue is the formation of fusel alcohols, which are removed in the process of heat distilling, but remain with the distillate in freeze distilling. These higher order alcohols can produce off flavors in the product, and some believe them to be contributors to hangover symptoms, although some studies dispute this.
Slashdot Mirror
... nuclear power is definitely a part of the solution to our power issues. But you kind of blow your credibility on the subject out of the water when you say stuff like this:
The point here is that your "solution" is essentially magic - you've just made the problem of getting inexpensive orbital insertions disappear by waving your hands. Not to mention the fact that the space launch industry has a safety record that makes oil drilling look good in comparison. And having a rocket with a full load of nuclear waste blow up on the launch pad, or fail to achieve orbit and burn up on re-entry... that would be, you know, bad.
It's also kind of hilarious that a nuclear apologist is accusing other power industries of being in it for the subsidies. Did you not notice that the gov't just announced gigantic loan guarantees for nuclear plants?
They're actually kind of beautiful - giant, graceful kinetic sculptures. I really don't understand the problem.
... if it weren't for those pesky laws of physics. Wind turbine efficiency goes up with the square of the radius of the turbine. So small turbines are way, way less efficient than big ones - which really means that household sized wind turbines are unlikely to ever win out over industrial sized ones. Solar PE and solar thermal you can do on a single home basis, but wind... not so much.
Expected value of wildlife killed by windmills if the most expansive plans are realized: what, a few thousand per year?
Wildlife killed from oil spills (Exxon Valdez, the Santa Barbara spill, the Mexican spill of a few years back, Deepwater Horizon, etc): uncountably large, even on an annualized basis. So, anti-wind people: spare me the "won't someone think of the birds" line of reasoning.
On offshore wind farms: both the Great Plains and offshore areas have the advantage of strong, sustained winds. But offshore wind farms have the advantage of being closer to population centers, so you have less transmission loss to worry about - I think that's the real attraction. Then again, it's likely cheaper to site the turbines on land (less complicated than attaching them to the ocean floor, etc). There's also a fair sized installed base on land, so we likely have more expertise there. I think the most likely end result is that we end up using both types of site.
Your employer having access to things you do with IT equipment they furnish is pretty much standard operating procedure, and has been for some time now. I'm having some trouble understanding how this even got to the Supreme Court. The fact that the government allowed them to use the devices for personal messaging doesn't mean that it gave up the right to see what they were doing with them.
... not bee pollinated. But your point stands. And in the case of the bluefin, there's another factor in play - they're rather delicious. So it's to our advantage to keep them around.
This article is specifically about bluefin, but if you do more reading, you find out that virtually ALL the large fish in the ocean are being overfished. As an example, the fishing industry on the Grand Banks, once thriving, is now all but gone. The reason? We caught all the fish. And I mean literally, almost every single fish. An area of the ocean that used to be teeming with life, is now an underwater desert. And all the people who used to make a living on the water... the ones that couldn't make the move to another industry are now mostly unemployed. The same thing happened to the Pacific sardine population (think Cannery Row).
There are real economic consequences to our tendency to mine the ocean of fish. And more importantly, no one knows what's going to happen to the ocean ecosystem if we don't stop.
If bluefin tuna were naturally going extinct, that would be one thing. But we're actually driving them to extinction through overfishing (primarily) and habitat destruction. This is not a matter of trying to save species that nature is killing off. This is an effort to stop actively killing off entire species.
Then there's the fact that bluefin tuna are an extremely valuable commercial item - so making them go extinct is going to have costs beyond pure esthetics.
... and it's hardly unique to Apple. Damn near every company in existence comes up with some feature, gives it a name that's stupid to one degree or another, and uses it to help sell the product. Sometimes this helps, sometimes not. Remember Intel's "Viiv"? That was marketing stupid turned up to 11.
... at least the UC is providing a valuable service. Nature provides almost nothing - the labor is almost entirely done by other people/organizations for free (or close to it). Nature simply publishes the results. Why should they expect to make enormous amounts of money when they're doing almost nothing to add value?
Wow, thanks for explaining that one. Although that was the expressed purpose of the cashback plan, I probably wouldn't have gotten it without this insightful post.
For one thing, I really don't understand why you'd want to have a device like this with a split screen (aside from slavish copying of the appearance of a book). It would be a lot more useful to have a single screen with the same width - then you're not stuck with a giant seam down the middle of the thing. I suppose being able to fold the thing in half is useful, but I'd still prefer it as a single screen.
Also, this seems like an awful lot of money to pay for a device that just displays books. I can't help but think that a netbook would be more versatile and cheaper.
Sure, in history or english 101 or whatever, I'm sure I could type faster and more legibly than I could write. But when the prof is covering the board in Hamiltonian dynamics equations... you can damn sure bet that I could write that down faster than I could peck it out in an equation editor. I would have been hopelessly behind. And I never got very much out of pre-printed notes - it was the act of writing stuff down that helped me understand and remember it.
Regardless of what Wikipedia may say, using "mouses" instead of "mice" is really jarring and weird.
... but AdBlockPlus doesn't depend on an ad being Flash-based to block it. It blocks by hostname - so if you hit www.cnn.com, and that web page tries to pull in ad content from www.punchthemonkey.com, AdBlockPlus recognizes that site as an ad server, and blocks it. No matter what the form of the ad is. The only real way around it is to have the ads come from the same domain as the actual content, which is apparently tricky to do.
Except, of course, that it doesn't "work just fine". It (meaning our current energy system) pollutes the hell out of the atmosphere, results in massive oil spills, and involves sending vast quantities of money to a group of folks who don't necessarily have our best interests at heart. This isn't a matter of "declaring" something to be evil. The fact that it's evil is objectively true.
While I could quibble with some of the particulars in your argument (the government is actually getting back almost all of the money spent in "bailouts", and a "deficit" is not something you can "spend money on", for example), the overall point here is correct. The economics of getting your ass to Mars simply don't work out. And a lot of the responses here only help prove your point - that people are in denial over this.
This idea keeps coming up, but repetition doesn't make it any more sensible. There's absolutely no way to make space mining or manufacturing pay off. Consider that 1) The asteroids, the Moon, Mars, etc, are made of silicates, iron, nickel, and a small amount of carbonaceous stuff. So is the earth. 2) There's no reason to fabricate anything in space because we don't really have a use for stuff in space. No one lives there, remember? 3) Even if you could think of a reason to mine/make stuff in space, you'd have to lift all the materials necessary to build your factory, mining equipment, whatever... millions of miles, and fight against earth's gravity to get there. Then you'd need to bring along all the people necessary to run this gear, plus their life support, minimal personal possessions, housing, etc. Then consider that it costs $10k/kg just to get to low earth orbit.
So what you're talking about is an absolutely colossal expenditure, and what do you get? The same stuff we can get right here on earth for a lot cheaper. There's a reason why the Lockheeds, Boeings, and Raytheons of the world are not going hog wild into this business - no one can figure out how to make any money at it.
Some of the big problem areas involved - the psychological issues regarding isolation & small group dynamics, logistics of maintaining a sealed environment, etc... are exactly the kinds of things this experiment is supposed to address. Not that it couldn't be all for show, but it seems at least potentially worthwhile.
And regarding Biosphere 2: not really an apt comparison for the space flight portion of this. Biosphere 2 was meant to be an entire enclosed ecosystem, and yeah, it really did a pretty bad job of it - they had to ventilate it on more than one occasion (as I understand it) because the atmosphere was becoming unsuitable. Biosphere 2 had important lessons to teach us about forming an actual permanent colony on someplace like Mars (lesson: we still don't know what we're doing with respect to closed ecosystems, therefore we're not ready to colonize)... but about prolonged space flight: not so much. That mission is a lot like being in a submerged submarine, with artificial air purifiers, etc. We can already do that, but it isn't routinely done for such extended periods. So this mission will be helpful in testing that aspect out.
Sure, over the course of geologic time, oil is a renewable resource. Unfortunately, our lifespans (and, in fact, the lifetime of all of human civilization so far) are considerably shorter than the period required to form any significant quantity of oil. So practically speaking, there is a finite supply of oil. This entire line of argument has been rehashed about a billion times already both on Slashdot and elsewhere - so what's the purpose of your comment?
This is probably not the best time in history to be pointing out the wonders of capitalism. Between global financial meltdown, widening income inequality, and environmental devastation, capitalism has not exactly been covering itself in glory lately.
A couple of things here:
Every day we delay fixing our energy problems, the consequences get worse. But hey, at least ExxonMobil, et al, are making a lot of money, so there's that.
It's just made more strongly than normal beer, but it isn't distilled. As such, about the highest alcohol concentration you can achieve is around 12-15%.
Methanol in Prohibition-era hootch was present as an adulterant - in other words, it was deliberately added to bathtub gin because it was cheap, and the producers didn't particularly care about their customers' health. Much like melamine was added to various Chinese products to make them appear more protein-rich.
... not very much methanol is actually produced in the process of fermentation. Typically, methanol formation requires the presence of pectin, which wouldn't normally be found in wort, and even then, very little is formed. A bigger issue is the formation of fusel alcohols, which are removed in the process of heat distilling, but remain with the distillate in freeze distilling. These higher order alcohols can produce off flavors in the product, and some believe them to be contributors to hangover symptoms, although some studies dispute this.