You're story is very interesting and all, but how about some actual numbers. According to department of Energy the EROI is 1-2.7 years. Yes, if you want to be of the grid you'd need batteries (though there's some good research on molten salt going on and of course gravity batteries have a proven track record), but for general usage solar could easily cover up to30-40% of energy needs (which are generally almost double during office hours).
If you want nukes. fine. I agree we need them at least for the immediate future and might need them for base load beyond, but their not the easy fix some people make them out to be. Their ROI, Energy or otherwise, is certainly not automatically better than some renewable systems. Nukes are very complex, very expensive, suffer from the cooling issue and require fairly massive mining and enrichment operations. Not to mention the decommissioning cost, which somehow never are factored in. And if you include refuelling and maintenance (plus the aforementioned lower power during hot summers or low river waters) their uptime is only around80-85%. Good but certainly not panacea their made out to be.
Portugal only generates 17% of the electricity it uses: http://energy.eu/#dependency So actually the 45% renewables is 45% of that 17%. Which is really, what, 8% of Portugal's consumed electricity?
Actually, if you look at the source you'll see that those figures are for total energy consumption inclusing oil and gas. Looking at electricity only the CIA worldfactbook states that Portugal generates 91% of the electricity it uses (well in 2007 anyway). And of course the introduction of electric cars would up the overal figure as well.
Pooh, not high tech enough? Last I looked, Asia was building over a hundred nukes. US is bringing up one that was mothballed decades ago. Europe, hmm, I think Italy just did a nuke deal with Russia? Otherwise, nothing. All stupid "green energy" stuff instead. Mostly, it takes more energy to make than it will produce over its lifetime. Asia is at least trying to have a future, even if Portugal is not.
Actually, they're building two next generation (well third generation pressurized water reactor) EPR reactors. One in France and one in Finland. Which is more than the US is doing so far. Those are, of course, late and vastly over budget, as almost all nuclear power plants are, but they are being built.
And to say that wind, tidal or solar power take more energy to construct than they produce over a lifetime is simply ridiculous. Even current photovoltaic, which is by far the most complex and involved to build, has a EROI of 2-4 years, with a 20 year lifespan (after which the cells are still produce energy, just at significantly lower power).
This is incorrect. Multibillion dollar payloads are more valuable than astronauts (though perhaps not more valuable than the costs of blame finding sessions after humans are lost on a launch vehicle). The need for reliability doesn't diminish when you don't put people on a flight. What is different is that humans require different handling, for example, more abort options (since a human can possibly be recovered from a failed flight, especially with some sort of crew escape system in place, while a multibillion dollar satellite can't, with our current technology) and a need for a lower acceleration and vibration environment.
You said ityourself. The PR disaster of killing astronauts far outweighs their "commercial value" (which seems a rather mercenary way to think about risk assessment to be honest). Just compare the effect of the two shuttle crashes (two long periods without launches while they made absolutely sure the problem was sorted out) with pretty much every failed launch of commercial rockets (back to launching in a few months at most). I explicitly used the Ariane 5 example since the Ariane 4 was a rather reliable rocket but because early in the development it was thought the Ariane 5 might be used for human launch, it was not good enough.
The Shuttle, for example, has a record worse than 99% survival of crew (in each case, the failure stemmed from a problem during launch) and that the crew of the Shuttle has the same survival rate as the orbiter and any payloads that the Shuttle is carrying.
True, however, the predicted failure rate was not 98,5%, the shuttle was designed to be safer. It should be noted that both disasters had more to do with operational failure at NASA than problems with the design itself. The Challenger launch should have been postponed after unusually cold weather while the original protocol stated that Colombia shouldn't have launched with the foam issue.
A good start would be the free release of postal code and mapping data by governments. After all this is information collected with public money, so it should be available to all citizens. The UK has or will release mapping and postcode data. But most countries still only allow the data to be sold for hefty prices. The most ridiculous part is that in some countries the postal code date is the property of privatized former monopolies.
One small counter to this is that manned space flight encourages vastly increased safety. If it's an (expensive) satellite 99% likelihood of success is fine, if it's a human the boundaries get pushed up. ESA's Ariane 5 rocket is an example. It was mostly designed with a possible human payload in mind. That's one of the reason's for it's excellent record (well after the first few launches:)
Seeing as when they compiled the bible, they packed together all of authoritative, trustworthy written documents that gave an account of Jesus' life or spoke of the man...
They didn't. They gathered together *all* stories they had and then picked the ones they liked. So at the very least there's a ton of writing which isn't in the bible. And academic researches generally assume that two of the gospels were written much later and were largely based on the other two (with some random additions).
If you are against all animal use: good for you (seriously, I have a lot of respect for people who are consistent about their principles, even when I disagree with them). But I highly doubt that all fervent anti-fur campaigners share that stantiment (and even when they do, they seem far more concerned with fur than with other usages).
Second concerning the standard of care for livestock animals; that may be true for the Us, but not world wide (at least the idea that fur animals are treated worse is a major point for anti-fur campaigns on this side of the pond).
Good point. Therefore you will be campaining to create a humane fur production, right? Larger cages, maybe even free range fur. The same standards for killing them off as there are for cattle, chickens etc.? Perhaps a better use of the meat?
(I agree that the way most fur is created/begotten is very inhumane. But I'm always puzzeled by the hard core campaigners against fur who insist is must be stopped completely)
I always wondered if the Cole bombing should be considered a terrorist attack. On the one hand the target was a legitimate military target on the other the goal certainly wasn't to reduce the capacity of the US navy, it was to strike fear.
(somewhat beside the point of the GP but I'm curious what the arguments are)
I'm not sure I can agree with the abolition of software patents entirely, as copyrights are insufficient in protecting innovation long enough for it to be profitable and there is no other system which ensures a company can recover development costs on truly innovative software.
There needs to be *something* which protects software developers from having their products ripped off and all their innovative functionality duplicated. Exactly how that *something* should work is best left to people far more expert in the field than me...but before we scrap software patents, we need to provide developers with an alternative.
I'd argue that almost all software shouldn't fall under software patents because the development cost is the same for the original creators and the competitor copying it. If software maker x comes up with a briljant new app/pug-in/feature software makes y should be free to implement it as wall, as long as they write the code themselves (otherwise they would be making copyright infringement).
Temporary monopolies through patents are meant to pay you back for the research time and effort, not to simply reward novel ideas. The only situation in software where that really applies would be something like googles search algorithm and the like, where it's possible that the actual algorithm is very simple to copy, while it takes years of research to arrive there.
There was no "Vietnam" there was only Ho Chi Min's resistance, which had little communication with the allies. Also it was actually the British that reocupied French Indochina.
The "betrayal" of the USA was that it asked for a UN sponsered referendum on the joining of North and south Vietnam. When they say the communist would win it, they abandoned that plan.
Those kind of statements about the unstoppable collapse of those terrible, socialist European nanny states was quite amusing during the last decades when it always was assumed that Europe would soon realise it's folly and live the right, American way.
But to do so after the financial collapse and the current crisis it must take a either a superhuman level of irony special kind of lobotomy.
It's a bad thing if the processors cost $7 to make, and there is only one other competitor, who happens to have far smaller cash reserves. It may be nice for that singe purchase, but 3 years later when the next upgrade round comes along and the competitor is out of business and all processors now cost $20 no matter how many you buy, it's not.
However, you're right that the EU is also motivated by the money, and the judgment is likely to be skewed by a conflict of interest.[..] That would be the most fair because the EU regulators would not have a conflict of interest. It would also really help those companies (ok, AMD) who were hurt by Intel's practices to regain ground that they lost.
And your basing the existence on a conflict of interest on what? Money from fines is put into the general budget, which is agreed upon long beforehand. Any extra income does not mean the commision gets to spend more, it just means the member states pay less (and that's not even taking into account that the commission has far less control over the money it does have than most governments). By that logic all financial penalties, including fines and tickets should not go be paid to originating party.
Reagan's solution to eliminate nuclear weapons: Create defenses that make them impotent, and trust but verify.
End result of Reagan's plan: Collapse of the USSR, and reduction of the probability of nuclear armageddon.
Reagan solution might also have led to a pre-emptive strike against the US (if the USSR really believed the USA was about to become impentrable) and the collapse of the USSR was actually a very dangerous moment, nuclear holocaust wise. We where very lucky to have Gorbachev as the secretary-general and even more so that the 1991 coup and Jeltsin's counter coup ended quick and relativly peacefull.
Really though, nuclear technology isnt that hard. Take 2 pieces of near-critical U235 and smack them together.. Hell, we could have Soulskill clap them together.
The theory isn't that hard (though a bit more tricky than that), but creating enough U235 to make such a bomb is very complex. Plus then you have a relatively weak bomb which (literally) ways a ton.
Building a plutonium bomb on the other hand is *very* complex (since the timing has to be absolutly right). Let alone a Hydrogen bomb. Miniturizing bombs down to a size that fits on a rocket is also very hard.
Denmark's share of windpower is even larger, with almost 20% overall and of course much higher peaks. And they plan to go even higher. They use Norway's abundant hydropower as a backup, including quite a few gravity batteries (pumping water upstream when there is surplus electricity, releasing it as hydropower when you need it). In general it's accepted that up to 20% of electricity can come from wind with little changes to the system. Aftter that you do need things to balance the system out (gravity batteries, easily adjustable Hydro and Gas plants etc.).
A goal of terrorism is to terrorize. Destroying the USA's infrastructure will certainly terrorize a lot of americans. Look at the effects of 911. Because of it americans allowed their rights to be abridged and allowed the president to start 2 wars. Heck hurricanes make people afraid.
The point that the GP was trying to make is that destroying infrastructure to a significant degree takes far too much work compared to the capabilities of terrorist. Just look at the amount of bombs dropped on the UK and Germany and how well their infrastructure kept working. The only exception I can think of is the power grid since the 2003 blackout showed that even a single bomb at the right point could potentially take out large swathes of the system. Thousands of windmill, all at least a few hundred feet apart are very difficult to damage in any sigficant way.
While pooling resources certainly is a good thing, not all examples you give are created equal. Eurofighter is a co-design; all four partner nations have complete access to all data. There already have been arguments between the UK and the US about the F-35 sourcecode which the US doesn't want to release completely to the UK (not even that unreasonable since the money which the UK invested, while a large sum, was just a small part of overall budget). The Harrier was a special case since no other VTOL plane existed at the time, and even then the Marine ones where build separately in the US so it had complete control. This despite the very small number of planes build (i.e. it made no economic sense).
All of this of course doesn't mean that buying of the shelf from other (trusted) nations doesn't make sense. Not trying to build everything yourself means money for more and/or better systems. And in most cases, even if you fall out with the supplier nations it would take years before it became a problem (see how long Iran kept it's F-14 planes in the air even after the revolution). However, with something as fundamental and complex as nuclear weapon delivery systems you'd expect the UK to demand more transfer of knowledge (they do so with other weapon systems and you can bet the US does so in the rare case where it buys something overseas).
German aircraft production, all types, 1939: 8,295
USSR aircraft production, all types, 1939: 10,382
UK aircraft production, all types, 1939: 7,940
German aircraft production, all types, 1940: 10,247
USSR aircraft production, all types, 1940: 10,565
UK aircraft production, all types, 1940: 15,049
(source: Richard Overly,Why the allies won (1996), page 331)
Of course the USSR wasn't at war with Germany in 1939-1941 and an enormous part of the USSR planes where destroyed in the initial phase of the German invasion. But throughout the war Germany had less aircraft than the allies, the only possible exeception would be during the Battle of Britain, but even then the difference must have been small). It's generally forgotten that Britain and France really cranked up the production of military equipment in the late thirties, while the Nazi's didn't really squeeze the most out of the German economy until fairly late in the war.
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3) Raise taxes. I know it's blasphemy in the US, but budget balancing can involve both sides of the equation.
You're story is very interesting and all, but how about some actual numbers. According to department of Energy the EROI is 1-2.7 years. Yes, if you want to be of the grid you'd need batteries (though there's some good research on molten salt going on and of course gravity batteries have a proven track record), but for general usage solar could easily cover up to30-40% of energy needs (which are generally almost double during office hours).
If you want nukes. fine. I agree we need them at least for the immediate future and might need them for base load beyond, but their not the easy fix some people make them out to be. Their ROI, Energy or otherwise, is certainly not automatically better than some renewable systems. Nukes are very complex, very expensive, suffer from the cooling issue and require fairly massive mining and enrichment operations. Not to mention the decommissioning cost, which somehow never are factored in. And if you include refuelling and maintenance (plus the aforementioned lower power during hot summers or low river waters) their uptime is only around80-85%. Good but certainly not panacea their made out to be.
Actually, if you look at the source you'll see that those figures are for total energy consumption inclusing oil and gas. Looking at electricity only the CIA worldfactbook states that Portugal generates 91% of the electricity it uses (well in 2007 anyway). And of course the introduction of electric cars would up the overal figure as well.
Actually, they're building two next generation (well third generation pressurized water reactor) EPR reactors. One in France and one in Finland. Which is more than the US is doing so far. Those are, of course, late and vastly over budget, as almost all nuclear power plants are, but they are being built.
And to say that wind, tidal or solar power take more energy to construct than they produce over a lifetime is simply ridiculous. Even current photovoltaic, which is by far the most complex and involved to build, has a EROI of 2-4 years, with a 20 year lifespan (after which the cells are still produce energy, just at significantly lower power).
You said ityourself. The PR disaster of killing astronauts far outweighs their "commercial value" (which seems a rather mercenary way to think about risk assessment to be honest). Just compare the effect of the two shuttle crashes (two long periods without launches while they made absolutely sure the problem was sorted out) with pretty much every failed launch of commercial rockets (back to launching in a few months at most). I explicitly used the Ariane 5 example since the Ariane 4 was a rather reliable rocket but because early in the development it was thought the Ariane 5 might be used for human launch, it was not good enough.
True, however, the predicted failure rate was not 98,5%, the shuttle was designed to be safer. It should be noted that both disasters had more to do with operational failure at NASA than problems with the design itself. The Challenger launch should have been postponed after unusually cold weather while the original protocol stated that Colombia shouldn't have launched with the foam issue.
A good start would be the free release of postal code and mapping data by governments. After all this is information collected with public money, so it should be available to all citizens. The UK has or will release mapping and postcode data. But most countries still only allow the data to be sold for hefty prices. The most ridiculous part is that in some countries the postal code date is the property of privatized former monopolies.
One small counter to this is that manned space flight encourages vastly increased safety. If it's an (expensive) satellite 99% likelihood of success is fine, if it's a human the boundaries get pushed up. ESA's Ariane 5 rocket is an example. It was mostly designed with a possible human payload in mind. That's one of the reason's for it's excellent record (well after the first few launches :)
They didn't. They gathered together *all* stories they had and then picked the ones they liked. So at the very least there's a ton of writing which isn't in the bible. And academic researches generally assume that two of the gospels were written much later and were largely based on the other two (with some random additions).
If you are against all animal use: good for you (seriously, I have a lot of respect for people who are consistent about their principles, even when I disagree with them). But I highly doubt that all fervent anti-fur campaigners share that stantiment (and even when they do, they seem far more concerned with fur than with other usages).
Second concerning the standard of care for livestock animals; that may be true for the Us, but not world wide (at least the idea that fur animals are treated worse is a major point for anti-fur campaigns on this side of the pond).
(I agree that the way most fur is created/begotten is very inhumane. But I'm always puzzeled by the hard core campaigners against fur who insist is must be stopped completely)
I always wondered if the Cole bombing should be considered a terrorist attack. On the one hand the target was a legitimate military target on the other the goal certainly wasn't to reduce the capacity of the US navy, it was to strike fear.
(somewhat beside the point of the GP but I'm curious what the arguments are)
I'd argue that almost all software shouldn't fall under software patents because the development cost is the same for the original creators and the competitor copying it. If software maker x comes up with a briljant new app/pug-in/feature software makes y should be free to implement it as wall, as long as they write the code themselves (otherwise they would be making copyright infringement).
Temporary monopolies through patents are meant to pay you back for the research time and effort, not to simply reward novel ideas. The only situation in software where that really applies would be something like googles search algorithm and the like, where it's possible that the actual algorithm is very simple to copy, while it takes years of research to arrive there.
Except that 2x3Ghz is not as fast as 1x6Ghz. Or even (in most circumstances) 1x4 Ghz.
It's been shown that dogs can smell some forms of cancer and diabetes.
While I agree with you O'm curious. What is elitist about the GP?
There was no "Vietnam" there was only Ho Chi Min's resistance, which had little communication with the allies. Also it was actually the British that reocupied French Indochina.
The "betrayal" of the USA was that it asked for a UN sponsered referendum on the joining of North and south Vietnam. When they say the communist would win it, they abandoned that plan.
But to do so after the financial collapse and the current crisis it must take a either a superhuman level of irony special kind of lobotomy.
It's a bad thing if the processors cost $7 to make, and there is only one other competitor, who happens to have far smaller cash reserves. It may be nice for that singe purchase, but 3 years later when the next upgrade round comes along and the competitor is out of business and all processors now cost $20 no matter how many you buy, it's not.
And your basing the existence on a conflict of interest on what? Money from fines is put into the general budget, which is agreed upon long beforehand. Any extra income does not mean the commision gets to spend more, it just means the member states pay less (and that's not even taking into account that the commission has far less control over the money it does have than most governments). By that logic all financial penalties, including fines and tickets should not go be paid to originating party.
Reagan solution might also have led to a pre-emptive strike against the US (if the USSR really believed the USA was about to become impentrable) and the collapse of the USSR was actually a very dangerous moment, nuclear holocaust wise. We where very lucky to have Gorbachev as the secretary-general and even more so that the 1991 coup and Jeltsin's counter coup ended quick and relativly peacefull.
The theory isn't that hard (though a bit more tricky than that), but creating enough U235 to make such a bomb is very complex. Plus then you have a relatively weak bomb which (literally) ways a ton.
Building a plutonium bomb on the other hand is *very* complex (since the timing has to be absolutly right). Let alone a Hydrogen bomb. Miniturizing bombs down to a size that fits on a rocket is also very hard.
Denmark's share of windpower is even larger, with almost 20% overall and of course much higher peaks. And they plan to go even higher. They use Norway's abundant hydropower as a backup, including quite a few gravity batteries (pumping water upstream when there is surplus electricity, releasing it as hydropower when you need it). In general it's accepted that up to 20% of electricity can come from wind with little changes to the system. Aftter that you do need things to balance the system out (gravity batteries, easily adjustable Hydro and Gas plants etc.).
The point that the GP was trying to make is that destroying infrastructure to a significant degree takes far too much work compared to the capabilities of terrorist. Just look at the amount of bombs dropped on the UK and Germany and how well their infrastructure kept working. The only exception I can think of is the power grid since the 2003 blackout showed that even a single bomb at the right point could potentially take out large swathes of the system. Thousands of windmill, all at least a few hundred feet apart are very difficult to damage in any sigficant way.
While pooling resources certainly is a good thing, not all examples you give are created equal. Eurofighter is a co-design; all four partner nations have complete access to all data. There already have been arguments between the UK and the US about the F-35 sourcecode which the US doesn't want to release completely to the UK (not even that unreasonable since the money which the UK invested, while a large sum, was just a small part of overall budget). The Harrier was a special case since no other VTOL plane existed at the time, and even then the Marine ones where build separately in the US so it had complete control. This despite the very small number of planes build (i.e. it made no economic sense).
All of this of course doesn't mean that buying of the shelf from other (trusted) nations doesn't make sense. Not trying to build everything yourself means money for more and/or better systems. And in most cases, even if you fall out with the supplier nations it would take years before it became a problem (see how long Iran kept it's F-14 planes in the air even after the revolution). However, with something as fundamental and complex as nuclear weapon delivery systems you'd expect the UK to demand more transfer of knowledge (they do so with other weapon systems and you can bet the US does so in the rare case where it buys something overseas).
German aircraft production, all types, 1939: 8,295
USSR aircraft production, all types, 1939: 10,382
UK aircraft production, all types, 1939: 7,940
German aircraft production, all types, 1940: 10,247
USSR aircraft production, all types, 1940: 10,565
UK aircraft production, all types, 1940: 15,049
(source: Richard Overly,Why the allies won (1996), page 331)
Of course the USSR wasn't at war with Germany in 1939-1941 and an enormous part of the USSR planes where destroyed in the initial phase of the German invasion. But throughout the war Germany had less aircraft than the allies, the only possible exeception would be during the Battle of Britain, but even then the difference must have been small). It's generally forgotten that Britain and France really cranked up the production of military equipment in the late thirties, while the Nazi's didn't really squeeze the most out of the German economy until fairly late in the war.