Re:Clarifications on my part
on
A Mighty Wind
·
· Score: 1
I think I should further clarify. Yes, nuclear meltdowns or leaks are pretty rare. However, they can be extremely catastrophic accidents when they do occur. And I know that the nuclear engineers are creating new designs with more redundencies and features as time goes on. But there is one thing that they will never eliminate and that is operator error. As you said, it was a problem with the user interface that caused TMI. The engineers who created that interface probably thought that they had done a very good job.
If you design something to be idiot-proof, someone will design a better idiot.
Clarifications on my part
on
A Mighty Wind
·
· Score: 1
Ok, I've got to say that I wasn't being literal when I said "BOOOM." However, nuclear plants can have meltdowns, so everyone in this thread please stop dismissing their risk because I was trying to be funny. (Not just parent, but I only want to reply to one.)
As for the costs on wind power, I have seen the same type of figures as you on residential use and it isn't cheap. My father lives on an island and has a windmill. However, it would also cost him MUCH more to get a power line out to the island, so he deals with it. But, utility-owned wind power is the topic here and it is on the same order as fossil fuels. Hopefully, in time costs can come down for residential usage as on-site generation doesn't waste power in the transmission. This would be great for less densly-populated areas, but it will probably still not be worth it in cities of any reasonable size.
I don't know of any environmentalists that are protesting against fusion. The government just seems to think it isn't worth funding. They have pored a lot of money (a lot to me, not to the government) into the Tokamaks and I guess they feel that haven't seen results quick enough, so they stopped. I feel they are being extremely short-sighted, but have you ever heard of a politician that wasn't?
Re:What would they rather have?
on
A Mighty Wind
·
· Score: 1
It has a lot more than it does oil, but it is still an unrenewable resource. The other thing is that they are starting to ship natural gas around as liquified natural gas (LNG). That stuff on a ship is a giant bomb just waiting to be steered into a harbor by some terrorist.
Yes, there are some plants which are clean. However, you are leaving out the coal extraction process which often rips the tops off of mountains in order to get at the coal. Coal mining is also dangerous and deadly when it isn't ripping the tops off and is instead staying underground.
Where did you get your information?
on
A Mighty Wind
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The programs that you are probably talking about were run by the federal government. They tried building large windmills on the order of 1-2 MW with synchronous generators which is the reason that they had problems. Synchronous generators have been abandoned at this point and people with brains make windmills using induction generators.
The other thing that they do is make smaller windmills and make lots of them. This is why they are called wind farms. The prototypes you refer to were likely meant to be large individual sources. This is another advantage of wind power, it is modular. When a windmill needs maintenance, you can shut it down and only take a few hundred kW off the grid.
Also, if you see my other post in this article, and take the link to the California report you will see that wind costs are comparable to the fossil fuels.
As for liability for broken windmill parts, I have never heard of such a thing. Please point out your source. There is a safety measure for this sort of thing anyway. Windmills have a brake put on them and their blades feathered when the wind is too strong to prevent them from centrifugally ripping themselves apart.
Re:Ridiculous
on
A Mighty Wind
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Please don't lump all environmentalists together in such a way. These people are not environmentalists, they are rich schmucks who just want everything their way.
There are critical thinking environmentalists too. I like to think that I am one, but I know that that would be a stupid assumption to make.
What would they rather have?
on
A Mighty Wind
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Ok, I consider myself an environmentalist and these people who bitch about wind farms really have no business claiming to be so. Their choices are according to my recent utility supplied info are along with my half-assed pissed-off descriptions:
1) Oil - Polluting
2) Coal - Seriously Polluting
3) Natural Gas - Clean compared to other fossil fuels, but still requires us to fight wars for it.
4) Nuclear - Cart toxic waste across country to bury it in Yucca Mountain. Also, BOOOM!
5) Wind - Unsightly, similar in price to fossil fuels.
6) Solar - Still too expensive in cents/kWh.
7) Biomass - Can't really increase the supply unless you want to start collecting cow farts.
8) Hydro - Most rivers that can generate hydro already are.
9) Imported Power - Mysterious Power!
10) Municipal Trash - Burning stuff is not clean.
Now, of the above choices, what should we focus on until something better becomes available? I think wind is the obvious choice. But no, they are unsightly! OMG! Everything has a negative and wind power's is pretty minor compared to the others. The land that wind power is on can also be used for other purposes such as farming or grazing.
I have a feeling that the people who whine would really like all their power to come from number 9, Imported Power. You know, that magical, free power that some poor schlub in another community has to suffer the environmental consequences for. Now, unless they want to whip out their magic fairy-wand and produce energy out of thin air, they have to use something and they should wake the hell up and realize that wind is a very good choice.
My intention was not to suggest literally "anything but." I agree that people need to be informed and vote for who they want in the government, not the lesser of the evils.
However, my pessimism tells me that, people being people, all political groups will fall prey to corruption given time.
Let's hope that it is. If you are British and have any sense, you should vote anything but Labour in the next election.
How funny is that? The British need to vote out the "liberal" party to prevent 1984 and those of us in the US need to vote out the "conservatives."
It just goes to show that people in power don't have any goals other than increasing their power. Their political positions are just the means by which they think they can get the most votes.
Humans are somehow not part of nature? What we do doesn't count as being "natural"?
If you are going to use the human actions are natural argument then you have to realize that humans are still subject to the laws of nature. When a species' population runs unchecked and it expands beyond the ecosystems capability to support it, it suffers a massive population crash due to lack of resources which brings it back in line.
Now, either humanity can recognize this natural law and attempt to self-police its draw on the ecosystem, or it can wait for the lack of resource induced population crash to do it for us.
So, even if people don't give a rat's ass about nature, their concern for their own skin and that of their progeny should make them environmentalists.
But then, maybe everyone thinks that they will come out on top and be the "fittest" when natural selection time comes.
As stated before, at the end of Half-life Gordon was given a choice. This resulted in either working for the G-man or being tossed into a hopeless fight on Zen.
At the end of Opposing Force, the G-man tells Adrian (I think) that he is impressed by his capabilities but does not offer him a job. He tells him that he can not be allowed to reveal what he knows and so is going to be taken somewhere safe where he can't tell anyone. Whether that means jail, killed, or a secret government resort, who knows.
At the end of Blue-Shift, Barney (who never interacts with the G-man) escapes the Black Mesa complex along with 3 scientists. No twist is pulled, so we can assume he got away.
Why, you can't deport the illegals! Who else is going to work for dirt cheap wages because they are afraid of getting reported? Businesses will lose their source of cheap labor!
Why doesn't your local co-op advocate the use of resuable bags? I bought 3 mesh bags about 4 years ago and they have done their job well this whole time. They ball up small, and I just keep them in my car so that I don't forget them. Also, they can hold a lot if you can carry it. I finally broke the handle on one once by putting 5 half-gallons of milk and juice into it. I just sewer the handle back on. I've probably saved hundreds of bags over the last 4 years of grocery shopping by doing so.
A computer lasts about 2 years... Why would a console last 6?
Because the hardware is more focused on a single purpose and because that is a benefit of consoles. Joe Average likes consoles as opposed to computer gaming because it is a single purchase that lasts a much longer time. He is not forced into a constant upgrade cycle to stay current. If Sony, MS, and Nintendo start making new consoles every two years they will alienate a lot of people. Look at what all those "upgrades" did to Sega during the Saturn days.
Re:before we go any further...
on
The Taste of Pain
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
If everyone has such free will why do we all act so similar. Of the billions of combinations of activities a person can do every day why do we all choose nearly the same thing; get up, go to work/school, eat at 'regular' times, sleep later that night.
I think it is because we all like food and shelter and that is what it takes to get it.
"Doomed to live out our genes"
on
The Taste of Pain
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Yea, I can only wish. My father is quite the ladies' man while I am reading slashdot.
The problems caused by invasive species are not due to the natural migration or spreading of species. They are caused when humans start shipping stuff all over the world. For example, there was that Chinese lung-fish that some dope in Delaware threw in to a pond roughly a year ago because he didn't want it as a pet anymore.
If you consider all of this to still be part of Darwinism, then you can look at it from another perspective. People want to protect the environment for their own sakes. For example, they like the varied swamp plants that they have in the Northeast US and hate seeing them all wiped out and replaced with a single invasive plant, a la purple loosestrife.
Hey, maybe these forests could also remove pollutants from the soil! And there could be giant, multi-eyed bugs that inhabit and take of the forest.
We'd need to be careful though. We might need to wind up genetically enhancing people as well so that they could survive the trace amounts of pollen from the forests that would spread around the world. Of course, you'd still need a mask if you actually went into one of the forests. We couldn't modfiy people THAT much.
Ah, but no matter how personal a letter you send to your Congresscritter, you get a form letter back if you get anything. Give them deep, well-thought out ideas and they return something that sounds an awful lot like a campaign speech.
As they are not likely to do anything other than say "This one is for", "This one against" doesn't it make sense to make it as easy as possible to get as many letters to them in support of your group's position?
Not that this really matters. If organization's want to really influence Congressmembers, they need to make it as easy to donate a few bucks to a Congresscritter's name in support of some issue/organization as possible. Webcomics with tiny readerships (relative to the number of people concerned about various political issues) seem to rake in the dough with paypal accounts. What if all the e-mail boilerplate letter pages had donation buttons on them too? "Dear Senator, this donation to your re-election campaign comes from the XYZ group. We sure like you. We hope you like us." *nudge* *nudge*
Yes, I'm advocating bribery. It's not like that isn't how it already works. (Bitter? Me? Nah.)
1) Build human colonies in space. 2) Get pissed at Earth. 3) Build indestructible giant robots, or Gundams. 4) Wipe out all life on Earth!
No wonder this guy is so convinced life on Earth is going to be destroyed. He intends to do it! Quick, we must build our own robots and train the angsty teenagers necessary to pilot them in order to stop this menace.
Slashdot Mirror
I think I should further clarify. Yes, nuclear meltdowns or leaks are pretty rare. However, they can be extremely catastrophic accidents when they do occur. And I know that the nuclear engineers are creating new designs with more redundencies and features as time goes on. But there is one thing that they will never eliminate and that is operator error. As you said, it was a problem with the user interface that caused TMI. The engineers who created that interface probably thought that they had done a very good job.
If you design something to be idiot-proof, someone will design a better idiot.
Ok, I've got to say that I wasn't being literal when I said "BOOOM." However, nuclear plants can have meltdowns, so everyone in this thread please stop dismissing their risk because I was trying to be funny. (Not just parent, but I only want to reply to one.)
As for the costs on wind power, I have seen the same type of figures as you on residential use and it isn't cheap. My father lives on an island and has a windmill. However, it would also cost him MUCH more to get a power line out to the island, so he deals with it. But, utility-owned wind power is the topic here and it is on the same order as fossil fuels. Hopefully, in time costs can come down for residential usage as on-site generation doesn't waste power in the transmission. This would be great for less densly-populated areas, but it will probably still not be worth it in cities of any reasonable size.
I don't know of any environmentalists that are protesting against fusion. The government just seems to think it isn't worth funding. They have pored a lot of money (a lot to me, not to the government) into the Tokamaks and I guess they feel that haven't seen results quick enough, so they stopped. I feel they are being extremely short-sighted, but have you ever heard of a politician that wasn't?
It has a lot more than it does oil, but it is still an unrenewable resource. The other thing is that they are starting to ship natural gas around as liquified natural gas (LNG). That stuff on a ship is a giant bomb just waiting to be steered into a harbor by some terrorist.
Yes, there are some plants which are clean. However, you are leaving out the coal extraction process which often rips the tops off of mountains in order to get at the coal. Coal mining is also dangerous and deadly when it isn't ripping the tops off and is instead staying underground.
The programs that you are probably talking about were run by the federal government. They tried building large windmills on the order of 1-2 MW with synchronous generators which is the reason that they had problems. Synchronous generators have been abandoned at this point and people with brains make windmills using induction generators.
The other thing that they do is make smaller windmills and make lots of them. This is why they are called wind farms. The prototypes you refer to were likely meant to be large individual sources. This is another advantage of wind power, it is modular. When a windmill needs maintenance, you can shut it down and only take a few hundred kW off the grid.
Also, if you see my other post in this article, and take the link to the California report you will see that wind costs are comparable to the fossil fuels.
As for liability for broken windmill parts, I have never heard of such a thing. Please point out your source. There is a safety measure for this sort of thing anyway. Windmills have a brake put on them and their blades feathered when the wind is too strong to prevent them from centrifugally ripping themselves apart.
Please don't lump all environmentalists together in such a way. These people are not environmentalists, they are rich schmucks who just want everything their way.
There are critical thinking environmentalists too. I like to think that I am one, but I know that that would be a stupid assumption to make.
Ok, I consider myself an environmentalist and these people who bitch about wind farms really have no business claiming to be so. Their choices are according to my recent utility supplied info are along with my half-assed pissed-off descriptions:
1) Oil - Polluting
2) Coal - Seriously Polluting
3) Natural Gas - Clean compared to other fossil fuels, but still requires us to fight wars for it.
4) Nuclear - Cart toxic waste across country to bury it in Yucca Mountain. Also, BOOOM!
5) Wind - Unsightly, similar in price to fossil fuels.
6) Solar - Still too expensive in cents/kWh.
7) Biomass - Can't really increase the supply unless you want to start collecting cow farts.
8) Hydro - Most rivers that can generate hydro already are.
9) Imported Power - Mysterious Power!
10) Municipal Trash - Burning stuff is not clean.
Now, of the above choices, what should we focus on until something better becomes available? I think wind is the obvious choice. But no, they are unsightly! OMG! Everything has a negative and wind power's is pretty minor compared to the others. The land that wind power is on can also be used for other purposes such as farming or grazing.
I have a feeling that the people who whine would really like all their power to come from number 9, Imported Power. You know, that magical, free power that some poor schlub in another community has to suffer the environmental consequences for. Now, unless they want to whip out their magic fairy-wand and produce energy out of thin air, they have to use something and they should wake the hell up and realize that wind is a very good choice.
If you are interested in costs, check out the California 1996 Energy Technology Status Report Summary. For a summary, it weighs in at 93 pages. Bleah.
My intention was not to suggest literally "anything but." I agree that people need to be informed and vote for who they want in the government, not the lesser of the evils.
However, my pessimism tells me that, people being people, all political groups will fall prey to corruption given time.
Let's hope that it is. If you are British and have any sense, you should vote anything but Labour in the next election.
How funny is that? The British need to vote out the "liberal" party to prevent 1984 and those of us in the US need to vote out the "conservatives."
It just goes to show that people in power don't have any goals other than increasing their power. Their political positions are just the means by which they think they can get the most votes.
Humans are somehow not part of nature? What we do doesn't count as being "natural"?
If you are going to use the human actions are natural argument then you have to realize that humans are still subject to the laws of nature. When a species' population runs unchecked and it expands beyond the ecosystems capability to support it, it suffers a massive population crash due to lack of resources which brings it back in line.
Now, either humanity can recognize this natural law and attempt to self-police its draw on the ecosystem, or it can wait for the lack of resource induced population crash to do it for us. So, even if people don't give a rat's ass about nature, their concern for their own skin and that of their progeny should make them environmentalists.
But then, maybe everyone thinks that they will come out on top and be the "fittest" when natural selection time comes.
As stated before, at the end of Half-life Gordon was given a choice. This resulted in either working for the G-man or being tossed into a hopeless fight on Zen.
At the end of Opposing Force, the G-man tells Adrian (I think) that he is impressed by his capabilities but does not offer him a job. He tells him that he can not be allowed to reveal what he knows and so is going to be taken somewhere safe where he can't tell anyone. Whether that means jail, killed, or a secret government resort, who knows.
At the end of Blue-Shift, Barney (who never interacts with the G-man) escapes the Black Mesa complex along with 3 scientists. No twist is pulled, so we can assume he got away.
Apparently the RIGHT coast and the LEFT coast do pretty much the same thing.
Congressional analysts see budget deficit exceeding $300 billion
The Republicans long ago stopped being the small government party. They are just the different flavor large government party now.
Why, you can't deport the illegals! Who else is going to work for dirt cheap wages because they are afraid of getting reported? Businesses will lose their source of cheap labor!
It's all about the money.
Is here. It is a slow server and will get slashdotted quickly, so someone mirror the pdf of the monkey's output if you can.
The abc news article says that it was intended more as performance art then as a real experiment.
Why doesn't your local co-op advocate the use of resuable bags? I bought 3 mesh bags about 4 years ago and they have done their job well this whole time. They ball up small, and I just keep them in my car so that I don't forget them. Also, they can hold a lot if you can carry it. I finally broke the handle on one once by putting 5 half-gallons of milk and juice into it. I just sewer the handle back on. I've probably saved hundreds of bags over the last 4 years of grocery shopping by doing so.
Quick! Someone call Steve McQueen!
A computer lasts about 2 years... Why would a console last 6?
Because the hardware is more focused on a single purpose and because that is a benefit of consoles. Joe Average likes consoles as opposed to computer gaming because it is a single purchase that lasts a much longer time. He is not forced into a constant upgrade cycle to stay current. If Sony, MS, and Nintendo start making new consoles every two years they will alienate a lot of people. Look at what all those "upgrades" did to Sega during the Saturn days.
If everyone has such free will why do we all act so similar. Of the billions of combinations of activities a person can do every day why do we all choose nearly the same thing; get up, go to work/school, eat at 'regular' times, sleep later that night.
I think it is because we all like food and shelter and that is what it takes to get it.
Yea, I can only wish. My father is quite the ladies' man while I am reading slashdot.
The problems caused by invasive species are not due to the natural migration or spreading of species. They are caused when humans start shipping stuff all over the world. For example, there was that Chinese lung-fish that some dope in Delaware threw in to a pond roughly a year ago because he didn't want it as a pet anymore.
If you consider all of this to still be part of Darwinism, then you can look at it from another perspective. People want to protect the environment for their own sakes. For example, they like the varied swamp plants that they have in the Northeast US and hate seeing them all wiped out and replaced with a single invasive plant, a la purple loosestrife.
Hey, maybe these forests could also remove pollutants from the soil! And there could be giant, multi-eyed bugs that inhabit and take of the forest.
We'd need to be careful though. We might need to wind up genetically enhancing people as well so that they could survive the trace amounts of pollen from the forests that would spread around the world. Of course, you'd still need a mask if you actually went into one of the forests. We couldn't modfiy people THAT much.
To all who are answering my question:
Who has an estimate on how long it will take for the Army to outfit its troops with anti-personnel rocket launchers?
I apologize for not thoroughly researching my joke.
Ah, but no matter how personal a letter you send to your Congresscritter, you get a form letter back if you get anything. Give them deep, well-thought out ideas and they return something that sounds an awful lot like a campaign speech.
As they are not likely to do anything other than say "This one is for", "This one against" doesn't it make sense to make it as easy as possible to get as many letters to them in support of your group's position?
Not that this really matters. If organization's want to really influence Congressmembers, they need to make it as easy to donate a few bucks to a Congresscritter's name in support of some issue/organization as possible. Webcomics with tiny readerships (relative to the number of people concerned about various political issues) seem to rake in the dough with paypal accounts. What if all the e-mail boilerplate letter pages had donation buttons on them too? "Dear Senator, this donation to your re-election campaign comes from the XYZ group. We sure like you. We hope you like us." *nudge* *nudge*
Yes, I'm advocating bribery. It's not like that isn't how it already works. (Bitter? Me? Nah.)
Personally, I'm amazed at the shelf life of the Britany Spears' albums.
Uh oh.
1) Build human colonies in space.
2) Get pissed at Earth.
3) Build indestructible giant robots, or Gundams.
4) Wipe out all life on Earth!
No wonder this guy is so convinced life on Earth is going to be destroyed. He intends to do it! Quick, we must build our own robots and train the angsty teenagers necessary to pilot them in order to stop this menace.