Your last paragraph doesn't entirely jibe with your earlier statements.
Specifically, if "reviewers & authors are unpaid" why this latter statement "The peer review is essential, and that is what costs money." Note I'm not disagreeing with you as to the value of journals, I'm just working on a thought.
If reviewers are unpaid what are the actual costs in peer review? Not in publishing or other aspects of getting a paper in a journal, but rather the actual peer review, what are the costs there?
Of course if your two pieces of broadcast "land" overlap that's a problem. But you made an artificial distinction. Your analogy with land would only be correct if you said that you own a plot of land at 1001 north maple street and I own the whole of the 1000 block of north maple street. See? Our real land overlaps, which of course is a problem. But for real land we have legal precedent (and deeds/bills of sale) going back hundreds(thousands?) of years to work out where the dividing line is.
If we both broadcast at a wattage where the signals don't interfere than they are two seperate pieces of the "broadcast space". They can be sold as two seperate pieces and legally treated that way. If I wanted to broadcast in to your "broadcast space"(your land) I'd have to buy it(or rent it) from you or face civil or criminal charges.
The FCC currently licenses the "broadcast space" exactly in the manner I describe in my second paragraph(e.g. non-overlapping). In other words, in the US the FCC is the sole proprietor and owner of the "broadcast space"(in Canada it is the CRTC).
Would you feel comfortable if your government owned all the land and ownly licensed it to you? You wouldn't actually have ownership and you could only do with it what your govenment said. Of course if you say yes, than you and I have a fundamental disagreement as to the role of government but that's a different story. (oh and before you go in to all the laws that apply to land usage, these aren't "license" terms dictated by one omnipresent government agency, they are laws passed by elected officials that can be voted in and out of office at the voters pleasure. They are by-laws or city ordinances that have been built up over long periods of time and generally apply in only certain regions,counties, cities etc. Ownership still invests with you, the government can't take it away, barring eminent domain or nonpayment of taxes.)
Except that the point isn't about what you can do on your property it is whether you have the ownership of the property to begin with.
Your cost justification is about use not about ownership. To be able to broadcast on all those frequencies you first have to own them, and you have to own the rights in every "jurisdiction" where you plan to broadcast.
We parcel out "public" land areas all the time. Setting aside certain frequencies for military, emergency civilian, "high" risk civilian(airlines), and just "park" use, can be done.
By the way, you never heard of a toll road?
The usable spectrum can be parceled out in both frequency and wattage(limiting the trasmission distance). Meaning if you can't get spectrum in NYC you can "still go somewhere else". But even if governments we're stupid enough to sell off a given frequency for usage everywhere, you can bet that the person owning it initially would certainly parcel it out that way.
The possibilities of the scenario are endless, be creative with the analogy and I think you'll see it's not all that far fetched. I can't say positively that it would be better than the current methods of regulation but it certainly would be different.
Consider for instance if RF "trespassing" was defined something like "usage of another person's RF spectrum in a manner that interfered with that usage"(not saying it would be but hey I'm just making this up right?). Bluetooth is defined so that it interferes as little as possible with other RF sources, eg. it is low power. WiFi is in a part of the spectrum made "public" by the FCC(at least that's my understanding), it could still be so in a "sell off" scenario, just like we have park land set aside for public use but we sell off all nonpublic land.
Most people seem to take "different" to mean bad, especially when it involves an idea that's been around for more than a few years. I'm not sure why this is the case. Different is just that, "not the same", we can imagine outcomes and scenarios but until it's tried it just remains "different". Furthermore, surely you don't believe the FCC will remain an institution forever do you?(by the way, I'm in Canada our equivalent is the CRTC).
The RF spectrum that the radios can pick up from a given distance from your transmitter is the relevant quantity.
Transmitting from Manhattan isn't going to get to somebody in Fargo,ND, or at least not without a powerful transmitter.
By selling both the spectrum and the allowed wattage you now effectively have a 2-D resource. Both land usage & RF spectrum usage can also be parametized by time(rentals for instance). So land use is 4-D(although limited in height by bylaws usually) and the RF spectrum is 3-D.
My point being however, that there is no fundamental reason to treat the RF spectrum different than land use on earth. Both are limited resources, nobody has a problem with the concept that some corporation might control all the land why do we consider this a viable reality for the spectrum?
Note that I'm not saying that it is a good idea to sell off the spectrum totally unregulated. But we regulate land usage all the time. Making it more similar to land use may not hurt. It is a different scenario than what we currently have, neither necessarily better nor worse but certainly different.
Is it any more limited than the land in NewYork City, Brooklyn, Manhatten island...?
The scenarios you worry about are no different than those for actual land and we don't have all land rapped up by one company. Yes there are companies that let land stagnate but why should the airwaves be treated differently?
All your saying is that if things were different they wouldn't be the same. At this level of analysis we can't possibly say what the results would be only that they would in fact be diffferent.
Sure the ad buyer is probably always biased, that's the point of the ad. However, the one potentially accepting the money always has the choice to decide if they want to support any given biased message. If an ad has the potential to not reflect the opinions/bias of the editorial staff why would you accept the money?
An unbiased source would not likely pay for an ad to promote a product but they might pay for one to promote themselves(e.g. JD Power & Associates, Consumer Reports, others that are supposedly unbiased). They may even pay for an ad such as "come check out our unbiased review of Linux server vs Windows server to get the real skinny on TCO". Again this just promotes themselves not either product.
While/. is primarily pro-linux, Linux is not it's entire reason for being. Information of all types for Nerds is given, including but not limited to Oracle, IBM, your rights on-line, hardware, gaming, PDA's etc.,etc.
LinuxToday is "only" a Linux site. Accepting money from a biased source to provide FUD is insulting to the community that the site is directed at.
I accept the/. presentation of the Microsoft FUD because this isn't a Linux only site.
Sorry about that, I did in fact put words in your mouth, please accept my apology I did not mean to do it I just got sloppy.
You didn't say it was unuseable, however you did say the sheep weren't being sold because the area is "too contaminated". The article clearly shows that the sheep from the areas are rehabilitated and sold. So the affect is being mitigated.
Just because there are areas "contaminated" by radioactive particles doesn't mean this is a bad thing. Once again, put it in perspective, how much extra radiation above background is being "added" to the area. Finding radioactive particles in biota isn't any big revelation, the "problem" comes if that radiation actually caused health problems.
The "problem" of "waste" disposal has been "solved". Any hold up now is purely political. Although I do not advocate this scenario, simply dumping the whole works in a deep part(miles) of the ocean would suffice. Encasing the waste in glass, which is further encased in rust proof housings, and putting the whole works back where it came from is overkill. Note that in Saskatchewan, Canada where I am from there is a deposit of almost reactor grade uranium that has a layer of clay between it and water. The uranium hasn't leached out in millions of years. It has survived glaciers, shifting continents and earthquakes.
I won't discuss terrorist scenarios either as I simply don't consider any of them credible. Actually, I wish terrorists would concentrate on trying to get nuclear material, it would keep their hands off really nasty stuff like fertilizer & diesel fuel.
By the way, I'm not stupid I know Britain isn't all that large. Even so, as the Chernobyl accident indicated, weather would play a dramatic affect in exactly which areas are affected. The contamination was very unevenly distributed. A wind blowing out to sea near a Brit power plant would indicate an extremely minor impact(note I don't know prevailing wind directions in Britain so I don't know if that is reasonable.) The point those is that an accident in Britain is no way guaranteed to affect the whole of the British Isles.
And there you go again with that "land unfit for sheep". It isn't unfit for sheep. They mature nicely there and before slaughter are moved to "clean" land to get rid of any contaminants through natural means. And now you point me to a "fishy" story. Look, I don't doubt that there is radioactivity in these animals but the question is one of levels. Guess what, your radioactive too you know? I guess you better stay away from people.
Radioactivity isn't the boogy man. It occurs naturally around you. Without it, it's very likely we wouldn't be here to argue over how bad it is. "Solar panel production produces chemicals that are known to cause cancer and other nasty birth defects anti-solar campaigners have good reason to resist the introduction of more solar power production." Without context neither your or my statement mean anything and are only intended to scare people.
We kill somewhere in the region of 50,000 people every year due to the use of Coal fired plants. The environment is (supposedly) drastically over stuffed with C02 and other toxic substances from Coal. Nuclear energy provides a clean, safe replacement. There will be deaths and sickness due to the use of nuclear energy just as there would be for solar but the far and away greater likelihood is that these would be significantly reduced with extensive Nuclear programs compared to what we do now.
But your link doesn't contradict anything I said. And you said specifically that land in Cumbria was unuseable. That's simply false, I can give you the benefit of the doubt that you misunderstood but perpetuating the idea that the land is unuseable does more harm than good.
With any man made device I can never say never, but(there's always a but), do British and French reactors not use containment buildings? This one factor alone could have drastically reduced the affects of Chernobyl.
Furthermore, as the article you pointed to makes plain, the area affected ran in to a particularly bad series of circumstances(e.g. rain during the accident and land that caused uptake in Cesium in plants rather than staying in the soil). So your concerns over a British or French accident is once again an extreme overstatement. Don't get me wrong though, an accident in Britain or France would be bad but not nearly as bad as you claim. There would be plenty of land to grow stuff just as there is in the Ukraine, Belarus and Russia(the hardest hit areas).
Go ahead and let people know that Chernobyl is still affecting the British Isles but do me a favor, please be accurate and put it in perspective. I jumped in on this discussion because a parent post indicated that the public's view of nuclear accidents is out of proportion with their actual affects as well as out of proportion with the risks people put up with every day. You believed otherwise, yet you have proven that the originally poster is correct in almost everything you've said.
Consider your statement "Cancer for all! Yippee!!!". Check up on the affects of Chernobyl to the population surrounding it. While there are definite increases in cancer(mainly thyroid), it isn't "Cancer for all!" not even close.
The point is to keep it in perspective. A nuclear reactor accident is bad but no where near as bad as the daily affects of burning coal. I have seen credible estimates of 50,000 deaths/year due to coal use(can't remember if that is world wide or just US).
I did a google search on Chernobyl & Cumbria, I found no reference to land which can't be grazed(admittedly I didn't spend a tonne of time looking) but did find reference to the fact that sheep from affected land are periodically moved to unaffected land to let them expire radioactive Cesium from their systems. So while this confirms your statement that Cumbria still has radioactive affects from Chernobyl it isn't as big a deal as you imply(e.g. as the parent poster indicated the affects of radiation are consistantly exaggerated).
Interestingly(to me at least) the 1/2 life of Cesium in sheep is 10 days. In other words 1/2 the contamination is released from a sheep every 10 days. Which makes it fairly straight forward to "decontaminate" infected sheep.
The people of Western Europe should be frightend of idiots pretending to be nuclear energy workers. The Russian's did almost everything wrong!
Actually this isn't a dumb question at all the only "real" objection is that environmentalists would find this very highly objectionable.
I don't have the numbers around right now but if you get ahold of a book by Bernard Cohen called "Before it's too late" he does all kinds of simple arithmetic to show just how stupid our over engineering of waste disposal is.
The fact is you could dump it in the ocean without shielding and have minimal impact on the environment. Consider that there is already enough Uranium in sea water to use in normal LWR type reactors to last billions of years. The minimal additional radioactivity from spent fuel cells would go unnoticed.
(Butt covering time: I do not actually advocate such a policy as dumping in the ocean but only because it would simply be too difficult to get the "normal" person to realize just how safe it is. Hell they're scared enough as it is could you imaging if we went around telling them we're just going to drive it out in to the middle of the ocean and through it overboard! It's very sad in an ironic sort of way.)
Just so you have an interesting mental graphic for people. Next time they ask this question just tell them that all 1.3 million of the spent fuel bundles from Canada's CANDU reactor's would fit in the space of 3 hockey rinks filled to the top of the boards.
The size of 1 CANDU fuel bundle that provides enough electicity for 1 household for 100 years is about the size of your average fire log! Now that's energy production baby!
Actually, yes, yes I do. In fact I will cash in on this irrational fear by charging a certain amount per gram/per year and I will make Billions, I will be richer than Mr. Gates.
I don't know what it's like in Britain but decommissioning costs have been included in North American Nuke plans for quite some time. It's (usually) put on as an extra cost/KW or something like that. In other words the plants are forced to set aside x amount of money for decommissioning.
It's about time. The article at the end of that link describes OS/2's Workplace Shell! I've been hoping that it would be ported to Linux but if the boys at Gnome are starting down that path I better have another look. I loved the Workplace shell.
The idea of the "finder browser" especially saved browsers sound like the Workplace Shell Templates to a T. Needless to say this was all supported by the Metadata built in to the HPFS filesystem. You could add any user data item to a file you wanted(e.g. the articles idea of a "label") and it was stored with the file.
I continue to maintain that the Workplace Shell was years ahead of it's time. If we had the shear horsepower than that we do now plus have IBM actually care to push the product, computing would be a totally different landscape. But of course that's just "fandom" speaking.
The metaphore is powerful but are users actually prepared to switch to it enmasse. It is so powerfully different than they are used to with Window's I think people would just look at it and be scared "Hey where's my Start Menu?". Maybe we can find a way to weene them off.
You aren't required to adopt any technology. However, if you conspire to NOT adopt something than that's collusion and should be fined/actionable. If they had all independantly decided they didn't like Rambus than that's o.k. But if you trade e-mails about how you should close them out of the market that's illegal.
I hope it didn't happen because Rambus is one hell of a f*(ked up company.
Your basing this sentiment on the idea that the RIAA will be forthcoming with their own accounting. It is the RIAA members that are supposed to do the tracking and than tell the artist or their accountant how much they owe. Of course this is like giving a cat the keys to the henhouse so I'm not surprised that they "couldn't find" David Bowie.
Let's see now, where would we find David today, oh how about we go to the west coast and turn left...
We're sticking to drugs now are we? (good debate tactic by the way, stick to the hardest question for me to debate).
As far as developing something from "scratch", how often does that really happen? All research builds on previous work. Nature certainly plays a role in this otherwise we wouldn't know what DNA was to begin with.
As well, nature provides us with untold riches as to the chemicals we use to enhance our health(penecilin anyone?).
I agree that the reward is definitely less for any SINGLE company but I'm not sure that the same reward wouldn't be spread out amongst all those "chemical" factories you mentioned. Well o.k., it's hard to argue that all these companies would realize the same reward as "monopoly" pricing, but I'm not sure that's a "bad thing"(TM). However, although reward is less for a single company the risks are significantly reduced as well.
Altuism in todays market is in short supply I agree. But I'm taking the position of "no patents" remember? In that alternate universe altruism would be all you would have. But than it wouldn't be altruism, it would be the natural method of investing in future technology. Anyway, it's never going to happen unless I build a computer simulation to see what happens, but than how do I keep my bias out of it?
Hee,Hee. Your really not going to like me for this next one.
I would argue company B has to do more marketing in order to break in to the market already paved by the first company. Presuming company A has good service & support and is responsive to their customers, in other words 'a stand up company', than company B has a much harder battle to fight to gain market & mind share. I don't know how much marketing drives the cost of a "complex physical device" though.
To me, drugs are even a harder sell. Effectively it is "educated guessing", throwing different chemicals together to see what you get. Yes, I know the "educated" part is the most important. But how is this much different than mineral/resource based companies that spend millions of dollars searching for gold,diamonds,oil etc? Nobody gives these companies a "patent" on these products. Hell, what if the drug that a company finds and develops is created naturally? Are companies entitled to a patent just because they found the chemical first and showed it had some beneficial effect? The next step already being taken is genetic engineering. Again, "just" taking genes, splicing them together and "hoping" for a beneficial outcome. Do that often enough and your bound to come up with something. I don't see how "educated" luck should be rewarded with a monopoly.
Obviously I have no way to prove it, but without patents I believe that research would still be conducted. It might take on the form of mainly University researchers who would be funded by all these "chemical factories" you mention just waiting to pump out the new drug. Even without proof I think it's obvious that research wouldn't be so "cloak and dagger" thus researchers would have no reason not to share their findings, possibly leading to faster returns. Just look at free software as an example of this idea.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting.
Your last paragraph doesn't entirely jibe with your earlier statements.
Specifically, if "reviewers & authors are unpaid" why this latter statement "The peer review is essential, and that is what costs money." Note I'm not disagreeing with you as to the value of journals, I'm just working on a thought.
If reviewers are unpaid what are the actual costs in peer review? Not in publishing or other aspects of getting a paper in a journal, but rather the actual peer review, what are the costs there?
Of course if your two pieces of broadcast "land" overlap that's a problem. But you made an artificial distinction. Your analogy with land would only be correct if you said that you own a plot of land at 1001 north maple street and I own the whole of the 1000 block of north maple street. See? Our real land overlaps, which of course is a problem. But for real land we have legal precedent (and deeds/bills of sale) going back hundreds(thousands?) of years to work out where the dividing line is.
If we both broadcast at a wattage where the signals don't interfere than they are two seperate pieces of the "broadcast space". They can be sold as two seperate pieces and legally treated that way. If I wanted to broadcast in to your "broadcast space"(your land) I'd have to buy it(or rent it) from you or face civil or criminal charges.
The FCC currently licenses the "broadcast space" exactly in the manner I describe in my second paragraph(e.g. non-overlapping). In other words, in the US the FCC is the sole proprietor and owner of the "broadcast space"(in Canada it is the CRTC).
Would you feel comfortable if your government owned all the land and ownly licensed it to you? You wouldn't actually have ownership and you could only do with it what your govenment said. Of course if you say yes, than you and I have a fundamental disagreement as to the role of government but that's a different story. (oh and before you go in to all the laws that apply to land usage, these aren't "license" terms dictated by one omnipresent government agency, they are laws passed by elected officials that can be voted in and out of office at the voters pleasure. They are by-laws or city ordinances that have been built up over long periods of time and generally apply in only certain regions,counties, cities etc. Ownership still invests with you, the government can't take it away, barring eminent domain or nonpayment of taxes.)
Except that the point isn't about what you can do on your property it is whether you have the ownership of the property to begin with.
Your cost justification is about use not about ownership. To be able to broadcast on all those frequencies you first have to own them, and you have to own the rights in every "jurisdiction" where you plan to broadcast.
We parcel out "public" land areas all the time. Setting aside certain frequencies for military, emergency civilian, "high" risk civilian(airlines), and just "park" use, can be done.
By the way, you never heard of a toll road?
The usable spectrum can be parceled out in both frequency and wattage(limiting the trasmission distance). Meaning if you can't get spectrum in NYC you can "still go somewhere else". But even if governments we're stupid enough to sell off a given frequency for usage everywhere, you can bet that the person owning it initially would certainly parcel it out that way.
The possibilities of the scenario are endless, be creative with the analogy and I think you'll see it's not all that far fetched. I can't say positively that it would be better than the current methods of regulation but it certainly would be different.
Consider for instance if RF "trespassing" was defined something like "usage of another person's RF spectrum in a manner that interfered with that usage"(not saying it would be but hey I'm just making this up right?). Bluetooth is defined so that it interferes as little as possible with other RF sources, eg. it is low power. WiFi is in a part of the spectrum made "public" by the FCC(at least that's my understanding), it could still be so in a "sell off" scenario, just like we have park land set aside for public use but we sell off all nonpublic land.
Most people seem to take "different" to mean bad, especially when it involves an idea that's been around for more than a few years. I'm not sure why this is the case. Different is just that, "not the same", we can imagine outcomes and scenarios but until it's tried it just remains "different". Furthermore, surely you don't believe the FCC will remain an institution forever do you?(by the way, I'm in Canada our equivalent is the CRTC).
The RF spectrum that the radios can pick up from a given distance from your transmitter is the relevant quantity.
Transmitting from Manhattan isn't going to get to somebody in Fargo,ND, or at least not without a powerful transmitter.
By selling both the spectrum and the allowed wattage you now effectively have a 2-D resource. Both land usage & RF spectrum usage can also be parametized by time(rentals for instance). So land use is 4-D(although limited in height by bylaws usually) and the RF spectrum is 3-D.
My point being however, that there is no fundamental reason to treat the RF spectrum different than land use on earth. Both are limited resources, nobody has a problem with the concept that some corporation might control all the land why do we consider this a viable reality for the spectrum?
Note that I'm not saying that it is a good idea to sell off the spectrum totally unregulated. But we regulate land usage all the time. Making it more similar to land use may not hurt. It is a different scenario than what we currently have, neither necessarily better nor worse but certainly different.
Just how limited do you really think it is?
Is it any more limited than the land in NewYork City, Brooklyn, Manhatten island...?
The scenarios you worry about are no different than those for actual land and we don't have all land rapped up by one company. Yes there are companies that let land stagnate but why should the airwaves be treated differently?
All your saying is that if things were different they wouldn't be the same. At this level of analysis we can't possibly say what the results would be only that they would in fact be diffferent.
Obviously you didn't read the article.
Ever heard of trespass?
The idea was to sell off the spectrum than allow the owners to treat it like land.
Go ahead and broadcast, you'll be thrown in jail just as fast as if you tried it now.
Sure the ad buyer is probably always biased, that's the point of the ad. However, the one potentially accepting the money always has the choice to decide if they want to support any given biased message. If an ad has the potential to not reflect the opinions/bias of the editorial staff why would you accept the money?
An unbiased source would not likely pay for an ad to promote a product but they might pay for one to promote themselves(e.g. JD Power & Associates, Consumer Reports, others that are supposedly unbiased). They may even pay for an ad such as "come check out our unbiased review of Linux server vs Windows server to get the real skinny on TCO". Again this just promotes themselves not either product.
Nope, because the similarity is only skin deep.
/. is primarily pro-linux, Linux is not it's entire reason for being. Information of all types for Nerds is given, including but not limited to Oracle, IBM, your rights on-line, hardware, gaming, PDA's etc.,etc.
/. presentation of the Microsoft FUD because this isn't a Linux only site.
While
LinuxToday is "only" a Linux site. Accepting money
from a biased source to provide FUD is insulting to the community that the site is directed at.
I accept the
Far too late to be making a comment on a story now but...
The Cigar lake Mine in Saskatchewan is a highly concentrated naturally occuring Uranium site.
http://www.nuclearfaq.ca/cnf_sectionE.htm#v2
Note that it is so radioactive that the last time I looked they hadn't figured out how to mine it yet and that comes from Mother Nature herself.
Sorry about that, I did in fact put words in your mouth, please accept my apology I did not mean to do it I just got sloppy.
You didn't say it was unuseable, however you did say the sheep weren't being sold because the area is "too contaminated". The article clearly shows that the sheep from the areas are rehabilitated and sold. So the affect is being mitigated.
Just because there are areas "contaminated" by radioactive particles doesn't mean this is a bad thing. Once again, put it in perspective, how much extra radiation above background is being "added" to the area. Finding radioactive particles in biota isn't any big revelation, the "problem" comes if that radiation actually caused health problems.
The "problem" of "waste" disposal has been "solved". Any hold up now is purely political. Although I do not advocate this scenario, simply dumping the whole works in a deep part(miles) of the ocean would suffice. Encasing the waste in glass, which is further encased in rust proof housings, and putting the whole works back where it came from is overkill. Note that in Saskatchewan, Canada where I am from there is a deposit of almost reactor grade uranium that has a layer of clay between it and water. The uranium hasn't leached out in millions of years. It has survived glaciers, shifting continents and earthquakes.
I won't discuss terrorist scenarios either as I simply don't consider any of them credible. Actually, I wish terrorists would concentrate on trying to get nuclear material, it would keep their hands off really nasty stuff like fertilizer & diesel fuel.
By the way, I'm not stupid I know Britain isn't all that large. Even so, as the Chernobyl accident indicated, weather would play a dramatic affect in exactly which areas are affected. The contamination was very unevenly distributed. A wind blowing out to sea near a Brit power plant would indicate an extremely minor impact(note I don't know prevailing wind directions in Britain so I don't know if that is reasonable.) The point those is that an accident in Britain is no way guaranteed to affect the whole of the British Isles.
And there you go again with that "land unfit for sheep". It isn't unfit for sheep. They mature nicely there and before slaughter are moved to "clean" land to get rid of any contaminants through natural means. And now you point me to a "fishy" story. Look, I don't doubt that there is radioactivity in these animals but the question is one of levels. Guess what, your radioactive too you know? I guess you better stay away from people.
Radioactivity isn't the boogy man. It occurs naturally around you. Without it, it's very likely we wouldn't be here to argue over how bad it is. "Solar panel production produces chemicals that are known to cause cancer and other nasty birth defects anti-solar campaigners have good reason to resist the introduction of more solar power production." Without context neither your or my statement mean anything and are only intended to scare people.
We kill somewhere in the region of 50,000 people every year due to the use of Coal fired plants. The environment is (supposedly) drastically over stuffed with C02 and other toxic substances from Coal. Nuclear energy provides a clean, safe replacement. There will be deaths and sickness due to the use of nuclear energy just as there would be for solar but the far and away greater likelihood is that these would be significantly reduced with extensive Nuclear programs compared to what we do now.
But your link doesn't contradict anything I said. And you said specifically that land in Cumbria was unuseable. That's simply false, I can give you the benefit of the doubt that you misunderstood but perpetuating the idea that the land is unuseable does more harm than good.
With any man made device I can never say never, but(there's always a but), do British and French reactors not use containment buildings? This one factor alone could have drastically reduced the affects of Chernobyl.
Furthermore, as the article you pointed to makes plain, the area affected ran in to a particularly bad series of circumstances(e.g. rain during the accident and land that caused uptake in Cesium in plants rather than staying in the soil). So your concerns over a British or French accident is once again an extreme overstatement. Don't get me wrong though, an accident in Britain or France would be bad but not nearly as bad as you claim. There would be plenty of land to grow stuff just as there is in the Ukraine, Belarus and Russia(the hardest hit areas).
Go ahead and let people know that Chernobyl is still affecting the British Isles but do me a favor, please be accurate and put it in perspective. I jumped in on this discussion because a parent post indicated that the public's view of nuclear accidents is out of proportion with their actual affects as well as out of proportion with the risks people put up with every day. You believed otherwise, yet you have proven that the originally poster is correct in almost everything you've said.
Consider your statement "Cancer for all! Yippee!!!". Check up on the affects of Chernobyl to the population surrounding it. While there are definite increases in cancer(mainly thyroid), it isn't "Cancer for all!" not even close.
The point is to keep it in perspective. A nuclear reactor accident is bad but no where near as bad as the daily affects of burning coal. I have seen credible estimates of 50,000 deaths/year due to coal use(can't remember if that is world wide or just US).
I did a google search on Chernobyl & Cumbria, I found no reference to land which can't be grazed(admittedly I didn't spend a tonne of time looking) but did find reference to the fact that sheep from affected land are periodically moved to unaffected land to let them expire radioactive Cesium from their systems. So while this confirms your statement that Cumbria still has radioactive affects from Chernobyl it isn't as big a deal as you imply(e.g. as the parent poster indicated the affects of radiation are consistantly exaggerated).
Interestingly(to me at least) the 1/2 life of Cesium in sheep is 10 days. In other words 1/2 the contamination is released from a sheep every 10 days. Which makes it fairly straight forward to "decontaminate" infected sheep.
The people of Western Europe should be frightend of idiots pretending to be nuclear energy workers. The Russian's did almost everything wrong!
Actually this isn't a dumb question at all the only "real" objection is that environmentalists would find this very highly objectionable.
I don't have the numbers around right now but if you get ahold of a book by Bernard Cohen called "Before it's too late" he does all kinds of simple arithmetic to show just how stupid our over engineering of waste disposal is.
The fact is you could dump it in the ocean without shielding and have minimal impact on the environment. Consider that there is already enough Uranium in sea water to use in normal LWR type reactors to last billions of years. The minimal additional radioactivity from spent fuel cells would go unnoticed.
(Butt covering time: I do not actually advocate such a policy as dumping in the ocean but only because it would simply be too difficult to get the "normal" person to realize just how safe it is. Hell they're scared enough as it is could you imaging if we went around telling them we're just going to drive it out in to the middle of the ocean and through it overboard! It's very sad in an ironic sort of way.)
Just so you have an interesting mental graphic for people. Next time they ask this question just tell them that all 1.3 million of the spent fuel bundles from Canada's CANDU reactor's would fit in the space of 3 hockey rinks filled to the top of the boards.
The size of 1 CANDU fuel bundle that provides enough electicity for 1 household for 100 years is about the size of your average fire log! Now that's energy production baby!
Actually, yes, yes I do. In fact I will cash in on this irrational fear by charging a certain amount per gram/per year and I will make Billions, I will be richer than Mr. Gates.
I don't know what it's like in Britain but decommissioning costs have been included in North American Nuke plans for quite some time. It's (usually) put on as an extra cost/KW or something like that. In other words the plants are forced to set aside x amount of money for decommissioning.
Hey, speak for yourself, I like nuclear energy just fine.
"You think the rest of the world doesn't know how lame y'all are? Coverup your government, failing space agency, lame retro-technology."
I read this and had to remind myself your talking about China and not the US. Seriously, think about that for a second, this describes the US to a T.
It's about time. The article at the end of that link describes OS/2's Workplace Shell! I've been hoping that it would be ported to Linux but if the boys at Gnome are starting down that path I better have another look. I loved the Workplace shell.
The idea of the "finder browser" especially saved browsers sound like the Workplace Shell Templates to a T. Needless to say this was all supported by the Metadata built in to the HPFS filesystem. You could add any user data item to a file you wanted(e.g. the articles idea of a "label") and it was stored with the file.
I continue to maintain that the Workplace Shell was years ahead of it's time. If we had the shear horsepower than that we do now plus have IBM actually care to push the product, computing would be a totally different landscape. But of course that's just "fandom" speaking.
The metaphore is powerful but are users actually prepared to switch to it enmasse. It is so powerfully different than they are used to with Window's I think people would just look at it and be scared "Hey where's my Start Menu?". Maybe we can find a way to weene them off.
You aren't required to adopt any technology. However, if you conspire to NOT adopt something than that's collusion and should be fined/actionable. If they had all independantly decided they didn't like Rambus than that's o.k. But if you trade e-mails about how you should close them out of the market that's illegal.
I hope it didn't happen because Rambus is one hell of a f*(ked up company.
Your basing this sentiment on the idea that the RIAA will be forthcoming with their own accounting. It is the RIAA members that are supposed to do the tracking and than tell the artist or their accountant how much they owe. Of course this is like giving a cat the keys to the henhouse so I'm not surprised that they "couldn't find" David Bowie.
Let's see now, where would we find David today, oh how about we go to the west coast and turn left...
Maximize shareholder ROI, that's it dammit! Great idea, now if only I can find the time.
We're sticking to drugs now are we? (good debate tactic by the way, stick to the hardest question for me to debate).
As far as developing something from "scratch", how often does that really happen? All research builds on previous work. Nature certainly plays a role in this otherwise we wouldn't know what DNA was to begin with.
As well, nature provides us with untold riches as to the chemicals we use to enhance our health(penecilin anyone?).
I agree that the reward is definitely less for any SINGLE company but I'm not sure that the same reward wouldn't be spread out amongst all those "chemical" factories you mentioned. Well o.k., it's hard to argue that all these companies would realize the same reward as "monopoly" pricing, but I'm not sure that's a "bad thing"(TM). However, although reward is less for a single company the risks are significantly reduced as well.
Altuism in todays market is in short supply I agree. But I'm taking the position of "no patents" remember? In that alternate universe altruism would be all you would have. But than it wouldn't be altruism, it would be the natural method of investing in future technology. Anyway, it's never going to happen unless I build a computer simulation to see what happens, but than how do I keep my bias out of it?
Hee,Hee. Your really not going to like me for this next one.
I would argue company B has to do more marketing in order to break in to the market already paved by the first company. Presuming company A has good service & support and is responsive to their customers, in other words 'a stand up company', than company B has a much harder battle to fight to gain market & mind share. I don't know how much marketing drives the cost of a "complex physical device" though.
To me, drugs are even a harder sell. Effectively it is "educated guessing", throwing different chemicals together to see what you get. Yes, I know the "educated" part is the most important. But how is this much different than mineral/resource based companies that spend millions of dollars searching for gold,diamonds,oil etc? Nobody gives these companies a "patent" on these products. Hell, what if the drug that a company finds and develops is created naturally? Are companies entitled to a patent just because they found the chemical first and showed it had some beneficial effect? The next step already being taken is genetic engineering. Again, "just" taking genes, splicing them together and "hoping" for a beneficial outcome. Do that often enough and your bound to come up with something. I don't see how "educated" luck should be rewarded with a monopoly.
Obviously I have no way to prove it, but without patents I believe that research would still be conducted. It might take on the form of mainly University researchers who would be funded by all these "chemical factories" you mention just waiting to pump out the new drug. Even without proof I think it's obvious that research wouldn't be so "cloak and dagger" thus researchers would have no reason not to share their findings, possibly leading to faster returns. Just look at free software as an example of this idea.