Sigh, you might want to actually know something before you start posting. Earthquakes and their accompanying tsunamis do not come on a regular basis. If anything having three in recent decades makes it less likely that there will be one of similar size in the near future as the energy would have been dissipated.
That a big earthquake in 2011 makes it less likely for a similar quake to happen in the near future in the same area has fuck-all to do with the fact that they should have built it higher in the first place, with data they had at the time.
And that's before you get to the fact that the chances of having to deal with a once-in-a-thousand-years event gets more likely as the number of sites you have increases.
Problem: when you depend on false, intellectually lazy arguments based not on facts but hatorade, they tend to fall apart rather quickly.
If I were to create an MP3 player today, an overly mature and saturated market already,
Except the iPod wasn't created today, in an overly mature and saturated market. WYP?
I could easily make it the "first" something.
Everything is obvious - after someone else has already done it. Jet engines, antibiotics, the Theory of Relativity - it's all "obvious" after someone else has already done the work.
And Apple didn't create the micro HDD.
And I never claimed they did, so again, WYP? Innovation != invention, and putting a micro-hard drive in an MP3 player was innovative. As was combining it with a fast Firewire interface, which Apple did invent.
It has great design... and oh yeah, a HUGE and aggressive legal department which seems to push the extremes which a company might go to keep the competition down...
You mean like when Apple sued Microsoft into the ground for the Zune, even forcing them to disband PlaysForSure, leaving all their former customers in the lurch? Oh wait, Microsoft did that all on their own.
Came back with arguments not based on Haterade, and maybe they will last a little longer.
but didn't take off because Apple shot itself in the foot trying to charge a ridiculous $1-per-port license fee for it.
Quibble: the fee was dropped to 25 cents per device. Differences in adoption were more due to every Wintel motherboard coming standard with USB, whereas only Crappaq and Sony really dabbled with Firewire. And in the cut-throat peripherals market, why spend extra money on an interface (even if licensing was dropped to $0) that's on millions of computers, when there's an interface that's "good enough" and on hundreds of millions of computers?
MP3 players with 2.5" hard drives had been in the market from Compaq
At a pocket-unfriendly size and weight that was several times that of the iPod. I didn't say that Apple invented the MP3 player, I said they were the first to combine a micro-hard drive with a fast interface. Or is there some other reason why Apple continues to dominate the MP3 player market instead of Compaq (now HP)?
It was obvious that this was an application for the smaller drives.
And it's obvious in retrospect that GUI interfaces on consumer computers were inevitable. Does that mean that the first companies to bring them to market deserve no credit for doing so? Everything is obvious.....after someone else has already done it.
The user interface is a better argument. That was much better on the iPod than on any competing music players at the time.
It was to address the parent poster's complaint that Apple never does anything creative or original....which was obviously false.
Looks more like dismissing real problems with cute hypotheticals that would never actually happen. And just how much land would be required to support these one-world cities? That bit if information seems to have been left off the pictures for some reason....
He understands it just fine. Take the polar bear, for example. It's dependent on arctic ice forming in the ocean so it can go out and hunt seals. Now, if that ice were to be drastically reduced over the course of a couple thousand years, the polar bear would have some time to adapt to finding new sources of food or migrate. But make that drastic reduction in ice over the course of a few decades, and now the bear doesn't have the time to make those adjustments without flirting with extinction.
Shorter version: it's the sudden change in environments, stupid. See also: the meteor impact that killed off the dinosaurs.
That is something no AGW scenario dreams of, and yet it happened.
Actually, there's mass methane poisoning of our atmosphere if the gas melts out of glaciers faster than the biosphere can handle it:
The juiciest disaster-movie scenario would be a release of enough methane to significantly change the atmospheric concentration, on a time scale that is fast compared with the lifetime of methane. This would generate a spike in methane concentration. For a scale of how much would be a large methane release, the amount of methane that would be required to equal the radiative forcing of doubled CO2 would be about ten times the present methane concentration. That would be disaster movie.
Methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. And, in mass quantities, could supplant other gases like oxygen and nitrogen in the Earth's atmosphere. That by itself would be a mass extension event.....
Well, since the only way to accomplish that is to slaughter most of humanity and have the survivors return to hunter-gatherer existence or just have humans perform a self-extinction, that's not an acceptable option.
Or, you know, stop over consumption and make do with a perfectly reasonable lifestyle based on energy saving technologies that have been around for decades.
The problem isn't humanity, the problem is shortsighted, selfish little shits like yourself that were ready to crucify Carter for suggesting you put on a sweater during the winter.
Ah, another anti-fanboy. Your complaints are false and intellectually lazy - see the iPod, which was the first MP3 player to combine a micro-hard drive with a fast interface, just for starters.
If marketing was the only thing Apple had going for it's products, they would have been overtaken by now. If you don't like their products, Jobs probably would have been the first one to tell you to go right ahead and buy from one of their competitors.
It's called being willfully obtuse. Here, I'll make you a deal: you lend or borrow - use whatever term your heart desires - a million dollars to me, interest free.
Then, I lend/borrow - again, whatever term your retentive heart desires - half of that money back to you, at 3% interest. Sound like a good deal to you?
Still not answering why the first response is to pretend that nuclear opponents defend coal - i.e. attack a straw man.
Why will it be around for thousands of years? If it's still radioactive. USE IT AS FUEL.
Uh huh. Except the articles cited like the one another nuke fanboy posted yesterday - are filled with "coulds" and "what ifs" and "on papers". Just like how the coal fanboys are always floating the promise of "Clean Coal" as the solution for all of coal's current problems.
Vaporware.
But even if some of your vaporware pays off in the end, you still have to spend massive amounts of money to replace existing coal and nuclear facilities while still facing most of the problems with nuclear power. We're talking trillions to invest here - trillions that could just as easily be spent on renewable sources of energy and energy conservation instead, and avoid the problems of nuclear power altogether.
You're wrong about the cost of containment. (It is quite low.)
On some planet where you don't have maintenance and monitoring costs? Even if you build the perfect storage facility underneath a mountain, you're still going to have to maintain and monitor it - for hundreds to thousands of years. Interesting that the nuclear power fans are always so Concerned about the number of people killed by dams that weren't maintained, yet spent fuel rods will just stay safe until the 4th Great and Bountiful Human Empire in the distant future.
Magically.
You are anti-nuclear, so there's a 99 % probability you are arguing for solar and wind in the daytime and magic by night and when there's no wind.
On some planet where wind ceases at night? Okay, maybe - and that's still not answering the question why nuke fans so frequently reach for the coal straw man. But to get to your point, the greatest energy use occurs on.....
Hot. Sunny. Days.
This really isn't that difficult - attempts to minimize the problems of nuclear power while maximizing the problems of alternatives aside. Government policies gave us cheap coal-fueled power and suburban sprawl - they can also give us renewable energy as a primary (not sole) power source and mass transit. High speed rail to replace most air travel and freight trucks. Building codes to maximize the use of sunlight while minimizing heating and cooling costs.
You know, stuff we've already had available for decades, for the most part. Too bad it's been pushed aside by monied interests invested in the status quo (sprawl, coal, nuclear).
Speaking of education, did you bother to read your own article....dumbass?
What if we could build a nuclear reactor that offered no possibility of a meltdown, generated its power inexpensively, created no weapons-grade by-products, and burnt up existing high-level waste as well as old nuclear weapon stockpiles? And what if the waste produced by such a reactor was radioactive for a mere few hundred years rather than tens of thousands?
A thorium reactor is different. And, on paper at least, this radical new technology could be the key to unlocking a new generation of clean and safe nuclear power. It could prove the circuit-breaker to the two most intractable problems of the 21st century: our insatiable thirst for energy, and the warming of the world's climate.
That's a whole lot of "coulds" and "what ifs" and "on papers" - just like the coal fanboys that are always talking about cold fusion, I mean "Clean Coal".
It's all the same shit, from the same breed of deniers defending big problems with big promises of developments that are coming "real soon now, we promise".
Because you're still using the same car and computer you bought in 1975, and living in a tent since new home and apartment construction ceased in the same year?
Or, maybe the parent should just skip idiots when looking for converts to common sense.
Why do nuclear fanboys try to pass the blame on to coal? Why do you try to compare the polution levels between the two without ever mentioning that nuclear waste will be around for thousands of years or the disparity in the number of power plants? 1436 coal vs 104 nuclear in the U.S.
Just to be clear - do you mean a source of radiation that ends when a coal plant shuts down, or a source of radiation that people will be dealing with a thousand years from now? A source of radiation that can impact an entire region, and who's waste needs to be managed for thousands of years?
And, just to be clear, why do nuclear fanboys point fingers at coal in lame attempts at misdirection? And, more importantly, why the clear dishonesty in comparing coal's pollution to nuclear without ever mentioning the fact that there are 14 times as many coal plants as nuclear in the U.S. alone?
Maybe you don't understand that it takes tens of thousands of years for mass radiation poisoning to pass, as well as spent fuel rods. We could see an entire global warming (brought on by coal plants) and ice age cycle pass and still have to deal with nuclear waste from the first nuclear power plants. Maybe you don't understand that arguing against nuclear power doesn't mean arguing for more coal or poorly built dams. Maybe you're under the delusion that nuclear power isn't the most expensive power source ever invented when you factor in the cost of containment. For tens of thousands of years.
...than the banks. Looks like only about $100 billion not paid back by banks
Uh, no. The banks have borrowed 16 trillion, and haven't come close to paying it back. Despite getting their loans at 0% interest while continuing to charge their customers usurious interest rates (i.e., the same taxpayers that are bailing them out) or just buying Treasury Bonds.
Man, I wish I could borrow money from the government at 0% interest, only to borrow that money back to the government and receive interest in return.
Contractual terms have to be mutually agreed to before money changes hands. And unless you're spending a serious amount of money (corporate site licensing for Windows, Oracle database) you're probably not doing that.
Fanned. Since the Paulbots are out in force I'll copy and paste what I said upthread in response to another Paulbot:
Case in point for the Paultards: how the cigarette industry went decades without losing a liability lawsuit because there's no way to know if Grandma got lung cancer because she smoked two packs a day or because she was genetically predisposed to it. Do they think other polluting industries wouldn't do the exact same thing?
"Your Honor, the plaintiff simply hasn't proven that the poisonous mercury that gave her children birth defects came from our mine. She could be a carrier, or the alleged poison could have come from from Massey Energy upstream....."
Then there's the fact that regulations and inspections are proactive, rather than reactive. Ask the parents of Valerie Lakey [wikipedia.org] what they would prefer: to have their daughters guts back in her body before she was hydraulically disemboweled from a faulty pool drain, or the $25 million judgement against the manufacturer. But back to pollution - just how the hell is the average family going to afford the tens of thousands of dollars to hire independent experts and subpoena documents and testimony from the polluting company in question?
The Libertarian Way would literally result in poverty, misery and even death for many in return for even more power and money for those who are already powerful and rich.
The companies know exactly what attorneys to hire to get out of this. The attorneys know exactly how to pick a jury that will lead to acquittal. And the lawyers representing the people in the case are comparatively underpaid to boot.
Case in point for the Paultards: how the cigarette industry went decades without losing a liability lawsuit because there's no way to know if Grandma got lung cancer because she smoked two packs a day or because she was genetically predisposed to it. Do they think other polluting industries wouldn't do the exact same thing?
"Your Honor, the plaintiff simply hasn't proven that the poisonous mercury that gave her children birth defects came from our mine. She could be a carrier, or the alleged poison could have come from from Massey Energy upstream....."
Then there's the fact that regulations and inspections are proactive, rather than reactive. Ask the parents of Valerie Lakey what they would prefer: to have their daughters guts back in her body before she was hydraulically disemboweled from a faulty pool drain, or the $25 million judgement against the manufacturer. But back to pollution - just how the hell is the average family going to afford the tens of thousands of dollars to hire independent experts and subpoena documents and testimony from the polluting company in question?
The Libertarian Way would literally result in poverty, misery and even death for many in return for even more power and money for those who are already powerful and rich.
Slashdot Mirror
Straw man.
That a big earthquake in 2011 makes it less likely for a similar quake to happen in the near future in the same area has fuck-all to do with the fact that they should have built it higher in the first place, with data they had at the time.
And that's before you get to the fact that the chances of having to deal with a once-in-a-thousand-years event gets more likely as the number of sites you have increases.
Not if your compensation is based on your job description, it's not.
Problem: when you depend on false, intellectually lazy arguments based not on facts but hatorade, they tend to fall apart rather quickly.
Except the iPod wasn't created today, in an overly mature and saturated market. WYP?
Everything is obvious - after someone else has already done it. Jet engines, antibiotics, the Theory of Relativity - it's all "obvious" after someone else has already done the work.
And I never claimed they did, so again, WYP? Innovation != invention, and putting a micro-hard drive in an MP3 player was innovative. As was combining it with a fast Firewire interface, which Apple did invent.
You mean like when Apple sued Microsoft into the ground for the Zune, even forcing them to disband PlaysForSure, leaving all their former customers in the lurch? Oh wait, Microsoft did that all on their own.
Came back with arguments not based on Haterade, and maybe they will last a little longer.
Quibble: the fee was dropped to 25 cents per device. Differences in adoption were more due to every Wintel motherboard coming standard with USB, whereas only Crappaq and Sony really dabbled with Firewire. And in the cut-throat peripherals market, why spend extra money on an interface (even if licensing was dropped to $0) that's on millions of computers, when there's an interface that's "good enough" and on hundreds of millions of computers?
At a pocket-unfriendly size and weight that was several times that of the iPod. I didn't say that Apple invented the MP3 player, I said they were the first to combine a micro-hard drive with a fast interface. Or is there some other reason why Apple continues to dominate the MP3 player market instead of Compaq (now HP)?
And it's obvious in retrospect that GUI interfaces on consumer computers were inevitable. Does that mean that the first companies to bring them to market deserve no credit for doing so? Everything is obvious.....after someone else has already done it.
It was to address the parent poster's complaint that Apple never does anything creative or original....which was obviously false.
Looks more like dismissing real problems with cute hypotheticals that would never actually happen. And just how much land would be required to support these one-world cities? That bit if information seems to have been left off the pictures for some reason....
He understands it just fine. Take the polar bear, for example. It's dependent on arctic ice forming in the ocean so it can go out and hunt seals. Now, if that ice were to be drastically reduced over the course of a couple thousand years, the polar bear would have some time to adapt to finding new sources of food or migrate. But make that drastic reduction in ice over the course of a few decades, and now the bear doesn't have the time to make those adjustments without flirting with extinction.
Shorter version: it's the sudden change in environments, stupid. See also: the meteor impact that killed off the dinosaurs.
Actually, there's mass methane poisoning of our atmosphere if the gas melts out of glaciers faster than the biosphere can handle it:
Methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. And, in mass quantities, could supplant other gases like oxygen and nitrogen in the Earth's atmosphere. That by itself would be a mass extension event.....
Or, you know, stop over consumption and make do with a perfectly reasonable lifestyle based on energy saving technologies that have been around for decades.
The problem isn't humanity, the problem is shortsighted, selfish little shits like yourself that were ready to crucify Carter for suggesting you put on a sweater during the winter.
How many stories have started with "those fucking libertarians", exactly?
Beck even has a chalkboard....I don't see Watts with a chalkboard.
Ah, another anti-fanboy. Your complaints are false and intellectually lazy - see the iPod, which was the first MP3 player to combine a micro-hard drive with a fast interface, just for starters.
If marketing was the only thing Apple had going for it's products, they would have been overtaken by now. If you don't like their products, Jobs probably would have been the first one to tell you to go right ahead and buy from one of their competitors.
It's called being willfully obtuse. Here, I'll make you a deal: you lend or borrow - use whatever term your heart desires - a million dollars to me, interest free.
Then, I lend/borrow - again, whatever term your retentive heart desires - half of that money back to you, at 3% interest. Sound like a good deal to you?
Still not answering why the first response is to pretend that nuclear opponents defend coal - i.e. attack a straw man.
Uh huh. Except the articles cited like the one another nuke fanboy posted yesterday - are filled with "coulds" and "what ifs" and "on papers". Just like how the coal fanboys are always floating the promise of "Clean Coal" as the solution for all of coal's current problems.
Vaporware.
But even if some of your vaporware pays off in the end, you still have to spend massive amounts of money to replace existing coal and nuclear facilities while still facing most of the problems with nuclear power. We're talking trillions to invest here - trillions that could just as easily be spent on renewable sources of energy and energy conservation instead, and avoid the problems of nuclear power altogether.
But that wouldn't make the pedants happy.....
On some planet where you don't have maintenance and monitoring costs? Even if you build the perfect storage facility underneath a mountain, you're still going to have to maintain and monitor it - for hundreds to thousands of years. Interesting that the nuclear power fans are always so Concerned about the number of people killed by dams that weren't maintained, yet spent fuel rods will just stay safe until the 4th Great and Bountiful Human Empire in the distant future.
Magically.
On some planet where wind ceases at night? Okay, maybe - and that's still not answering the question why nuke fans so frequently reach for the coal straw man. But to get to your point, the greatest energy use occurs on.....
Hot.
Sunny.
Days.
This really isn't that difficult - attempts to minimize the problems of nuclear power while maximizing the problems of alternatives aside. Government policies gave us cheap coal-fueled power and suburban sprawl - they can also give us renewable energy as a primary (not sole) power source and mass transit. High speed rail to replace most air travel and freight trucks. Building codes to maximize the use of sunlight while minimizing heating and cooling costs.
You know, stuff we've already had available for decades, for the most part. Too bad it's been pushed aside by monied interests invested in the status quo (sprawl, coal, nuclear).
Speaking of education, did you bother to read your own article....dumbass?
That's a whole lot of "coulds" and "what ifs" and "on papers" - just like the coal fanboys that are always talking about cold fusion, I mean "Clean Coal".
It's all the same shit, from the same breed of deniers defending big problems with big promises of developments that are coming "real soon now, we promise".
Because you're still using the same car and computer you bought in 1975, and living in a tent since new home and apartment construction ceased in the same year?
Or, maybe the parent should just skip idiots when looking for converts to common sense.
Why do nuclear fanboys try to pass the blame on to coal? Why do you try to compare the polution levels between the two without ever mentioning that nuclear waste will be around for thousands of years or the disparity in the number of power plants? 1436 coal vs 104 nuclear in the U.S.
Just to be clear - do you mean a source of radiation that ends when a coal plant shuts down, or a source of radiation that people will be dealing with a thousand years from now? A source of radiation that can impact an entire region, and who's waste needs to be managed for thousands of years?
And, just to be clear, why do nuclear fanboys point fingers at coal in lame attempts at misdirection? And, more importantly, why the clear dishonesty in comparing coal's pollution to nuclear without ever mentioning the fact that there are 14 times as many coal plants as nuclear in the U.S. alone?
Just to be clear.
Maybe you don't understand that it takes tens of thousands of years for mass radiation poisoning to pass, as well as spent fuel rods. We could see an entire global warming (brought on by coal plants) and ice age cycle pass and still have to deal with nuclear waste from the first nuclear power plants. Maybe you don't understand that arguing against nuclear power doesn't mean arguing for more coal or poorly built dams. Maybe you're under the delusion that nuclear power isn't the most expensive power source ever invented when you factor in the cost of containment. For tens of thousands of years.
Uh, no. The banks have borrowed 16 trillion , and haven't come close to paying it back. Despite getting their loans at 0% interest while continuing to charge their customers usurious interest rates (i.e., the same taxpayers that are bailing them out) or just buying Treasury Bonds.
Man, I wish I could borrow money from the government at 0% interest, only to borrow that money back to the government and receive interest in return.
Contractual terms have to be mutually agreed to before money changes hands. And unless you're spending a serious amount of money (corporate site licensing for Windows, Oracle database) you're probably not doing that.
Fanned. Since the Paulbots are out in force I'll copy and paste what I said upthread in response to another Paulbot:
Case in point for the Paultards: how the cigarette industry went decades without losing a liability lawsuit because there's no way to know if Grandma got lung cancer because she smoked two packs a day or because she was genetically predisposed to it. Do they think other polluting industries wouldn't do the exact same thing?
"Your Honor, the plaintiff simply hasn't proven that the poisonous mercury that gave her children birth defects came from our mine. She could be a carrier, or the alleged poison could have come from from Massey Energy upstream....."
Then there's the fact that regulations and inspections are proactive, rather than reactive. Ask the parents of Valerie Lakey [wikipedia.org] what they would prefer: to have their daughters guts back in her body before she was hydraulically disemboweled from a faulty pool drain, or the $25 million judgement against the manufacturer. But back to pollution - just how the hell is the average family going to afford the tens of thousands of dollars to hire independent experts and subpoena documents and testimony from the polluting company in question?
The Libertarian Way would literally result in poverty, misery and even death for many in return for even more power and money for those who are already powerful and rich.
Case in point for the Paultards: how the cigarette industry went decades without losing a liability lawsuit because there's no way to know if Grandma got lung cancer because she smoked two packs a day or because she was genetically predisposed to it. Do they think other polluting industries wouldn't do the exact same thing?
"Your Honor, the plaintiff simply hasn't proven that the poisonous mercury that gave her children birth defects came from our mine. She could be a carrier, or the alleged poison could have come from from Massey Energy upstream....."
Then there's the fact that regulations and inspections are proactive, rather than reactive. Ask the parents of Valerie Lakey what they would prefer: to have their daughters guts back in her body before she was hydraulically disemboweled from a faulty pool drain, or the $25 million judgement against the manufacturer. But back to pollution - just how the hell is the average family going to afford the tens of thousands of dollars to hire independent experts and subpoena documents and testimony from the polluting company in question?
The Libertarian Way would literally result in poverty, misery and even death for many in return for even more power and money for those who are already powerful and rich.