Neutrons running amok in the reactor vessel (which, if it wasn't obvious, is a big metal container with the reactor core inside) cause two things to happen:
1. Some small fraction of the metal atoms absorb neutrons and change from stable isotopes to non-stable ones. Cobalt-60, with a half-life short enough to be pretty radioactive, and long enough to be a nuisance, is the biggest issue here.
2. Neutron embrittlement occurs. The reactor vessel becomes more prone to cracking instead of stretching under pressure changes. This is likely to be less of an issue in a low-pressure fusion reactor than in a high-pressure fission reactor.
Both effects are known in advance, and designed around, though the earliest reactors were built without this (later) information. I don't know how many of the "earliest" reactors are still operational. My guess is none, but that's a guess.
Only real long term issue is the radioisotopes in the reactor vessel. This is why you have to mothball the reactor before dismantling it. Ideally, once you dismantle the things, you'd recover the Co-60 and related radioisotopes, but practically, it doesn't occur in amounts that are worth the trouble.
So you have to dispose of it in some "safe" way. Sealing it in glass bricks and stacking it in some out-of-the-way corner of the desert would do nicely.
Given the US's past (present and future) trend towards rampant, unbridled, unhindered, wanton capitalism,
YOu should read more history. "Capitalism" was far more "rampant, unbridled, unhindered, wanton" in the 19th century. Current trends are (and have been for several generations) rather in the other direction.
Well, in my area there aren't any alternatives. Every grocery chain requires you to have a tracking card to get reasonable prices. Nearly everything I buy is at a 50% or higher discount now. I can't afford not to use a discount card.
I'm impressed. My discount card (the one that claims I'm an old Abanian lady) gives me maybe a 3% discount on a good day. I suggest that you get a new one, using the name of your next door neighbor, if they worry you. Or your boss. Or use "William Hickock"...
- Customers don't make the connection between companies handing over their private info and the results like junk mail and telemarketing.
Alternatively, many people don't think junk mail or telemarketing is that big a deal. Toss the junkmail unread, and hang up on the telemarketers. I use both of those techniques. My wife, on the other hand, being more vocal about her privacy, usually yells obscenities at the phone before she hangs up.
- Some privacy violations have abstract and not concrete results like your data going into some giant government database, e.g. TIA, CAPPS II. So either customers don't know about it, don't care because it doesn't affect their everyday lives, or don't make the connection back to the company that handed over their data.
This is the reason I consider privacy an issue. So I contaminate databases wherever possible. For instance, the NYTimes thinks I am a 90+ year old Albanian. As does my local grocery chain, last I looked.
- Customer have no choice. We assume everybody will sell your data to telemarketers given the chance.
True enough. I concede I am in this group. And it doesn't bother me. Hanging up works just as well if I have a choice as if I don't.
Far as I can tell, most people consider whatever small loss of privacy they suffer to be worth the convenience. Targetted advertising may be obnoxious, but no more so than random advertising. Giving up on credit cards is more trouble than it is worth, etc.
And they will continue to think so, no matter the harping on the subject by privacy advocates, until someone uses their lack of privacy against them in some obvious way. Then, likely as not, they'll overreact horribly.
How do these Grand Juries know "what the citizens want"? Which citizens?
The Grand Jury is chosen by lot from among those eligible for Jury Duty. That is, registered voters. Where I served, the normal Jury pool had (as I recall) 20 people chosen by lot from among the hundred or so in the particular Jury pool for that court session.
Let's get this straight: you like how a Grand Jury can ignore prosecutors' evidence?
Yes, I do. Isn't it nice that a Grand Jury can refuse to indict you for violating the DMCA if enough of them think the law is a bad law?
That "Fifth Amendment -Free Zone" seems pretty cool?
Yes. It allows one to learn the TRUTH. Which frequently is overlooked as a relevant part of justice. Note also that since immunity is granted for speaking to a Grand Jury (as I said, and as you obviously ignored), lack of Fifth Amendment protections doesn't hurt anyone.
Tossing due process is pretty convenient?
Well, no. The Grand Jury (in places it is used) is PART of Due Process. It is not an exception to it. In places where a Grand Jury is used, the ONLY way to indict someone is through the action of the Grand Jury.
Harassing controversial political publishers is OK, as long as it just wastes their time in defending themselves?
the alternative, to allow a single government agent (the DA, as an example) to harass citizens is better? You are more likely to have a hard time convincing 20 randomly chosen people that a crime has been committed than you are to convince a DA (who wants to be reelected, and thus "tough on crime") that a crime has not been commited.
Unless the crime is one of those obvious, offensive to everyone sorts of things, like murder. The more subtle forms of crime, like copyright infringements and such, are far more likely to get a pass by a Grand Jury than murder is.
I checked. 1986. 18 years ago. "ten years after" was eight years ago. No clue whether sheep are still eating radioactive grass. Are you saying that eating British mutton is unsafe? If not, who cares whether they are eating radioactive grass? If so, stop feeding the silly sheep , and the problem will go away.
And as to the problem still being there 10 years later and thousands of miles away: isn't global warming a side-effect of fossil fuel plants that will be felt centuries later and all over the world? Put things in perspective.
I doubt that anyone will ever know just how much radioactive strontium was in the Chernobyl reactor when the interlocks were removed. But it is fairly safe to say that it was on the order of 1% of the mass of the nuclear fuel in the reactor (and the -238 filler doesn't count). So, almost certainly less than 50 kg. Probably less than 5 kg. Grind that up small, and distribute it over the area within 3000km of Chernobyl, and you have a couple micrograms per hectare. There are more radioactives naturally occurring in your body than that. It's not no risk, but it's a smaller risk than being run over by a drunk Mardi Gras float driver (which may not happen much where you are, but happens from time to time here)
50-100 years is nothing, and it's not the fuel or exhaust that you need to worry about, only the parts of the reactor itself that become radioactive from neutron bombardment. So, we only need to store retired reactor parts for 50-100 years, which is much less mass and much less duration than what we currently produce from nuclear plants, and massivly less environmental impact when compared to the equivilent fossil fuel usage.
The part that becomes radioactive from neutron bombardment is called the "reactor vessel". It weighs about 1000 times as much as the fuel in a fission reactor. The irradiatted iron/nickel/chromium/cobalt/whatever-else-is-in-yo ur-alloy-of choice has a much shorter half-life, and this is far more radioactive than the spent fuel rods.
You'd probably get more irradiated metal in a fusion reactor than a fission reactor, though this no doubt depends on design details. But the neutron flux will be higher, per watt, so expect it to tend toward more radiatted metal rather than less.
In other words, don't expect fusion to be cleaner than fission. There'll be a different mix of radioactive byproducts, but it is by no means clear that there will be less, or that said byproducts will be easier to dispose of.
find? hmm, the canal behind my house should have a couple tons of it, at a guess.
Gather? most sewage treatment plants process tons of the stuff every day.
Conectrate? There's the rub! Searate water into H2 and O2, toss the O2, then separate the H2 into H2 and D2. No clue as to actual numbers. But I am sure it is tiny compared to the energy to be extracted by fusing the stuff.
Not that I expect fusion to work in my lifetime. It's been just a few decades away since I was a boy. and that's been a while.
I use Standard of Living in the conventional way. It is healthier to do "honest work" (the kind that involves you sweating a lot while holding a shovel;-) ). But sweating a lot is not considered a "high standard of living". driving a Beemer across the street to buy another video-game is a "high standard of living".
Assuming that the existing economy makes , and employs enough people to do so, then if one reduces the market to 20% of its previous level, then 80% of the people who WERE employed need not be employed. I make no distinction between Mom&Pop stores and GM.
Though, of course, GM would likely be hit sooner than a Mom&Pop. But Walmart is already hitting the Mom&Pop stores hard. It's tough to compete with someone who can offer lower prices.
Thing to realize is that productivity really has gone up dramatically. It takes fewer people to make the "necessities". Which is why we keep redefining "necessity" to include more things. A desktop home computer used to be a luxury. Then, later, it was "normal", and a laptop was a luxury. Now, a laptop is moving rapidly into "normal", and a desktop system is a "necessity".
Same for telephones/cellphones. Telephone was luxury, then "normal", then "necessity". Cycle started again with cellphone, and is rapidly reaching the point of "necessity" (may already be there - just added our third cellphone to our family account, so the daughter would have one).
When I was a lad, a car was already a "necessity" if you lived outside a city. "Two car" families were definitely upper-middle class, if not lower-upper-class. By the time I learned to drive (back when you could get an unrestricted license at 15), a "two car" family was the norm for the middle class, and the one car per driver was rapidly becoming the norm (my family wasn't upper middle class by any means, but by the time my younger brother was driving, we had one car per driver.
These are examples of "former luxuries" that are now considered "necessities". I could come up with more (fresh vegetables year round, for one) without trying hard. If we were to truly drop back to the necessities by the standards of the '30s, there would be a dramatic impact on our economy. Note that an economic downturn that was once touted as "the worst economy in 50 years" (it wasn't) did not force people to drop back to a standard of living as low as the 70's, much less the 30's. Trust me, by modern measurements, the 30's qualified well below "dirt poor", even when people were employed (unemployment was high, but most people still were employed, even then).
I think Chernobyl melted down around 82? In the 80s I think. I'm only 14, so I don't remember the Soviets, but being towards the end of the Cold War, the Soviet economic situation would have been quite poor, and they could not have afforded maintenence, etc. as well as we can now.
Chernobyl is interesting. The design was inherently less safe than it could have been, but one must remember when it was built. At that time, the design looked quite good. However, that wasn't actually the problem.
Chernobyl melted down as a result of a test by the Soviet version of the NRC. Someone wanted to find out how much power could be extracted from a reactor that was melting down. This information would allow them to better plan for dealing with a reactor meltdown. So....
The Soviet NRC guys came out, disabled all the safety interlocks in place, and tried to "simulate" a reactor meltdown. Worked like a charm! The "simulation" was so realistic they couldn't hardly believe it (that last was sarcasm, if it wasn't obvious).
With the exception of possible undocumented losses of nuclear submarines by the Soviets, there have been four or five nuclear problems serious enough to ruin a reactor (not all of them were serious enough to escape into the environment). That's not a terribly bad safety record, especially since none of them have been technical issues - in all cases, the problems were induced by human stupidity. Of which, I admit, we have an abundant supply.
2. Cut seriously back on what we spend energy on. Does an average household really need several TVs, computers, electronic games, microwave ovens, electric can openers etc etc - or are these things just stupid luxuries? If you want to know about what is essential and what isn't, try going on a holiday with a tent (and no car!) or something. It's not a lot of hardship living without a large part of all those things.
The tent holiday example shows how little we actually need to survive - comfortably, even. So stop consuming so much unnecessary crap - the most blindingly stupid example I know of is the way our society produces 'instant rubbish': the wrappers, mostly plastic (ie. made from oil), that comes with so many things. Can you think of anything more extreme?
It's fascinating to see people talking about how we could get along without those little luxuries. Especially when they had to use one of them (a computer) to do the post.
A quibble: microwaves are generally more energy efficient than ovens for heating things up.
In general, I agree that people are in love with their "stuff". And would be healthier without the "stuff". And have a standard of living that is considerably worse than they do now (think about the effect on the economy - your own job, if noone else's) if we all bought only what we "needed". Not saying that only buying what is needed is bad, but consider the transitional pain of a society living at a 1930 standard of living, with modern prodcution techniques. It is likely that 80% of everyone would be perpetually unemployed. Which, now I think of it, would mean more time for me to play videogames....
Do you? How about figuring out how much energy is required to ship a terajoule's worth of reactor-grade uranium across the country, as opposed to a terajoule worth of coal/gasoline/biodiesel/whatever?
Do you know how much energy it takes to grow your plants, process them into fuel, deliver same? Or how much CO2 is emitted when "biodiesel" is burned?
Or how much it takes to build a wind generator, maintain it, and dispose of it? And how much effect on global weather would there be if, say, 30% of our energy were extracted from the ambient wind?
Repeat same for wave generators? Anyone ever figured out how much it costs, and what the long-term effects are?
I don't pretend to know whether wind/wave generators can be cost-effective. Haven't done the research. Biodiesel is a waste, in terms of global warming - doesn't much matter whether the emissions come from petroleum or corn, they're still in atmosphere. I *do* know that uranium reactors (or plutonium reactors), properly designed, are reasonably clean (That should excite some horrendous reactions from the anti-nuke zealots!), emit no greenhouse gases, and (barring lawsuits) are no more expensive than the alternatives (not counting the greenhouse emissions of the alternatives).
Sounds like they're suffering from the same market fragmentation as the War Gaming (tabletop wargaming, of course) industry did once upon a time.
Many games, each requiring a significant time to master, means that fewer people will play each one. And as the games get more expensive to make (as they try ever harder to attract an audience share), they require more players to be profitably made.
Actually, I would assume the purpose of this is to remove personal bias from the grading system. It will not work, of course, until we can teach a computer English (or such other language as you wish to teach).
Until a computer can understand the difference between "Time flies like an arrow" and "Fruit flies like a banana", computer-grading of essays isn't here yet.
The websites not only had the internal Diebold memos but some even had the actual GEMS software and sample voting data files to play with.
The webpages included instructions on how to intall the software on your Windows computer and then use Microsoft Access to easily bypass the all security features. As I recall, it also explained how to modify the "AuditLog" and bypass the audit trail.
Just out of curiousity, did anyone bother to prove that this software was Diebold's software? Or did they just take someone's word for it? Someone who obviously had an axe to grind.
Myself, I live in a place that has had electronic voting for a long time. I've occasionally griped about how subject E-voting is to subvert, but I have to concede that traditional voting is easily subvertable in other ways. So, I don't really give a rat's hind leg about California's problems with Diebold (or with anyone else they buy the machines from, really). But you people seem to be accepting the statements of one side pretty much at face value here, and vilifying the statements of the other side....
No, a Grand Jury (which I served on once upon a time) is not some nefarious plot to steal your computers.
Grand Juries aren't about doing whatever the Prosecutor wants. Usually, they're about doing whatever the citizens want - the Prosecutor can ask them to investigate something, but there is no requirement that they do so. The Prosecutor can present all sorts of evidence that a crime has occurred, and the Grand Jury can vote not to indict (we did, in one case), and the Prosecutor can tell the Grand Jury not to indict someone, and have them indicted anyway (we did that too).
The reason Grand Juries are secret is that there are no Fifth Amendment protections when facing a Grand Jury. Yes, a Grand Jury can require you to answer a question you'd rather not (like, "Did you kill your wife?"). That said, testifying before a Grand Jury grants immunity to prosecution for any crimes discussed in your testimony. So, we had to be VERY careful about who we "invited" to talk to us. Wouldn't do at all to accidently invite the murderer to testify, thinking he was just a material witness....
It should further be noted that the Grand Jury concept came about to protect people from abuses by the government. No matter what the government says, the Grand Jury can indict or not at its whim - and if it refuses to indict, the Prosecutor/DA is just SOL, no matter how bad he wants a trial.
And finally, even if this person whose logs are being subpoena'd is considered "one of the good guys", and even if Diebold and the Republicans are "bad guys", stealing things is still illegal, so the Grand Jury investigation may be warranted.
And even more finally, why are you people whinging about this? The lady is a journalist, which means she can invoke Source Protection laws, if applicable, and refuse to turn over any information....
No. This was done before Popes were infallible. And not even the Church believes that everything they decree is "divine law". I hope. Because if they did, they really would be the Anti-Christ that early protestants believed them to be.
Sure, unmanned probes produce a lot of interesting information. But how much of that is terribly useful if we just sit here quietly on this planet until extinction takes us?
Hubble has produced some fascinating things. It shoud be preserved and extended until a replacement is in place. But how would we be worse off if it had never been launched? Not in terms of science, but in terms of the way people live. After all, if manned space travel is a waste of money, how much value can be assigned to putting a telescope in space to look at the stars (which will essentially be just lights in the sky if we don't visit them someday)? Personally, I put a high value on science. But if we turn our backs on space, then we may as well do it right - forget deep-space probes, forget orbital missions that don't directly affect Earth. Keep the commsats and weathersats in place, and ignore the rest - because they won't really matter....
I, alas, have the engineering viewpoint - absent intention to go there, learning something about a place is pretty much shruggable.
Actually, I don't think "preserving the Earth" is a humble goal. It fits my definition of "grandiose" a bit better. But as far as that being a goal of humanity, that goal posits a fairly short lifetime for humanity. The planet won't be here forever. Or even a very long time, in cosmic terms.
Survival shouldn't require abandoning Earth. Even if we can live elsewhere, it's not like we can allow asteroids to hit the motherland anyway.
Why should going other places imply "abandoning earth"? Did humanity abandon Europe when the Americas were rediscovered? Some people will go, some will stay.
And you may not be willing to "allow" asteroids to hit the motherland, but if we turn our backs on space, we really won't have much ability to stop one. The unmanned mission theory of asteroid defelection has a fatal flaw (which is shown quite clearly in our recent Mars missions) - if the vehicle fails to do its job properly, for whatever reason, it's a LONG wait till you can try again. Men on site, at least, have the wherewithal to do "adapt and overcome" if something goes wrong - they may fail, but they can try again. Without a year-long wait for the second vehicle to arrive....
Besides, what kind of dorky attitude is it that nobody should be allowed to build on an idea for twenty years?!? Imagine that somebody has had a trivial idea and you get the same idea from elsewhere, and build something much larger on it. Well, you cannot use your ideas for the next twenty years if the first person has patented it.
You have a misunderstanding about patents. if someone patents something, and you come up with an improvement to his idea, you are free to patent your improvement. The fact that you must get a license to use his patent in order to use YOUR patent is just part of the patent concept.
Likewise, if he than improves upon YOUR idea, he must get a license from YOU to use his improved idea (which is based on your improvement to his original idea).
Now, it is possible that someone will refuse to license his patents. I am unsure of the legality of this. However, this does NOT stop you from developing improvements to his patented idea, and patenting them. And he is NOT free to use your patents just because they require his patents to be useful. "Derivative works" are protected under Copyright, NOT under Patent Law.
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What he said.
Neutrons running amok in the reactor vessel (which, if it wasn't obvious, is a big metal container with the reactor core inside) cause two things to happen:
1. Some small fraction of the metal atoms absorb neutrons and change from stable isotopes to non-stable ones. Cobalt-60, with a half-life short enough to be pretty radioactive, and long enough to be a nuisance, is the biggest issue here.
2. Neutron embrittlement occurs. The reactor vessel becomes more prone to cracking instead of stretching under pressure changes. This is likely to be less of an issue in a low-pressure fusion reactor than in a high-pressure fission reactor. Both effects are known in advance, and designed around, though the earliest reactors were built without this (later) information. I don't know how many of the "earliest" reactors are still operational. My guess is none, but that's a guess.
Only real long term issue is the radioisotopes in the reactor vessel. This is why you have to mothball the reactor before dismantling it. Ideally, once you dismantle the things, you'd recover the Co-60 and related radioisotopes, but practically, it doesn't occur in amounts that are worth the trouble.
So you have to dispose of it in some "safe" way. Sealing it in glass bricks and stacking it in some out-of-the-way corner of the desert would do nicely.
YOu should read more history. "Capitalism" was far more "rampant, unbridled, unhindered, wanton" in the 19th century. Current trends are (and have been for several generations) rather in the other direction.
I'm impressed. My discount card (the one that claims I'm an old Abanian lady) gives me maybe a 3% discount on a good day. I suggest that you get a new one, using the name of your next door neighbor, if they worry you. Or your boss. Or use "William Hickock"...
Alternatively, many people don't think junk mail or telemarketing is that big a deal. Toss the junkmail unread, and hang up on the telemarketers. I use both of those techniques. My wife, on the other hand, being more vocal about her privacy, usually yells obscenities at the phone before she hangs up.
- Some privacy violations have abstract and not concrete results like your data going into some giant government database, e.g. TIA, CAPPS II. So either customers don't know about it, don't care because it doesn't affect their everyday lives, or don't make the connection back to the company that handed over their data.
This is the reason I consider privacy an issue. So I contaminate databases wherever possible. For instance, the NYTimes thinks I am a 90+ year old Albanian. As does my local grocery chain, last I looked.
- Customer have no choice. We assume everybody will sell your data to telemarketers given the chance.
True enough. I concede I am in this group. And it doesn't bother me. Hanging up works just as well if I have a choice as if I don't.
Far as I can tell, most people consider whatever small loss of privacy they suffer to be worth the convenience. Targetted advertising may be obnoxious, but no more so than random advertising. Giving up on credit cards is more trouble than it is worth, etc.
And they will continue to think so, no matter the harping on the subject by privacy advocates, until someone uses their lack of privacy against them in some obvious way. Then, likely as not, they'll overreact horribly.
The Grand Jury is chosen by lot from among those eligible for Jury Duty. That is, registered voters. Where I served, the normal Jury pool had (as I recall) 20 people chosen by lot from among the hundred or so in the particular Jury pool for that court session.
Let's get this straight: you like how a Grand Jury can ignore prosecutors' evidence?
Yes, I do. Isn't it nice that a Grand Jury can refuse to indict you for violating the DMCA if enough of them think the law is a bad law?
That "Fifth Amendment -Free Zone" seems pretty cool?
Yes. It allows one to learn the TRUTH. Which frequently is overlooked as a relevant part of justice. Note also that since immunity is granted for speaking to a Grand Jury (as I said, and as you obviously ignored), lack of Fifth Amendment protections doesn't hurt anyone.
Tossing due process is pretty convenient?
Well, no. The Grand Jury (in places it is used) is PART of Due Process. It is not an exception to it. In places where a Grand Jury is used, the ONLY way to indict someone is through the action of the Grand Jury.
Harassing controversial political publishers is OK, as long as it just wastes their time in defending themselves?
the alternative, to allow a single government agent (the DA, as an example) to harass citizens is better? You are more likely to have a hard time convincing 20 randomly chosen people that a crime has been committed than you are to convince a DA (who wants to be reelected, and thus "tough on crime") that a crime has not been commited.
Unless the crime is one of those obvious, offensive to everyone sorts of things, like murder. The more subtle forms of crime, like copyright infringements and such, are far more likely to get a pass by a Grand Jury than murder is.
And as to the problem still being there 10 years later and thousands of miles away: isn't global warming a side-effect of fossil fuel plants that will be felt centuries later and all over the world? Put things in perspective.
I doubt that anyone will ever know just how much radioactive strontium was in the Chernobyl reactor when the interlocks were removed. But it is fairly safe to say that it was on the order of 1% of the mass of the nuclear fuel in the reactor (and the -238 filler doesn't count). So, almost certainly less than 50 kg. Probably less than 5 kg. Grind that up small, and distribute it over the area within 3000km of Chernobyl, and you have a couple micrograms per hectare. There are more radioactives naturally occurring in your body than that. It's not no risk, but it's a smaller risk than being run over by a drunk Mardi Gras float driver (which may not happen much where you are, but happens from time to time here)
The part that becomes radioactive from neutron bombardment is called the "reactor vessel". It weighs about 1000 times as much as the fuel in a fission reactor. The irradiatted iron/nickel/chromium/cobalt/whatever-else-is-in-yo ur-alloy-of choice has a much shorter half-life, and this is far more radioactive than the spent fuel rods.
You'd probably get more irradiated metal in a fusion reactor than a fission reactor, though this no doubt depends on design details. But the neutron flux will be higher, per watt, so expect it to tend toward more radiatted metal rather than less.
In other words, don't expect fusion to be cleaner than fission. There'll be a different mix of radioactive byproducts, but it is by no means clear that there will be less, or that said byproducts will be easier to dispose of.
find? hmm, the canal behind my house should have a couple tons of it, at a guess.
Gather? most sewage treatment plants process tons of the stuff every day.
Conectrate? There's the rub! Searate water into H2 and O2, toss the O2, then separate the H2 into H2 and D2. No clue as to actual numbers. But I am sure it is tiny compared to the energy to be extracted by fusing the stuff.
Not that I expect fusion to work in my lifetime. It's been just a few decades away since I was a boy. and that's been a while.
Ten years after the event? Wasn't Chernobyl 20 years ago? So, you're saying the problem went away ten years back?
I use Standard of Living in the conventional way. It is healthier to do "honest work" (the kind that involves you sweating a lot while holding a shovel ;-) ). But sweating a lot is not considered a "high standard of living". driving a Beemer across the street to buy another video-game is a "high standard of living".
Assuming that the existing economy makes , and employs enough people to do so, then if one reduces the market to 20% of its previous level, then 80% of the people who WERE employed need not be employed. I make no distinction between Mom&Pop stores and GM.
Though, of course, GM would likely be hit sooner than a Mom&Pop. But Walmart is already hitting the Mom&Pop stores hard. It's tough to compete with someone who can offer lower prices.
Thing to realize is that productivity really has gone up dramatically. It takes fewer people to make the "necessities". Which is why we keep redefining "necessity" to include more things. A desktop home computer used to be a luxury. Then, later, it was "normal", and a laptop was a luxury. Now, a laptop is moving rapidly into "normal", and a desktop system is a "necessity".
Same for telephones/cellphones. Telephone was luxury, then "normal", then "necessity". Cycle started again with cellphone, and is rapidly reaching the point of "necessity" (may already be there - just added our third cellphone to our family account, so the daughter would have one).
When I was a lad, a car was already a "necessity" if you lived outside a city. "Two car" families were definitely upper-middle class, if not lower-upper-class. By the time I learned to drive (back when you could get an unrestricted license at 15), a "two car" family was the norm for the middle class, and the one car per driver was rapidly becoming the norm (my family wasn't upper middle class by any means, but by the time my younger brother was driving, we had one car per driver.
These are examples of "former luxuries" that are now considered "necessities". I could come up with more (fresh vegetables year round, for one) without trying hard. If we were to truly drop back to the necessities by the standards of the '30s, there would be a dramatic impact on our economy. Note that an economic downturn that was once touted as "the worst economy in 50 years" (it wasn't) did not force people to drop back to a standard of living as low as the 70's, much less the 30's. Trust me, by modern measurements, the 30's qualified well below "dirt poor", even when people were employed (unemployment was high, but most people still were employed, even then).
Chernobyl is interesting. The design was inherently less safe than it could have been, but one must remember when it was built. At that time, the design looked quite good. However, that wasn't actually the problem.
Chernobyl melted down as a result of a test by the Soviet version of the NRC. Someone wanted to find out how much power could be extracted from a reactor that was melting down. This information would allow them to better plan for dealing with a reactor meltdown. So....
The Soviet NRC guys came out, disabled all the safety interlocks in place, and tried to "simulate" a reactor meltdown. Worked like a charm! The "simulation" was so realistic they couldn't hardly believe it (that last was sarcasm, if it wasn't obvious).
With the exception of possible undocumented losses of nuclear submarines by the Soviets, there have been four or five nuclear problems serious enough to ruin a reactor (not all of them were serious enough to escape into the environment). That's not a terribly bad safety record, especially since none of them have been technical issues - in all cases, the problems were induced by human stupidity. Of which, I admit, we have an abundant supply.
It's fascinating to see people talking about how we could get along without those little luxuries. Especially when they had to use one of them (a computer) to do the post.
A quibble: microwaves are generally more energy efficient than ovens for heating things up.
In general, I agree that people are in love with their "stuff". And would be healthier without the "stuff". And have a standard of living that is considerably worse than they do now (think about the effect on the economy - your own job, if noone else's) if we all bought only what we "needed". Not saying that only buying what is needed is bad, but consider the transitional pain of a society living at a 1930 standard of living, with modern prodcution techniques. It is likely that 80% of everyone would be perpetually unemployed. Which, now I think of it, would mean more time for me to play videogames....
Do you? How about figuring out how much energy is required to ship a terajoule's worth of reactor-grade uranium across the country, as opposed to a terajoule worth of coal/gasoline/biodiesel/whatever?
Do you know how much energy it takes to grow your plants, process them into fuel, deliver same? Or how much CO2 is emitted when "biodiesel" is burned?
Or how much it takes to build a wind generator, maintain it, and dispose of it? And how much effect on global weather would there be if, say, 30% of our energy were extracted from the ambient wind?
Repeat same for wave generators? Anyone ever figured out how much it costs, and what the long-term effects are?
I don't pretend to know whether wind/wave generators can be cost-effective. Haven't done the research. Biodiesel is a waste, in terms of global warming - doesn't much matter whether the emissions come from petroleum or corn, they're still in atmosphere. I *do* know that uranium reactors (or plutonium reactors), properly designed, are reasonably clean (That should excite some horrendous reactions from the anti-nuke zealots!), emit no greenhouse gases, and (barring lawsuits) are no more expensive than the alternatives (not counting the greenhouse emissions of the alternatives).
Many games, each requiring a significant time to master, means that fewer people will play each one. And as the games get more expensive to make (as they try ever harder to attract an audience share), they require more players to be profitably made.
No, my wife did, when she was doing her graduate work. A wonderful example of the difficulties of English.
With any luck, this statement will pop up in one of SCO's Google searched someday, and result in a lawsuit....
Am I correct that you meant synonyms?
Actually, I would assume the purpose of this is to remove personal bias from the grading system. It will not work, of course, until we can teach a computer English (or such other language as you wish to teach).
Until a computer can understand the difference between "Time flies like an arrow" and "Fruit flies like a banana", computer-grading of essays isn't here yet.
I wonder to what extent your essay can be meaningless gibberish with proper form and still get a good grade?
On the other hand, if kids are forced to learn grammar and spelling, it can't be all bad, even if they CAN turn in meaningless gibberish.
Way to screw up a perfect Zen game! A pitch isn't legal unless the pitcher is on the mound.
Just out of curiousity, did anyone bother to prove that this software was Diebold's software? Or did they just take someone's word for it? Someone who obviously had an axe to grind.
Myself, I live in a place that has had electronic voting for a long time. I've occasionally griped about how subject E-voting is to subvert, but I have to concede that traditional voting is easily subvertable in other ways. So, I don't really give a rat's hind leg about California's problems with Diebold (or with anyone else they buy the machines from, really). But you people seem to be accepting the statements of one side pretty much at face value here, and vilifying the statements of the other side....
Now I'm curious about what they consider an unbiased voter registration procedures.
For instance, does requiring some form of ID to register qualify as biased, or unbiased?
Is requiring voter registration to take place in front of a clerk of the court biased? Contrariwise, is allowing someone to register online biased?
Grand Juries aren't about doing whatever the Prosecutor wants. Usually, they're about doing whatever the citizens want - the Prosecutor can ask them to investigate something, but there is no requirement that they do so. The Prosecutor can present all sorts of evidence that a crime has occurred, and the Grand Jury can vote not to indict (we did, in one case), and the Prosecutor can tell the Grand Jury not to indict someone, and have them indicted anyway (we did that too).
The reason Grand Juries are secret is that there are no Fifth Amendment protections when facing a Grand Jury. Yes, a Grand Jury can require you to answer a question you'd rather not (like, "Did you kill your wife?"). That said, testifying before a Grand Jury grants immunity to prosecution for any crimes discussed in your testimony. So, we had to be VERY careful about who we "invited" to talk to us. Wouldn't do at all to accidently invite the murderer to testify, thinking he was just a material witness....
It should further be noted that the Grand Jury concept came about to protect people from abuses by the government. No matter what the government says, the Grand Jury can indict or not at its whim - and if it refuses to indict, the Prosecutor/DA is just SOL, no matter how bad he wants a trial.
And finally, even if this person whose logs are being subpoena'd is considered "one of the good guys", and even if Diebold and the Republicans are "bad guys", stealing things is still illegal, so the Grand Jury investigation may be warranted.
And even more finally, why are you people whinging about this? The lady is a journalist, which means she can invoke Source Protection laws, if applicable, and refuse to turn over any information....
No. This was done before Popes were infallible. And not even the Church believes that everything they decree is "divine law". I hope. Because if they did, they really would be the Anti-Christ that early protestants believed them to be.
Sure, unmanned probes produce a lot of interesting information. But how much of that is terribly useful if we just sit here quietly on this planet until extinction takes us?
Hubble has produced some fascinating things. It shoud be preserved and extended until a replacement is in place. But how would we be worse off if it had never been launched? Not in terms of science, but in terms of the way people live. After all, if manned space travel is a waste of money, how much value can be assigned to putting a telescope in space to look at the stars (which will essentially be just lights in the sky if we don't visit them someday)? Personally, I put a high value on science. But if we turn our backs on space, then we may as well do it right - forget deep-space probes, forget orbital missions that don't directly affect Earth. Keep the commsats and weathersats in place, and ignore the rest - because they won't really matter....
I, alas, have the engineering viewpoint - absent intention to go there, learning something about a place is pretty much shruggable.
Actually, I don't think "preserving the Earth" is a humble goal. It fits my definition of "grandiose" a bit better. But as far as that being a goal of humanity, that goal posits a fairly short lifetime for humanity. The planet won't be here forever. Or even a very long time, in cosmic terms. Survival shouldn't require abandoning Earth. Even if we can live elsewhere, it's not like we can allow asteroids to hit the motherland anyway.
Why should going other places imply "abandoning earth"? Did humanity abandon Europe when the Americas were rediscovered? Some people will go, some will stay.
And you may not be willing to "allow" asteroids to hit the motherland, but if we turn our backs on space, we really won't have much ability to stop one. The unmanned mission theory of asteroid defelection has a fatal flaw (which is shown quite clearly in our recent Mars missions) - if the vehicle fails to do its job properly, for whatever reason, it's a LONG wait till you can try again. Men on site, at least, have the wherewithal to do "adapt and overcome" if something goes wrong - they may fail, but they can try again. Without a year-long wait for the second vehicle to arrive....
You have a misunderstanding about patents. if someone patents something, and you come up with an improvement to his idea, you are free to patent your improvement. The fact that you must get a license to use his patent in order to use YOUR patent is just part of the patent concept.
Likewise, if he than improves upon YOUR idea, he must get a license from YOU to use his improved idea (which is based on your improvement to his original idea).
Now, it is possible that someone will refuse to license his patents. I am unsure of the legality of this. However, this does NOT stop you from developing improvements to his patented idea, and patenting them. And he is NOT free to use your patents just because they require his patents to be useful. "Derivative works" are protected under Copyright, NOT under Patent Law.