Let's say I had a tested, working LFTR design. Do you really think it would be very hard to convince the public that it is inherently safer than other fission designs. Safer than a coal plant. Safer than hydroelectric. It is pretty easy to understand that a plant that is inherently impossible to cause a melt-down might be a different kind of plant than a light-water reactor design.
True, there is radiation, but it is very modest. Few people seem to have NIMBY issues with LWR reactors based on the normal radiation. It is the fear of a Chernobyl event.
Current laws make it difficult to justify capitalism when it is known that the results of your efforts may be disallowed. Add the total uncertainty of tax treatment and you have 2 strikes. Add regulatory uncertainty 3 strikes. Hope may spring eternal, but big money investors would like a reasonable chance of return.
Tax dollars could fund prizes, research etc. but governments incentives are frequently little more than politically motivated distractions that distort the marketplace by specifying "how" not "what".
Promise a contract of x number of pounds delivered into LEO for y dollars (gold equivalent) by the year 2025 and you might get something more useful out of your public funding.
Promised contracts for other infrastructure advances -- energy, food, water, education, medicine, etc. could have dramatic economic impacts that would certainly help support space exploration as well as improve things on the ground.
Proper Incentives to solve social issues would also be very positive: curing generational welfare dependency, curing various forms of addiction, preventing crime.
Stopping negative incentives which abound in government -- e.g. war on drugs, huge amounts of money spent, direct and indirect. Say you like using cocaine, limited use may not be destructive at all. But if the behavior is destructive, there is a problem. Can you make it non-addictive, maybe never; we could change policies to limit the destructiveness. The criminal treatment is clearly not working too well for society as a whole. Crony capitalism? Comcast is an exemplar hate by liberals and conservative (though politicians benefit, the public does not). Lots of other possible examples. All of these waste money here and now, freeing up the capital to do better things would clearly help transition to a space economy.
You can use email distribution of reset passwords at least a little intelligently. Make the reset password expire soon and make it a single use password so password sent via email immediately expires when first used.
Low cost support of users is important to companies too. Email based password resets are very cheap.
Perhaps secret question passwords can be improved by simply renaming as "backdoor password" or suchlike and include some explanatory text for how it would be used.
Say you have an old lithium ion battery based computer that you've forgotten about. Does this battery degrade to the point that it eventually self-immolates? I bet there are lot's of these sitting in closets around the world.
__slots__ is a terrible hack with nasty, hard-to-fathom side
effects that should only be used by programmers at grandmaster and
wizard levels. Unfortunately it has gained an enormous undeserved
popularity amongst the novices and apprentices, who should know
better than to use this magic incantation casually.
Using __slots__ to enforce your programming style is very much not Pythonish. It break pickle an other things too.
I believe that climate modelers have identified over a thousand feedbacks, many positive, many negative. The problem is that this really and truly the great unknown of climate models -- The early models (and probably later ones, since the results are somewhat consistent in overall sensitivity) pretty much all seem to be have estimated sensitivity to the CO2 as much larger than unity. From radiation emissivity calculation alone, a doubling of CO2 should raise average temp. by 1.1 def C, the earlier climate models that were used in the the IPCC reports, etc. all modeled the actual sensitivity as well in excess of 1 (which is why predictions were 3-7 degrees IIRC), i.e., more positive feedback than negative.
Positive feedback is well known in dynamic systems as a source of instability (although it is very useful in active control systems).
Personally, given that the known climate history is mostly stable over long periods of time, I would expect the overall sensitivity to be less than unity. I.e., if it was significantly over unity (unstable) the planet should have already been cooked or frozen by now.
I oversimplify, because real systems are non-linear, i.e., at near "normal" mid-range temperature, the net feedback could be positive, but a more extreme temperatures, the net feedback could be negative. But, this would tend to cause a meta-stable system in that the climate would initially overheat or freeze, then tend to stay at that extreme and require a significant external perturbation to flip the climate back to a "normal" mid-range (or even the opposite extreme). I suppose that this could arguably be a pretty considered a good match to the accepted temperature of the earth.
It is not really an issue of thermal capacity. The huge difference is that solid materials like rock, silt, etc. do not have convection currents (or other forms of mixing). Heat transfer via conduction alone is very much lower. If the oceans were magically raised by 1 degree overnight, it would take months to years to warm the underlying floor by half a degree 5 meters below its surface (depending upon the material)
Water has a higher heat capacity compared to just about everything else when considered on a unit mass basis, but a few meters of ocean floor cannot begin to approach the thermal capacity of the ocean.
The has actually been intentionally. As the user see the error message they say to themselves, "stupid computer" -- Having salved the human's need for feeling superior, the software can continue about its business without the human resisting the computer's penchant for literalness.
I've actually read this, not just something I made up.
Actually, I was trying to unscrew it by the base, but the top exploded -- Can't testify in court that I was not touching the bulb, probably was but I know I was applying minimal pressure. Access to the bulb was wide open in this fixture.
I would say it was a defective bulb, big part of that was no doubt the horrible design from a safety viewpoint of using a twisty glass bulb in the first place. You know, to get the lumens per watt they wanted for a direct-replacement bulb.
I was unscrewing one of the twisty CFL's that died after probably 1000 hours use. It basically exploded in my face, about the top 15% of the bulb was small shards though the rest was intact. Yes, we got screwed by the government forcing them on us before they were ready for prime time, just like the water saving toilets that don't flush unless you cycle them a few times.
You might consider this strange, but none of the people resurrected in the Bible make any reference at all related to their experiences after death. The closest thing you would find related to this topic is the account of the rich man and Lazarus, who both died and were in Hades, the rich man in torment, and Lazarus in Abraham's bosom. The rich man wanted to send a message to his relatives so that they would not end up in torment like him and was told, they have Moses and the prophets (i.e., they were not going to get another revelation from a dead man), and nether would they believe if one rose from the dead.
In short, the Bible denies the near-death experience as a means of religious experience and knowledge.
weapons grade uranium is 90% U-235, natural uranium is 0.7% U-235 -- No, it was not weapons grade a billion years ago, or ever if it was 50% U-235 at formation. Reactor grade is 3-4% U-235, which would exists in natural ores 1.5 billion year ago.
If you are having lots of trouble paying bills, keeping an extra payment in a savings account is not easy as it is so tempting to use it to pay one of those bills. Also, some creditor gets a judge to say so and the balance can disappear or become unavailable you making a car payment.
There is a significant spread in the retail and wholesale price of a vehicle. You cannot repo a "fully depreciated vehicle" and get your money back, much less the cost of doing the repo.
The clear comparison would be RomneyCare. While certainly smaller, it was more more successful, at least in terms of administrative snafus, etc. The high costs of RomneyCare are very similar however. One obvious difference was that RomneyCare has a higher level of bi-partisan support, thought it is difficult to see how this would account for the difference in administrative competence.The other differences are that Romney has proved competence in a few executive roles and was probably a lot more focused than Obama -- presidents have to wear a lot of hats being at least part of the problem. ObamaCare is arguably a larger structural change that involved more fiefdoms.
Thursday's cuts were spread over different countries and teams, the spokesman said. The last wave of cuts mostly affected the handset business of Nokia, which Microsoft bought earlier this year.
Socialism is usually used as a pejorative term by those on the right, e.g, Obama is a socialist. Philosophically, I generally agree with the Libertarians. I would not be inclined at all to say the adding some regulations or holding Comcast, etc. is in any way socialism. The problem is that broadband providers are generally running a protected monopoly already, this is a form of corporate socialism already a.k.a. crony capitalism.
So, one problem is already a result of government interference in the market, resulting in Comcast, etc. having too much advantage over the consumer. Given that a broadband provider may well be a natural monopoly or oligarchy in many if not most marketplaces, some sort of regulation is probably needed in these markets as a free-market approach may not support enough competition or even with competition prices are still high as a result of duplication of infrastructure. A conservative approach would prefer the minimal government interference that still allows and encourages competition, but given the natural monopoly for an broadband provider, a municipal utility may well be the best solution.
So a well-informed economic conservative has not problem with this at all. Unfortunately many conservatives (and others) are not well-informed on any variety of topics, but this often does not prevent the expressing of a opinion, usually in conformance with a priori viewpoints on how things should work in the abstract.
Feel free to extrapolate that regulation, etc. is often needed with respect to other aspects of corporations. We will likely draw the line at different locations re: the best level of regulation. I would prefer these lines to be drawn based on evidence, and I believe it is very likely you share this view. Unfortunately for Comcast, etc. the current regulations seems clearly against the interest of the typical consumer as the US today.
Evidence is not always available, and corporations have a vested interest in pushing their interests via lobbying in various forms. I.e., policy making is hard. Facts are hard to obtain, they may change over time, and everybody has a vested interest in the decisions. I fail to see how condemning one side or the other is useful in actually discussing policy.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's say I had a tested, working LFTR design. Do you really think it would be very hard to convince the public that it is inherently safer than other fission designs. Safer than a coal plant. Safer than hydroelectric. It is pretty easy to understand that a plant that is inherently impossible to cause a melt-down might be a different kind of plant than a light-water reactor design.
True, there is radiation, but it is very modest. Few people seem to have NIMBY issues with LWR reactors based on the normal radiation. It is the fear of a Chernobyl event.
Current laws make it difficult to justify capitalism when it is known that the results of your efforts may be disallowed. Add the total uncertainty of tax treatment and you have 2 strikes. Add regulatory uncertainty 3 strikes. Hope may spring eternal, but big money investors would like a reasonable chance of return.
Tax dollars could fund prizes, research etc. but governments incentives are frequently little more than politically motivated distractions that distort the marketplace by specifying "how" not "what".
Promise a contract of x number of pounds delivered into LEO for y dollars (gold equivalent) by the year 2025 and you might get something more useful out of your public funding.
Promised contracts for other infrastructure advances -- energy, food, water, education, medicine, etc. could have dramatic economic impacts that would certainly help support space exploration as well as improve things on the ground.
Proper Incentives to solve social issues would also be very positive: curing generational welfare dependency, curing various forms of addiction, preventing crime.
Stopping negative incentives which abound in government -- e.g. war on drugs, huge amounts of money spent, direct and indirect. Say you like using cocaine, limited use may not be destructive at all. But if the behavior is destructive, there is a problem. Can you make it non-addictive, maybe never; we could change policies to limit the destructiveness. The criminal treatment is clearly not working too well for society as a whole. Crony capitalism? Comcast is an exemplar hate by liberals and conservative (though politicians benefit, the public does not). Lots of other possible examples. All of these waste money here and now, freeing up the capital to do better things would clearly help transition to a space economy.
I've ranted long enough.
You can use email distribution of reset passwords at least a little intelligently. Make the reset password expire soon and make it a single use password so password sent via email immediately expires when first used.
Low cost support of users is important to companies too. Email based password resets are very cheap.
Perhaps secret question passwords can be improved by simply renaming as "backdoor password" or suchlike and include some explanatory text for how it would be used.
Say you have an old lithium ion battery based computer that you've forgotten about. Does this battery degrade to the point that it eventually self-immolates? I bet there are lot's of these sitting in closets around the world.
Some guy named Guido said
__slots__ is a terrible hack with nasty, hard-to-fathom side
effects that should only be used by programmers at grandmaster and
wizard levels. Unfortunately it has gained an enormous undeserved
popularity amongst the novices and apprentices, who should know
better than to use this magic incantation casually.
Using __slots__ to enforce your programming style is very much not Pythonish. It break pickle an other things too.
According to this article, Johnny Christian and Mary rotten may both want to use the same ISP.
But you do have to keep buying a great amount of black rocks, pulverizing them, hauling away ash, etc. Seems like that might cost a bit too.
You're crazy. How could we ever make a profit off of that when people could just collect their own energy directly.
People have been trying to do direct plasma to electricity, not easy though, nothing close to commercial of course.
I believe that climate modelers have identified over a thousand feedbacks, many positive, many negative. The problem is that this really and truly the great unknown of climate models -- The early models (and probably later ones, since the results are somewhat consistent in overall sensitivity) pretty much all seem to be have estimated sensitivity to the CO2 as much larger than unity. From radiation emissivity calculation alone, a doubling of CO2 should raise average temp. by 1.1 def C, the earlier climate models that were used in the the IPCC reports, etc. all modeled the actual sensitivity as well in excess of 1 (which is why predictions were 3-7 degrees IIRC), i.e., more positive feedback than negative.
Positive feedback is well known in dynamic systems as a source of instability (although it is very useful in active control systems).
Personally, given that the known climate history is mostly stable over long periods of time, I would expect the overall sensitivity to be less than unity. I.e., if it was significantly over unity (unstable) the planet should have already been cooked or frozen by now.
I oversimplify, because real systems are non-linear, i.e., at near "normal" mid-range temperature, the net feedback could be positive, but a more extreme temperatures, the net feedback could be negative. But, this would tend to cause a meta-stable system in that the climate would initially overheat or freeze, then tend to stay at that extreme and require a significant external perturbation to flip the climate back to a "normal" mid-range (or even the opposite extreme). I suppose that this could arguably be a pretty considered a good match to the accepted temperature of the earth.
It is not really an issue of thermal capacity. The huge difference is that solid materials like rock, silt, etc. do not have convection currents (or other forms of mixing). Heat transfer via conduction alone is very much lower. If the oceans were magically raised by 1 degree overnight, it would take months to years to warm the underlying floor by half a degree 5 meters below its surface (depending upon the material)
Water has a higher heat capacity compared to just about everything else when considered on a unit mass basis, but a few meters of ocean floor cannot begin to approach the thermal capacity of the ocean.
The has actually been intentionally. As the user see the error message they say to themselves, "stupid computer" -- Having salved the human's need for feeling superior, the software can continue about its business without the human resisting the computer's penchant for literalness.
I've actually read this, not just something I made up.
Yes, but will it bend? Certainly this must be the stupid meme for all new tablet / phone announcements.
Actually, I was trying to unscrew it by the base, but the top exploded -- Can't testify in court that I was not touching the bulb, probably was but I know I was applying minimal pressure. Access to the bulb was wide open in this fixture.
I would say it was a defective bulb, big part of that was no doubt the horrible design from a safety viewpoint of using a twisty glass bulb in the first place. You know, to get the lumens per watt they wanted for a direct-replacement bulb.
I was unscrewing one of the twisty CFL's that died after probably 1000 hours use. It basically exploded in my face, about the top 15% of the bulb was small shards though the rest was intact. Yes, we got screwed by the government forcing them on us before they were ready for prime time, just like the water saving toilets that don't flush unless you cycle them a few times.
You might consider this strange, but none of the people resurrected in the Bible make any reference at all related to their experiences after death. The closest thing you would find related to this topic is the account of the rich man and Lazarus, who both died and were in Hades, the rich man in torment, and Lazarus in Abraham's bosom. The rich man wanted to send a message to his relatives so that they would not end up in torment like him and was told, they have Moses and the prophets (i.e., they were not going to get another revelation from a dead man), and nether would they believe if one rose from the dead.
In short, the Bible denies the near-death experience as a means of religious experience and knowledge.
weapons grade uranium is 90% U-235, natural uranium is 0.7% U-235 -- No, it was not weapons grade a billion years ago, or ever if it was 50% U-235 at formation. Reactor grade is 3-4% U-235, which would exists in natural ores 1.5 billion year ago.
If you are having lots of trouble paying bills, keeping an extra payment in a savings account is not easy as it is so tempting to use it to pay one of those bills. Also, some creditor gets a judge to say so and the balance can disappear or become unavailable you making a car payment.
There is a significant spread in the retail and wholesale price of a vehicle. You cannot repo a "fully depreciated vehicle" and get your money back, much less the cost of doing the repo.
Chippy: 1. Belligerent 2. Female prostitute or promiscuous female 3. A carpenter 4. Resentful or oversensitive about being perceived as inferior:
What exactly are you saying about Einstein?
The clear comparison would be RomneyCare. While certainly smaller, it was more more successful, at least in terms of administrative snafus, etc. The high costs of RomneyCare are very similar however. One obvious difference was that RomneyCare has a higher level of bi-partisan support, thought it is difficult to see how this would account for the difference in administrative competence.The other differences are that Romney has proved competence in a few executive roles and was probably a lot more focused than Obama -- presidents have to wear a lot of hats being at least part of the problem. ObamaCare is arguably a larger structural change that involved more fiefdoms.
From the article.
Socialism is usually used as a pejorative term by those on the right, e.g, Obama is a socialist. Philosophically, I generally agree with the Libertarians. I would not be inclined at all to say the adding some regulations or holding Comcast, etc. is in any way socialism. The problem is that broadband providers are generally running a protected monopoly already, this is a form of corporate socialism already a.k.a. crony capitalism.
So, one problem is already a result of government interference in the market, resulting in Comcast, etc. having too much advantage over the consumer. Given that a broadband provider may well be a natural monopoly or oligarchy in many if not most marketplaces, some sort of regulation is probably needed in these markets as a free-market approach may not support enough competition or even with competition prices are still high as a result of duplication of infrastructure. A conservative approach would prefer the minimal government interference that still allows and encourages competition, but given the natural monopoly for an broadband provider, a municipal utility may well be the best solution.
So a well-informed economic conservative has not problem with this at all. Unfortunately many conservatives (and others) are not well-informed on any variety of topics, but this often does not prevent the expressing of a opinion, usually in conformance with a priori viewpoints on how things should work in the abstract.
Feel free to extrapolate that regulation, etc. is often needed with respect to other aspects of corporations. We will likely draw the line at different locations re: the best level of regulation. I would prefer these lines to be drawn based on evidence, and I believe it is very likely you share this view. Unfortunately for Comcast, etc. the current regulations seems clearly against the interest of the typical consumer as the US today.
Evidence is not always available, and corporations have a vested interest in pushing their interests via lobbying in various forms. I.e., policy making is hard. Facts are hard to obtain, they may change over time, and everybody has a vested interest in the decisions. I fail to see how condemning one side or the other is useful in actually discussing policy.
It's getting hard to distinguish Lamarckianism, Lysenkoism and epigenetics these days.