Ultimately, what the GP doesn't understand is that any major industrial economy needs power sources that are more energy-dense, not less. We're a terawatt civilization now, and you're not going to produce that kind of power (and the kind of power that's going to be needed over the coming decades) with diffuse energy sources. Supplementary, sure, solar, wind, tidal... but our primary power is going to come from fission reactors for the foreseeable future. That is, of course, unless we want to continue burning coal. And you know what? I think I've breathed enough thorium, thank you very much.
The truth is, we're way beyond the point where we can tolerate unreliable electric power. Most people that talk about "alternative energy" are only thinking about the residential aspects, even though the biggest non-industrial user of electric power in the U.S. is domestic refrigeration! In any event, the costs to industry of an uncontrolled shutdown of major manufacturing processes is enormous: we need power, and we need power that never goes dark. I worked a software job out at United States Steel many years ago... the continuous caster I worked on had thirty-seven separate substations tied to multiple power grids in three States to guarantee that they'd never lose power. To do so during a production run would have cost millions, if the machine could even be recovered after that.
But you were demonizing people who would push us back to coal
No, the parent poster did that and I agree with him. I, on the other hand, am demonizing people that cannot be bothered to learn a few bloody facts before they make up their minds. I don't care whether we're talking about nuclear power, space research, God, Aspartame or any other subject, open your mind and get the facts. They are readily available, but many people will reject what is, in favor of their own warped internal reality. Doesn't matter if it is right, so long as it feels right. I find this trend disturbing, and frankly it is exactly that sort of defective mental processing that kept the human race from achieving technical civilization for millennia.
And you're right: those people you mention aren't basing their anti-nuclear sentiment (for it is exactly that... an emotional response to an issue that requires sound judgment and clear thinking) on a perceived shortage of nuclear fuel. Well, some are... the individual that started this thread certainly is, more the fool he. Fortunately, a number of other posters promptly educated him. The rest are basing their largely-uninformed opinions upon irrational fears of nuclear Armageddon, of the evil "R" (radiation), without getting a handle on either the significant risks of our current fossil-fueled power system, or the very real benefits of a nuclear-powered economy.
Ultimately, what this comes down to is an absolute inability on the part of some people to perform any kind of risk/benefit analysis. Just try telling such people that many coal fields are radioactive, and that when that coal is burned for power tons of thorium are dumped into the atmosphere. Just watch... they'll stick their fingers in their ears and shout "I can't hear you!" at the top of their lungs. Substantial numbers of people die as a result of coal-fired power plants every year, and that's not counting the other combustion products we have to take in with each breath. Where are the environmentalists soaking up airtime telling us of the evils of coal burning? Where? Why, they're too busy getting nuclear plants and wind-farms shut down, that's where. I sincerely hope they're happy when the lights go out for good. I especially hope they're happy when the X-rays come back with spots on their lungs.
Other people are simply so risk-averse (mostly due to their ignorance of science and technology in general) that they insist that any nuclear program offer a guarantee of absolute safety... as if that were a. remotely possible and b. anything even close to what we have now!
I'm tired of people that just won't make the effort to think. I know it's work, but that's why we have brains! Let me tell you this, if we as a culture don't get the lead out and start learning to think, and start making some smart decisions, and soon... we're finished!
What? If you know what's best for you, don't get me started on SUVs. Besides, if you're so damned concerned about "The Environment", do us all a favor and just off yourself right now. Go ahead, do it... don't wait another second. Why? I'll tell you why. If you're breathing you're transpiring a greenhouse gas, if you fart you cause a little more Global Warming, and every product you buy, every bit of food you eat, every kilowatt hour you consume, took energy and raw materials in its production, and caused some damage to the environment. So get off your high horse.
What? This thread was about whether or not we are nearly out of nuclear fuel, not about the relative safety of reactor technology. That's the original point of misinformation to which I was referring.
I really wish that folks like you would simply stop. You solve nothing and force US (and probably EU) back to coal.
I agree. You know, some people wave their ignorance around like a badge of honor (or honour, if you prefer.) Me, I was raised by a nuclear physicist and electronics engineer, I have multiple Ph.Ds in my family, and while I'm just the village idiot in comparison, I am continually astounded at the sheer number of people that complain vociferously about that which they do not understand. I wasn't taught to look upon ignorance as a virtue, yet that is exactly how many Americans look at it. Scary, really.
It's not a matter of intelligence, or lack thereof, it is a matter of realizing the limits of one's knowledge, and rectifying that situation when necessary. This is the Information Age... arming oneself with basic facts on any subject is neither difficult nor time-consuming. At least on Slashdot, if you post ignorantly you'll be flamed into a state of crispy enlightenment in a matter of seconds.
... no plans to reimburse the artists in question.
And why should they? The artists in question sold their souls and their copyrights when they signed on with a record label. Unless they refused to sign over their copyrights, they have no stake in this. Whoever holds the rights now is entitled to any revenue (presumably the various labels), so that's not really the issue.
The problem is the fundamental hypocrisy of the RIAA's stance, which is that they're vigorously defending artist's rights, when in fact they're doing nothing of the sort. That particular PR bubble has long since been burst and I'm surprised they keep repeating it, but then again, I don't suppose they really care what we think anyway. We're only customers after all, and not their customers at that. The studios are their customers.
Well, I look at the term "artistic vision" as being a sort of holistic concept... you have to get it all right if you want to be remembered for having such a vision. Saying that you can write a good plot -or- a good setting doesn't really cut the mustard the way I see it. The original Alien would be an example of a sci-fi film that truly had an artistic vision: H.R. Giger's work combined with Scott's production values resulted in a classic motion picture.
Personally, I'd say the first three of Lucas' efforts came much closer to that goal than the last batch. Certainly I enjoyed the prequels far more (heck, my girlfriend fell asleep during Episode III: I only stayed awake 'cause I'd just paid twenty bucks and dammit I was going to get my money's worth.)
I will say this: so far as the cliches are concerned, truthfully those films created many of those cliches! Star Wars one liners have become an integral part of our pop culture, much as Star Trek before it. Not that Lucas' scripts were anything to write home about, but we've certainly absorbed a lot of them.
Not really. Customers have surprising little influence on corporate behavior even when they bother to exert any.
Put it this way: publicly-held corporations (like IBM) do not operate in a power vacuum. They are a shadowy reflection of the ethical and moral standards of their shareholders, who are the only ones that have the power to tell upper management to stop doing something. As our society has increasingly begun to suffer what many term "moral decay", it's to be expected that the corporations beholden to us will behave in ways that previous generations would have found unacceptable. If the only criteria applied by the stockholder to determine the worth of a corporation is the size of the dividend, well, ethically that means pretty much anything goes as long as the checks keep getting bigger.
George Lucas never had a solid artistic vision in his life, and I agree that he was going for the action-figure market, particularly in the last three films and the re-releases of the original trilogy.
That said, however, this is the Age of the Tracker. Everything is available, and if you can't get if from legitimate channels, well... there are other means. That often plays hob with the studio's desire to control the re-release of films in order to target the next generation of moviegoers, but that's just too bad.
On the other hand, Scott has brought us enough quality entertainment over the last forty years that I, for one, don't particularly mind. I garnered a lot of respect for the man after the original Alien film. When I look back, I'd say that Alien and Star Wars are the two movies that stick out in my mind from the Seventies.
Good luck with that. They stopped being a parts store a loooong time ago.
It's funny though... about forty years ago I remember walking into the big Allied Radio Shack in Bethesda, Maryland with my father, back when they were the retail arm of Allied Radio, before Tandy bought the name. Dad was an electronics engineer, and would often go there to pick up a few parts for something he was working on. Anyway, the place was huge, the rows of shelves full of electronic parts seemed to go on forever. I will always remember the big tube tester up in front, and how Dad always let me press the TEST button. It would light up, and I liked the way the needles moved on the panel meters. I was only seven or so. Things sure have changed since then.
Up 'til the early nineties, there were a number of major retail parts stores in my area. Joseph's Electronics, Tri-State Electronics... all places you could buy everything from a resistor to an oscilloscope . They've all gone the way of the dodo bird, though. You kinda have to have active industry and manufacturing to need places like that, and hobbyists that need stuff for their projects. Hell, at that point even Radio Shack was still a decent parts store, even if was mostly cheap stuff, but all they do now is cell phones and DirecTV subscriptions. Useless.
No, +5 right on the money. An educational system incapable of teaching citizens even basic math, science, and statistics combined with journalists more interested in headlines than accuracy is guaranteed to induce irrational kneejerk reactions from the general public.
The Austrian artist Gordan Savicic takes the wlan landscape to a painful level. The density of the waves and strength of the encryption cause servos to tighten a corset.
I'd like to see this designed by H.R. Giger. Forget the corset: you'd be enclosed in a giant organic vagina, which would pulsate rhythmically to indicate encryption strength.
It's not so much a matter of stretching things as it is illegally selling used products as new. That's crossing the line from poor customer service into criminal behavior.
The real problem now is that, even if you could convince a significant number of Americans to only "buy American"... they couldn't do it. There's are hardly any consumer goods on sale anywhere that aren't Made in China. The masses had a chance fifteen or twenty years ago to vote with their wallets, and they did. They voted for cheap imported goods from China. We're getting exactly what we wanted: cheap imports, at the expense of domestic manufacturing and national independence. The situation is, of course, untenable and is a disaster in the making.
Good job, America. Pull out that credit card and keep on voting.
At the end of Jurassic Park he had the military (someone's military, I don't think he specified whose) bomb the island to kill all the saurians, and then (of course) had a colony of velociraptors escape the island and make it to the mainland. The presumption was that the raptors would breed and ultimately put us into a world of hurt. That whole book was classic Crichton, but in order to make the film palatable to everyone who made it out of the 1970's, Spielberg had to change ending. I stopped reading Crichton after that one (although I loved the movie.)
it's actually a damaging book, in that it actively attempts to hobble a science before it was anywhere near that level of complexity.
Crichton may write what is passed off as "science" fiction, but he's fundamentally anti-technology, anti-progress, and unlike a Clarke or a Heinlein he's not always very careful about working through the numbers to make sure his vision of the future is even remotely probable. I can't stand his stuff for that reason, it's always the same thing. Man reaches for something he doesn't have the wisdom to handle properly, and gets bitchslapped by Mother Nature for overstepping his bounds. It's a common theme running through his books.
I predict they'll find out that all the stars in the galactic core went nova some millions of years ago in a vast chain reaction... and that the resulting blast wave will reach Earth about 30,000 years from now. Better start looking around... I hear real estate in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud is a good buy this time of year.
Slashdot Mirror
Ultimately, what the GP doesn't understand is that any major industrial economy needs power sources that are more energy-dense, not less. We're a terawatt civilization now, and you're not going to produce that kind of power (and the kind of power that's going to be needed over the coming decades) with diffuse energy sources. Supplementary, sure, solar, wind, tidal ... but our primary power is going to come from fission reactors for the foreseeable future. That is, of course, unless we want to continue burning coal. And you know what? I think I've breathed enough thorium, thank you very much.
... the continuous caster I worked on had thirty-seven separate substations tied to multiple power grids in three States to guarantee that they'd never lose power. To do so during a production run would have cost millions, if the machine could even be recovered after that.
The truth is, we're way beyond the point where we can tolerate unreliable electric power. Most people that talk about "alternative energy" are only thinking about the residential aspects, even though the biggest non-industrial user of electric power in the U.S. is domestic refrigeration! In any event, the costs to industry of an uncontrolled shutdown of major manufacturing processes is enormous: we need power, and we need power that never goes dark. I worked a software job out at United States Steel many years ago
Usually, they don't have much to say after that.
Most people that have had their egos turned into oatmeal generally don't.
But you were demonizing people who would push us back to coal
... an emotional response to an issue that requires sound judgment and clear thinking) on a perceived shortage of nuclear fuel. Well, some are ... the individual that started this thread certainly is, more the fool he. Fortunately, a number of other posters promptly educated him. The rest are basing their largely-uninformed opinions upon irrational fears of nuclear Armageddon, of the evil "R" (radiation), without getting a handle on either the significant risks of our current fossil-fueled power system, or the very real benefits of a nuclear-powered economy.
... they'll stick their fingers in their ears and shout "I can't hear you!" at the top of their lungs. Substantial numbers of people die as a result of coal-fired power plants every year, and that's not counting the other combustion products we have to take in with each breath. Where are the environmentalists soaking up airtime telling us of the evils of coal burning? Where? Why, they're too busy getting nuclear plants and wind-farms shut down, that's where. I sincerely hope they're happy when the lights go out for good. I especially hope they're happy when the X-rays come back with spots on their lungs.
... as if that were a. remotely possible and b. anything even close to what we have now!
... we're finished!
No, the parent poster did that and I agree with him. I, on the other hand, am demonizing people that cannot be bothered to learn a few bloody facts before they make up their minds. I don't care whether we're talking about nuclear power, space research, God, Aspartame or any other subject, open your mind and get the facts. They are readily available, but many people will reject what is, in favor of their own warped internal reality. Doesn't matter if it is right, so long as it feels right. I find this trend disturbing, and frankly it is exactly that sort of defective mental processing that kept the human race from achieving technical civilization for millennia.
And you're right: those people you mention aren't basing their anti-nuclear sentiment (for it is exactly that
Ultimately, what this comes down to is an absolute inability on the part of some people to perform any kind of risk/benefit analysis. Just try telling such people that many coal fields are radioactive, and that when that coal is burned for power tons of thorium are dumped into the atmosphere. Just watch
Other people are simply so risk-averse (mostly due to their ignorance of science and technology in general) that they insist that any nuclear program offer a guarantee of absolute safety
I'm tired of people that just won't make the effort to think. I know it's work, but that's why we have brains! Let me tell you this, if we as a culture don't get the lead out and start learning to think, and start making some smart decisions, and soon
What? If you know what's best for you, don't get me started on SUVs. Besides, if you're so damned concerned about "The Environment", do us all a favor and just off yourself right now. Go ahead, do it ... don't wait another second. Why? I'll tell you why. If you're breathing you're transpiring a greenhouse gas, if you fart you cause a little more Global Warming, and every product you buy, every bit of food you eat, every kilowatt hour you consume, took energy and raw materials in its production, and caused some damage to the environment. So get off your high horse.
Okay, I'll buy that. But what has he really done since that is equivalent in that regard?
What? This thread was about whether or not we are nearly out of nuclear fuel, not about the relative safety of reactor technology. That's the original point of misinformation to which I was referring.
How many times has he redone Alien?
... Aliens was directed by James Cameron.
None, so far as I know
I really wish that folks like you would simply stop. You solve nothing and force US (and probably EU) back to coal.
... arming oneself with basic facts on any subject is neither difficult nor time-consuming. At least on Slashdot, if you post ignorantly you'll be flamed into a state of crispy enlightenment in a matter of seconds.
I agree. You know, some people wave their ignorance around like a badge of honor (or honour, if you prefer.) Me, I was raised by a nuclear physicist and electronics engineer, I have multiple Ph.Ds in my family, and while I'm just the village idiot in comparison, I am continually astounded at the sheer number of people that complain vociferously about that which they do not understand. I wasn't taught to look upon ignorance as a virtue, yet that is exactly how many Americans look at it. Scary, really.
It's not a matter of intelligence, or lack thereof, it is a matter of realizing the limits of one's knowledge, and rectifying that situation when necessary. This is the Information Age
Who told you that?
... no plans to reimburse the artists in question.
And why should they? The artists in question sold their souls and their copyrights when they signed on with a record label. Unless they refused to sign over their copyrights, they have no stake in this. Whoever holds the rights now is entitled to any revenue (presumably the various labels), so that's not really the issue.
The problem is the fundamental hypocrisy of the RIAA's stance, which is that they're vigorously defending artist's rights, when in fact they're doing nothing of the sort. That particular PR bubble has long since been burst and I'm surprised they keep repeating it, but then again, I don't suppose they really care what we think anyway. We're only customers after all, and not their customers at that. The studios are their customers.
Well, I look at the term "artistic vision" as being a sort of holistic concept ... you have to get it all right if you want to be remembered for having such a vision. Saying that you can write a good plot -or- a good setting doesn't really cut the mustard the way I see it. The original Alien would be an example of a sci-fi film that truly had an artistic vision: H.R. Giger's work combined with Scott's production values resulted in a classic motion picture.
Personally, I'd say the first three of Lucas' efforts came much closer to that goal than the last batch. Certainly I enjoyed the prequels far more (heck, my girlfriend fell asleep during Episode III: I only stayed awake 'cause I'd just paid twenty bucks and dammit I was going to get my money's worth.)
I will say this: so far as the cliches are concerned, truthfully those films created many of those cliches! Star Wars one liners have become an integral part of our pop culture, much as Star Trek before it. Not that Lucas' scripts were anything to write home about, but we've certainly absorbed a lot of them.
Not really. Customers have surprising little influence on corporate behavior even when they bother to exert any.
Put it this way: publicly-held corporations (like IBM) do not operate in a power vacuum. They are a shadowy reflection of the ethical and moral standards of their shareholders, who are the only ones that have the power to tell upper management to stop doing something. As our society has increasingly begun to suffer what many term "moral decay", it's to be expected that the corporations beholden to us will behave in ways that previous generations would have found unacceptable. If the only criteria applied by the stockholder to determine the worth of a corporation is the size of the dividend, well, ethically that means pretty much anything goes as long as the checks keep getting bigger.
George Lucas never had a solid artistic vision in his life, and I agree that he was going for the action-figure market, particularly in the last three films and the re-releases of the original trilogy.
... there are other means. That often plays hob with the studio's desire to control the re-release of films in order to target the next generation of moviegoers, but that's just too bad.
That said, however, this is the Age of the Tracker. Everything is available, and if you can't get if from legitimate channels, well
On the other hand, Scott has brought us enough quality entertainment over the last forty years that I, for one, don't particularly mind. I garnered a lot of respect for the man after the original Alien film. When I look back, I'd say that Alien and Star Wars are the two movies that stick out in my mind from the Seventies.
Well, are we talking just a "large proportion" or do we mean "vast majority"? I think it's the latter myself.
Video Surveillance Identifies Threat Patterns
Maybe they could save some money on expensive computer hardware and use some of those picture-sorting dogs from the next story.
He, like, totally sounds like a Silicon Valley girl.
Yes well, it's too bad somebody didn't gag him with a spoon a couple decades ago.
Good luck with that. They stopped being a parts store a loooong time ago.
... about forty years ago I remember walking into the big Allied Radio Shack in Bethesda, Maryland with my father, back when they were the retail arm of Allied Radio, before Tandy bought the name. Dad was an electronics engineer, and would often go there to pick up a few parts for something he was working on. Anyway, the place was huge, the rows of shelves full of electronic parts seemed to go on forever. I will always remember the big tube tester up in front, and how Dad always let me press the TEST button. It would light up, and I liked the way the needles moved on the panel meters. I was only seven or so. Things sure have changed since then.
... all places you could buy everything from a resistor to an oscilloscope . They've all gone the way of the dodo bird, though. You kinda have to have active industry and manufacturing to need places like that, and hobbyists that need stuff for their projects. Hell, at that point even Radio Shack was still a decent parts store, even if was mostly cheap stuff, but all they do now is cell phones and DirecTV subscriptions. Useless.
It's funny though
Up 'til the early nineties, there were a number of major retail parts stores in my area. Joseph's Electronics, Tri-State Electronics
No, +5 right on the money. An educational system incapable of teaching citizens even basic math, science, and statistics combined with journalists more interested in headlines than accuracy is guaranteed to induce irrational kneejerk reactions from the general public.
The Austrian artist Gordan Savicic takes the wlan landscape to a painful level. The density of the waves and strength of the encryption cause servos to tighten a corset.
I'd like to see this designed by H.R. Giger. Forget the corset: you'd be enclosed in a giant organic vagina, which would pulsate rhythmically to indicate encryption strength.
It's not so much a matter of stretching things as it is illegally selling used products as new. That's crossing the line from poor customer service into criminal behavior.
The real problem now is that, even if you could convince a significant number of Americans to only "buy American" ... they couldn't do it. There's are hardly any consumer goods on sale anywhere that aren't Made in China. The masses had a chance fifteen or twenty years ago to vote with their wallets, and they did. They voted for cheap imported goods from China. We're getting exactly what we wanted: cheap imports, at the expense of domestic manufacturing and national independence. The situation is, of course, untenable and is a disaster in the making.
Good job, America. Pull out that credit card and keep on voting.
At the end of Jurassic Park he had the military (someone's military, I don't think he specified whose) bomb the island to kill all the saurians, and then (of course) had a colony of velociraptors escape the island and make it to the mainland. The presumption was that the raptors would breed and ultimately put us into a world of hurt. That whole book was classic Crichton, but in order to make the film palatable to everyone who made it out of the 1970's, Spielberg had to change ending. I stopped reading Crichton after that one (although I loved the movie.)
it's actually a damaging book, in that it actively attempts to hobble a science before it was anywhere near that level of complexity.
Crichton may write what is passed off as "science" fiction, but he's fundamentally anti-technology, anti-progress, and unlike a Clarke or a Heinlein he's not always very careful about working through the numbers to make sure his vision of the future is even remotely probable. I can't stand his stuff for that reason, it's always the same thing. Man reaches for something he doesn't have the wisdom to handle properly, and gets bitchslapped by Mother Nature for overstepping his bounds. It's a common theme running through his books.
I predict they'll find out that all the stars in the galactic core went nova some millions of years ago in a vast chain reaction ... and that the resulting blast wave will reach Earth about 30,000 years from now. Better start looking around ... I hear real estate in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud is a good buy this time of year.